Season 1: Turning Complex Cases into Yeses: Building a Specialist Mortgage Business with Ross Jones

In this episode of Progress in Practice, Charlie Reading sits down with Sam Sloma, founder of Engage Financial Services - a fixed fee lifestyle financial planning firm based in North London serving professional footballers, entrepreneurs, and those approaching retirement. Sam's journey to building his own firm is rooted in two very specific moments of clarity: a client who couldn't understand why his fee doubled when he simply added more money, and the realisation that his clients were loyal ...

In this episode of Progress in Practice, Charlie Reading sits down with Simon Dent, Chairman of Firmative, the creative company that puts brands in culture, working with the likes of Netflix, Atlantic Records, Sony and Universal. Simon is the first guest to bridge Charlie's two podcasts, The Business of Endurance and Progress in Practice, and the conversation shows exactly why. From cutting his teeth as a London club promoter to founding sports creative agency Dark Horses, and from hitting ro...

In this episode of Progress in Practice, Charlie Reading sits down with Matthew Smith, founder of Buckingham Gate Chartered Financial Planners, to explore how he built an award-winning estate planning practice and then turned his competitors into his clients. Matthew shares the extraordinary story of nearly dying on his honeymoon and how that experience inspired both the launch of his business and his passion for estate planning. He explains why Inheritance Tax is rapidly becoming a mainstrea...

In this episode of Progress in Practice, Charlie Reading sits down with Jill Martin, founder of Impact Business Consultancy, to get under the bonnet of how we really operate as humans and why the founder is always the biggest block in the business. Jill works with impact and purpose-driven entrepreneurs who are already high-achieving, but know they're not accessing everything they have to give. Rather than managing limitations or working around them, her approach undoes the beliefs beneath th...

In this episode of Progress in Practice, Charlie Reading is joined by Felix Mead, founder of Sliq Homes- a London-based property management business built on a model that still raises eyebrows: free management, free maintenance, free refurbishment, and a guaranteed rent for five years. The model works because Sliq Homes converts three and four-bed family homes into high-quality HMOs for working professionals, creating the margin that makes the free service possible. But the business behind th...