This week on the Ways to Wealth Podcast, Charlie speaks to Jeffrey To, founder of MĀKI, a New Zealand company that builds autonomous boats, submarines, and underwater robots to go where humans can't.

Bored in his garage during lockdown, Jeffrey took a cheap fishing kit, turned it into a self-driving boat, and sent it out to scan his local lake. What it found stopped him cold: a 55-metre, star-shaped structure sitting on the lakebed that nobody could see from the surface and nobody could explain. That mystery, and the answer to it, accidentally launched a business now hired by councils, power companies, and industrial operators to map the things beneath our water.

But Jeffrey's story didn't start with engineering. It started in Hong Kong, where he didn't do well at school, and a cultural exchange that landed him in a tiny New Zealand town of 3,000 people. To build his future, he and his now-wife saved 60% of their income before tax, working second jobs late into the night, going without food and petrol, eating dinner on the floor because they couldn't afford a table.

This is a conversation about building things that don't exist yet, the discipline it takes to bet on yourself, and a hard-won philosophy on failure from a man who has learned that as long as you're still here, there's always tomorrow.

Watch every episode of the Ways to Wealth Podcast here: www.eccuity.com/podcasts

Learn more about Jeffrey here: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jeffrey-to-637209a7/

Learn more about Jeffrey's company here: https://www.maki.nz/

#waystowealth #robotics #engineering #autonomousvehicles #startup #entrepreneurship #nzbusiness #innovation #investing #saving #environmental #technology #maki #wealthbuilding

This week on the Ways to Wealth Podcast, Charlie speaks to Harrison Stott, founder of The Kitchen Collective, New Zealand's first cloud kitchen, with sites in Auckland and Christchurch.

If you've ordered food on an app lately, there's a growing chance it came from a kitchen with no storefront, no dining room, and no sign on the door. Harrison runs the spaces where that food gets made, a kind of co-working office building, but for chefs and food businesses, where anyone from a meal-prep startup to a fried chicken brand can move into a fully fitted kitchen and start trading almost overnight.

Harrison spent years in the UK chasing one question: how do startups actually work? He worked across out-of-home media, an AI company, an EdTech business teaching kids to code through Minecraft, and a cloud kitchen company that raised a quarter of a billion pounds. Then he brought the concept home, bought a building, fitted out the kitchens, and discovered the market he'd built for didn't actually exist here yet. What he did next is the real story.

This is an honest conversation about being the only person who truly cares about your business, why he'd rather solve a problem than talk about it, and what it takes to stay sane when every single moving part runs through you.

Watch every episode of the Ways to Wealth Podcast here: www.eccuity.com/podcasts

Learn more about Harrison here: https://www.linkedin.com/in/harrisonstott/

Learn more about Harrison's company here: https://www.tkcollective.co/

#waystowealth #cloudkitchens #ghostkitchens #food #hospitality #startups #entrepreneurship #nzbusiness #fooddelivery #foodtech #solofounder #realestate #smallbusiness #wealthbuilding

This week on the Ways to Wealth Podcast, Charlie speaks to Dec Penfold, a chef and food consultant who has built restaurant brands everywhere from Dubai to Melbourne, and who once pitched a now-thriving chicken brand to a room full of famous YouTubers using nothing but a shoebox with stickers on it.

Dec has been in kitchens since he was 14, washing pots in a Thai restaurant in North Wales. At 22 he turned up to a French ski resort expecting to snowboard between shifts, only for the head chef to never arrive, leaving him to run the entire hotel kitchen for a season without speaking a word of French. From there he ran a two-storey kitchen at the O2 feeding thousands a day, opened a string of restaurants before he was 27, burned out, and was eventually headhunted by Deliveroo to build something most diners have no idea exists.

