The Entrepreneurs’ Lunch

The Entrepreneurs’ Lunch is a joint initiative between Smith & Williamson and www.freshbusinessthinking.com bringing together a select group of entrepreneurs and business leaders to allow high-level networking and exchanges of ideas.

Date: Wednesday 26th June 2019

Time: 12.30 – 15.00

Location: Private Dining Rooms of Smith & Williamson

Address: 25 Moorgate, London, EC2R 6AY (see map)

Speaker:

Paul Lees

Paul Lees is the founder and CEO of Powwownow, the UK’s leading free conference call service provider. Paul sold the business to PGi in December 2013 and is now an active investor in early-stage businesses, including thortful, the online greetings card marketplace.

Paul is a tech entrepreneur from London with a software development background, and has built and sold two tech businesses during his career.

The guests:

Dan Padbury | HeyHub

Dan Padbury is a serial entrepreneur in the tech space. Since 2009, he has been the founder of social recruitment platform Talentfizz, educational services platform SimpleTutor, and insurance app ONLY. Dan’s current focus is HeyHub, which is activating communities for spaces across the real estate spectrum. 

Iris Anson | Solely Original

Iris is a serial entrepreneur and most recently founder of Etiq AI. Having originally come from the finance industry working with private equity and hedge fund companies, she has developed a strategic business mind and strong financial knowledge, she then left in February 2014 to start her first venture. Etiq AI was born out of Zinc VC incubator and is on a mission to tackle biases in machine learning data and algorithms. Iris believed this technology could help companies to remove unintended biases and make your automated decisions much more efficient and accurate.

Jeremy Tear | Gov Grant

Started as a graduate trainee with Thorn EMI Ltd, then moved into technology innovation in the chemical and plastics industries, leading to operating the UK’s leading garden chemicals company, acquired by Sumitomo Corp Japan, became Vice President Sumi Agro Europe and Global General Manager involved in mergers and acquisitions setting up operations on six continents. More recently founded a group of advisory companies focused on supporting small and medium technology development companies in the UK, The Experience Group: GovGrant Ltd, Evolution CBS Ltd, Innovators Highway Ltd, DMS Ltd.

Nicola Gammon | Shoot Gardening

Nicola Gammon is the founder and CEO of Shoot Gardening, the world’s leading online plant reference and garden management system for both professionals and hobby gardeners.

Avril Millar | Leadout Business

Avril is an experienced entrepreneur and non-executive director with a >10+ year portfolio career for both established leaders and high growth SMEs, primarily in the financial services sector, as well as technology, healthcare, consultancy, leisure, oil and professional services. This follows 20 years of experience as founder and director of Andersen Charnley, a private wealth business which grew to £500 million assets under advisory, and an early background as a civil engineer and maths & physics teacher.

Soumyadip Rakshit | Mystery Vibe

Soumyadip is the co-founder and CEO of British pleasure brand, MysteryVibe. The company’s main focus is to create highly personalised, sexual health products through user-driven design and cutting-edge technology.

Andy Solomon | Yomdel

Andy Soloman is the founder & CEO of Yomdel, a company that helps businesses grow through delivering exceptional digital and customer insight experiences via services including managed live chat, mystery shopping and experiential customer research.

He’s an entrepreneur and digital communications expert who established the UK’s only multiple award-winning provider of intelligent 24/7 managed live chat. Yomdel clients benefit from significantly improved online conversion rates, with increased leads, more direct sales and excellent customer service driving new revenue growth through increasing market share. Yomdel is active across numerous sectors including property, finance, automotive, retail and many others; and is also expanding globally.

Richard Harris | Okappy

Richard is the CEO of Okappy. A B2B workforce management platform which connects you to your employees, customers and subcontractors. Previous to this Richard worked in Investment Banking and holds an Executive MBA from Cranfield School of Management.

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Kevin Bath | JimJams Spreads

Kevin Bath is the co-founder of JimJams, the award-winning no added sugar chocolate spread brand. JimJams products are available in major supermarkets and are now exporting to the US and UAE.

