Business Leader

Kim Innes, the founder of the dessert brand Humble Crumble, recounts her extraordinary business journey to Sir Richard Harpin. It begins with tough shifts at a vendor's stall in Spitalfields market in east London and ends with a chain of successful shops devoted to her product, the fruit crumble pudding. She didn't get it right at first in the market stall, she explains. She was too fixated on exotic flavours and she hadn't yet started to cook live on site, creating those appetising aromas. She also had to learn, as a small brand, how to leverage social media though a series of posts that went viral. These cooked up huge demand and people began to seek her out, including the Royal Family. Though looking back, she thinks she could have approached it in a smarter way. She also shares with Harpin her plans for the future, which include a possible move into retail environments like supermarkets.
Business Leader is a membership community for ambitious CEOs and founders of mid-sized UK companies, designed to help them grow with purpose through strategic support, peer-to-peer learning, expert coaching, and high-impact events. Join the Business Leader community here and sign up for our newsletter here.
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Nnamdi Emelifeonwu left a top London law firm to set up one of the UK’s fastest-growing legal tech companies. He talks to host, Sir Richard Harpin, about how building a tool to help his visually impaired colleague to navigate complex legal documents led to co-founding Definely. It is an AI-powered legal tech platform designed to help lawyers access definitions, clauses and key information instantly without leaving the Word document they’re working on. It is used by some of the world’s leading law firms and global businesses and is now integrated into Anthropic’s Claude. Nnamdi shares the reality of becoming a founder, the challenges of raising investment, and how solving one deeply personal problem evolved into a multi-million-dollar AI business.

Themes include:
The future of AI in the legal industry
Building a startup from scratch
Entrepreneurship, risk and resilience
Scaling a B2B company
Expanding into the US
Starting a business in the UK

Business Leader is a membership community for ambitious CEOs and founders of mid-sized UK companies, designed to help them grow with purpose through strategic support, peer-to-peer learning, expert coaching, and high-impact events. Join the Business Leader community here and sign up for our newsletter here.
Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Chris de Lapuente, former Executive at LVMH and CEO of Sephora, played a pivotal role in scaling the business from €2.5bn to €16bn during his 13 years at the helm of the beauty retailer. He first met host Sir Richard Harpin at Procter and Gamble and shares reflections on their training which led to many successful business leaders. Chris describes how he grew Sephora, expanded globally and learned to be adaptable, as well as the mistakes that define his journey. Also, what is it like to work with Europe’s richest man and CEO of LVMH, Bernard Arnault?

Topics covered:
Procter and Gamble
Work-Life balance
Transformation
Expansion
Retail brands and experience
High-performing teams
LVMH and Bernard Arnault
Tips for Scaling businesses
Business Leader is a membership community for ambitious CEOs and founders of mid-sized UK companies, designed to help them grow with purpose through strategic support, peer-to-peer learning, expert coaching, and high-impact events. Join the Business Leader community here and sign up for our newsletter here.
Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Jonathan Spry, co-founder and CEO of reinsurance startup Envelop Risk, talks to Sir Richard Harpin about how cyber-attacks are now inevitable for modern businesses — and how business leaders can mitigate the risks. From ransomware and Black Swan events to AI-generated threats, Jonathan reveals how his company uses AI and advanced analytics to model catastrophic cyber scenarios for insurers around the world. He also shares how he scaled a Bristol-based B2B business, raised major investment and built competitive moats. Also, how many Jonathans has he hired?

Topics covered:
Insurance
Artificial Intelligence
B2B
Sales
Cyber attacks
Black Swan
Geopolitics
Investment
Quantum Computing
Leadership
Hiring talent
London and IPO
Bristol
Mentoring
Business Leader is a membership community for ambitious CEOs and founders of mid-sized UK companies, designed to help them grow with purpose through strategic support, peer-to-peer learning, expert coaching, and high-impact events. Join the Business Leader community here and sign up for our newsletter here.
Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

If something isn’t working in your business – at what point do you say – let’s adapt and change course? Sir Richard Harpin talks to Kai Feller, the co-founder of Bark.com, the online marketplace that connects you to a local gardener or event planner. Kai Feller had a make-or-break moment and changed his business model in response. After that the company grew by 200 percent over three years and Kai sold it for £240 million. How did he pivot so successfully and how important is harnessing AI for the future of businesses? Also Kai Feller recommends reading Stephen Covey's book "The 7 habits of highly effective people" and he compares notes with Richard about buying the local village pub.

Topics covered:
Leadership
Building and scaling a business
Artificial Intelligence
International expansion
Managing people
Work/Life balance
Local pub
Business Leader is a membership community for ambitious CEOs and founders of mid-sized UK companies, designed to help them grow with purpose through strategic support, peer-to-peer learning, expert coaching, and high-impact events. Join the Business Leader community here and sign up for our newsletter here.
Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.