E18 – Effective Presentation Skills: Interview With Paddy Willis from Mission Ventures
In this episode, I interview Paddy Willis. Paddy is Founder and CEO of Mission Ventures and has a passion for building better challenger brands. He was co-founder of disruptive baby-food brand Plum, which was sold in year five to Darwin PE in 2010 on retail sales of £15m. Since then he has been mentoring and supporting start-ups across the industry, with the first UK Food accelerator launched in January 2015. Recently, Mission Ventures announced their partnership in The Good Food Fund, a £1.8m fund established by Big Society Capital with Guy’s & St Thomas’ Charity to tackle childhood obesity with market-led solutions. Today, we discuss effective presentation skills.
Paddy Willis – Founder and CEO of Mission Ventures
You Can Read the Transcript of Our Interview Below:
Nathan Simmons:
We are in. Phenomenal. Welcome to another Sticky Interview. My name is Nathan Simmons. I’m senior trainer and coach for MBM, Making Business Matter, the training provider, soft skills provider for the U.K. grocery and manufacturing industry. The idea with these interviews is to be sharing the thoughts and concepts of great people in great spaces doing great work to help you be the best possible version of yourself. Today, I’m speaking to a gentleman I got to meet last week by the name of Paddy Willis.
Nathan Simmons:
Paddy, I’m going to read his bio here. I’m going to tell you why some of this is so engaging for me, though. Paddy is the founder and CEO of Mission Ventures, and has a passion for building better challenger brands. He was co-founder of disruptive baby food brand Plum, which was sold in year five to Darwin PE in 2010 on retail sales of £15 million, which on its own, Paddy, is pretty phenomenal.
Since then, he has been mentoring and supporting startups across the industry with the first UK food accelerator launch in January 2015. Recently, Mission Ventures announced their partnership in the Good Food Fund, a 1.8 million fund established by Big Society Capital with Guy’s and St. Thomas’ Charity to tackle childhood obesity with market led solutions.
Nathan Simmons:
This is where it got interesting for me, why I wanted to, and when I reached out to Paddy, so there’s three elements of this. One is challenger brands. I thought that’s really interesting, disrupting markets. Two, childhood obesity, this is a huge thing that’s going on with the way that the industry is moving.
Then I got thinking, those two facets on their own are difficult enough. What do effective presentation skills… What is a great presenter in that space where you’re talking to companies about challenger brands that may put them out of business potentially or disrupt their market, and also getting people to make moves on the amount of sugars, and salts, and fats, et cetera, they’re putting into their foods, and what sort of skills have you got to have in order to present to that level, to get people to make those shifts?
Nathan Simmons: