Leadership, Awesome Craft Beer and at Least One Painful Lesson with Greg Koch

Sir Steven Wilkinson has been involved in business finance and investment for the best part of 30 years having started working for Merrill Lynch Investment Bank in Munich, Germany in 1987 at the tender age of 24. He now runs an investment company and a knowledge platform teaching finance to entrepreneurs which goes by the name of Good & Prosper. His focus has always been on Small & Medium-sized Enterprises (SMEs) primarily in Germany and Europe and mostly in some sort of distress or need of restructuring. He works at the seam between strategy, finance, and leadership and brings three decades of experience as a finance and investment professional to the world of SME operations. Good & Prosper also offers courses to entrepreneurs and SME business owners to enable them to further their expertise in finance, capital allocation, leadership, culture, and strategy, as well as individual leadership coaching and mentoring.

Steven's perspective on business, politics, and society is shaped primarily by his alignment with the Austrian School of Economics. He was irredeemably inspired by his early reading of the Intelligent Investor at the age of 24 and was at a loss to understand why anyone would want to think differently about investing and capital allocation other than from a value perspective. He is a Christian Libertarian by conviction.

Steven is an Englishman, born in Lancashire in 1963 who moved to Germany at the age of 24 after completing his education at Rugby and Durham University. Starting in 1987, he spent almost all of his investment career in Munich, Germany, before moving to Ireland with his family in early 2015. He's been married to Britta since 2000 and his family consists of four children, three dogs, and a horse, all of whom live in Delgany, Co. Wicklow. He's an avid long-distance trail walker, cross country skier, and sailor, reads voraciously, listens to an unhealthy amount of podcasts, writes enthusiastically, and drinks large quantities of green tea every day.

Steven is also a founding member of the Small Giants Community, a wonderful, US-based organization, that caters to companies that choose to be great instead of big and provides resources and a community to value-based leaders.

In addition, Steven is an active supporter and mentor within the Ashoka Social Entrepreneurship network, both here in Ireland and in Germany and Britta and he's been actively involved with Ashoka in one way or another since 2002.

In 2015, Steven was invited to join an interfaith delegation to the Caribbean Island State of Grenada, whose purpose was to coordinate a number of reconstruction and redevelopment projects for infrastructure seriously damaged by hurricanes a decade earlier. As part of that delegation representing the Anglican community, he was awarded an honor bestowed by the Governor-General into the Order of the Nation of Grenada with the rank of Knight Commander.

Since 2017 Steven served as one of a number of business professionals working as mentors to high-growth entrepreneurs with the Ryan Business Academy's Mentoring for Growth' Program.

In 2018 Steven was elected to serve on the founding steering committee (supervisory board) of the MyData Global Organisation, a Helsinki-based foundation set up to 'empower individuals with their personal data, thus helping them and their communities develop knowledge, make informed decisions, and interact more consciously and efficiently with each other as well as with organizations.'

Steven believes that business can and should be a force for good in society and that the more people take entrepreneurial responsibility for their lives, the better the society will be. He also believes in Benjamin Franklin’s dictum of “doing well by doing good.”

Connect with Steven via LinkedIn or visit his website GoodAndProsper.com

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