He explains the strange world of virtual brands, the fake-looking restaurants quietly operating inside real kitchens to squeeze extra revenue out of empty hours, why he brought Mr Beast Burger to New Zealand, and how a business with almost no bricks and mortar actually works. There's also the honest story of swapping a decade in a one-bed London flat for a house by the beach, and what it really takes to run UK clients from the other side of the world at one in the morning.

This is a conversation about reinvention, spotting opportunity where others see none, and building a career that travels with you.

Watch every episode of the Ways to Wealth Podcast here: www.eccuity.com/podcasts

Learn more about Dec here: https://www.linkedin.com/in/dec-penfold-7ba566b9/

Learn more about Dec's company here: https://www.decskitchen.com/

Timestamps:

00:00 Intro

00:59 Who is Dec?01:34 A life in kitchens03:08 Thrown in at the deep end in France04:42 London, the O2 and burnout06:17 Sales and the Michelin back door07:09 Deliveroo and virtual brands11:05 Going solo as a consultant14:52 KSI, the Sidemen and the shoebox17:50 Equity vs getting paid19:08 Mr Beast Burger: a passion project20:13 Your salary as an asset20:55 Can you clone yourself?23:48 Will AI replace him?26:46 Your household as a business28:13 New Zealand as a hedge30:02 Life in NZ vs London33:11 The NZ market vs the UK35:19 Growing Mr Beast Burger38:47 Taking it on the road

#waystowealth #food #hospitality #restaurants #ghostkitchens #virtualbrands #mrbeastburger #entrepreneurship #nzbusiness #chef #foodtech #delivery #sidemen #wealthbuilding

This week on the Ways to Wealth Podcast, Charlie speaks to Andy Wright, founder of Engage Media, a one-man social content agency that has made videos for everyone from Volkswagen to the local pharmacy down the road.Andy spent a decade as a radio presenter, had a stint as a professional golfer, and now fronts golf coverage for Sky, but the thread running through all of it is an obsession with a single question: what actually makes someone stop scrolling and watch? After years of pouring himself into content he thought was brilliant that nobody saw, he stumbled on a hundred-dollar course from a tiny Canadian startup that changed everything, and boiled the whole game down to one principle most people get completely wrong.He explains why he deliberately makes content look rough and unpolished, how a one-minute video for a small-town pharmacy racked up half a million views, and why he believes the safest thing you can do with a brand is also the most dangerous. There's also an honest thread here about money, the internal battle of charging what you're actually worth when you grew up watching your parents work the land for forty years and say yes to twenty-five dollars an hour.This is a conversation about attention, authenticity, and building a life around the work you'd happily do for free, then learning how to get paid properly for it.Watch every episode of the Ways to Wealth Podcast hereLearn more about Andy hereLearn more about Andy's company here#waystowealth #contentmarketing #socialmedia #marketing #virality #entrepreneurship #nzbusiness #branding #creators #smallbusiness #advertising #ai #engagemedia #wealthbuilding

This week on the Ways to Wealth Podcast, Charlie speaks to Kai Malte Röver, a German-born industrial designer who has spent over 20 years building products on the other side of the world.

Kai's career reads like a tour of modern design. He built six-axis robots for Toyota, designed car dashboards, developed luxury fireplaces, worked on hydrogen and solar systems, and now leads product design at Mars Bioimaging, a Christchurch company that just earned FDA clearance for a next-generation medical scanner.

But the thread running through all of it isn't the products. It's what happened when a direct-talking German moved to Japan, hit a serious culture shock, forced himself to learn the language, and discovered that the way people think is wildly different depending on where they stand. That lesson reshaped how he designs, how he leads, and what he believes about staying relevant in a world that won't stop changing.

In this conversation, Kai makes the case for getting out of your bubble, why simplicity is the hardest thing of all to design, and what he tells young people who want to build a career that lasts.

