Thrive in Global Markets

Julia Langkraehr is an entrepreneur and the UK’s first EOS implementer. Having succeeded on the high sees of entrepreneurism she’s using her experience to help others do the same.  

She talks about her life in business, how she grew her start up from scratch to a thriving enterprise pulling in revenue of £30 million.

She has taken her success and used it to help others. As a business mentor she’s helped 55 entrepreneurs scale and grow. She’s been named among the UK’s top ten entrepreneurs and is a finalist in the 2020 National Business, Newman's awards.

She talks about making the leap from the corporate world to become an entrepreneur doing pop up retail way before the pop up boom exploded. Being a successful entrepreneur, she says is all about seeing an opportunity and taking it. It’s a lesson which will stand all budding entrepreneurs in good stead in the turbulent world of COVID 19.

Her latest venture sees her become the first EOS implementer in the UK. Created in America by Gino Wickman, the Entrepreneurial operating system is a methodology to help entrepreneurs grow. She talks about how she’s using it to help other entrepreneurs thrive.

Matti Hemmi is founding partner of InKnowation, a consulting firm, based in London and Madrid specialising in transforming businesses through people centred innovation.  He’s a successful author, engineer and now an innovator passionate about helping businesses find transformative ways to develop their operations to cope with an increasingly complex and demanding world.

Having grown up in Spain, he had seemed destined to follow his father into a successful career in engineering, but after studying psychology and strategy at university, he branched out on his own to become a consultant.  

Today he works as a consultant, helping businesses transform their prospects through innovative strategy.  He talks about the challenge of stepping out from a comfortable and successful career to go it alone, and his belief that innovation and creativity hold the key to success in business.   

Lesley Batchelor is an international trade expert who spent 12 years as Director General of the Institute of Export and played a major role in promoting UK trade around the world.

A glittering career has seen her named the CBI’s Businesswoman of the Year and CEO of the Year by the Congress of Trade Association. In 2014, she earned one of the highest honors possible when she received an OBE.

Today she is CEO of Export Boot Camps and is focusing on new export growth.

She talks to us about her rise from humble beginnings, early ambitions to be a ballerina and succeeding as a woman in a man’s game. 

Most importantly of all, she describes how she took the Institution of Export from a struggling organization £200,000 in the red to a thriving voice for international trade with profits of more than £2 million a year and bold plans for the future.

Serial entrepreneur Zeynep Turudi’s star is flying high this year. Her company Truede, which imports authentic Turkish delight for the UK market, is going strong and she was recently named Export Champion of 2020. She is also the founder of Study a Course which is a service providing an accessible platform for students looking to study overseas. Her career took a dramatic turn in 2003 when she left a computer science engineering degree at Coventry University to start her first business importing authentic Turkish Delight. She talks about how she remembered the Turkish Delight her parents would bring back with them from Turkey and how there was nothing like it in the UK. Spotting a gap in the market, she formed her own company bringing the unique texture of real Turkish Delight to UK customers for the first time. Since then she has built up an impressive list of achievements, including taking part in Barack Obama’s ‘A New Beginning Entrepreneurship and Business Innovation’ scheme and was named export champion for 2020. Hers is a story of how innovation and an eye for an opportunity can be the secret sauce for entrepreneurial success.

John Vuong started his own SEO company six years ago in Toronto, Canada after working in the corporate world for many years.  

The fourth child of Vietnamese immigrants to Canada, John is very familiar with hard work. He was born and raised in Hamilton, and worked from a young age to help his family while also having some pocket money to have fun.

John believes in education and continuous learning. That’s why he started his own podcast, Local SEO Today, in 2018. He wanted to provide a tool for business owners and entrepreneurs to help them succeed. https://www.localseotoday.ca/podcast/

Jeff Dewing is the founder and CEO of Cloudfm, a facilities management company based in Colchester, Essex. He has grown the company from just £1 million to over £70 million in only four years and is a disruptive force of nature within the facilities management industry.

He began as a fridge engineer, following in his father’s footsteps, and has since been in the FM industry for over 35 years. This experience and knowledge have allowed him to see how the industry needed to be transformed, and Cloudfm was formed from this need for change.

Cloudfm is a revolutionary company, both in terms of the impact it has had on the FM industry, and with Jeff’s refreshing approach to leadership and how you should value your employees. This is why the company has won the 2019 Queen’s Award for Innovation, and why they continue to grow.

Also discussed in this episode is how the company is coping with the current pandemic, and the difficulties of making a facilities management company work with remote and home working. 

The UK has left the European Union and the post Brexit Transition period will end on 31 December 2020. What does this mean for UK businesses?

There is currently no trade deal, though the UK government and the EU are hoping to put something in place before the deadline.

This is hardly giving any comfort to businesses as 50% of the UK’s exports are to EU countries. And if a high percentage of your company’s revenue comes from EU countries, then you are likely to be considerably worried about the future of your business and what form any trade deals will take.

What can businesses do while waiting for politicians to sort this out?

Alistair Callender is the founder and CEO of Gate8, a modular cabin luggage manufacturing and retail company founded in 2006. Originally training as an engineer, and with over 20 years’ experience working for large corporations, Alistair found himself spending many hours each month stuck at luggage check-in points and paying excess baggage fees. He needed a solution.

Taking inspiration from the boarding gate he found himself frequenting the most, he decided to create a range of travel luggage that would be universally accepted by all airlines as hand luggage. He explains how after a period of steady growth, the 'Swiss-army knife' brand of luggage began to be used by many popular airlines, helping them to expand from just B2C to include B2B sales.

We also discuss how the business has navigated the COVID-19 pandemic. From manufacturing PPE for airline clients, to creating travel kits for consumers, the business has been pivoted in order to cope with the loss in luggage sales.

International expansion of the company is in progress, and after many lessons learnt from the attempt to break into the US market, Alistair is working on securing distribution partners in other countries.

Gate8 website: https://www.gate8-luggage.co.uk/

Sebastian Bates is the Co-Founder of Shield, Founder of The Warrior Academy and Co-Founder of the Global Anti Bullying organisation “Not A Victim”. Sebastian is an Entrepreneur, Mentor, Best Selling Author and host of the the No 1 podcast for Business and Entrepreneurs “Round pegs Square holes” and No 3 podcast for Education “The Warrior Academy Podcast”.

The near death experience taught Sebastian the importance (and power) of building a team to help your business grow. This single, pivotal moment transformed Sebastian’s mindset around business and Sebastian went on to create multiple 6-7 figure, highly leveraged, online businesses. During the global Pandemic in 2020, noticing a huge challenge that many entrepreneurs were facing running a physical business, which had to close down operations due to the restrictions, without a plan to pivot online and save their business. Sebastian partnered with Timothy Fare Mathews, Co-Founder of Dubai’s leading production house and both Sebastian and Timothy vowed to help 100 business pivot online Rapidly in 2020.

Melissa Day has helped to raise over £60,000 for a project called Tea Leaf Vision, run via UK registered charity Tea Leaf Trust. They provide a life changing English Diploma programme to youth of the poorest tea estate communities in Sri Lanka whilst empowering them to become “Change Agents”; role models, active in social service.

As part of her Niroshini portfolio, Melissa has also launched a Direct Trade Tea brand – which helps to support Tea Leaf Vision as well.