Our guest today is a phenomenal businesswoman, Mel Nicci, of Baby2Body, the app that helps new and expecting mothers live healthier and happier, with daily guidance on fitness, wellbeing, nutrition and beauty. Mel’s story is a fantastic example of turning a frustrating experience into a life-changing business opportunity – which can inspire us all. Mel’s story? Well, Mel is a fitness fanatic and when she was pregnant her GP told her not to worry about her health and just sit on the sofa and eat biscuits! So Mel turned that frustration into a rocketing lifestyle app that helps women navigate pr ..read more

On today's show, I am with the fantastic Alanna Banks from Friday's Off - an online fabric and textiles store over in Canada that is having phenomenal success.   Alanna has a fascinating story. She used to work in PR but ten years ago she was in an agency and had got to the point where she wanted a fresh challenge. So, she left the PR world and set up her own online textiles business selling beautiful fabrics when no one else was really doing this.   Today’s show is fascinating, how does a PR professional transition into the world of e-commerce? I think that Alanna's advantage is tha ..read more

What can we all learn from the reputational crisis currently ripping through Oxfam and parts of the NGO sector? On today’s show, I wanted to take a break from the normal guest format and put on my other hat, the hard one I wear when I’m advising clients on issues management. Now on the surface, you may think there’s not much a small business can learn from what has happened to Oxfam, but you’d be wrong. All of us face reputational threats on a daily basis – it might be a poor online review, a few nasty tweets, or yes in some cases national media exposure. What all of these have in common is ho ..read more

How do you take a successful pop up food brand and transition to a bricks and mortar business? On today’s show food entrepreneur Simon Bowden shares the story of how he got his first business, The Whole Cheese on national TV, became a ‘must book’ with some of the UK’s biggest festivals and then took the plunge into a full-time premises. Simon’s first business was an instant hit with TV producers and UK audiences when he told the tale of how he transformed a horse box into a cheese truck. And that success has continued with his craft beer and cheese store, Palmer Street Bottle in Frome, Somerse ..read more

Brittany Haas founder of Happily Ever Borrowed tells us how she got the media to fall in love with an online wedding business. Happily Ever Borrowed is a leading online wedding shop that rents designer bridal accessories worldwide. They help make that big day even bigger, but without breaking the bank. Their innovative online rental model has already received a lot of media coverage, from the New York Times, Martha Stewart Weddings and CBS to Style Me Pretty and the New York Post. I caught up with Brittany to find out how she got journalists to fall in love with Happily Ever Borrowed.  Fi ..read more

With Melissa Rollins of Henty, Claire Carroll of the Frome Independent, Nick Farnsworth of Little Sport Star and Eleanor Bell On today's show I’ve got something a bit different for you. Instead of our usual one guest – we have four! Now that’s value for money. I met these guys almost a year ago when they were part of the businesses we filmed in a week-long PR bootcamp to create an online training course. Wait, this isn’t a plug for the FAMOUS course – these guys have genuinely fascinating stories about the impact having a much greater understanding of PR has had on their businesses in just 12 ..read more

Russell Saks, Founder of Campus Protein, tells us how living the lifestyle of his customers helped them conquer the campus supplement market. Campus Protein are in the business of helping college students access high quality supplements, protein and stacks so they can tone up and get ripped – much like your podcast host (yeah right! – Ed) Russell explains how he took a college business and turned it into a US-wide enterprise and the role PR played in helping his sporty followers trust a new brand muscling in on the healthcare sector where reliability is everything. In this episode you’re going ..read more

In today’s episode Class:PR founder Gemma Clay crashes the studio to give us her look back on 2017. To mark the end of the first year of The Famous Business Podcast Gemma picks her favourite episodes and tells Alistair why these guys stood out for her. From Mel Nicci of Baby2Body and Thomas Bertrand of Bento Box to Andy Allen from The Snaffling Pig Company and Freddie Blackett from Patch, we take a look back at the highlights of TFB 2017. Don’t get us wrong, we LOVE all our guests, but these ones stood out as having truly awesome stories. There were so many insightful learnings in these episod ..read more

With John Stapleton, co-founder of New Covent Garden Soup Company, Little Dish and serial entrepreneur. It's not often we have someone on the show who has completely invented a new category of product - but John Stapleton was part of a duo that did just that. John is one of the co-founder's of the New Covent Garden Soup Company, the guys who took soup out of the tin, made it fresh and put it in a carton. In the late 1980s this was completely revolutionary and sparked a new way of manufacturing, selling and consuming soup. It's fair to say John is a true pioneer - he even had to build his own f ..read more

Today's guest is a young woman on a mission. Hannah Phillips knows more about UK healthcare than most - because as a child and a young adult she underwent major heart surgery. During her years in and out of hospital, Hannah saw that more needed to be done to make appropriate information available for young people. It was hard enough going through such serious procedures but being given information designed for aging adults made it even tougher. As soon as Hannah was well enough she became a health campaigner and is determined to make things better for other young ..read more