The Smart Connector

In this fast paced, fascinating interview, celebrity DJ Brandon Block speaks on where his music journey began, his near death experience with drugs and his amazing work with charities on mental health and homelessness.  With a 25-year-career that has spanned the highest highs and the lowest lows, Brandon Block was the undisputed king of the acid house generation. Brandon was known as the joker in...

Nick Hird, Co-founder of ViDrate is a former male model with a background in fitness and nutrition.  Specialising in hydration for over 7 years, Nick has delivered talks on the benefits of hydration to the military, NHS, fire service, universities, professional athletes and many more.    Nick has a passion for helping people to make small changes to their lifestyles and habits, that have a huge po...

A strategy consultant and leadership coach, Guillaume Wiatr guides CEOs and Founders to align people and accelerate innovation adoption. He is the Founder of MetaHelm; a consulting firm focused on building strategic narratives for established companies. For Guillaume, traditional business storytelling is dead. Innovation happens when you build a new narrative instead. As he says, "people will pay...

Sandy began her career as a police officer in Alexandria, Virginia, and wore many hats during her 23-year stint there, including 10 years as a hostage negotiator.  Since retiring from law enforcement in 2012, Sandy has gone on to teach criminal justice to high school students, author books, and train law enforcement agents across the country in several areas, including sexual violence, crisis inte...

Daniel Priestley is the Founder of Dent Global and ScoreApp, Entrepreneur Of The Year ’22, x4 Best Selling Author. Daniel is a leading authority in scaling businesses. His reputation and extensive experience with his own companies have seen him advising for inc500 leaders and unicorn Entrepreneurs as well as appearing regularly in the media.  Starting with nothing, Daniel has built valuable and sc...

In this episode, host Jane and commodity investment expert, Simon Popple discuss commodity investing, how and why people invest in commodities such as gold and silver and when the right time to invest is.  Simon helps commodity companies seeking capital, so he is heavily involved with the industry daily, enabling him to work with many exciting companies that are not well known to the investment co...

In this fast paced episode, Jane and Nathan discuss the new investment trends, NFT’s, Metaverse and Crypto Currency, and how easy or difficult it may be for your business to raise capital based on your business model and it’s scaleability.  They also discuss how critical customer experience is and how there is a great opportunity right now to stand out and win the right attention by providing exce...

Edgar Blazona is a modernist American furniture designer and founder of wildly popular DTC sofa brand BenchMade Modern. A high school dropout, turned graffiti artist, turned serial entrepreneur, Edgar got his start in the furniture industry because of need: he was young and broke, and his first apartment didn’t have any furniture, so he taught himself how to build some.  Along with starting severa...

In this episode, Jane and James discuss achieving a frictionless customer experience and what gets in the way of achieving this, the important of hypnotic language in digital marketing and the importance of staying ahead of the curve in the ever changing industry of content marketing.  James Scherer is the VP of Growth of Codeless, a content marketing agency working with unicorns like monday.com t...

In this episode, Jane and Ashley discuss how you can become an industry thought leader by repurposing your content as well as the importance of systems in marketing and how you must understand your audience, where they are based and what they care about in order to create the best content. Ashley McManus is a tech marketing lead and Director of Global Marketing for Smart Eye, which specialises in...

Oliver Oguz is one of Lord Alan Sugar’s most recent business partners. In this podcast episode, Jane and Oliver discuss why trademarking and IP protection is such an important thing for any business today and how Oliver took over Trade Mark Wizards, which within its first year became the UK’s number one trademark filer. They also discuss Oliver’s relationship with Lord Alan Sugar and how it didn’t...

In this interview with Jane, originally recorded for the Hands On Business with Podcast with Hakeem Adebiyi, Jane talks about how the pandemic accelerated the rate of change in consumer behaviour, and caused saturation across the expert space. As a flood of new people enter the market, succeeding online has become more challenging than before. Today, standing out for your difference is the only wa...

In this heartwarming and inspiring story, Jason and Jane talk about how Jason went to hell and back in a physically and emotionally violent marriage. After escaping, he rebuilt his life and business to achieve enormous wealth and success as a values and relationship driven ‘smart connector’.  A hard working, honest business owner, Jason Kehoe is the founder of Eterna Consultancy, which is a “one s...

