Simon Mainwaring

Founder & CEO of award-winning strategic consultancy, We First, New York Times bestselling author that was named Best Marketing Book of the Year by strategy+business

Expert on

  • Corporate Culture
  • Marketing
  • Branding
  • Thought Leadership
  • Strategy

Fee Range

$20,000–$40,000

Travels from

CA, US

Biography

Simon Mainwaring is founder/CEO of We First, a strategic consultancy accelerating growth and impact for purpose-driven brands. He’s a member of the Steering Committee of Sustainable Brands, the Forbes Business Council, and a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts.

Simon is a Featured Expert and Jury Member at the Cannes Lions Festival for the Sustainable Development Goals in 2021, host of the ‘Brands With Purpose’ series with Harvard Business School Association of Boston, and his company, We First, is included in Real Leaders list for the Top 100 Impact Companies in the US for 2021 and 2019, as well as a B Corps ‘Best for The World’ Honoree. He was a Real Leaders Top 100 Visionary Leader in 2018, a finalist for the Conscious Company Leadership Awards in 2017, received the MAKE CHANGE, ‘Conscious Leadership’ Award for 2016, and was a finalist for Global Australian of the Year in 2015.

Simon’s first book, We First was a New York Times, Wall Street Journal, and Amazon bestseller and named Best Marketing Book of the Year by strategy+business. It was named an Amazon Top Ten Business Book, 800CEORead Top Five Marketing Book and Sustainable Brands listed We First as one of their Top Sustainability Books of the decade. His new book Lead With We is available November, 2021.

Simon was a Real Leaders Top 50 Keynote Speakers in the World in 2020, was voted a Top 5 Marketing Speaker by speaking.com for 5 years in a row, and was on the cover of the National Speaker’s Magazine (U.S.). He’s been featured in BBC World News, The Guardian, Advertising Age, Inc., AMA, Fast Company, and Forbes.

Prior to We First, Simon was a writer, Creative Director and Worldwide Creative Director at agencies including DDB (Sydney), Saatchi & Saatchi (London), Wieden & Kennedy (Portland) and Ogilvy (Los Angeles) winning awards at all major advertising festivals on clients such as Nike, Toyota and Motorola. He lives in Los Angeles with his wife and two daughters.

Speaker Videos

Lead With We: How Companies Thrive in Uncertain Times

You can grow your business even during an unprecedented time of uncertainty. In fact, your growth, relevance, and long-term prosperity can increase depending on how you frame your role in the world and execute against it. The starting point is to ‘Lead With We’ which transforms limiting mindsets and habits into new beliefs and behaviors that leverage the power of We to ensure all stakeholders build your business. It’s a new vision for leadership, culture, marketing, and impact that empowers your business to thrive in today’s market and course-correct our future. In this presentation, attendees will learn:

  1. How to accelerate business growth while solving today’s most pressing challenges.
  2. How to drive fresh relevance and resonance with employees and customers.
  3. How to leverage rising market forces to compound your growth and impact.

How Purpose Becomes a Force Multiplier for Your Business

How do you define, integrate, and activate your purpose across your business to unlock the greatest business value? It’s this question every company must answer as business is called on to not only compete but also solve connected and growing crises. What most companies don’t know, however, is how to position and leverage their purpose so that it drives a movement that becomes a force multiplier for the business. This requires new mindsets, strategies, and tactics that ensure you’ll capture the full value of being a purposeful company in terms of company reputation, culture, sales, and impact. In this presentation, attendees will learn:

  1. How to define and activate your purpose in ways that propel business growth.
  2. Strategies and tactics to launch, build, and scale a purpose-led movement.
  3. Critical movement-making mistakes to avoid and insights to leverage.

The Future of Work: How to Ignite an Irresistible Company Culture

If your company is to compete and lead, you need new ways of working especially given the complexity of company culture and employees’ expectations today. Doing so requires a radically new approach to work that is fundamentally co-creative and fortified by beliefs and behaviors that straddle and strengthen office and remote work. The goal is to create a culture that people actively want to be a part of because it improves their lives which then drives productivity, growth, and competitive advantage. In this presentation, attendees will learn:

  1. How to frame, build, and strengthen a co-creative and productive culture.
  2. The building blocks of office, hybrid, and remote cultures that outperform.
  3. Strategies and tools to reset and enhance ways of working and the employee experience.

The ESG Advantage: Strategy & Storytelling That Delivers Business Value

New regulations and rising stakeholder expectations have put every company on notice for their ESG commitments. Yet complexity and competition leave many companies feeling confused, stalled, or paralyzed. The key is to build the right strategic architecture and leverage intentional storytelling that builds a competitive advantage that translates to business growth. So that ESG commitments, when planned and executed correctly, become sustained business drivers while creating critical impact. In this presentation, attendees will learn:

  1. How to build a clear and actionable ESG strategy across enterprises, brands, and markets.
  2. How to avoid pitfalls from greenwashing to green hushing.
  3. How to tell ESG impact stories in ways that deliver business value.