Andrew Dudum founded Hims & Hers to try to bring healthcare into the digital age. The business is a wellness platform that specialises in treatments for conditions that traditionally have a stigma attached, such as hair loss, acne and erectile dysfunction. It allows people access to over-the-counter drugs and prescriptions following an online consultation with a qualified doctor. The company went public on the New York Stock Exchange in 2021. It is now valued at more than $3.5bn (£2.7bn) and has more than 1.7 million subscribers. Dudum says he has built the business while aspiring to be “the least interesting person in the room”. This is the story behind how he did it...

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Chris Oglesby succeeded his father Michael as chief executive of Bruntwood in 1999. Since then he has grown Bruntwood into one of the biggest and most important businesses in northern England. Bruntwood is responsible for much of the regeneration work in Manchester in recent years and is working on property developments across northern England. The company thinks there is an opportunity to transform the economy in northern England. But the Oglesby family has recently been hit by tragedy

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In 2017 Tom Leathes decided it was time to give the second-hand car market a digital update. With his two best friends and long-time business collaborators, Alex Buttle and Harry Jones, he co-founded Motorway. Investors spotted the potential and by 2021 the company was another British unicorn, valued at more than $1bn. The platform handled £2.2bn worth of transactions in 2023, helping customers sell their second-hand vehicles to a network of more than 5,000 verified car dealers. The three co-founders have a shared history as a team of serial entrepreneurs. They've set up more than five companies. Failures and setbacks, it turns out, have taught them as much as the successes.

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Lord Mark Price spent more than 30 years working for the John Lewis Partnership, including eight years as the boss of Waitrose. He then joined the government as trade minister before founding his own business, WorkL, which tracks the happiness of employees. In this episode of Business Leader we explore what he has learned about running a business as well as the past, present and future of the John Lewis Partnership, and why businesses are underestimating the importance of their staff being happy. Plus, we explore what it was like trying to do post-Brexit trade deals and how he initially wanted to be a professional golfer...

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The story behind Manchester-based travel company Travel Counsellors and why it might be the company with the best reviews in the UK. Steve Byrne, the long-serving chief executive, explains why customers and staff rate it so highly, why you may not have heard about the company until now, and why it has ambitious plans for the future.

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In 1989, Mark Dixon had an idea - the traditional office didn’t work for many businesses and they needed something more flexible. More than 30 years later, he has been proved right. IWG, the business he founded, is now worth more than £2 billion and runs 4,000 serviced offices around the world, which millions of people use to do their jobs as flexible working has taken off.

But it has been a challenging and sometimes lonely battle to get IWG to this point. This is a story that involves rapid growth, Chapter 11 bankruptcy and flashy new rivals…

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Josh Bayliss was appointed as the chief executive of Virgin Group by Sir Richard Branson in 2011. He works with an array of Virgin branded-businesses, 70,000 employees but just one shareholder - the Branson family. It is a unique job with unique challenges and unique opportunities. This is the story behind the Virgin brand and how Josh Bayliss ended up running it…

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Kevin McCabe tells the story of how he built a property empire and then ended up running Sheffield United, his beloved football club. It is a story that has highs, lows, controversial goals and legal battles.

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In 2018 the founder of Tide, George Bevis, stood aside as chief executive and was succeeded by Oliver Prill. Since then Tide has grown rapidly. It has gone from being a promising financial technology start-up to a company whose online banking services are used by one in 10 small and medium-sized businesses in the UK. In this episode of Business Leader, Oliver Prill discusses the challenges of becoming chief executive, how to disrupt the financial services industry and why regulators may hold back innovation in the UK.

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Wizz Air has emerged as one of the biggest airlines in Europe and a new low-cost rival to Ryanair and EasyJet. Its first flight was in May 2004, travelling from Katowice in Poland to Luton in the UK. Today it carries more than 60 million passengers every year and is valued at well over £2 billion after floating on the stock market in London. In this episode of Business Leader, Jozsef Varadi, the founder and chief executive of Wizz Air, discusses how he founded and built the airline, the challenges he has faced and his fascinating views on what it is like running a UK-listed business.