In this interview, Kevin and Jane discuss how to build wealth through recurring 'passive' income and the different methods of achieving it. Kevin’s seven pillars of wealth, the fear of the unknown when investing, and other things that hold people back from creating lasting wealth. I decided to bring Kevin onto the Smart Connector podcast as he is one of the UK’s leading experts and authorities on...

Henri Ghijben is a property investor and business owner who owns a successful tree surgery business in Southampton. Henri built his first business from a one man band, starting with a £10,000 loan and operating from from a rented garage. This transformed to a company employing over 47 staff with a 2 million pound turnover per year. In 2019, the worst happened and Henri lost his first business - lo...

Founder and CEO of Kansaltancy Ventures, Tushar is an accomplished professional with expertise of financial and business advisory, fund raising & creation of docs/collaterals for venture capital funding.  Tushar is also a venture advisor with Loyal VC, the INSEAD-led Canadian VC Fund, having a core portfolio of over 200+ investments in more than 60+ countries. Over the years, Tushar has arrang...

Vandana is a Venture Capital expert, and CEO of Convanto, a renowned boutique investment bank in India. She was recently awarded the accolade of Woman Entrepreneur Of The Year 2021, and was also named as one of the Top 10 Women Leaders in Wealth Management 2021. She is also a Venture Advisor with Loyal VC, the INSEAD-led Canadian VC Fund, having a core portfolio of over 160 investments in more tha...

For the past 30 years, Tim has designed advocacy, incentive and loyalty programmes to drive up sales for some of the world’s leading brands, including: BMW, Compaq, Coty, Honda, GE, Microsoft, Orange, Procter & Gamble, and Wella to name but a few. His company, Orangutan, typically delivers returns of 20-40x on the initial client investment.  Tim talks about how it isn’t the reward that actuall...

Tim Parkin and Jane come together in this episode to discuss the important of having the right people as well as the right processes in your business to maximise growth, the ever changing marketing landscape that makes regular training essential for businesses and the importance of being close to your customer. Tim Parkin is a global consultant, advisor, and coach to marketing executives of many w...

Jane and Linked In trainer and coach Ian Denny come together in this episode to discuss social selling, the LinkedIn algorithms and whether it’s possible to “game the system”, whether or not to use automation, and Ian’s top tips for LinkedIn success.  Ian helps people turn the time they spend on LinkedIn into real business. With a copywriting background, Ian heads his LinkedIn training business an...

Dr. Wayne Wright is an executive chairman, investor and business author who helps entrepreneurs break the glass ceiling of growth and profitability to create multiple seven and eight figure businesses. Dr Wayne has extensive senior and board level experience, and with a scientific background, he's invested primarily in health care businesses across the UK and in the US. He's named on nine global p...

Jane and Anne discuss the challenges of managing a remote team and how you can build one for your business. They also talk about why solopreneurs struggle to scale their business fast, due to feeling they have to master all the tech systems themselves.  Anne Hill has had the desire to help others for as long as she can remember. Even as a child, Anne was rising to the rank of captain in whatever s...

In this episode, Jane and Kay discuss the evolution of recruitment in the digital age, why businesses still need recruitment consultants and where the value lies in using one. They also discuss why recruitment remains such a dynamic and fast moving industry that is also highly profitable. Kay Kennedy is a UK qualified solicitor and business owner. After progressing through the ranks to a partnersh...

In this episode, Ashvy and Jane discuss the holistic health habits that elevate productivity, mood and performance, in both business and life. Dr Ashvy heals & cures people using a root cause, functional medicine philosophy. After 20 years as a medical doctor, Ashvy's broad & deep knowledge facilitates people to ditch the pills, and achieve weight loss & vitality. Ashvy consults in a w...

Slater Victoroff, who is from Boston, Massachusetts, is the Founder and Chief Technology Officer of Indico, which is an enterprise AI solution provider that has just announced a successful raise of $22M of Series B funding to expand globally.  Slater's a world leading expert in data science and has been building machine learning and artificial intelligence solutions for startups, governments and F...