Ladder Down

Chris Matheson is a Labour Party politician in the United Kingdom. He has been the Member of Parliament (MP) for the constituency of the City of Chester since winning the seat in the 2015 general election.

Growing up in rural Cheshire, he attended Manchester Grammar School then went on to gain a degree in Economics and Politics from the London School of Economics. He became an MP in 2013. He has two children and is an avid football fan for Chester and Everton FC. You can connect with Chris at: https://www.chrismatheson.co.uk/

Sue Moore is an experienced business leader and growth consultant with a passion for sharing what she knows and encouraging others to reach their potential, which she calls ‘paying it forward’.

Sue has a wealth of commercial experience at Board Level and has successfully transferred her skills and experience across several sectors, each time delivering the required results. She has appeared on radio, TV, podcasts and has frequently been a guest speaker at franchising and start up events.

Sue's experience extends to franchising including start ups, high growth and exit planning. Industries include: franchising, FMCG, retail, health and fitness, recruitment, home services and children's services.

As well as working in her day-job where she lends her skills and expertise to a range of different sectors providing interim leadership support, she is also a Mentor for the Northern Power Women Network, supporting founder Simone Roache MBE.

You can connect with Sue on Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/suemoorecheshire/ 

In this mini ladder lesson episode, Kate shares her top tips on maintaining a positive mindset including getting ahead of it, filling your cup, how to keep doing the work, avoiding the dreaded comparisonitis culture.

In this episode Kate speaks to the hugely inspirational Mr Simon Cohen. Simon hit the headlines when he gave away his communications agency Global Tolerance for the riches of family life!

Simon initially followed a conventional path to wisdom. In his search for answers, he studied Theology at university, but was instead faced by a cul-de-sac of questions. He started a traditional career in advertising, but in choosing status and salary over personal values, he failed to find happiness.

At the age of 24, he decided to defy society's ideas about what it means to be wise, wealthy, and happy today. He set up Global Tolerance, a communications agency to spread messages of hope. In the following decade, Simon travelled the world, representing the Dalai Lama, Gandhi's grandson, and many of the world's wisest women, men and children.

Simon was a regular Pause for Thought contributor on the Chris Evans Breakfast Show on BBC Radio 2. In 2013, he became the first person in the UK to place his whole company on sabbatical. A sought after keynote speaker, his talk Challenging Conventional Wisdom was the most popular talk on Trendhunter, the world's leading trend site, for six months running.

At the end of the sabbatical, spent writing and considering what would be best for Global Tolerance and his family, Simon came to a momentous and (some say) crazy decision. It was time to give away the company he founded.

Simon launched the first ever Open Leadership Exercise (OLE), handing over 95% ownership of Global Tolerance, £10,000 in the bank, a state-of-the-art website, a decade of business contacts, and all the company assets! He hopes that business leaders around the world will consider their own version of an OLE as a new, values-driven type of exit strategy.

Simon is currently writing a book, blogging for the Harvard Business Review, Entrepreneur Magazine, Huffington Post, and gives keynote talks around the world - as long as he can take his family with him!

This is an epic episode because Kate and Helen had A LOT of business ground to cover! Helen Pritchard is an award winning entrepreneur, the absolute Queen of online business and a huge force for good! Helen started her business out of her home as a single mum, recently divorced while suffering the aftermath of the 2008 recession.

After building up a successful agency, in 2017 she waved goodbye to it and started training entrepreneurs, coaches and businesses in LinkedIn lead generation. 

She has since gone on to impact the lives of thousands of people around the world with her famous Linkedin Challenges and lead generation strategies, such as the ‘bring your £99 thing to the world’. She now has an ever-expanding team of people working alongside her helping business owners of all shapes and sizes to attract clients. You can connect with Helen via her website: https://helenpritchardonline.com/ 

The saying goes that all publicity is good publicity but Gerald Ratner would tell you differently! 

When Gerald inherited his family jewellery company in 1984, he expanded it from about 150 shops to over 2,000 in just six years, capturing over 50% of the UK’s jewellery market. He became known as ‘The King of Bling’ and was heralded as a business prodigy.

That was up until an eventful speech that Gerald made at an Institute of Directors dinner on 23rd April 1991, where he famously, or infamously, called one of his products ‘total crap’ in front of 6,000 business leaders and journalists, saying that one of the sets of earrings he sold was "cheaper than a prawn sandwich from Marks and Spencers but probably wouldn't last as long”.

