Today’s guest is Daniel Marcos, co-founder and CEO of Gazelles Growth Institute, based in Austin, Texas. Daniel is a lifelong entrepreneur and has run his company for the past 20 years.

For the last 10 of those years he’s focused his energies coaching other CEOs, showing them how to change their mindset in order to take their companies to the next level. According to Daniel, the majority of scaling a company is all in the mind—you need to have the right mindset in order to grow your business.

As well as running Gazelles Growth Institute, the leading online executive education company for C-level executives at fast-growing firms, Daniel also co-founded Inflection (Gazelles Mexico), a management coaching company that helps business executives and entrepreneurs grow their companies faster and with less “drama”.

Today, however, Daniel is keen to discuss his latest project “How to be a better CEO”. Daniel has witnessed, time and again, CEOs keen to scale their companies, but without first setting a system in place of how to do it and how they are going to get the support they need from their team.

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On today’s episode of The Melting Pot we talk to Nicole Yershon, founder and CEO of the NY Collective, a leverage-model business that was created to disrupt the traditional practices of consulting and marketing agencies, and to get to the heart of a business’ problem, whether operational or strategic, as quickly as possible.

Nicole is the original rough diamond: she wasn’t a yes-girl, she asked the awkward questions, she queried the processes and she side-stepped authority and the chain of command to get things done. Her measure of success wasn’t financial, it was in her ability to move people from an analogue world to a digital world.

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Today’s guest is the founder and Managing Director of creative brand agency, MadeBrave® and Executive Chairman of content production agency, Campfire®, Andrew Dobbie.

A designer and photographer originally, Andrew is on a mission to inspire creativity in everyone, believing that branding and marketing don’t need to be confusing and has set up two agencies to help businesses bring their best ideas to life.

MadeBrave® was founded seven years ago and now sees an annual turnover of £4m. Starting with just him, it quickly grew and saw him handing over design responsibility to a better designer very early on. The agency then grew faster and within a year he had six employers. As MadeBrave® entered their second year they were bringing in one new employee a month, and within two years he had 16 employees.

So how did Andrew go from freelance design to being the CEO of two agencies?

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Today’s guest is CEO and co-founder of Bare Conductive, Matt Johnson. Bare Conductive is a company inventing radical new ways to interact with and place electronics in our environment. With key customers such as Ikea and Dupont, this relatively new London-based technology startup is developing a platform of sensing technologies based around its electrically conductive paint and capacitive hardware.

Since launching its first product in 2011, Bare Conductive has sold over 220,000 units in more than 120 countries, as well as winning a number of competitions including Innovate UK’s Digital Disruptive Solutions £100k award, been nominated for Design of the Year Award by the Design Museum, and received an Honorary Mention at Ars Electronica, this self-funded company is going from strength to strength.

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On today’s podcast we talk with Jenny Kitchen, MD of Yoyo Design, a company specialising in designing digital solutions so that every brand can tell its own story and create a genuine user engagement.

Jenny was crowned Young Business Person of the Year for 2016 at the RTW Business Awards, as one of the top 30 under 30 women in Digital by The Drum, young business leader of the year and recognized by BIMA as one of the Hot 100 in digital for the past 3 years—all for her incredible achievement growing Yoyo.

But since winning, she hasn’t sat back on her laurels, instead she has channeled her energy into growing the business further, making sure all Yoyo clients are happy, but more importantly, making sure that the team she has created and molded are motivated, inspired, driven and delivering work that is considered and beautifully presented.

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Today’s guest is executive change mentor Sally Henderson. With 20 years of experience in leadership development, Sally works with high performing senior leaders keen to reach ambition faster by enabling powerful change from the inside out.

Sally cut her teeth in recruitment, setting up her own coaching-based recruitment company, The Career Company, before embarking on a successful career in Executive Search. It took having her first child to realise that whilst she was helping so many people get to where they want to go in their careers, she was not happy in hers. Ironically The Career Company motto was “You have a right to be happy and effective at work,” and as the founder of such a successful company, she simply wasn’t.

Knowing that her real interests and motivators lay far outside recruitment, she took the brave decision to walk away from her company and now works with C-Suite execs, Founders and senior leaders and MDs to influence and bring about transformational change through her innovative coaching and mentoring methods.

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Today’s guest is Nic Marks, CEO and Founder of Friday, the company Nic set up to track employee happiness, in order to help businesses build a more positive, productive work culture.

A statistician by trade but with a background as a therapist, Nic has a slightly weird speciality—happiness—having used it spending the last three decades creating a measure of people’s quality of life. Nic firmly believes that measuring happiness kick-starts a process which ultimately builds happiness.

In just over 6 years, Nic and the team at Friday have worked with more than 9,000 teams across 1,000 organisations, measuring and improving happiness at work. Happiness is a great proxy for quickly judging how things are in a team at a moment in time—if you’re happy at work things are likely to be going well, if you’re not happy, they’re not.

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Today’s guest is Kevin Lawrence, author, speaker, strategic advisor and coach to entrepreneurial CEOs and business leaders around the world. With his deep knowledge of the Rockefeller Habits and Scaling Up, combined with his own methodology developed over the last 25 years, Kevin has helped countless leaders to build high-performance leadership teams, expand into new markets, attract profitable customers, and increase productivity and profits.

More recently Kevin has written a book, Your Oxygen Mask First, which features 17 practical steps for leaders and CEOs to follow, to achieve success whilst maintaining balance in the rest of their lives.

It’s this book as well as Kevin’s other observations of CEOs that we discuss, so join us on today’s podcast:

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Today’s guests are Carla Cringle and Imogen Pudduck, co-founders of FizzPopBANG Ltd. Their tagline, “making people whistle on their way to work,” says all you need to know about these two upbeat people. They met 15 years ago when they worked together at Red Bull as Head of Brand and Head of HR.

Carla and Imogen realised that to have a truly amazing brand that consumers fall in love with, you need infectiously passionate and loyal people that drive that ethos forward. Today, a strong business “plan” is no longer good enough to drive success.

They left Red Bull to share their collective knowledge and inject a little sparkle into the working lives of others. Together they created FizzPopBANG, a small but beautifully formed consultancy specialising in brand employee engagement.

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Today’s guest is Professor Moran Cerf, a neuroscientist and business professor at the Kellogg School of Management and the neuroscience program at Northwestern University. He holds a Ph.D in neuroscience from Caltech, an MA in Philosophy and a B.Sc in Physics from Tel-Aviv University.

Moran has had a varied work history, prior to his academic career, he spent nearly a decade in industry, holding positions in computer security (as a hacker), pharmaceutical, telecom, fashion, software development, and innovations research.

Now he’s interested in how we can use the brain to leverage better business opportunities. He is currently teaching MBA students how to change behaviour, how marketing works and how people think and make decisions. He is a firm believer that social engagements are more powerful than the addictive lure of drugs or our devices, and his goal is to make the world a more optimistic place.

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