Chik Chat

In this episode of the Chik Chat podcast, I talk about what it’s like running a millennial business and how ingrained the corporate world's way of working can be. It’s been just over two years since I started CF Marketing and I easily forget what a great job we’re doing. We are a team of freelance nomads who choose when we work and our mental health is at the forefront of everything we do - how many people can say that?

In this week's episode, I talk about showing up, how I went viral and how it’s changed the scope of my business in a mere few weeks.

I can’t thank you all enough for your support. Your likes, saves, comments, etc. literally mean the world when you work online!

Happy New Year!

We’re back with an exciting one to start off 2023. In this episode, I am joined by Sylvie. We talk about mindset, culture, expectations, and learning to take a step back, to take a step forward in life and our careers. We also talk about job hunting and what made Sylvie start her business Career Minded Circles which helps people on that journey.

Can’t wait for more of this in 2023!

In this week's episode, I have the pleasure of introducing you to Josh Keegan! I met Josh through one of my clients when I started working on his personal brand and content. I quickly realised we were similar in such random ways - as a financial wizard, a nomad (this year), a present dad AND a present partner, he takes being a lifestyle entrepreneur to inspiring heights for me.

In this podcast we talk about mindset, making money in business and being kinder to yourself and others. It was a chat I definitely needed!

A little more about Josh:

Josh Keegan is a Chartered Accountant and Award Winning Entrepreneur. Having started, scaled, and sold multiple successful businesses Josh walks the talk and effectively combines the disciplined world of finance, with the fast paced world of entrepreneurship.

This unique skill set and insight allows us to create world-class, industry-leading services to efficiently support you with all of your financially related business challenges. We know business, and we know finance. We are the perfect bridge between these two worlds. You are in safe hands.

https://www.ultimatefd.co.uk

https://www.facebook.com/joshua.keegan

https://www.instagram.com/the_ultimate_fd/?h

https://www.linkedin.com/in/joshua-keegan/?originalSubdomain=uk

In this week's episode, it’s just little old me! I go through my top 5 lessons learned this year and how in hindsight, my life fell apart just so the next stage could come together.

In this episode, I talk about grief and what it’s like to grieve someone still alive, I talk about the lessons I’ve learned from my one year old niece (she’s already a wise little owl) and how I plan on shaping 2023.

I hope you enjoy it!

In this week's episode, I am joined by the amazing Catherine Rees. 

Catherine is an actor and writer, based between Belfast and London. I met Catherine through Lean In and Sinead, who funnily enough was on last week's episode and we instantly hit it off. I’m quite the introvert and homebody so you can imagine how excited I was when I met Catherine for a coffee and ended up being late for a meeting all because we had so much to talk about (it’s not very often you meet someone that splits their time between two homes and is going through the same transitions in life as you).

In this episode alone, we talk about Catherine's many hats, what it’s been like as an actor and how the change in seasons is affecting our work/life balance.

A little more about Catherine:

She trained on the BA Acting course at East 15 Acting School and has since appeared in The Mousetrap in London's West End and on two India tours, as well as in television and film such as The Deceived, Nova Jones, Ted's Top Ten and Catholic Matchmaking Bureau.

As a writer, she was a member of the Soho Theatre Writer's Lab, Lyric Hammersmith Development Lab, and Northern Ireland Screen's Short's Focus Programme, where she developed her short Arena which appeared in the BFI NI Talent Showcase and Cork Film festival to name a few. She is currently developing her comedy pilot with Old Hall Films and her next short film with Farset Films which goes into production in January 2023. She is also a Hatch Artist at The Mac Belfast and is passionate about female-led work and comedy.

Catherine has business coaching in Public Speaking, combining her Theatre skills and years of corporate, sales, and business development experience gleaned from working in Financial Services in London ( in between acting jobs!).

https://www.instagram.com/speakupcoaching/

In this week's episode, I’m joined by another special guest. Last week I talked about how things sometimes just align and this is another example of that for me in the business world. Sinead is such a positive and inspiring force. Whether you run a business or work in the corporate world, our aim is to elevate our careers so this one is definitely for you!

