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Rachel Harris is disrupting what it means to be an accountant, a business owner and an employer in 2024. She is a TEDx speaker, Forbes contributor, content creator, author, business owner and most importantly... an accountant! As the official accounting personality of the year 2023 & breakout star of the year 2023, Rachel adds value to her audience of 90,000 by creating completely free long and short form content delivering financial education! She is passionate about free financial education for everyone, she is the founder of @accountant_she, her £1m firm striveX accountants, striveX audit, striveX consulting and striveX mortgages.

Zoë Thompson is an Accredited Master Coach, keynote speaker, and former international strongwoman competitor, known for helping high-achieving professionals lead with identity, act with purpose, and succeed without sacrifice.

With over 20 years of leadership experience in the Police and 7+ years as a business owner, Zoë combines real-world credibility with powerful coaching to support individuals and organisations in achieving aligned success in life, leadership, and business.

Her coaching draws from lived experience, from frontline leadership to global stages. Blending mindset, strategy, and identity work to help ambitious individuals push past limits, embrace challenge, and create success that feels as good as it looks.

21 years’ generalist HR experience including 7 years’ international experience and 5 years in consultancy. Postgraduate Diploma in Human Resource Management and Development Chartered Member of the CIPD Civil Mediation Council accredited qualification in Workplace Mediation

Did you know that 900 million people use LinkedIn, but only 1% actually create any content? Ashley Leads has been training people on LinkedIn since 2018, and he's helping them to get business from LinkedIn with his 30 years of sales experience.

Ashley is also able to simplify the complexities of social media to help people do more than just have a pretty profile.

With his motivational energy, you cannot help to be inspired and start loving LinkedIn.

He has also written his first book, 101 Ideas for LinkedIn - Content Made Easy, to help people do more on this incredible platform.

He’ll be talking at our next event about the real value of LinkedIn and why we need to have a profile and more importantly what we need to do. He’ll share some top tips so if you are a user of LinkedIn make sure that you have it on your phone because he has some great networking tricks to show you.

Bev is a multi award winning accountant that has been in the accounting profession for 28 years. She founded and grew a 100% cloud accounting practice and successfully sold in the summer of 2022. She is very passionate about the accounting industry and now is a consultant to other accountants and bookkeepers to help them realise the potential in their practice ready for exit. Whether their exit be in the next 12 months, in the next 10 years or even 30 years! But every single practice owner will exit at some point and Bev believes that a business should be running right now with the exit in mind, so it’s always at it’s highest profitability and saleable asset value. She is also an elected council member, director and trustee of the AAT.

Margaret began her career in hospitality management and operated in a number of hotels around the South of England before moving to the North East in her early 20’s. From there she moved into the field of recruitment where she worked with Manpower for 3 years covering a range of disciplines. A change of environment when Margaret took a post with a radio station selling advertising before a move into professional services where she spent 20 years as the marketing manager with a leading regional firm. Starting this role in 1998 was at a time when marketing in accounting firms was quite new and it presented a wonderful range of challenges and opportunities. Margaret developed the role, established & supported commercial relationships, introduced processes and made the department a key selling aspect of the firm by introducing a telemarketing function.

The department grew and this cascaded throughout the firm. An exciting marketing led culture was established and results were achieved through communication internally, service focus and putting in systems to track activity and outcomes.

Throughout her career, Margaret has been involved in relationship building, the development of processes, the joining of people and opportunities as well as passionately bringing a sense of focus towards customer service and the associated rewards.

In 2017, the button was born! Margaret set up her own business with a focus on marketing planning. The vision was to highlight the role of a marketing plan in a business so that business owners could access the very process required to make a difference. Now with an accredited training programme and award winning technology solution, Margaret and her team are striving forward and reaching out to new markets. On a personal note, Margaret enjoys music where she is a singer with a local band, loves time with her children, walking around North Yorkshire as well as a good chat over a cuppa with friends.