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How does a business survive for 250 years and still be controlled by the same family? Rankin Brothers & Sons was founded in 1774 and is celebrating its 250th birthday in 2024. It has seen the creation of the United States of America, two World Wars, and the Covid-19 crisis. Jim Rankin is the sixth generation of the family to lead the business, which supplies corks and caps for beer, wine and spirits. He has been in the business for 30 years, but when he was younger he didn’t want to join it and feared he would fall-out with the rest of his family…

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Floyd Woodrow and Peter Malmstrom had illustrious military careers in the SAS, the special forces unit of the British Army. Now they are using what they learned about leadership, team-building, and negotiating to build a business. That business - Quantum Group - is already worth hundreds of millions of pounds, and they have ambitions to make it much bigger.

This episode of Business Leader is the story of what the military taught them about how to build and scale-up a business. And it includes the key points from the elite coaching courses that Floyd Woodrow gives to professional sports teams and businesses.

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Matt Grech-Smith and his business partner Jeremy Simmonds had an idea a decade ago that they called “competitive socialising”. They’ve gone on to create a mini-golf entertainment empire that is a thriving global business with annual sales of more than £35m. It all started with a warehouse in east London, an email that went viral, and a website that crashed. Now Swingers is heading for Las Vegas and Dubai. Dougal Shaw presents the story behind a business that has changed how people socialise at night

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Duncan Clark was an environmental journalist at The Guardian, pioneering a new way of telling stories through data visualisation and graphics. Now he is at the centre of one of the fastest-growing tech companies in the world - Canva, which offers free online tools for graphic design and has been valued at $40 billion (£32 billion). This is the story of how he built a business, sold it to Canva, and is now leading the company’s ambitious expansion plans in Europe

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Robinhood is one of the fastest-growing companies in America and claims it is helping to democratise finance by offering commission-free share trading for all. Now it is coming to the UK. Jordan Sinclair, the president of Robinhood UK, explains how it is approaching a UK launch, the story behind the business and the challenges it has faced along the way…

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A failed athletics career and an unfulfilled Olympics dream. A successful business. A failed business. Another successful business and a redemption story. This podcast episode could be four stories in one. But remarkably it is one story, which is why it is slightly longer episode of Business Leader than normal. This is the story of John Stapleton.

He co-founded the New Covent Garden Soup Company and Little Dish, two successful food businesses. But in between those success stories he suffered a big failure with Glencoe Foods, which he had to close. And before all of that he had dreams of competing in the triple jump at the Olympics. This is a story about how failure can teach you more than success. And how luck - good and bad - will always play a role…

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Ophelia Brown is the founder of Blossom Capital, a venture capital firm which has raised around $1 billion (£789 million) from investors since she launched it in the UK in 2018. Blossom uses the money it has raised to invest in promising businesses in Europe. Blossom is a rare success story - it is a female-led start-up and venture capital firm but is also thriving away from the traditional heart of this industry in Silicon Valley. This is the story of how Ophelia Brown founded the business, raised the money, and what she has learned along the way.

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It’s time for the second episode in our story about how B&M went from a small discount chain in the north of England to one of the biggest retailers in the UK. In part two we look at B&M’s transition from a promising medium-sized business to a FTSE 100 giant. This is a transition that many businesses fail to make. For B&M, it was about keeping your focus despite constant distractions. But it was also about learning and evolving - in terms of strategy and people. At the end of the episode we speak to Simon Arora about why he stood down as B&M’s chief executive and what may come next for him and the business.

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The story behind how Simon Arora and his brothers Bobby and Robin turned B&M from a small discount chain in the north of England into one of the biggest retailers in the UK. In part one, we speak to Simon Arora about how he found B&M, the strategy behind building the business, and how it nearly all ended after less than a year…

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Marc Allera explains how EE went from being an upstart mobile phone brand to a key part of BT and a business with big ambitions for the future. Plus he explains what he learned from launching Sega’s Dreamcast games console and mobile phone brand Three in the early 2000s, which had mixed success.

