Levi had the honour of singing Happy Birthday to Nelson Mandela when he visited Brixton and he also played football with the famous icon Bob Marley every Sunday in Battersea Park. He gained widespread fame after appearing on the UK television programme Dragons' Den, where he gained £50,000 funding for his Reggae Reggae Sauce. Shortly after Levi Roots' appearance on Dragons' Den, Sainsbury's agreed an exclusive distribution deal. The sauce sold out as soon as it became available. Now, the sauce is stocked by all major retailers and Levi has built a complete brand ranging from ready meals to snacks and soft drinks to pasties. Fast forward seven years and his business is worth an estimated £55 million: " https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ys6dmS3BFm4&feature=youtu.be "

Steve Smith with a market stall idea, started Poundland 13th December 1990. The dream was to turn over 10 million pounds, over 78% of the population have visited a Poundland shop. Steve Smith sold the company in 2001, the company has gone on to turn over 1 billion pounds.

Appointed Group Chief Executive and a director of the Company in 2013, Mr. Buttress joined Just Eat in March 2006 and co-founded its UK business. Mr. Buttress started his career with Coca-Cola Enterprises at the start of 1998. During his time at Coca-Cola he had a variety of senior sales roles before moving into the internet world with Just Eat. He recently led JE through the companies London Stock Exchange IPO, the biggest Technology IPO in the UK for eight years. Mr. Buttress holds a Bachelor of Arts (Hons.) in Law & Business from Middlesex University Business School.

John Griffin, 69, started minicab service Addison Lee in 1975 with no capital. Today, the company has a turnover in excess of £250m, with over 600 office staff and 4,500 drivers. After beginning a career training as an accountant, John was forced to give up his apprenticeship and focus his efforts on rescuing his father’s business, working as a minicab driver to make ends meet during this period John was inspired to start his own business and came to the conclusion that he could run his own minicab business a lot more successfully than the companies he had worked for. Founded with just one car, Addison Lee now carries 10 million passengers and couriers 1 million deliveries a year. In 2013, it was bought by US private equity firm Carlyle for £300m.

After his end-of-millennium’s management and business studies at LSE and Berkeley, Vincent Hotyat embarked on an exciting journey that started in a Big 4 management consultancy, followed by a dive in Brussels’ ocean of EU lobbyists, and then experienced the very fast climbing of the European gaming industry summit that culminated with EuroMillions creation and launch while meeting the challenge of being the youngest executive committee member of Belgium’s National Lottery. Passionate about innovation, change and societal responsibility, Vincent has been pursuing two passions in business: creating, launching and selling new products and services, and advocating and campaigning for sustainable development and a fair and inclusive society. Among his many achievements, he led the creation of more than fifty products for the gaming industry, selling for billions of euros, and set up and coordinated the largest international coalition of NGOs campaigning for the inclusion of social and environmental criteria in public procurement. In 2012, Vincent re-joined LSE to deepen his international, cross-cultural management and CSR expertise and to share his insights, experience and knowledge with the management students he passionately teaches and prepares for being tomorrow’s leaders in global business and society.

Kelsey Ramsden is a west coast gal and east coast business powerhouse. From construction to kids toys and now travelling the world sharing what she has learned starting and building multimillion dollar businesses, Kelsey is truly a thought leader and an inspiration to those who follow her work. She is all brass tacks and belly laughs, down to earth with stratospheric accomplishments, mother of three under 8 and cancer survivor her story of success is compelling and her authenticity is inspiring. Kelsey runs quarterly challenges for current and contemplative business owners to rocket propel their business and lives toward success by their own definition.

