With David Wise – Founder Wise Productions
What if the most valuable move a founder can make is admitting they’ve become the weakest person in their own company and then acting on it?
David Wise spent three decades building Wise Productions into a live-events company trusted inside Britain’s grade-listed museums, palaces and galleries. In this conversation he tells me about the three quiet epiphanies that reshaped him as a founder: realising in 1999 that he needed people who did not look, sound or think like him; waking up before the 2012 Olympics with the uncomfortable knowledge that he was the weakest person in his own business and walking out of a 2019 acquisition meeting because the deal would have cost his people. The result, in December 2022, was a move to employee ownership. Expect an honest, humbling founder’s account of ego, humility, legacy and what it means to "send the lift back down".