Watch every episode of the Ways to Wealth Podcast here

Reach Kai on Linked-in here

Learn more about Kai here:

Learn more about Mars Bioimaging here

#waystowealth #design #industrialdesign #japan #medical #innovation #nzbusiness #circulareconomy #entrepreneurship #renewables #ai #productdesign #culture #wealthbuilding

This week on the Ways to Wealth Podcast, Charlie speaks to Christine Liggins, co-founder and CEO of the DebtFix Foundation, a charity that now helps 8,000 New Zealand families a year claw their way out of debt.

If you think the people drowning in debt are who you'd expect, this conversation will change your mind. Christine's average client isn't on a benefit. They're middle to high earners, often self-employed or running their own business, and they owe around $80,000, not on a mortgage, but on credit cards, personal loans, and buy now pay later. The people who felt the most secure in their jobs are often the ones carrying the most, right up until the moment that security disappears.

Christine has spent two decades fighting for these people, and she pulls no punches. She'll tell you why she calls bankruptcy a weapon of mass destruction, why money is now the single biggest driver of mental health problems, and the simple thing almost nobody realises they can do the moment repayments start to slip. There's also a story about a franchise owner convinced he owed a fortune, until Christine showed him the truth was nowhere near as bad as he feared.

This is a conversation about how quickly things can unravel, why the shame around debt keeps people silent for far too long, and the small first steps that start to turn it all around.

Watch every episode of the Ways to Wealth Podcast here: www.eccuity.com/podcasts

Learn more about Christine here: https://www.linkedin.com/in/christine-liggins-7454992b/

Learn more about Christine's company here: https://www.debtfix.co.nz/

#waystowealth #debt #personalfinance #bankruptcy #financialwellbeing #mentalhealth #nzbusiness #money #debtfree #charity #smallbusiness #costofliving #financialresilience #wealthbuilding

This week on the Ways to Wealth Podcast, Charlie speaks to Kristina Mydlar, founder of Mydlar Consulting, a boutique London firm that helps fintech and financial services companies put AI to work where it actually makes a difference.

Kristina spent over 20 years in banking and finance before everything changed in a single evening. During COVID, she found out from a Financial Times article on a Monday night that the company she worked for was being shut down. A few days later a stranger messaged her on LinkedIn asking for help, she remembered a line from Richard Branson about saying yes when opportunity knocks, and a business was born. Her partners have since raised over a billion pounds in equity for their clients.

The most useful part of this conversation is how bluntly Kristina cuts through the AI hype. She'll tell you that you cannot bolt AI onto a business that hasn't sorted out its own processes, because all it does is magnify the problems already there, and then everyone blames the technology instead of the homework that never got done. She explains why some client meetings feel more like therapy sessions, why company valuations are starting to look inflated, and what investors are now quietly scrutinising before they part with a penny.

This is a clear-eyed look at where the money actually is right now, what separates the founders who break through from the ones who stall, and why the hardest part of going out on your own has nothing to do with the admin.

Watch every episode of the Ways to Wealth Podcast here: www.eccuity.com/podcasts

Learn more about Kristina here: https://www.linkedin.com/in/kristina-mydlar-310b7b10/

Learn more about Kristina's company here: https://www.mydlarconsulting.com/

#waystowealth #ai #fintech #fundraising #venturecapital #financialservices #entrepreneurship #consulting #london #startups #founders #generativeai #investing #wealthbuilding