Dr Rami Ranger MBE, FRSA is a successful businessman, philanthropist and a social reformer who has been honoured by Her Majesty the Queen on seven occasions. Six times for Business and once personally for community services and was also made a Member of British Empire in 2005. He started his first company, Sea, Air & Land Forwarding in 1987 with just a £2 capital from a shed in Hayes and his second company, Sun Mark Ltd was set up in 1995 to market British supermarket products. It now exports to 130 countries with staggering results. Sun Mark Ltd, has received the Queens Award for Enterprise for an unprecedented 5 consecutive years from 2009 onwards, and in the process made British business history as no other company has received this accolade before. Sun Mark has been added to the Sunday Times most profitable 100 companies in Britain in their “Profit Track 100” league table for the past three years with a turnover approaching £200 million. Rami won the prestigious Institute of Director’s, the Director of the Year Award for 2013. He is a Fellow of the Princes Trust and works tirelessly to enable The Prince’s Trust to reach even more of our youth to pass on his experience and expertise in inspiring the next generation of entrepreneurs. His message is that one does not need a rich family or an elite education to succeed in life. However, one needs self-respect, good work ethics, commitment, vision and empathy for others. He has donated £250,000 to the London South Bank University to set up ‘Dr Rami Ranger MBE Centre for Enterprise Excellence’. He has also donated £100,000 towards the erection of the Mahatma Gandhi Statue in Parliament Square, London.

He has set and broken Guinness world records, and appeared on How Do They Do That?, Oprah, You Bet, Guinness World of Records, Sky News, Discovery Channel, Tomorrow’s World, and Record Breakers. His feats include committing to memory a random sequence of 2808 playing cards (54 packs) after looking at each card only once. He is a bestselling author of 13 books and was given a lifetime achievement award by World Memory Championships International. At Sparks, we will be teaching our audience how to train your memory to memorise vast quantities of data, how to develop your mental agility and how to apply this in practice.

Dubbed the ‘father of neuromarketing’, Dr David Lewis-Hodgson is a Chartered neuropsychologist, an Associate Fellow of the British Psychological Society, a Fellow of the Royal Society of Medicine and the International Stress Management Association. Chairman of Mindlab International, he is an award winning broadcaster and author whose most recent books include Impulse. Why We Do What We Do Without Knowing Why We do It and The Brain Sell: When Science Met Shopping. In April, his most recent book Fat Planet (co-authored with Dr Margaret Leitch) will be published by Random House, David started life studying medicine but switched to psychology and gained a First Class Honours degree and a doctorate from the Department of Experimental Psychology at the University of Sussex. After lecturing there in clinical psychology and psychopathology, he left to found his own research organisation Mindlab International a company specialising in brain research and neuroscience applied to analysing sub-conscious responses.

Adrian Hayes is a British record-breaking polar explorer & adventurer, keynote speaker, business coach, author and campaigner. An Arabic and Nepalese speaking former Airbus Middle East Sales Director and British Army Gurkha Officer, in his expedition work he has achieved more major goals the past eight years than almost anyone in the world – Everest, K2, the North Pole, South Pole, the length of Greenland by kite-ski, the Arabian Desert by camel, two Guinness world records, two documentaries and one book. Adrian has featured in two television documentaries: the 2011 National Geographic Channel ‘Greenland Quest’ and the 2013 Discovery Channel ‘Footsteps of Thesiger’. His first book ‘Footsteps of Thesiger’ was published in 2013.

Mr. Ladi Balogun holds a bachelor’s degree in Economics from the University of East Anglia and an MBA from Harvard Business School, USA. He has 22 years banking experience across 3 continents with Morgan Grenfell - an erstwhile UK investment bank, Citibank in New York and for the last 16 years FCMB. He led the transformation of FCMB from a small but successful investment bank to one of Nigeria’s leading commercial and retail banks with a presence in 2 continents. Amongst other interests, he is very passionate about venture capital, entrepreneurism and impact investing.

Julian Treasure is author of the book Sound Business and a highly-rated international public speaker on the effective use of sound in business, and on personal communication skills (particularly conscious listening and powerful speaking). His five TED.com talks have been viewed an estimated 20 million times, and his latest is already in the top 50 all-time TED talks. His company The Sound Agency works with major brands worldwide, proving that good sound is good business, especially through the pioneering use of generative soundscapes in retail spaces.

Kaushal Dugar is the Founder & CEO of Teabox. He graduated from the Singapore Management University, where he was the founder & president of SMU Ventures. The society became the Entrepreneurship Society that encouraged students to pursue entrepreneurship and has resulted in few businesses with million dollar revenues. Prior to Teabox, he worked as a corporate finance analyst and strategy consultant at KPMG Singapore. At KPMG, he worked with government agencies and corporations across South East Asia on long term corporate strategy development across many industries. Kaushal was also the co-founder of Books to Read – a nonprofit aimed to help primary & secondary school children get access to books from developing nations where he and his team shipped around 100,000 books from Singapore to schools in Tanzania and Zambia. Founded in 2012 by Kaushal, Teabox is the only premium tea brand that delivers teas direct from origin to customer. With fulfillment center in the heart of tea producing regions, Teabox ships the world’s freshest teas, chosen by tea experts to customers all over the world within 24-48 hours of production. Teabox provides the largest selection of single estate and premium fresh teas online. Within 2 years of its existence, Teabox has already delivered over 5 million cups of tea to tea-lovers in over 65 countries.

