Creating useful people - the childhoods of entrepreneurs and business leaders - from Clever Tykes

Carrie Green is the founder the Female Entrepreneur Association (FEA) and the author of the international bestseller, She Means Business: Turn Your Ideas into Reality and Become a Wildly Successful Entrepreneur.
FEA is a global network of over 600,000 women from around the world. Carrie set it up after feeling isolated running her first successful online business and is now utterly passionate about helping to inspire and empower other women to succeed in business. Carrie has a TEDx talk on YouTube with nearly 7 million views, she has a podcast, publishes a digital magazine AND is writing another book!
In this inspiring episode we discuss the activities Carrie did from a young age which helped set her up for success. We talk about mindset; thinking big and getting intentional, what separates those who fulfil their potential from those who don't, as well as the messages Carrie is excited about passing on to her son!
See the Female Entrepreneur Association website here.
Find Carrie on Instagram here.
Find Carrie's book here.

Decision-making frameworks for a successful career and lifestyle.

Katrina Owen is an ecosystem engineer at GitHub, the world’s leading software development platform. She accidently became a software developed whilst pursuing a degree in molecular biology! Katrina is also the creator of Exercism, a platform for code practice and programming mentorship that has helped over 200,000 people all over the world learn new programming languages. Katrina mainly works in programming languages Go and Ruby, and she’s a Ruby Hero, which is an award given out by Ruby to their top programmers. Katrina is committed to creating beautiful code and has co-written a book about this called 99 Bottles of OOP.

In this episode we discuss Katrina’s life before and after the pivotal age of 25, her younger self’s approach to decision-making, how introverts become exhausted and putting lifestyle and routine at the centre of success. More from Katrina on her website.

The making of a mayor

Andy was elected as the first mayor of the West Midlands in May 2017. Prior to that, he was the managing director of British retail giant, John Lewis, where during his tenure at the top he oversaw a 50% increase in gross sales to over £4.4bn, a doubling of the number of stores and the growth of the company's online business. Alongside this, Andy held a host of high-profile economic development roles including the chair of the Greater Birmingham and Solihull Local Enterprise Partnership. Andy was awarded a CBE in 2015 for services to the national economy.
In this episode we discuss the influences that have shaped Andy's leadership style and his career from business to politics, how his parents supported and encouraged him and the advice he would give to his 10-year old self!

From buying a badge-making machine to hiring 100 people.

Charlotte heads up the creative and marketing at Awesome Merch - a custom print and merchandise business she co-founded way back in 2005, when business partner Luke and she went off to university in Leeds. Since then, Awesome Merch has gone from 2 people in a bedroom, to over 100 people in two locations across two continents, and from one product to over 650, almost all produced in-house.
In this episode we discuss Charlotte's favourite subjects at school, rewarding effort versus rewarding achievement and creating an awesome business that scaled rapidly whilst Charlotte was still at university!

From no electricity on Sundays to technology that saves lives.
Jeremy is a geek and an entrepreneur. He runs a range of technology businesses ranging from an education platform that’s helped over 200,000 learn to code, to using artificial intelligence to improve outcomes during heart surgery.

In this episode, recorded face-to-face from Austin, we discuss how a low-income, religious upbringing can create future success, as well as Jeremy’s love of debating and travel. We learn about the teachers who had the biggest impact on him and are joined by an unexpected guest!