Speakers

Fabio Giuseppetti (past parent)
Fabio is Senior Partner at Palamon Capital Partners, where he started working in 2003 as a Principal. Palamon has grown since then into a leading pan-European private equity fund manager in a number of growth sectors, including software, education and healthcare. Before joining Palamon, Fabio was an investor in Eastern Europe on behalf of a US Government-backed fund. Following the fall of the Berlin Wall, he focused on countries transitioning into a market economy.

Jess Douglas (Chandos, 1999 & current parent)
Jess fell almost accidentally into the family business, Confex buying group. Her mother, who was MD at the time, was advertising for a job that Jess could bring her journalism skills to, following a move from London back to the Cotswolds. She joined the business in 2014 on a part-time basis and has worked her way up from digital asset manager, to marketing manager, marketing director, COO and now is now joint owner and joint Managing Director with her brother. The group has grown by 50% since Covid and recently merged to become The Wholeasle Buying Group, now the largest wholesale buying group in the UK with 257 wholesale members, £4.52billion turnover and representing 13.7% of the UK wholesale market serving 349,000 customers. The Wholesale Group has an £80 million foodservice Own Brand and works with over 300 key FMCG suppliers such as Coca Cola, Heinz, Unilever and Pepsico. Jess is passionate about family businesses, and women’s role in business and the wholesale sector.

Ben White (Leconfield, 1986)
An entrepreneur at heart, Ben has built and exited multiple pioneering technology businesses. He co-founded RBR Networks, scaling it into one of Europe’s largest Cisco distributors before its $80m acquisition by Comstor in 1998. He then launched Star Internet, one of the UK’s first ISPs, and MessageLabs, the first cloud-based anti-virus and anti-spam service, which was acquired by Symantec for $800m in 2008, marking a key milestone in the SaaS industry. In 2009, he co-founded Notion Capital with former MessageLabs colleagues to invest in B2B SaaS startups, helping to grow it into a $1bn+ fund with over 100 portfolio companies. Returning to entrepreneurship, Ben is now Chairman of Upp.ai, a company he co-founded to revolutionise eCommerce advertising. Backed by a strong leadership team, Upp leverages AI to maximise sales performance through smarter ad spend. Ben’s passion remains building innovative businesses, assembling top talent, and driving growth from the ground up.

Beth Chapman (Queens, 2011)
Beth Chapman is a Fractional CMO and former founder of Leaf Envy, the design-led houseplant brand she started on her sister’s canal boat and grew into a category-defining direct-to-consumer business before its acquisition in 2024. The experience gave her first-hand insight into the realities of scaling a brand — the wins, the challenges, and the lessons in focus and profitability. Today, she helps founders build and scale challenger consumer brands with distinctive positioning and sustainable growth strategies through her consultancy and Bold Moves newsletter.

David Noble (Newick House, 1981)
David co-founded his first business – Elbon & Co Futures and Options Ltd - in 1985. He has been involved in many more businesses since then. This includes founding Rentafone, a mobile phone rental business, in 1987; then through the 90s, co-founding Wonder Foods Nigeria, now the biggest private milk powder company in Africa; investor and director at Sandwich Supplies Ltd; co-founder of Supermarket Direct Ltd (similar to Ocado but much earlier); as well as completing an MBA at Cranfield. In 2000, he became a founding shareholder and NED of Moonpig Ltd – now a FTSE 250 company; and Director and Chair of the Supervisory Board at X5 Retail Group in Russia (19,000 stores and a market cap of c$10 billion). Since 2007, David has focused on property investment as well as a range of angel, venture capital and private equity investments.

Harry Cragoe (Thirlestaine, 1983)
Harry is responsible for creating the early 90s fresh fruit smoothie boom by launching P&J Smoothies, a market innovator who set in motion the fastest growing grocery category in the UK. He sold the business to PepsiCo in 2005. At 22 he had set up his first business selling water filters direct to consumers. A move to LA to open a US office exposed him to the west coast culture of smoothies. He saw an opportunity, sold out to his partners in the filter business, and set about bringing the smoothie revolution to the UK. Of the P&J experience, he says, “I sold pretty much everything I owned to get the business going … the only things I had left were my clothes and shoes.” Harry later became an angel investor and NED for a wide-range of start-up and mid-cap businesses, and now runs his award-winning hospitality businesses Coastal Hotels and Happiness Hospitality.