The British media went to town on Gerald and even though he subsequently explained it was meant in good humour, the country’s sense of humour wasn’t great due to a very deep and dark recession…the public voted with their feet and the company’s shares dropped £500 million in a matter of days.

This very nearly resulted in the firm's collapse and Gerald Ratner was fired, lost his home, had to take his children out of school and was left severely depressed. It was only when his wife threatened to kick him out that he decided to change. He started a health club from nothing which he sold a few years later for almost £4million and is now involved in an online jewellery business called ‘Gerald Online’. 

In this episode Kate chats to the legend himself to find out if he would have done anything differently 30 years on!

In this episode Kate chats to Donna Hamilton who has a passion for helping organisations to get the most out of their people. She is Director of Customer Success for a company called 'Peachy Mondays', an employee listening platform which helps businesses improve their employee engagement. Their trademark is 'Happy people work better'!

Donna has held senior People roles in FTSE 100 companies and worked all around the world so has a wealth of experience of operating within different cultures and organisational structures. Tune in to hear Kate and Donna chat about how to make the employee experience a brilliant one in your business! 

In this episode Kate meets Nigel Taberner who spent 30 years in the UK Police working in a wide variety of front line, protective security, asset coordination and investigative roles. Perhaps his most interesting role was as a Hostage Negotiator.

He successfully negotiated over 130 high-risk armed sieges, domestic and international kidnaps, suicide interventions and was deployed during high profile counter-terrorism operations.

He says that as well as saving lives, the skills that he learned made him a more effective leader and a better colleague, husband and father. Since retiring from the Police force in 2019 he has started up his own business called Level2Communications where now helps people transform their businesses using the skills that he honed in his words ‘the murky world of hostage negotiation’  as a power for good. He says that these skills can enhance your workplace, develop your teams, increase your productivity and give you a competitive edge.

In this episode Kate catches up with an ex-colleague, Bieneosa Ebite, a seasoned Public Relations professional who thrives on managing reputation, engaging diverse audiences and providing strategic counsel.

Kate and B met when they were both leading communications for one of the world’s largest brands, McDonald’s Restaurants during one of the most challenging periods of its history! She went on to establish her own PR consultancy managing campaigns for more big names including Costa Coffee, Starbucks, the Home Office, the Office for National Statistics and Oxfam. All the while promoting her passion for diversity in all its forms, co-founding Ignite, a not-for-profit organisation that operated for five years, promoting the benefits of cultural diversity in PR.  

She is now Head of Corporate Communications for Centrica, where she is also co-chair of the Women's Network. She too has her own podcast ‘News Bants’ providing an unfiltered and light-hearted take on current affairs and politics. You can find out more about B’s career and business journey by connecting with her on Linked in.

In this episode Kate meets Scott Anthony who is an expert on business innovation. Senior Partner at Innosight, Scott helps leaders design new growth strategies, build innovation capabilities, navigate disruptive innovation, and manage strategic transformation.

Scott has written eight books, including most recently Eat, Sleep, Innovate (2020) and Dual Transformation (2017), which describe how forward-thinking organizations can navigate disruptive change and own the future. Scott is a prolific contributor to Harvard Business Publishing. He is the most published digital author on HBR.org and is Harvard Business Corporate Learning’s most in-demand subject matter expert.

He has been based in Singapore since 2010, where he served as a member of the Committee on the Future Economy and a Board member of MediaCorp from 2013-2019. In 2019 he was named one of the world’s 10 most influential management thinkers by Thinkers50, and in 2017 he won the T50 Innovation Award.

Scott is a featured speaker on topics of innovation and growth. He has delivered keynote addresses on six continents, and has appeared on Good Morning America, Channel News Asia, CNBC, and FOX Business. Scott served on the Board of Directors of Media General (NYSE: MEG) from 2009-2013 and of Mediacorp from 2013-2019, helping guide both companies through strategic transformations.

From 2009 to 2015 Scott chaired the investment committee for IDEAS Ventures, a SGD 10 million fund Innosight ran in conjunction with the Singapore government that invested in 10 Singapore-based companies and generated a 16% internal rate of return.

Prior to joining Innosight, Scott was a senior researcher with Clayton Christensen, managing a group that worked to further Christensen’s research on innovation.

Scott received a BA in economics summa cum laude from Dartmouth College and an MBA with high distinction from Harvard Business School, where he was a Baker Scholar.