Richard Kennell is the founder and CEO of the charity SOFEA. SOFEA is all about helping young people for whom traditional schooling doesn’t click find their spark, the thing that is going to unlock their talents and ultimately find their path in life.

Before starting SOFEA Richard ran his own Education company working with local schools and prior to that Richard had a 20-year career as a secondary school teacher and Assistant Head Teacher. During his time as a teacher, Richard decided he wanted to help those young people that didn’t get on with the traditional schooling system. Richard saw these young people dropping out of school with few skills and fewer qualifications and decided it was time to do something about it.

In this conversation, Richard shares with us the inspiration behind the charity and some of the personal leadership challenges he faced when first getting things off the ground. Richard also talks to us about how businesses can help students in this situation and how they can re-think the early-stage recruitment processes to account for an untapped pool of young talent.

SOFEA - https://www.sofea.uk.com/

Fareshare - https://fareshare.org.uk/

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Piers Daniell is an entrepreneur in the world of energy, property and, more recently, politics. Piers set up his first business aged just 15 and hasn't looked back since then. Piers founded internet service provider Fluidata in 2004 and by the time he departed as Chairman in March 2019, it had grown into a £30m company with over 95% customer retention rate.

The company won numerous awards multiple times including the Tech Track 100 award, Deloitte Fast 50 and being named a Sunday Times Best Small Company to work for three times. Piers himself has also won a number of awards, including Young Entrepreneur of the Year and the Queen’s Award for Innovation which he was presented by the Queen in 2014.

More recently Piers has entered the energy market with his company Tewke. Tewke's AI-enabled Automation allows homeowners to boost energy efficiency, save money, and reduce environmental impact by learning from homeowners' routines and encouraging eco-friendly habits. Tewke's objective is to control and optimise energy, by learning, controlling and adapting.

In this episode, Piers shares with us the challenges and lessons from the very early stage of his business career and the significant challenges he faced when selling his first major business Fluidata. We then go on to discuss his new business Tewke and the work it is doing to address the problems of behavioural change in sustainable living, using AI and Automation to build what is in essence a smart grid for homeowners.

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Omid Moallemi Is a creative and product designer. He is the Co-Founder of the social gifting app Prsnt. After graduating, Omid worked in furniture design, creating designs for tables, cutlery and kitchen products. Following this he joined other design consultancies which ultimately gave him the platform to start his own consultancy BlueSix Design in Brighton.

Omid has also designed a next-generation nicotine device and has a patent around its technology which has attracted interest from the “big 4” tobacco companies. In 2020, Omid Co-Founded Prsnt. Prsnt is a social gifting app aiming to change the social fabric of how we gift in the next few years. In this episode, Omid explains in detail how Prsnt allows you to send someone instant gifts, such as a coffee or a voucher to their phone, they can redeem the QR code and send a video message back. Prsnt already has many big-name brands signed up to its platform including Deliveroo, John Lewis, Amazon and Sainsbury's.

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