Eric grew up in Chicago where he fell in love with both Mexican food and the hospitality industry. In 2007 he co-founded Chilango, serving fresh Mexican food across the capital. Chilango has been voted London’s best burritos by Zagat, Harden’s, Time Out, and The Evening Standard. Before Chilango Eric worked at Skype as well as McKinsey & Company. In 2010 he was named 1 of the top 30 entrepreneurs in the UK, age 35 and younger, by Startups.co.uk and in 2014 the Telegraph named Eric amongst Britain’s 27 Most Disruptive Entrepreneurs. He has appeared as a guest judge with Lord Alan Sugar on The Apprentice and cooked together with Tana Ramsay on UKTV’s Market Kitchen. He also runs a blog www.becoming.life, which helps readers reach their full potential in life and business.

On arriving in the UK from Chandigarh, Atul Pathak started his career in the hotel industry and is now one of the UK’s most successful franchise entrepreneurs, running twenty six McDonald’s restaurants across North and West London and Berkshire through his company Appt Corporation Ltd. Eleven years after opening his first restaurant he employs more than 2,000 staff, placing a strong emphasis on their development and training. Atul is actively involved in the communities where his restaurants operate and lends his support whenever he can, ranging from supporting several youth football teams to carrying out a number of clean-up campaigns. In the last 4 years, Atul and Appt Corporation have raised more than £250,000 for various charities. He also donates a percentage of his annual sales. Atul shares his business experience with budding entrepreneurs, aiming to help others make their ideas a reality. Atul’s success has been recognised by many organisations. He also featured as a case study in a 2014 keynote report by the Centre for Entrepreneurs examining the economic and social contribution of Migrant Entrepreneurs.

A native Londoner, Lee is passionate about using his own experiences to help young ambitious students achieve their goals. Graduating from UCL in 2006, Lee won full colors for his university football team, while also playing semi-professional football. At university he interned with a sports marketing agency IMG, and after graduation he worked for three years as a European fixed income trader; eventually heading up a trading team in 2009. Lee left his recent role in L’Oreal’s marketing department to co-found The Intern Group. The Intern Group is an award-winning social entrepreneurship company that amplifies the global consciousness and career development of talented individuals worldwide through global internships. The company has an international network of partnerships spanning all sectors, which enables them to place students in internships around the world. The Intern Group Latin America/ London also won the start-Up Chile entrepreneurship Award in 2011, which was selected from over 650 applications, and received a $40,000 grant and full support from the Chilean government.

Since founding Alexander Mann Solutions in 1996, CEO Rosaleen Blair has seen it become recognised as a global leader in talent acquisition and management services and be ranked in 2014 as No. 4 in the Sunday Times’ TopTrack 250, the annual league table for Britain’s mid-market growth private companies with the biggest sales. With a turnover of £617 million and over 2,800 staff operating across more than 80 countries globally, Rosaleen is proud Alexander Mann Solutions is the trusted partner of choice for blue chip organisations with large, complex and global talent management needs. Rosaleen is frequently acknowledged for her leadership in the global HR industry as well as her entrepreneurial success. She has been named as a Global HRO Superstar by HRO Today magazine and one of the Staffing Industry Analyst’s ‘25 most powerful people in staffing’. Named EY’s business products & services Entrepreneur of the Year (2006) and Veuve Clicquot Businesswoman of the Year (2007), Rosaleen is actively involved in the investment, coaching and mentoring of small businesses. Rosaleen has also been recognised as one of SIA’s Most Influential Women, GQ and Editorial Intelligence’s 100 Most Connected Women 2014 and Brummell’s Inspirational Women 2014: Entrepreneurs. On a personal note, Rosaleen is passionate about the diversity agenda and youth employability. She is heavily engaged in numerous charity and governmental organisations, which support these agendas, including Everywoman, Life Skills and The Prince’s Trust.