Lucy Bartlett (nee Solari, Chandos, 2004)
Lucy Bartlett was the founder of Bundle Beds, a travel brand launched in 2015 to simplify adventures with compact, all-in-one beds for families, campers, and festival-goers. She grew the business through crowdfunding and angel investment, building a loyal customer base and achieving a strong following before making the tough decision to close in 2025, following changes in the market. Previously, she worked in marketing for brands including Gü, Firefly Tonics, and Sipsmith, where she learnt from some of the UK’s best-known food and drink entrepreneurs. She now works as a consultant, helping New Zealand drinks brand Ecology & Co launch internationally, and supporting Brandhouse with UK expansion. She’s also developing a family travel hub with Roarsome, inspiring more families to get outside and explore. Her entrepreneurial drive is fuelled by a passion for purposeful products, storytelling, and building brands that bring joy and adventure.

David Bruce (Boyne House, 1996)
David is an international serial entrepreneur. Having completed a management traineeship with Courage Brewery, in 1979 he started Bruce’s Brewery and the Firkin Pubs which he sold in 1988 for £6.6m, then going on to invest in and develop the Slug & Lettuce chain. With a burgeoning global craft-beer market in the early 1990’s, he co-founded and/or invested in breweries from Europe to the US. When he sold these, David co-founded both The Capital Pub Co. PLC in 2000, which was sold in 2011 to Greene King for £93m, and The City Pub Group PLC which was sold last year to Young’s for £162m. During the past 25 years, David has raised for his various start-up companies over £120m under the Enterprise Investment Scheme. David remains the founder and Chairman of his chain of Cobbs Farm Shops and a founding investor in Hawkridge Distillery.

Suzie Burley (past parent)
Suzie Burley is the Founder of The Cotswold Career Concierge and a leading Career Expert and Strategist. With over 25 years’ experience within organisations including Intel and Redstone, Suzie has been igniting the careers of professionals, entrepreneurs and executives across the UK and Middle East. Known for her bold, human-first approach, Suzie helps founders, C-suite leaders and professionals to redesign their careers and accelerate with authenticity, agility and purpose. She is widely recognised as a thought leader in portfolio careers - a model that empowers entrepreneurs to stack skills, build agility and test ventures, generating diverse income streams and scaling with confidence. Suzie is also a Business Mentor with The King’s Trust, where she regularly delivers her entrepreneurial workshop; Career Design - Entrepreneurial Thinking for Flexibility & Fulfilment. She is also a Fractional Career Consultant for The Royal Agricultural University, where she supports the next generation of entrepreneurs. Her methodologies have transformed thousands of lives and are captured in her forthcoming book. She is passionate about helping people connect passion with opportunity and impact to build careers that thrive.

Charles Wyn-Davies (Boyne House, 2008)
In the early 2010s, Charles went into digital marketing, developing and managing customer experiences for subscribers of The Financial Times and leading magazine titles including Elle and Men’s Health. In 2018, Charles founded the consultancy Marketing Yeah! to help fast-growing organisations such as The Financial Times, Thomson Reuters, Wagestream, and Benefit Cosmetics to implement more sophisticated marketing technologies. Today Marketing Yeah! is the in-house marketing consultancy for a number of scaling companies. In 2020 Charles founded Digi Yeah! to support the development of enterprise software for companies within the group and third parties. LiveView is among one of Charles’ biggest successes so far; the cloud-based beverage dispense platform has been adopted internationally and Charles continues to invest in proprietary technologies and areas such as online retail.

