CEO Secrets: 'Your business is not your baby'

I caught up with Liz Jackson MBE a fortnight ago to record this one. A colleague had recommended her as a good potential guest for the series, after attending a business event she was at. I looked her up and her story sounded interesting and I wanted to meet her.

These days she is a director of a firm that offers corporate financial advice. But CEO Secrets focuses on the stories of CEOs and founders. So I wanted to hear about a different time in her life, in her mid-twenties, when she set up and began to scale a marketing agency. She built up a company with more than 100 employees over 17 years, before exiting. She did all this while losing her sight. She knew since childhood that she had a condition that would mean this would likely happen, but she didn't know exactly when. Her sight started to degenerate just after she set up the business.

We actually spoke at length about how this affected her as a business founder and leader. But in the end, we decided not to make those thoughts the focus of her main video contribution for the series, which is a warning to entrepreneurs not to treat the companies they create as their "babies" - a word that is often used as a badge of pride. She explains why this is dangerous in the video which you can watch here.

The video ran on the front page of the BBC News website today, and has also aired on BBC News Channel and BBC World TV News.

***

This week I also visited Meatless Farm up in Leeds, in the north of England. It makes a vegan, plant-based alternative to meat, which you will find in many supermarket shelves. It started out doing mince, but now does other types of food product too, like sausages. I went there to catch up with its founder, Morten Toft Bech.

He made a prediction that has stuck in my head. He said that one day he hopes that supermarkets won't have Meat aisles anymore. Instead they will simply have Protein aisles.

I was given a sneak peek at some of the new products they are working on in their testing lab. I also got to see how their in-house chefs prepare food.

One cool trick is to put cheese slices on top of your burgers while they are still frying, add some water to the pan, then put a lid on top - then put the hob on a low setting. This seemed to melt the cheese in a very nice way!

The journey to Leeds is only about 2 hours by train from London, where I'm based, so I did it as a day trip. In fact, that is kind of a clue to what the advice in Morten's contribution is - though I won't give too much away now.

Dougal