Elizabeth Gooch MBE is the award winning founder & former CEO of UK tech company, EGS plc, where she invented a software product and pioneered a $3bn technology market. She started her company in her bedroom with £1 leading it through listing and global expansion before it was acquired by a US software company in 2017. She is one of very few women to have listed their company on AIM.

She now helps other Founders to scale and build valuable, investable businesses and also sits on Private & PLC Boards as Chair or NED. Elizabeth was named in The Telegraph’s ‘Most Disruptive Entrepreneurs’ and was awarded West Midlands Woman of the Year for ‘Outstanding Contribution to Technology’ and awarded an MBE for her services to industry.

Reya El-Salahi is an award-winning presenter, reporter and broadcast journalist. She has presented TV and radio programmes and made documentaries for the BBC, Times Radio, CGTN Europe, and This American Life among others.

Joanna Jensen has never done things the conventional way.

She started her career in investment banking, working across Hong Kong and the UK for firms including UBS, Paribas and WI Carr, before walking away from financial markets at 40 to solve a problem that no spreadsheet could fix: her daughter Bella’s eczema.

In 2010, with two small children, a divorce in progress, and weeks of cash in the bank, Joanna built Childs Farm at her kitchen table. She had no retail experience, no manufacturing contacts, and no idea what FMCG stood for – she used to write it on her hand before meetings. What she did have was an unshakeable conviction that children with sensitive skin deserved something better than the products that had existed since the 1970s.

By 2019, Childs Farm was the UK’s No.1 baby and child toiletries brand by sales value – outselling Johnson’s Baby, a company more than a century her senior. In 2022 she sold the business to FTSE-listed PZ Cussons, delivering a 17x return for her investors.

Her brand had reached over 10 million customers across the world.

What makes Joanna’s story remarkable isn’t just the exit. It’s everything she navigated to get there – the investor who pulled out four days before signing documents, leaving her with weeks of cash left; the health challenges she dealt with quietly and without fuss; the divorce, the financial pressure, the two small daughters relying on her. She kept going anyway. Not because she didn’t feel the fear, but because she had made up her mind she was going to succeed.

Today, Joanna is a board chair, non-executive director, author and one of the UK’s most distinctive voices on entrepreneurship. As Chair of the EIS Association, she works directly with HM Treasury and achieved the first changes to the Enterprise Investment Scheme in 12 years – proof that she is just as effective in a policy chamber as she was in a boardroom or on a factory floor.

She writes an occasional business column for The Sunday Times, has published a book on building a consumer brand, and speaks at events across the country – earning a 9.9 out of 10 speaker score from Virgin Start Up, the highest they had ever given. Her TEDx Manchester talk in 2026 told the Childs Farm story with the honesty, humour and emotional intelligence that have become her trademark.

Joanna is an active angel investor in female-founded businesses, a mentor at Imperial College, and a passionate advocate for women who are considering starting something new – whatever stage of life they are at. She is proof that the best businesses are often started not by people with perfect credentials, but by people with a genuine problem to solve and the stubbornness not to give up.

She is 56, lives in Marlborough with her husband, two daughters, two dogs, three and a half horses and a cat, and has absolutely no intention of slowing down.

Her advice to anyone hesitating at the start line: pop on your Teflon knickers and get on with it.