Charlie Turner (Leconfield, 1989)
Charlie spent most of his working life on the family farm, growing brandless fruit for the multiples – in his words “not very entrepreneurial”. In 2018, he started a distillery to use up waste fruit. The entrepreneurial touchpaper was ignited following the impact of Covid on the traditional business, and Penrhos Spirits was launched. Penrhos became the first distillery to use a bottle made from 100% recycled aluminium, got picked up by Sainsbury’s as a Future Brand and launched into duty free with the big brands. The next step for the business, which Charlie is currently navigating, is export.

Natasha Poole (Chandos, 2007)
Over the past 14 years, Natasha has worked in a variety of sectors, ranging from the health and fitness industry to education, and recently has set up a hedge fund. With a desire to work for herself and an interest in economics and trading, she decided to set up a long-short portfolio and build the returns over the next few years. She has written about economics and politics as a freelance journalist and is now working on developing an effective day-trading strategy, which capitalises on current market volatility, whilst at the same time generating long term returns. Having lived in the Southern Hemisphere for the past 14 years, she is now looking to build the business in a time zone closer to home. Key areas of investement are AI stocks, as well as the tech sector generally, as she considers their valuation metrics to be different to traditional expectations.

Charlie Cadbury (Soutwood, 1998)
Charlie has spent his career in emergent technology starting with websites from 1999, subsequently founding a web/mobile/social software company in 2005 and overseeing the development of over 400 digital products from contract to code. Charlie has been working exclusively with voice assistants like Alexa since 2015 and co-founded Say It Now in 2018 to enable brands to take advantage of the opportunities presented by consumers adopting voice as their interface of choice. Say It Now enable voice response for Audio and Video adverts.  These “Actionable Ads” offer frictionless engagement for the consumer and real-time data for the advertiser.  Say It Now are currently working with Coca-Cola, AmEx, Unilever and hundreds of other top tier advertisers globally.

Sam Pearman (Christowe, 1996)
A former professional rugby player with a dream of owning his own restaurant, Sam is a co-founder and previous owner of the Lucky Onion Group, along with his wife Georgie Pearman. They left the business in 2017 and since have built up a portfolio of pubs and inns in the Cotswolds under the Country Creatures umbrella, and the Cubitt House pub group in London. They design and project manage the refurbishment of hotels, restaurants, pubs and bars and operate them, drawing on their experience as owners, business partners, shareholders and managers; as well as their relationship with some of the best contacts in the industry. Both the Cotswold and London venues have won numerous awards and outstanding national press reviews for food, feel and hospitality, and Sam sums up their ethos as, “We love great British hospitality, places where people can feel relaxed and have a good time.”

Archie Brooksbank (Leconfield, 2004)
Archie turned his passion for film and photography into a business while still at university, founding Bladesman Productions from his student digs. Armed with little more than a second-hand camera and determination, he began taking on small projects that quickly snowballed into work with global talent and brands. Bladesman has grown into an award-winning production company, delivering high-end campaigns for Lionel Messi, Gabriel Macht, Chanel, and Qatar Airways.

Archie’s entrepreneurial streak lies in spotting opportunities across multiple sectors - from high-energy sports advertising to luxury fashion and long-form documentaries - and building a team capable of adapting to each. His approach blends traditional production values with forward-thinking creativity, allowing Bladesman to thrive in an industry where trends and technology change fast. Today, Archie continues to expand the company’s reach internationally.

Max Brown (Christowe, 2022)
Founder & Director of FITSZOO Ltd, Max is at the beginning of his entrepreneurial journey, having left College in 2022. He has founded FITSZOO Ltd, a physical and online curated vintage sportswear and streetwear company. Max manages every aspect from lease negotiations, interior design, merchandising, international supply chains, staff, accounting and financial planning. He is at the sharp end of one of the most competitive and arguably most fickle businesses – high street fashion – as well as running in tandem an online operation and a bricks and mortar one. Max’s experiences have been instructive, and he will talk about what it takes to bring an idea to market; and the challenges and opportunities that he sees for his young business and for himself, as an entrepreneurial newcomer.