Working Hard

Shimona Mehta is an acclaimed tech pioneer with extensive experience in retail, technology, food and beverage. Awarded for being one of the UK’s most influential retail leaders, Shimona is best known for being the Managing Director of EMEA for Shopify - the leading e-commerce hub for independent brands. Designed to make buying and selling easy, Shopify offers businesses a range of tools to design, manage and grow an online store, hosting numerous high-growth brands including Deliveroo, Lindt, and Heinz.

Delving deeper, Shimona and I get real on female leadership in the tech industry touching on the uphill battle for women to reach the top and also so they feel like they belong there. We have a Q&A on side hustles, we answer all your questions on Instagram on when you should know you need to leave your job, how you should build your business and how you should overcome failure.

The career path that took Shimona Mehta to become MD

Making the move from consumer goods to tech

How Shimona built career progression

The journey of setting up Shopify in London

What Shimona looks for when she hires

Shimona's experience with imposter syndrome

How Shimona became a good leader

The barriers Shimona has come across

The importance of managerial training

Why we need women in tech

Diversity and recruitment

How to start your side hustle

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Dr Frankie is an NHS Doctor, media and content creator who offers factual and relatable health advice in preventative medicine.

A qualified doctor working on the frontline, Dr Frankie graduated with a degree in Medicine and Surgery in 2018. During this time, Dr Frankie set out to better understand the risk factors for cancer, becoming heavily involved in clinical trials at Barts Cancer Institute for Renal and Bladder cancer.

Alongside all of this whilst juggling university, Dr Frankie started an educational social media page to provide expertise on a range of health and wellbeing topics. In her well-known #MedicalMonday, Frankie posted a weekly poll on her Instagram to allow people to ask health-related questions, each time focusing on a different topic. Frankie’s profile in this space began to grow, and as a result Frankie now also makes regular appearances to disseminate her knowledge, becoming an enthusiastic public speaker for general preventative health.

Although there are many things I’d love to discuss with Dr Frankie, today we share a conversation about training, nutrition and the female menstrual cycle,. The episode covers the entire cycle story, exploring what a ‘normal cycle’ looks like, when ovulation occurs, and how to identify important changes that sometimes signal significant health problems. Dr Frankie also discusses how a women's strength may be affected by constantly changing hormone levels, and how we can adjust our training and nutrition to reach our full potential at any point in our cycle.

This episode is important for both men and women, so if you're a female (or know one), I strongly recommend you listen...

When you should be concerned about your periods?!

3 essential things women should do to live a healthier life

Can training on your period help with menstrual cramps?

Why you should track your period if you work out

How do we know when we can push ourselves harder when we work out on our periods?

Should we replace the iron we lose during our period?

Why you need to eat before working out

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Karl Lokko is an ex-gang leader turned activist, campaigner, influencer and entrepreneur. Growing up on a tough estate swarming with gangs, Karl's childhood was far from plain-sailing, witnessing his first shooting when just 12 years old.

Though at the time this had felt shocking, within four years Karl found himself behind the trigger, eventually becoming the ringleader of his own notorious gang. Before he was even 16, Karl had already been shot at, cut on his face, stabbed in the chest and watched one of his best friends get killed.

Karl finally pivoted when he met Pastor Mimi Asher, the mother of a fellow gang member, who showed him a way out. Resulting from Mimi's courageous counselling and mentorship, Karl was able to gain perspective, zoom out on his situation, and turn a life of crime into a life worth living.

Since then, Karl has dedicated his life and career to helping others do the same. Karl also leads the vision for Black Seed, a community and seed fundraiser to exclusively support black-led start-ups. With an embarrassing 0.24% of venture funding reaching black founders, Karl is leading the Black Seed team to tackle the systemic racial disparities in investment, their vision to find the next black unicorn and transform Brixton into Silicon Valley.

Today’s episode will completely blow your mind. As he describes it, Karl’s story reflects the journey of a caterpillar turning into a butterfly - the complete transformation of his life into something utterly unrecognisable.

Karl's childhood in South London

Where Karl's involvement in gangs began

When Karl couldn't join a gang, he created one

The problems within the system perpetuating gang culture

How and why Karl eventually turned his back on crime

The beginnings of Karl's first business - a rehab centre.

The initial idea for Black Seed

The horror show that are Black Founder statistics

https://www.instagram.com/blackseedvc/?hl=en

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Ella Mills is an award-winning author, entrepreneur and champion of plant based living. She was the founder of Deliciously Ella in 2012, a plant-based food & wellness platform sharing delicious ways to feel better. Although it originated as a recipe website, Ella Mills has developed the business into a restaurant, a range of plant based food products, an app, a podcast and a collection of best-selling recipe books.

Prior to starting Delicious Ella in 2011, Ella was diagnosed with postural tachycardia syndrome as well as ehlers-danlos and mast cell activation disorder, which followed four months in and out of hospital. The condition affected Ella’s autonomic nervous system and also meant she struggled with digestive issues, chronic fatigue, a series of infections and a whole host of other symptoms. After being prescribed a cocktail of medication that had no effect Ella hit rock bottom, both physically and mentally.

It was at this point that Ella looked into other ways of managing her condition and turned to whole foods, a plant-based diet, and overhauled her lifestyle.

Deliciously Ella has become a leader in the plant-based space. Together with her husband and Deliciously Ella CEO, they’ve published six best-selling cookbooks, including the fast-selling vegan cookbook ever; a lifestyle app with recipes, workouts and meditations; a central London cafe and several ranges of food products in over 7,000 stores across the UK, with customers ranging from Tesco to Boots, Waitrose and Costa.

the early life of Ella Mills

how Ella knew something was wrong with her health

the symptoms she developed

how her illness affected her physical and mental health

how Ella's illness changed her university experience

what caused Ella's lifestyle change

the start of Deliciously Ella

the media's response to plant based eating

would Ella have been treated by the press differently if she was a man?

dealing with judgement

how Ella met her husband and moved in after a week

Ella's mindset over her 8 year career

how Ella evolved Deliciously Ella

Ella's experience opening her first restaurant

Ella closing her restaurant and the media storm it ensued

the affects of the media storm on her employees

Ella's biggest learnings

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Kwajo Tweneboa, known as the hero of social housing, is a remarkable 23-year-old campaigner demanding urgent reform in public-sector housing. Amid the housing crisis, Kwajo has emerged as an influential voice online for social housing tenants, known best for naming and shaming some of the largest accommodation associations in the UK.

Haunted by memories of his own housing hell, Kwajo joined the fight to improve conditions after his father, a care worker, died in their family home among a sea of cockroaches, mould and vermin. To make matters worse, just a week after his death Kwajo and his siblings were informed their tenancy contract had been evicted and therefore they must leave, in essence making them homeless. By some miracle, Kwajo and his family were allowed to stay, but for Kwajo this was understandably still not good enough - the conditions were still terrible.

Astounded by how he had been treated, Kwajo channelled his anguish and publicly exposed his landlord for breaching housing standards, ignoring calls and allowing his family to live in unimaginable filth. His first post went viral, reaching the attention of mainstream news and his housing association who eventually came to fix the problems. Kwajo now uses his online presence to help others share their housing horrors, becoming an active proponent for change in the UK - his campaign backed by nearly 62,000 followers on Twitter.

While a picture-perfect image for social housing still seems a world away, Kwajo's work on behalf of other tortured tenants has begun to make a real difference, his work sparking the conversation among significant journalists and MPs.

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