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It is nearly 30 years since Sir Stelios Haji-Ioannou founded easyJet in the mid-1990s and helped to transform air travel in Europe. In this episode of Business Leader, Sir Stelios discusses how he built the airline, how he used distinctive marketing to fight fierce competition, how the fly-on-the-wall documentary Airline became one of the most popular shows on television, and why he has launched a new award for young entrepreneurs.

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How do you get to the top of the venture capital industry? Why should CEOs be concerned about burning out? And what does a promising business actually look like? Suranga Chandratillake, general partner at Balderton Capital and one of the leading venture capital investors in Europe, explains all of that and more in our latest episode.

He tells the story of his journey from working at Autonomy to being the founder and chief executive of a promising technology company and then leaving all that behind to become a venture capital investor…

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Tom Beahon, the co-founder of Castore, explains how he and his brother Phil built a sportswear brand in North West England that is taking on Nike and Adidas. The story begins with Beahon failing to make it as a professional football with his beloved Tranmere Rovers.

Castore is now worth nearly £1 billion and makes kits for the England cricket team, Newcastle United and other high-profile teams and athletes. But the journey for this British success story has taken twists and turns…

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Joanna Knight was an entrepreneur running a business that imported components for laser printer cartridges into the UK. But it was struggling. Her mother urged her to get a job. So Joanna Knight did. She joined Wrexham-based Moneypenny as its first sales director. More than a decade later she is now the chief executive of Moneypenny, one of the fastest-growing companies in the UK. "Failure is just another step to success," Knight says. This is the story of how she went from failure to CEO, the challenge of adapting to that role and the future of Moneypenny

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“Everyone has a plan until they get punched in the mouth,” Mike Tyson, the boxer, once said. So what does a business leader do when life doesn’t turn out as expected? That is the question behind this episode of Business Leader. A sharp drop in passenger numbers, strikes by workers, an accounting scandal, a row with the government and a takeover bid.

That is what Christian Schreyer faced after taking over as chief executive of Go-Ahead Group, one of the UK’s largest rail and bus companies. He stood down two years later after a whirlwind period in charge. “Life is what happens when you have other plans,” he says…

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The story behind Peloton and how it has tried to change the way people exercise. Peloton has enjoyed big success but also faced big challenges. Amanda Gilmore, Peloton’s general manager for the UK and expansion, discusses how the company has built a community of loyal users around the world and changed how people keep fit, as well as how to improve diversity in the business world

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Jeff Kelisky, the chief executive of Seedrs, the crowdfunding platform, tells the story of what it is like to succeed a founder as boss of their own company and how crowdfunding is helping businesses scale-up

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The story behind why a company based in King’s Cross in London, not Silicon Valley or Detroit in the US, may hold the answer to self-driving cars being on our roads

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What skills does it take to run one of the UK’s biggest companies for a decade? What does a business leader do when an activist investor demands you change your strategy? How is the UK really doing with its net-zero ambitions? And why should a leader be concerned about wet paint? All of that and more are covered in the latest episode of Business Leader as we speak to Alistair Phillips-Davies, one of the longest-serving chief executives in the FTSE 100…

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The story of how Metro became the most-read daily newspaper in the UK after launching in 1999. How did this newspaper - which is free - disrupt a highly competitive industry and then survive a string of big challenges? We speak to Deborah Arthurs, the editor-in-chief, and Richard Thomson, the managing director…

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The story of how Sydney-born Dan Labbad rose through the property industry to become chief executive of the Crown Estate and be tasked with the extraordinary challenge of “creating lasting and shared prosperity” for the UK. This episode explores the history of that unique organisation, its £16 billion collection of assets that range from Regent Street in London to the seabed around the UK, and how Labbad’s approach to management has been shaped by the discrimination his Egyptian father suffered in Australia, a disregard for hierarchies and a belief that you need to nudge the world in the right direction rather than change it…