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Michael Elkaim | Visii

Michael is the founder of Visii, where he developed a novel online discovery technology blending his work in the visual cortex, his geometric model of semantics, and conversation theory.

Michael started his work on the visual cortex as a Karyn Kupcinet scholar of the Weizmann Institute’s neurobiology department while completing a double degree in Artificial Intelligence and Computer Science at Edinburgh University. He created a geometric model of semantics while, as a Medical Research Council funded Ph.D. student in Bioinformatics at Oxford University, he participated in three years of seminars held to establish the field of Collective Intelligence.

Alison Shadrack | Adia PR

Adia PR was founded by Alison Shadrack MCIPR, a serial entrepreneur with a wealth of connections and a talent for raising awareness and building influence.

Alison’s passion for good PR is at the heart of everything she does, which is why you’ll find her listed as one of the UK’s Top 100 Media Influencers in the entrepreneurial space.

Jason Muller | Pivigo

Jason Muller is an entrepreneurial leader with over 20 years’ experience in sales and talent delivery both in the UK and Australia. Since 2013, he has been co-founder and COO of Pivigo, a niche UK-based data science training and skills marketplace helping businesses innovate through better utilisation of their data and delivering exceptional PhD-trained talent from academia into commercial industry, largely via Science to Data Science (S2DS), Europe’s largest data science training initiative.

Douglas Andrews | Double Wing Health & Beauty

Douglas Andrews is a senior multinational healthcare industry executive and serial entrepreneur, with 40 years of experience in global healthcare markets, including company start-up, country and regional management, sales & marketing, product licensing, and international M&A.

After more than 20 years with Schering-Plough (now Merck) in the Americas and Europe, founded Consilient Health, a European ‘virtual’ generic pharmaceutical company sourcing retail market generics from suppliers in central & eastern Europe, Turkey and India. Subsequently founded Stravencon, a hospital generics supplier, bridging Chinese producers and European institutional markets.  Most recently founded DoubleWing Pharma and DoubleWing Health & Beauty to provide healthcare product and technology platforms between Europe and China.

David Rajan | Centaur Robotics

David is the founder and chairman of Centaur Robotics, a mobility company building new vehicles for the elderly and disabled. He has over 25 years of experience working with major corporations and start-ups.

David also set up one of the first corporate start-up incubators in the UK and established a pioneering inter-company open innovation project between 14 large corporations. He is non-executive director at 100%Open, a leading pioneer of enterprise open innovation and was previously an advisor to the Goodlab, a JV of the UK’s top 12 charities.

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Charles Hall | Pepper

Charles Hall is the co-founder and CEO of Pepper. It’s technology platform creates branded mobile apps for hospitality businesses. Pepper’s platform is EPOS integrated and delivers rich features including discovery, ordering, mobile payments, loyalty & rewards, push marketing and data analytics. Pepper’s platform is proven, cost-effective, open and flexible. Pepper has 100 merchants across 600 locations in the UK and USA.

Pete Reis-Campbell | Kaizen

Jonny Biggins | The Book of Everyone

Jonny Biggins is the founder and CEO of The Book of Everyone, the world’s best-loved personalisation company. The business has grown from a single book to over 500,000 sales globally across two ranges, greeting card collections and celebratory videos. Jonny is passionate about innovative ideas that are disruptive and meaningful, which is why he helped create The Book of Everyone. His philosophy in life is ‘Make It Happen’ and he’s set on building the world’s most loved personalisation company.  Jonny has a BSC Honors degree in Estate Management from Brooks University Oxford that he only intends to use in an absolute emergency.

Piero Tomassoni | Artvisor

Jo Dalton | JD & Co

Jo Dalton is the founder of executive recruitment and people consultancy JD & Co. Her business’ continuous mission is to deliver outstanding talent, service and insight in a way that defies existing industry standards.

