Influential Visions

Renagade Rum and Waterford Distillery : Inside Story Renegade Rum and Waterford Distillery lead the way in the new era of traceability and in this episode I interview Mark Reynier CEO. Mark was the founder and CEO of Bruichladdich distillery. If you're into Whisky, you will know about Bruichladdich single malt. Fantastic Whiskys! And they sold the business for £58 million to Remy Cointreau in July 2012. Mark has been in the drinks industry his whole working life. It will be 40 years next year; he will have spent 20 years in Whisky and 20 years in the wine industry. He joined his family's wine shipping firm in 1980, they bottled old wines and distributed them. He went into wholesale restaurant sales before creating his own retail wine business in 1995; after a short stint with a West Country Brewer Eldridge Pope. It was here that he first experienced single malt Whiskys used for blending in bulk the "Brewers Ken" blended whisky. Bruichladdich was the only single malt stocked at one of his shops "La Reserve" in Knightsbridge and the Bruichladdich distillery was purchased in 2000 and developed until 2012 when it was acquired by Remy Cointreau along with a creation of theirs called The Botanist Gin. Since then, Renegade Rum has been created. It's a distillery project, which is due to come online in August 2019 and that's actually on the island of Grenada. 

Fortune Hunter Oh to be a fortune hunter. Many of us aspire to make our fortune and make a success of ourselves and keeping grounded is crucial and following advice from people who have done it before. Nathaniel Schooler 0:24 Today, I'm interviewing someone called Lyndon Wood and he's the CEO of constructaquote.com which he started when he was 19 years old. In 1990, he was struggling financially and he had to live out of his car. He landed a commission-only insurance job. He had no experience in the industry but needed to support his family. So nine months later, he decided to take control of his life and his career and he started Construct A Quote and persuaded insurance companies to trust him and then he became a millionaire at 26 years old. By the time he was 28 he was a multi-millionaire; he's a serial entrepreneur and he's launched lots of other businesses, including Xbroker, Sunzu and CuriousHow. And in 2012 he wrote a book called Diary of a Fortune Hunter. Lyndon also had a Sky TV show based on his book called Fortune Hunter TV when he interviewed all sorts of successful entrepreneurs around the world about building businesses and startups and this kind of stuff. It's a great interview, check it out! Have a listen please make sure you drop me a review and share with your friends! We're going to talk a bit about innovative thinking, creativity and critical thinking and sort of anything in between because Lyndon's involved with a lot of different businesses and I'm looking forward to learning more about him. Nice to see you Lyndon. 

Secrets of Successful Sales with Alison Edgar MBE

Secrets of successful sales are so important for any business or entrepreneur. Today I’m interviewing Alison Edgar, she’s known as the Entrepreneurs Godmother and Managing Director of Sales Coaching Solutions. She’s an author and entrepreneur, a speaker, and a thought leader. From growing up in a high rise flat in Scotland, and struggling with undiagnosed dyslexia, to working internationally in hospitality management, and ultimately owning and scaling a successful sales training business.

Buy Secrets of Successful Sales by Alison Edgar here or find her:

So on LinkedIn is a great place to get Alison, she is very active on LinkedIn as and on Instagram Alison Edgar and Twitter The Alison Edgar on Facebook it’s entrepreneurs can clan we’ve got our Facebook group and it’s almost 2000 members in there or via my website.

Alison Edgar MBE deals with speaking and author activities.

Entrepreneurs God Mother for start-ups and micro-businesses.

Sales Coaching Solutions which deals with sales team training as well as a new topic which is intrapreneurship. So that’s our topic for another podcast for another day.

Nathaniel Schooler 0:23 Today I'm interviewing Chrissie Lightfoot and she's a legal futurist And CEO of Entrepreneur Lawyer Ltd and CEO of Robot Lawyer Lisa; a tool that you can use to create contracts and NDAs. You don't even need to use a real lawyer! She's been mentioned as a cool vendor in AI for small and medium sized businesses by Gartner Inc. She has won all sorts of awards in Entrepreneur Magazine, as a top 10 lawyer turned entrepreneur adviser to the board of the Telegraph's digital enterprise network. Her blog was selected by Feed Spot as one of the top 50 entrepreneur blogs on the web. She's an honorary visiting fellow at the University of Westminster School of Law on AI and robots in law. In this really interesting episode, we talked about entrepreneurial thinking and entrepreneurial skills; key really for actually staying away from being disrupted by technology which is happening fast. 

I’m going to introduce Billee Howard who you will find shares some very valuable information around the latest in neuro marketing, emotional AI and how it all impacts storytelling and new approaches to customer engagement in our new Emotion Economy. Billee Howard is founder and CEO of BRANDthro, which is a neg, consultancy that harnesses creativity and technology to power a brand’s purpose and experience in ways that demonstrate a deeper understanding of brand targets and the language and content most apt to drive their engagement. Billee and I discussed storytelling and it’s power as a business currency as she has more experience than most people in it that I know....so it’s well worth listening to this episode. Billee has a strategic vision for how brands can differentiate themselves from their competition through the lens of purpose and sharpened emotional intelligence. She was founder of the global corporate storytelling practice, the GSMG, at Weber Shandwick for many years, following a career as press secretary for the President of the Philippines and his cabinet. I know Billee from from when I went to IBM’s THINK event. We met in Las Vegas and had a really good time there and really good conversation around emotional AI. Billee is also author of the book We-Commerce and the well read Forbes Ask the CMO column. 

Nathaniel Schooler Welcome to the show. Jessica. Your name is Jessica Kelly, and you work for Cisco. And we've kind of connected on Twitter probably for about; it's got to be about three or four years, and you've kind of progressed in your jobs. And I don't know quite what you actually do now. So I'll let you introduce yourself. Jessica Kelly Well, first of all, apologies for my puppy who chose that moment to bark. I hope that you got a good solid recording of that. He's very cute, by the way, I probably more interesting than I am. I do work for Cisco just recently started working for Cisco as an employee. I've been a consultant for a long, long, long time, primarily because I enjoy working from my own office. And Cisco allows me to do that. So it's, it's great. I've been heavily involved in social media for publicity and promotion for years. And that is indeed where we met on Twitter. And it was an accidental meeting, if I remember correctly, just we were talking about a piece of content that got shared somewhere, but it's been great. It's been great sharing tweets with you. 

Compassionate communication has been one of the building blocks for Lessonly's success and in this interview we learn more about Max Yoder CEO and co-founder of Lessonly - "The powerfully simple training software that helps teams learn, practice and Do Better Work." Today, I'm interviewing Max Yoder - Ceo and Co-founder of Lessonly, with now over 2 Millions users, we are discussing B2B sales, compassionate communication and having difficult conversations. Lessonly is the powerfully simple training software that helps teams - learn, practice and Do Better Work. 

Building a Global Brand with John McDonnell Building a global brand is a speciality of John McDonnell's and he outlines some valuable brand-building information here outlining the steps he took when building a global brand, or should I say global brands! It was a really interesting conversation. Nathaniel Schooler I have got another really exciting interview with a chap called john McDonnell. He has launched and marketed a number of successful global drinks brands. And is highly regarded as a leader in in the drinks industry. He used to be European VP of sales for Seagrams, which was a huge business. And he used to lead $1.1 Billion of sales in in Europe. 

He also grew the expansion of Patron in the world into over 130 countries and islands. And Patron became the world's number one tequila brand. He's now actually managing director of international for Tito's Handmade vodka. They are now in over 130 countries in just five years with his with his experience, and he's heavily involved with charities and things and in fact grew the Patron Tequila brand it into I believe it's 150 countries.