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Why does a business that was previously thriving end up failing? What tips a struggling business into insolvency? Find out all that and more in the new episode of Business Studies. Retail boss Ian Shepherd discusses what it was like being chief executive of video game retailer Game when it collapsed into administration and what his experience and the demise of discount chain Wilko tells us about why businesses collapse. A summary of our discussion: “Gradually, then suddenly.” Ian Shepherd now writes the superb Moving Tribes newsletter on business strategy which you can read here

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Andrew Brem, the general manager for Uber in the UK, discusses the growth of the taxi app, the controversies it has faced, and why London and electric cars are key to its future

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Garry Wilson, the co-founder and managing partner of Endless, explains how he built one of the UK’s largest private equity firms and why his journey from Belfast to Leeds helps to explain why the private equity industry does not deserve its controversial reputation

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Hawksmoor was founded by friends Will Beckett and Huw Gott in 2006 and the pair now have 10 restaurants in the UK. From humble beginnings in a former Turkish restaurant in London, Hawksmoor generated sales of more than £90m in 2023 and is now expanding overseas.

In this episode of Business Leader, Dougal Shaw looks at the story behind a culinary and business success. “People don’t like being miserable," says Beckett. "One of the joys in life is spending time with people in restaurants."

Beckett and Gott are childhood friends and lifelong foodies. Their parents also worked in the food business. In their mid-twenties the co-founders ran several London bars. These didn’t take off, but it taught them valuable business lessons about hiring and venue location. 

They hit on a winning formula with Hawksmoor, realising that there was a gap in the market because steak meals were associated with French bistros or American-style diners: “In a country really famous for beef, there wasn’t a British restaurant, that idea of Britishness made a difference."

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Former Google and Stripe executive Claire Hughes Johnson tells the inside story of how those two companies went from promising tech start-ups to big businesses, and how it was often chaos behind-the-scenes…

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Richard Price, the managing director for clothing and home at Marks & Spencer, explains how he is trying to put the spark back into one of the UK’s leading fashion brands and how, after years of false dawns, success should be sustained this time. Plus he discusses a career in retail that has spanned Next, Sir Philip Green and Tesco. And why Brian Clough is such an inspiration…

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We look at the story of how Yorkshireman Richard Harpin built Homeserve into a £4.1 billion company despite the business nearly failing twice in its early years. It is a story that involves unexpected twists, setbacks and lessons about how you really build a business that Harpin now wants to share with other entrepreneurs and leaders.

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The remarkable story of how Arm became one of the most successful and talked-about technology companies that Britain has ever produced. What does Arm actually do so well? Why is Apple so key to this story? And should the £24 billion sale of the company to Japanese investor Softbank and its charismatic founder Masayoshi Son have been stopped in 2016?

All of these questions and more are explored with James Ashton, author of a new book on Arm called The Everything Blueprint: The Microchip Design that Changed the World.

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The story of how Teach First became the biggest graduate recruiter in the UK, the legacy it has left, the controversies it faced, and why Brett Wigdortz, the founder, is now focused on improving pre-school childcare in the UK

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Oxford Nanopore Technologies is one of the most promising and exciting companies operating in the UK today. Its handheld devices read genomes and mark a new era for how easily and quickly DNA can be sequenced, which should have significant benefits for health and fitness. In this episode of Business Studies we speak to Gordon Sanghera, the chief executive and co-founder, about how the company was built, how it was inspired by the Arctic Monkeys, Brian Clough and Rinus Michels, and why he is unlike most other FTSE bosses…

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What can businesses really learn from elite sport? How to sustain performance over a long period of time, according to Catherine Baker, author of a new book called Staying the Distance: The lessons from sport that business leaders have been missing. We speak to Catherine Baker about her new book and the lessons that matter from sport, including insights from the New Zealand rugby union team, Dame Jessica Ennis-Hill, Sir Chris Hoy, and Mel Marshall, coach of Olympic gold medalist swimmer Adam Peaty…

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Will Shu founded Deliveroo with his childhood friend Greg Orlowski in 2013. Ten years on, Deliveroo is listed in London and worth nearly £2 billion. But a lot has happened in-between. In this episode of Business Studies, Shu discusses the story behind how Deliveroo was founded, how he built the business as CEO, its difficult IPO and the future for the online food delivery service…

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Women were first allowed access to the London Stock Exchange only 50 years ago. There has been progress since then, but men continue to dominate the City, as well as the world of start-ups and venture capital. That makes Clara Melia a pretty rare success story. She worked in the City and then set up her own business, Equitory, which helps companies with investor relations. In this episode of Business Studies we look at how she built her business, why women are still under-represented in the City and start-ups, and how she came to represent Great Britain in skydiving.