A little more about Sinead:

Sinead Sharkey-Steenson is The Career Elevator Coach at Generation Women where she helps women get the promotions and pay rises they deserve. Passionate about equality and seeing more women in leadership, Sinead blends practical strategies with simple mindset tools to achieve amazing results...with several getting over 100% pay rises and multiple promotions! To date she’s helped close to 10,000 women take a step up.

Sinead draws on over 20 years of corporate experience in HR, Leadership Development, Business Improvement, and Cultural Transformation to help her support women to achieve their ambitions. She has been recognised as one of 22 Leaders to Learn from in 2022 by Bunch Leadership App. She has developed and delivered career and leadership programmes for multiple global organisations including; Sensata, Citi, Deloitte, the IFA, and Lean In. Sinead has a lifelong love of learning and strives to bring the best academically and professionally to her work. She has a BA Hons in Psychology, MSc Computing, MSc Human Resource Management, is an NLP Master practitioner, Lean Six Sigma Master Black Belt, and an accredited ICF Coach and Positive Intelligence (PQ) Coach. She’s a mum of two girls who have made her even more passionate about equality. She also loves live comedy and music, sleep, and cold water swimming...in that order!

Website: https://genwomen.global/

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/sinead-sharkey/

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/GenerationWomen/

Pinterest: https://www.pinterest.co.uk/GenWomenGlobal/

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/genwomen/

Twitter: https://twitter.com/genwomenglobal

Have you ever met someone and everything just seemed to align - how you met, your background stories, your passions? That was Lucy for me and she came into my life just as I was on the journey to finding myself and my purpose.

A year on and my life looks drastically different to the way it did when I met Lucy however, Lucy’s work as my coach and as my client had been so invaluable in terms of fighting negative thoughts such as imposter syndrome and pushing myself to be even more authentically me!

A little bit more about Lucy:

For the last 19 years, Lucy has run several businesses and worked with clients internationally in a variety of sectors to help them reach their potential. She is particularly interested in working with ambitious businesses aligning their people who see the value of a clear vision and strategy.

Lucy is passionate about helping organisations find their purpose and through this, unlocking their people and encouraging a culture of openness and honesty, and finding ways to recognise and develop their personal strengths, to be resilient to change, and to challenge the status quo, in order to grow themselves and their organisation. She believes more agile outward-facing businesses are needed to operate well above the norm and thus meet the needs of our ever-changing environment.

Lucy cares deeply and prides herself on exceptional quality in what she does. Her warmth and presence help her to swiftly gain trust and strong empathy with people and work at a deeper level to challenge assumptions.

She is a great collaborator and is able to work particularly well with people who are very creative or technically minded as well as those who don’t typically fit the mould. Her patience, rigour, persistence, and reflective approach always helps ensure she gets the best results for her clients.

Lucy is an accredited coach and a graduate of the Shirlaws Business Coaching academy and prides herself on being results-focused. Prior to this, she had a number of leadership roles in blue-chip FMCG corporations including Director of Brand Strategy for Unilever (leading growth in Unilever’s market share by over 10%), Director of Marketing (Unilever), Head of Development for Marlow foods and director of communications at OCS.

http://neovitae.co.uk/who-we-are/

https://uk.linkedin.com/in/lucy-czakan

In this week's episode, I have the pleasure of being joined by Asson.

Asson Kasonde is a Zambian-born father of two (a boy and a girl), currently working in the finance sector in Manchester which is a very interesting industry to be a part of but more on that later! He also enjoys a round of the old man’s game GOLF whenever he can - also an escape to focus on his mental health.

Asson is someone that has been a part of my life since the day I was born simply because our families have such a long history together. Growing up in England, we didn’t really hang out and yet we have kept in touch for years. In this episode, we talk about life, culture, and mindset. I really enjoyed this conversation because although we grew up in similar cultures, the cultural expectations of men and women can vary so it was nice to see where some of the similarities lay.

If you want to know more about Asson, you can find him on the handles below:

Instagram bashi_mulenga

Twitter @A4JonesK

In this week's episode, I’m joined by G as we catch up on life since our last podcast together.

We fill you in on how dating is going, him meeting nearly all of my UK family, AND the fact that our first trip away together was with my parents. 

We also talk about our thoughts on Love Is Blind season three, toxic men, and Liverpool FC’s recent run - you can say there’s a little bit of something for everyone!