The Dating App Founder | 8M members | Bootstrapped startup with a team of 50+ | Co-founder & COO of Inner Circle | Follow for insights on business, leadership and relationships

I build and scale companies by raising standards, strengthening teams, and scaling execution.

I’m an entrepreneur with over 14 years of experience founding and scaling businesses. 
I’m the Co-Founder of Inner Circle, a dating app founded in 2012, which has grown to over 8 million users across 50 countries. 

As Chief Operating Officer and acting Chief Marketing Officer, I sit at the intersection of leadership, hiring, execution, and growth.

Across that journey, I’ve helped build teams from 0 to more than 50 people across two continents. 
I’ve interviewed 1,000's of candidates and hired 100's of high performers, giving me a front-row seat to what separates teams that scale from those that stall. 

As companies grow, performance rarely breaks because of strategy. It breaks when clarity fades, standards slip, and execution becomes inconsistent. My perspective is practical and grounded in operating reality. High-performing companies are built by A-player teams, clear priorities, and leaders who combine ownership with humanity. 

My leadership principles are:

⟶ Disciplined execution beats complexity. 
⟶ Trust works when standards are explicit. 
⟶ Momentum comes from focus, not motion.

This account is for founders and leaders who want to build companies that perform consistently as they grow, without losing speed, accountability, or their human edge.

To collaborate with me as a creator please contact: enquiries@alecrickard.com

Michael Krayenhoff

Most founders don't have a talent problem.

They have an "overthinking" problem.

The way you frame a hard moment decides everything.
Not your skills. Not your network.

The story you tell yourself.

Every team eventually hits a wall.
A bad hire. A missed target. A product that didn't land.

What separates the ones who recover from the ones who don't?

They see the same situation differently.

Learning to code at 35 wasn't about code.
It was about proving to myself that hard things are learnable.
That discomfort isn't a stop sign. It's a starting line.

That shift changed how teams around me operate too.

When the leader treats hard problems as puzzles, not threats,
the team starts doing the same.

It's not about being positive all the time.
It's about training yourself to ask a better question.

Not "why is this happening to us?"
But "what does this make possible?"

That's the real competitive edge.
Not the strategy deck. Not the funding round.

The mind you bring into the room every morning.

Train it like a muscle.
Push it when it wants to stop.
Question the first story it tells you.

The obstacle doesn't change.
But what you do with it always depends on how you see it.

What's one moment where changing your thinking changed the outcome entirely?

Drop it below. I'd love to read it.

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Founder of MTD Training & Skillshub | Trusted by 9,000+ Companies to Build Leaders & Drive Sales | Award-Winning L&D Partner | Author & Speaker

After more than 20 years building businesses in learning and performance, one thing is clear: training only matters if it makes an impact.

I’ve seen too much learning that looks good on paper but disappears once normal work resumes. Courses get completed. Boxes get ticked. Very little changes.

I’m the Founder and CEO of MTD Training and Skillshub. Together, we help organisations improve performance through stronger leadership, management and sales capability, supported by a practical learning ecosystem designed to be applied, not just consumed.

Over the years, my teams and I have worked with more than 9,000 organisations. That scale gives you perspective. You start to see what sticks, what fades, and why most training fails to deliver lasting impact.

The biggest issue I see is focus. Too much training is built around activity rather than outcomes. Our approach is simple: impact over attendance. 

Everything we do is designed to shift behaviour, build habits and improve performance in the real world.

The results matter. One FTSE 250 organisation saw a 27% increase in leadership capability within three months. Another generated over £1.5m in additional sales within six months of a programme going live.

We work with multinationals, fast-growing teams and SMEs. The size varies, but the expectation doesn’t. They all want learning that delivers measurable change, not just good feedback scores.

Alongside leading the businesses, I’m also the author of several practical books on leadership, sales, performance and coaching, and I speak regularly at conferences, on podcasts and in the media. I focus on what works when things are busy, complex and under pressure.

Recognition includes industry awards for L&D and HR impact, and being named the UK’s #1 Sales Influencer in the Top 100 Sales Index.

This profile is where I share thinking from running and scaling learning businesses, and from seeing how performance really changes inside organisations.

Sean McPheat

Most meetings don’t move work forward.

They just consume time.

Agendas drift, discussions wander, decisions get delayed, and people leave feeling drained rather than focused. 

I bet this sounds familiar to you! (And yes, I’m guilty as charged too.)

Over time, meetings can become a habit instead of a tool.

I’ve sat through hundreds of them. The worst ones all have the same thing in common — nobody can tell you why the meeting actually exists.

That’s the starting point for this exercise.
It’s designed for learning professionals to use directly, share with their managers, or for managers to work through on their own. 

It works best when meetings regularly overrun, participation is low, or decisions aren’t followed through. New managers often get the most from it because it gives them a clear structure to lead with confidence.

Here’s the core of it.

Pick one meeting that clearly isn’t working. (Some that I used to attend were just moan fests!)

Step back and ask what it’s truly meant to achieve. Most managers have never actually defined that — they inherited the meeting and kept running it.

Once the purpose is clear, write down the desired outcomes so everyone knows what success looks like before the meeting starts.

Then look at the invite list. Fewer people almost always leads to better discussion and faster decisions. 

Clarify who’s deciding, who’s contributing, and who’s just there to stay informed. That one change alone removes a huge amount of frustration.

Build a simple structure with time limits for each section. Summarise decisions before the meeting ends. Confirm who’s responsible for what. And close with a quick “was this useful?” — not as a box-ticking exercise, but to break the habit of repeating the same format week after week because nobody questioned it.

For L&D teams, this exercise is gold dust. 

It surfaces facilitation gaps, planning issues, and team habits that drain productivity. Those insights feed straight into coaching conversations and future development work.
For managers, the impact is immediate. 

Meetings get shorter. Energy improves. Accountability goes up. And the meetings that didn’t need to exist? 

Gone. Off the calendar!

Great managers don’t run more meetings. They run better ones.

Please use this exercise any way you like.

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Founder & CEO, MTD Training & Skillshub | Leadership & Management Development | Trusted by L&D Leaders in 9,000+ Organisations

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