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In the year 2000 the Dot-com bubble burst. The stock market value of internet-based companies had surged in the previous months and years. Suddenly their world collapsed. Many went bust and disappeared. In this episode of Business Studies we explore what happened, why it happened and what lessons can be learned and applied to the modern-day, when public and private markets are recovering from another sharp drop in the value of tech-based businesses. To do that we speak to Rob Hornby, the managing director for AlixPartners, the consultancy firm, in London…

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Airbus is one of the biggest manufacturing businesses in the UK, Europe and the world. In this episode of Business Leader, we look at Airbus's business in the UK, its commitment to manufacturing in the country and its concerns about the geopolitical situation. We speak to John Harrison, the chairman of Airbus UK, the most senior Brit in the company and also its general counsel

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. Sign up for our Business Leader newsletter here.

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Miles Roberts has transformed DS Smith since becoming chief executive in 2010 and made cardboard boxes interesting. Today, DS Smith is a FTSE 100 company that makes recyclable packaging and paper, spanning 34 countries with 30,000 staff, including 36 sites and 4,300 employees in the UK.

In the latest episode of Business Studies, Roberts, the sixth longest-serving boss in the FTSE 100, explains why packaging is way more interesting than you might think, how DS Smith got caught-up in the chaos around Kwasi Kwarteng’s mini-Budget, how he became a FTSE 100 chief executive after leaving school at 16 and why longevity is an underrated asset at the top of a business.

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. Sign up for our Business Leader newsletter here.

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Rishi Khosla, the co-founder and chief executive of OakNorth, tells the story of how OakNorth bid for Silicon Valley Bank UK during a frantic weekend in March 2023 and why the eventual deal with HSBC could be bad for innovation and start-ups.

Aside from recent events, Khosla talks about building OakNorth into the most valuable fintech in the UK, the challenges it has faced since then, and his concerns about listing in London. Finally, the OakNorth boss sets the record straight on whether he is a donor to the Conservative Party or not…

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. Sign up for our Business Leader newsletter here.

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Not so long ago Waitrose and John Lewis were lauded as model retailers. They had enjoyed years of rising sales and profits and, as part of the John Lewis Partnership, were owned by their employees. But now Waitrose is battling to turnaround falling sales and the partnership is losing money. Is being owned by staff part of the problem? Has it meant that Waitrose has been too slow to react to changes in how we shop? James Bailey, the boss of Waitrose, addresses those questions in the latest episode of Business Studies. It is an issue that is even more important after reports emerged following the interview that the John Lewis Partnership could sell a minority stake to an external investor and dilute its ownership model. Bailey also discusses the status of the Waitrose brand, the future of food, what he learned from his mentor Mike Coupe, and why he nearly got fired by Sainsbury’s for promoting flexible working…

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. Sign up for our Business Leader newsletter here.

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Andre Lacroix thinks that just about every major crisis in the 21st century was caused by a failure of leadership. He is so concerned about the quality of leadership that he has written a book about it - Leadership with Soul. Why is understanding risk so important for leaders? What can be learned from Ayrton Senna? Why is Toyota such an incredible organisation? Why did Lacroix go from wanting to being a surgeon to wanting to be a CEO? And why is London still the perfect place to base an international business? Find out all of that and more in the last episode of Business Studies as we speak to Lacroix, who has been chief executive of FTSE 100 company Intertek since 2015 and before that was at car dealer Inchcape, Disneyland Paris, Burger King and PepsiCo.

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. Sign up for our Business Leader newsletter here.

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