Episode 16 - Lou Meadows, International Rugby Coach: What Holds a Team Together When it Counts

Episode 16 - Lou Meadows, International Rugby Coach: What Holds a Team Together When it Counts

Lou Meadows was never capped as an England player.  Yet she didn't let that stop her becoming the first woman to coach a men's national side, then attack coach for the Red Roses, helping deliver a home Rugby World Cup gold against Canada. Weeks later, at what should have been the peak of her career, she left the Red Roses to become attack coach for the USA Eagles. This isn't a story about riding a winning high. It's about the weeks after a World Cup final, when the medal's won and no one can really tell you what comes next. About walking away from a team you love, mid-momentum, because you believe investment is what builds success, and you want to go build it somewhere else before the window closes. Kirsty and Lou talk about holding a team together through home World Cup pressure without it cracking, what it actually means to "bond" with players you're also competing against for a place, and what it takes to coach internationally with two young kids at home. They get into why USA Eagles won her over and why she thinks the barrier for women in coaching was never talent, it's a system with no roadmap built for them. As Lou puts it: "You need to invest."  It's a philosophy she lived by winning a World Cup, and one she's now betting on all over again.

Episode 15 - Zena Couppey, CEO of Altum: Growth comes from Structure, Discipline & Diversity

Zena Couppey left school at 16 with no degree, no female role models, and no blueprint. Today she runs Altum as CEO, having grown it from £11 billion to £72 billion in assets under six years, with a 60% female senior leadership team and Dame Helena Morrissey as chair. This isn't a story about having it all figured out, but rather about what happens when you stop waiting for permission and get on with building the culture you wish you'd had. About making enough right calls under pressure, that eventually the numbers speak for themselves. Kirsty and Zena talk about what authentic leadership actually looks like inside a fast-growing, PE-backed business. They dive into the AI transformation that's already underway, Altum's incredibly low staff turnover, and the very human cost of running a household with two CEOs, two children, and six offices across multiple continents. It's about discipline, leading with authenticity and creating the structures that allow people to thrive.  When we create the space and support mechanisms for people to do their best work, we can therefore, as Zena puts it, focus on "winning together".

Episode 14 - Daniel Priestly: Let’s Leverage Billion Year Old Technology

He helped build one of the most influential pensions and investment consulting firms in the UK. Then he walked away from it. In this episode of the Rebalance Earth Podcast, entrepreneur and bestselling author Daniel Priestley turns the tables and puts his long-time friend Rob Gardner in the hot seat. The two have known each other for more than 15 years. Over that time they have both built successful businesses, navigated the realities of entrepreneurship, and seen firsthand what it takes to turn big ideas into companies that actually work. But Rob’s latest venture may be the most ambitious yet. Rebalance Earth is built around a simple but radical idea. What if Nature wasn’t treated as a cost to be protected, but as infrastructure that investors can fund and earn returns from? In this wide-ranging conversation, Dan pulls apart the origin story behind the company. Why Rob left a successful career helping shape institutional investment through Redington and managing billions of pounds of investments at St. James’s Place. What he saw at COP26 that convinced him the financial system was missing something fundamental. And why he believes the next major asset class could be nature itself. They explore how restored landscapes can reduce flood risk for railways and cities and how pension funds are beginning to invest in ecosystems in the same way they once invested in renewable energy infrastructure. But this conversation is also a deep dive into entrepreneurship. About the moment you decide to leave a comfortable career and start again. About building teams, convincing sceptics, and turning a seemingly impossible idea into something that can actually work in the real world. Because if Rob Gardner is right, the next generation of infrastructure will not be built from steel and concrete, but grown. And the entrepreneurs who are able to figure out how to finance it will reshape the entire global economy.

Episode 13 - Dimple Patel, NatureMetrics: Building a Bloomberg for Nature

Most decisions about nature risk are made without any data at all. Right now, if you run a global supply chain, manage a pension portfolio, or sit on the board of a company with commodity exposure, the nature risk embedded in your operations is essentially invisible. The effects of yields declining, input costs rising and supply chains breaking being stretched is becoming more and more visible. But you can't price it, model it, or act to hedge against it. In this episode, Rob Gardner sits down with Dimple Patel, CEO of NatureMetrics, a company that has spent a decade building the data infrastructure to change that. Dimple explains how environmental DNA extracted from a bucket of water or a handful of soil can map every species in an ecosystem to forensic precision. That the tools being built for financial institutions today are deliberately slower to market than the technology allows, because the data has to be good enough to trade on. And what it would look like if nature risk appeared on a Bloomberg terminal the same way credit risk does now.  She's a former Goldman Sachs fixed income trader turned three-time entrepreneur, and she thinks about nature the way a portfolio manager thinks about exposure. She understands that with the right data presented in the right way, nature risk can be correctly priced and acted on in the financial markets.  It's an exciting conversation about what happens when the world stops flying blind on nature, and what the markets will look like when it can finally price what it's been ignoring.

Episode 12 - Chris Walters, OFWAT: Water is a Serious Business

Most people only think about water when it stops working. But the story of UK water is far bigger, and far more broken, than those moments suggest. £104 billion. That's the investment committed to the UK water sector over the next five years. A system serving 70 million people, running on Victorian infrastructure, facing a reckoning it can no longer defer. In this episode, Rob Gardner sits down with Chris Walters, CEO of Ofwat, the economic regulator at the centre of that transformation. Chris explains why water bills stayed flat for two decades while the infrastructure fell behind. Why two thirds of what pollutes our rivers isn't domestic wastewater. And why the most serious thinkers in this space aren't reaching for concrete at all. They're reaching for reed beds, wetlands, and restored river catchments. It's a conversation about stewardship, natural infrastructure, and whether the next generation of essential systems gets built from pipes and tanks, or grown from the landscape itself. If you've ever turned on a tap without thinking twice, this episode is worth your time. Water is a serious business.