Steve Oliver is the Founder and CEO of musicMagpie, one of the great Northern entrepreneurial success stories. After the collapse of Music Zone, the retailer he was managing director of, a failure that cost him half the value of his family home. Steve invested the other half into a new venture, by starting trading people’s old CDs and DVDs initially from his garage in Stockport in 2007. What began as a "lazy man's eBay" for trading in CDs, DVDs and games pivoted towards phones and consumer tech, growing today into the number one buyer and seller of refurbished phones in the UK and, remarkably, the biggest seller in the history of both eBay and Amazon globally. musicMagpie floated on the London Stock Exchange in 2021 at a value of £208 million, and was subsequently acquired by AO in late 2024. Across its history the business has generated a cumulative £2 billion of gross income. A pioneer of the circular economy and champion of sustainability, Steve also chairs the Stockport Economic Alliance, and announced in July that he'll step down at the end of September in his words, "to chase more thrills."

I hope you enjoy it…

You can find Sam on socials at @SamJonesMCR

Produced by Sally Rutter

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Chatting with Cherubs: https://www.instagram.com/chattingwithcherubs/

Dogs4Rescue: https://dogs4rescue.co.uk/

Claudia Cardinali is a social media strategist andpersonal-branding specialist, and one of the sharpest voices in the fast-growing business of building people into influential brands. Now working independently and building her own thing, she brings a rare depth of experience to the question every founder, expert and executive is now asking: how do Iactually cut through online?

She previously worked as a senior strategist at GreatInfluence, the agency dedicated to building high-profile personal brands, where she helped shape the online presence of some genuinely big names with the agency's roster spanning the likes of Gary Neville, Grenade founder Alan Barratt,author and Times columnist Matthew Syed, and MyProtein founder Oliver Cookson.

Her specialism is the craft of personal branding: understanding what makes someone worth following and translating their expertise and personality into content that lands.

Claudia is also a sought-after speaker and educator, teaching at General Assembly and appearing regularly on marketing and career podcasts, where she unpacks everything from authenticity to navigating the "quarter-life crisis."With a large, engaged LinkedIn following of her own, she practises exactly what she preaches. I hope you enjoy it...

You can find Sam on socials at @SamJonesMCR

Produced by Sally Rutter

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Chatting with Cherubs: https://www.instagram.com/chattingwithcherubs/

Dogs4Rescue: https://dogs4rescue.co.uk/

Clint Boon is a Manchester institution. Bornin Oldham, he rose to fame as the keyboard player of Inspiral Carpets, the band responsible for that defining organ sound and a stack of acclaimed, chart-topping singles and albums at the heart of Madchester. After the band split in 1995 he formed The Clint Boon Experience, before two decades as a fixture of the airwaves on XFM, BBC Radio Manchester, Radio X and XS Manchesteralongside a parallel life as one of the country's most in-demand club DJs. The Inspirals reformed in 2023 to sold-out tours, with a sixth studio album, Burn Like the Sun, due in January 2027.

His first book, TheManchester Chronicles: True Tales of Music, Madness and Mayhem 1976–2006, is published by Monoray on 3rd September with a foreword by Shaun Ryder. A personal folk-telling of the city's musical coming of age, from punk through Madchester, rave and beyond. Guy Garvey has called it "the greatest rock and roll book ever written."

I hope you enjoy it…

You can find Sam on socials at @SamJonesMCR

Produced by Sally Rutter

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Chatting with Cherubs: https://www.instagram.com/chattingwithcherubs/

Dogs4Rescue: https://dogs4rescue.co.uk/