For seven years he was Chairman and CEO of Boyden World Corporation, during which time the company grew to 64 offices in 40 countries. He then established his own firm, Garner International, floated it on the LSE and later bought Norman Broadbent, one of the all time leading search brands operating across Europe and the Middle East. Andrew is perhaps best known for the many top-level corporate appointments he has facilitated for UK FTSE 10 companies. Andrew has had a number of other prominent roles, including non-executive director of The Royal Philharmonic Orchestra, where he helped the orchestra transform its business model.

Gerald B. Hörhan was previously an Investment Banker at J.P. Morgan, New York and McKinsey, Frankfurt. Since 2003, he has been a serial entrepreneur in the areas of Investment Banking, Corporate Finance and Real Estate. Gerald is Executive Director and 50% owner of Pallas Capital Holding AG (www.pallascapital.com), one of Austria’s leading corporate finance boutiques for SMEs. As well as Executive Director and 33% owner of Life Settlement Holding AG (www.lifesettlementholding.com), one of Austria’s largest investors in second hand US life insurance policies. Gerald is also a successful real estate investor in Germany and non executive director of several medium sized businesses in Austria and Germany. In his spare time Gerald is a University lecturer at the University of Business Administration in Vienna; guest lecturer at the University of Witten Heredecke and at Studienstiftung and author of several best-selling books (“Investment Punk”, “Gegengift”, “Null Bock Komplott”). He is also a member of the Spiegel and Manager Magazin Bestseller Lists, having coveted several awards.

Gary is the founder and Managing Partner of regulatory and governance consultancy Tetractys Partners LLP. He has extensive asset management, hedge fund and investment banking experience in addition to a broad and deep understanding of corporate governance developed over the past 21 years, including spells with the Personal Investment Authority, Henderson Global Investors, Brevan Howard Asset Management, Religare Capital Markets and, most recently, as a Managing Partner of Solo Capital Partners. Bill Prew is the Founder and CEO of INDOS Financial, an independent depositary business which provides depositary services to alternative investment funds under the Alternative Investment Fund Managers Directive (AIFMD). Bill is a qualified accountant with over 19 years financial services experience. He started his career in 1993 in the investment management division of Coopers & Lybrand (now PwC). Bill is a recognised independent expert on AIFMD and has presented at many industry events and been published widely in the industry press.

For seven years he was Chairman and CEO of Boyden World Corporation, during which time the company grew to 64 offices in 40 countries. He then established his own firm, Garner International, floated it on the LSE and later bought Norman Broadbent, one of the all time leading search brands operating across Europe and the Middle East. Andrew is perhaps best known for the many top-level corporate appointments he has facilitated for UK FTSE 10 companies. Andrew has had a number of other prominent roles, including non-executive director of The Royal Philharmonic Orchestra, where he helped the orchestra transform its business model.

In 2005, James Eder became one of the youngest entrepreneurs in the country when he founded website Student Beans aged 22, alongside his brother Michael. 10 years later Student Beans has gone from an idea to a nationally recognised brand, reaching millions of students every month. Now known as The Beans Group, the company employs a team of over 40 people and was named Digital Business of the Year 2013 at the National Business Awards. James is a frequent speaker at conferences, schools and universities on subjects including marketing, entrepreneurship and building a brand, addressing The One Young World conference in South Africa and most recently in Dublin. James’ drive and passion led to him winning a number of awards in 2013, including Social Media Entrepreneur of the Year at the Great British Entrepreneur Awards, being named one of Future 50 and graduating as a Marketing Academy Scholar.

Stefan van der Fluit is a dutch entrepreneur who grew up in Silicon Valley. From a young age he has been working in tech startups, founding his first one at the age of fifteen; Nafets Solutions. During his first year at University of Warwick, Stefan co-founded the campus discovery tool, Unibubble. Stefan is currently working on Nuklius; a startup who’s mission it is to help entrepreneurs realise their ideas and to create micro-silicon valleys everywhere. In late 2014, Stefan was recognised by HRH The Duke of York as ‘Entrepreneur of the Week’. Currently he is part of the Accelerate Cambridge Cohort working on growing Nuklius.