This week on the Ways to Wealth Podcast, Charlie speaks to Paul Tranter, a serial entrepreneur from Birmingham whose life has taken more turns than almost anyone we've had on the show.Paul has been a graphic designer in the London rat race, living in a broom cupboard. He chased an advert promising £700 a week on a tropical island and ended up selling timeshare in the Canaries, not knowing at the time that the whole operation was a front for one of Britain's most infamous robberies. He spent years skippering charter yachts around the Mediterranean, where his entire job was to show people a good time. Then he met his wife, retrained on a computer in his thirties, and quietly built a string of internet businesses while everyone else was still figuring out what the web was.Now he lives on a farm at the bottom of New Zealand, planting native trees and building toward something he calls ‘wealthness’. He'll tell you why turning the world off and walking around his land taught him more about security than any amount of money ever did, why he thinks the richest men on earth are missing something in their soul, and the strange story of a screaming crow that he credits with steering his whole life.There's also a masterclass buried in here on how Paul makes his living. No paid ads, ever. Just relentless content, an immunity to the numbers, and a long game most people give up on far too early. This is a conversation about living big, having enough, and the difference between the two.Watch every episode of the Ways to Wealth Podcast hereLearn more about Paul hereLearn more about Paul's company here#waystowealth #entrepreneurship #offgrid #selfsufficiency #contentmarketing #digitalproducts #nzbusiness #wealthness #legacy #simpleliving #onlinebusiness #wellbeing #serialentrepreneur #wealthbuilding

This week on the Ways to Wealth Podcast, Charlie speaks to Peter Bird, a registered nurse who spent 25 years in occupational health before a health scare made him look closely at what he, and everyone around him, was actually eating.Here is the problem he kept running into. You stand in a supermarket aisle holding a product covered in healthy-sounding claims, and you genuinely cannot tell whether it's good for you or not. Around 75 percent of what's on those shelves is ultra-processed. The packaging is built to reassure you, not inform you. And if you've ever tried to work out what to put in your kid's lunchbox, you'll know exactly how confusing and stressful that moment can be.So Peter built Kaiwise. You scan a barcode and a simple traffic light system tells you the truth about what you're holding, the level of processing, the additives, the things the label would rather you didn't notice. No advertising, no brand deals, no judgement. He bootstrapped the entire thing himself, having never worked in tech in his life, and after one video went viral in February it became the most downloaded app in the country almost overnight.The most freeing thing he says in this whole conversation is that healthy eating was never actually meant to be complicated. Scientists have known what a healthy diet looks like for decades. The confusion isn't an accident, and once you can see through it, the choices get a lot simpler. This is a conversation about taking that power back, why doing the right thing and building a viable business don't always pull in the same direction, and what it takes to hold on until it does.Watch every episode of the Ways to Wealth Podcast here Learn more about Peter hereLearn more about Peter's company here#waystowealth #kaiwise #ultraprocessedfood #nutrition #health #foodindustry #nzbusiness #entrepreneurship #bootstrapped #wellbeing #parenting #healthyeating #foodtruth #wealthbuilding

Every founder talks about growth. Raise the round, hit the milestones, scale the team. Nobody warns you about the price tag that doesn't show up on a spreadsheet.In this compilation episode of Ways to Wealth, Charlie Meaden pulls together four conversations that each answer the same uncomfortable question from a completely different angle.Luigi Lenguito (BforeAI) proved traction in the US before anyone would write a cheque, then lost product-market fit four months after closing the round. Simon Millar (Pure Advantage) spent 22 years in Hollywood managing A-list talent and walked away from all of it after one afternoon in a broken air-conditioned cinema. Henry Aung (Octopass) spent $100K and three years building a fintech in Myanmar and ran the brutal maths on what doing nothing would have returned instead. Sayantan Bhattacharya (Love Your Body) moved to the US not to sell, but to learn how global wellness brands operate before scaling Love Your Body.Four founders. Four very different journeys. One truth: growth always costs more than you think.Connect with Luigi Lenguito: https://www.linkedin.com/in/llenguito/

Learn more about Pure Advantage: https://pureadvantage.org/

Connect with Henry Aung: https://www.linkedin.com/in/henryaung/

Connect with Sayantan: https://www.linkedin.com/in/sayantan-bhattacharya-1084a4250/ Watch every episode of Ways to Wealth: https://www.eccuity.com/podcasts Learn more about eccuity: https://eccuity.comTimestamps:00:00 Introduction 00:52 Luigi06:36 Simon11:50 Henry15:21 Sayantan#WaysToWealth #Founders #Startups #Entrepreneurship #BusinessGrowth