The business section of the BBC website has assembled a selection of short video interviews with well known figures associated with either growing a company from nothing to a successful national or global brand, or bringing the good times back to existing global companies.

The series of videos in the ‘CEO Secrets’ series include contributions by Baroness Martha Lane Fox of Lastminute.com (and now Dot Everyone), Jeremy Schwartz the boss of The Body Shop, Ford Motor Company boss Mark Fields, EasyJet boss Carolyn McCall, and Morten Heuing who is the boss of classified ads website Gumtree.

You can find them on the BBC website here: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-35842808

Example – 3 Secrets From Martha Lane Fox

If your company is a start-up and / or you are building your business with just a great idea from the ground up you may find what co-founder of lastminute.com Martha Lane Fox has to say very useful. Her 3 Secrets to Success as shown in her video are:

1. Hire people based on a vigorous interview process rather than just on gut instinct. Martha made the point that it is worth making sure that you spend enough time with the potential employee to get to know more about them and make sure that plenty of people in your company (if there are many) get to meet the potential employee too.
2. Build for scale. Martha argues that we now have global opportunities and therefore we should develop a mindset from the outset that allows us to see the business on large scale and therefore make decisions to build that scale in and make it come to pass.
3. Get on with it. The business environment is fast moving so it is a good idea to get hiring people and finding customers ASAP, and to therefore to already have at least something promising to show investors.

What Does This Mean For Your Business?

It can always be useful to get nuggets of valuable business advice, especially if they come from people whose advice we trust because they’ve been there, done it and got the t-shirt.

It’s not very often however that we get the opportunity to hear the most important business secrets of some of the greatest recent and current business success stories condensed into easy to digest chunks, direct from the horses’ mouths. Even if it is a source of just a small bit of encouragement and inspiration this is one of many online resources out there that could help in some small way to contribute to the success of your business.

It also helps to show how powerful and engaging rich media such as video can be on your website, particularly if it adds perceived real value.