Andrew Pullman | People Risk Solutions

Andrew Pullman is a human resources professional and CEO/founder since 2006 of People Risk Solutions, a HR consultancy working with companies in all sectors, specialising in financial and professional services. He is in the process of launching PeopleClear Ltd, a new company into the FinTech/RegTech sector offering regulatory technology solutions to financial services firms. Andrew has also just co-authored his first book, “Building an Outstanding Workforce”, which will be published by Kogan Page in October 2019.

Fran Boorman | Goal 17/FranBGlobal

Voted the UK’s top female influencer in 2019 by Global Woman, Fran Boorman is an award-winning entrepreneur, having built a multi-million-pound turnover business around her two young children, which became the fastest growing in its sector. Fran is the founder is Goal 17, which delivers corporate mentor training which was recognised as the number one sports-led mentoring programme just five months after launch.

John Agnes | Constant Commerce

John Agnes is a designer and entrepreneur, who has spent the last five years working with 80 brilliant engineers, designers and execs to build a powerful performance marketing platform. It’s used in 24 markets globally and counts the world’s biggest retailers and brands among its customers. 

Alex Kammerling | Kamm & Sons

Alex Kammerling is the creator of Kamm & Sons. Alex has been working in the drinks industry for over 22 years, having first cut his teeth making cocktails in bars, hotels and restaurants all over the world. In his time as a bartender, Alex has made drinks for royalty, rock stars, and world-class actors, invented hundreds of cocktails and published his own cocktail book. He has also worked on some of the world’s biggest brands such as Grey Goose and Campari.

Christiane Wuilliamie OBE | Serial entrepreneur

Christiane Wuilliamie OBE is co-founder and chief technology officer of CulturSys, Inc. a company specialising in predictive culture analytics for business improvement. She has over 30 years of experience in technology from software development to running software companies and financial institutions technology groups. Christiane has been helping companies across the globe blend technology, security, business systems and cultural change to solve complex problems.

Susan Kabani | Ugenie

Susan Kabani is the founder of Ugenie, which provides organisations with tailored digital platforms to more effectively engage their membership. Ugenie’s vision is to provide affordable and easy to use technology to organisations or businesses that could not normally afford their own mobile technology.  It currently focuses on small to medium-sized organisations that have an existing membership or customer base to which they deliver regular content. The platform also allows enables the organisation to build stronger communities in private and customised digital space.

Janet Theodore | Theodore Global

Janet Theodore a director of Theodore Global, which exports and distributes carefully curated British, alcohol-free, natural beverages to Utah working in direct partnership with UK companies such as Innocent, Franklyn and Sons, Schloer and Water-to go.

Mark McCormack | Talking Tables

Having started his own company, Mark McCormack became a director of Talking Tables in 2001 after a merger. Talking Tables is a multi-channel retailer selling partywear, decorations games and gifts. It has customers across the supermarket industry, department stores, independent retailers and e-commerce.

Francesca James | Great British Entrepreneur Awards

Francesca James is the founder of the Great British Entrepreneur Awards. Now in its seventh year, the Great British Entrepreneur Awards acknowledges the hard work and inspiring stories of entrepreneurs in the UK.

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The hosts:

Nick Jacques | Partner, Smith & Williamson
Philip Barker | Head of Industrials at Smith & Williamson
Zach Francis | Corporate Finance, Smith & Williamson
William Reedman-White | Entrepreneurial Services, Smith & Williamson
Jenny Batchelor | Partner, Smith & Williamson
Mark Benka | Partner, Smith & Williamson
James Leeming | Investment Manager, Smith & Williamson

About the hosts:

Smith & Williamson are accountants and business advisers with a focus on entrepreneurs and growth businesses.  They offer their energy and expertise to help their clients grow, delivering a personal, commercial approach and providing access to “end to end” services including corporate finance, accounting, tax and a wide range of other financial services. Clients include both the private and quoted sectors and range from early stage to mature businesses with values of tens and hundreds of millions.