Seams Impossible: How Nadine Merabi built a £40m fashion brand

Helen Cannon had five children and wanted a sixth. Instead, she decided her next baby would be a company. In 2013 she founded ISON Travel and built a corporate travel management company from scratch that now turns over around £70 million. Sir Richard Harpin talks to Cannon about bootstrapping ISON Travel without ever taking on external funding. When Covid grounded the travel industry and competitors cut back, she chose to hire and expand. Revenue grew from around £4 million in 2020 to £32 million by 2022. Cannon explains how she has scaled internationally through India, the Philippines, Dubai and a US acquisition. She covers how she builds culture across a fully remote team, why 70% of her staff are women and a quarter are over 55, how to deal with imposter syndrome and why every entrepreneur should be "10% braver." She also speaks openly about leading the business after the death of her husband, who was also a key member of the management team, and about her push towards a £100 million revenue goal. This episode is for founders, CEOs and female entrepreneurs who want to scale a business, lead while raising a family, and turn a crisis into an opportunity.

Simon Mellin, founder and CEO of Modern Milkman, grew up working in his dad's butcher's shop in Colne, rural Lancashire. By trying to move the business online, he was shocked to find just how disconnected food supply chains had become across the UK. In 2018, inspired by Blue Planet, he bought a real, working milk round for £2,000 to find out why the dairy industry was dying – and what could be done to save it. From that cart, he has delivered Modern Milkman: a returnable-packaging grocery delivery business that has since raised tens of millions in funding, expanded into five US states, and is aiming for its first full year of profit. In this episode, Mellin tells Sir Richard Harpin about his experience as the modern milkman, as well as the strange coincidence that led him to merge with a US rival – and what he got wrong trying to run it 'the UK way'. Plus, his frank advice for founders: If you don’t try you don’t know, just get on with it!

Kate Prince, founder and CEO of Ancient + Brave, walked away from a career as a lawyer, including years spent drafting contracts for Big Brother, to build one of the UK's fastest-growing wellness brands. Her collagen and supplements are now stocked in Selfridges, Harrods, online and in over 20 countries worldwide. In one twelve-month period, the business grew from £1 million to £10 million in revenue, and last year it surpassed £54 million. Now, Prince has her sights set on £100 million within two years. Prince talks to Sir Richard Harpin about building a brand from nothing, bootstrapping before securing outside investment, scaling fast without losing control, finding communities of female founders and never losing sight of the company’s mission, purpose, principles and value system.

Adrian Blair talks to Sir Richard Harpin about taking over from Trustpilot's founder in 2023 and how discipline turned a loss-making EBITDA position into a business now targeting 30% margins by 2030. Drawing on lessons from Just Eat and running Dext as a non-founder CEO, Blair reflects on what it takes to succeed a founder — respecting their ambition while building on the culture they left behind. He explains how Trustpilot has become one of the biggest beneficiaries of the AI search era and why "genuine human feedback" has become essential to AI answer-engine strategies. Blair also lives by the mantra "never let a good crisis go to waste": he rebuilt confidence after a short-seller report wiped 30% off the share price in a single day, and he shares his hiring philosophy for senior teams — including why you should always meet a candidate in person before hiring them.

Eric Ries, author of the bestselling The Lean Startup which sold over 2 million copies, joins Sir Richard Harpin to discuss his new book Incorruptible. Fifteen years after redefining entrepreneurship with concepts like the MVP and the pivot, Ries turns his attention to a different threat: what he calls "financial gravity" - the corporate governance norms and regulatory standards that can erode a founder's integrity and long-term vision even after early success. They discuss why pivoting is a change in strategy without a change in vision, how founders like Costco's Jim Sinegal built "governance fortresses" to protect long-term thinking, and why Ries founded the Long-Term Stock Exchange to reward companies that resist short-term pressure. Ries shares advice on when startups should take investment, the benefits of employee ownership and explains how trust is the most valuable asset that an organization can have. Also, his tips on how to harness AI in a better way that allows the human and the AI to be much closer to collaborators than to delegators.