How CXO Portals is Helping Tech Leaders Connect and Grow

In this week’s episode of the Inspiring Tech Leaders podcast, I’m joined by Glenn Hapgood and Charmaine Baker, the co-founders and co-CEOs of CXO Portals.  CXO Portals is an innovative events company dedicated to creating meaningful, engaging experiences for senior leaders, businesses, and partners.

We explore their inspiring journey around building a purpose-driven business that champions authentic networking and impactful conversations.

In this episode, we discuss:
💡 What inspired Glenn and Charmaine to start CXO Portals
💡 How their professional backgrounds shaped the company’s vision
💡 The challenges they faced launching the business
💡 How CXO Portals is redefining executive networking
💡 And what the future holds for this exciting venture

It was an absolute pleasure having Glenn and Charmaine on the show. Their passion for building ethical, people-focused experiences truly shines through.

Tune in now to hear how CXO Portals is helping senior leaders connect, learn, and grow.

Chapters

• 0:34 What inspired the creation of CXO Portals
• 3:14 The core mission of CXO Portals and how it differentiates itself in the market
• 5:18 The professional backgrounds that shaped the vision and direction of CXO Portals
• 7:57 The primary audience and challenges CXO Portals is helping to solve
• 11:41 The hurdles faced setting up CXO Portals
• 17:03 How CXO Portals is influencing the future of executive networking and knowledge sharing
• 19:51 CXO Portals in the next 5 years
• 22:35 How learn more and connect with CXO Portals

Transcript

Welcome to the Inspiring Tech Leaders podcast with me, Dave Roberts. Today, I'm joined by Glenn Hapgood and Charmaine Baker, the co-founders and co-CEOs of CXO Portals. CXO Portals is an events company specialising in creating engaging and impactful events for senior leaders, businesses and partners.

What a pleasure to have you both here today.

Lovely to be here, thank you, Dave.

Hi, Dave, yes, great stuff.

So let's kick things off with you, Glenn. What inspired you and Charmaine to create CXO Portals? And was there a particular gap in the market that you wanted to address?

The inspiration, I think the inspiration goes two ways, actually, Dave. And, you know, I'm talking for Charmaine as well here, but both of us have 15 years actually experienced the event industry. And I think when you attend an event, you sometimes forget about all the things that go behind the scenes, all things that happen, all the preparation, all the good things that people do.

But you also don't see maybe all the things that I suppose aren't quite what we believe in, aren't quite, I would say, ethical in the way some event companies are run. And I think for us, we wanted to create a company, A, we were proud of, that could leave a legacy, but most importantly, actually addressed what events should be. We're one of our straplines, Dave, is events to be enjoyed, not endured.

And I think recently, too many events, people are in enduring part of it, to then get to the bits they enjoy. When actually, events themselves, they should be enjoyed all the way through. There should be no reason to have to endure anything.

Events should be delivering value. And I think both myself and Charmaine really wanted to look at, what events were meant to be, what are they the catalyst for, which is usually partnerships, relationships, and sharing, networking, engaging, etc., etc.

But most importantly, we just wanted to make them special again. We wanted people to feel they could come to events, they could enjoy it, they would learn something, they would take something away, very outcome-based in what we want to do. So that's why we hold them at Michelin-starred venues, that's why we really listen to our advisory board, we listen to our community to really create agendas and events that are not only informative and help people take something away from them, but also can be enjoyed as well.

So that's, I suppose, wasn't really a gap in the market as such, but we felt that a lot of other events were very transactional, and we're focused maybe in a different area, whether that's on revenue and sponsorship and making sure they can get money in and make a profit. Where actually we feel that events are there to actually hit a pain point in the market, whether that's a solution provider trying to gain new business, or whether that's a CIO trying to understand the new tech in the marketplace or learn from their peers, or see what their competitors have been doing, and can they take something back to their own organisation?

I absolutely agree. I think events should be enjoyed throughout. So Charmaine, what is the core mission of CXO Portals, and how does it differentiate itself from others in the industry?

So I'd say very much our core mission is to be truthful and honest and ethical to all of our clients and our staff, actually. It's not just about CXO being a company that works with solution providers and delegates, we are trying to change the status quo that the reputation that event companies have. And how are we doing that?

We're doing that by listening to our clients, by not always putting revenue first. Obviously, we need revenue to be able to function. You can't function without money, but we are listening to our clients, we listen to our advisory board, we listen to our staff.

When they're speaking to delegates and they're speaking to clients daily, we will listen to what they want to have at an event, how they want to run an event, what works, what doesn't. So for example, our upcoming conference in May and the conference we recently did in October in Munich, there were no sponsor meetings. We don't want our attendees and our sponsors to have real really bad experiences by being forced into a position that's not beneficial.

So for us, we are standing by our ethics, we're practicing what we're preaching, we're not forcing people into situations that aren't going to be beneficial and just a complete time waste for everybody because it just leaves a sour taste. So for us, it's about providing educational learning. It's about creating mentorship.

A lot of our advisory board are very strong in NED roles and advocates of bringing the next generation of IT, tech security through. For us, like I say, it's the ethical side of it. So our mission is very much around cultivating professional networks and relationships, creating new revenue opportunities for our clients.

But it's about the connections that our executives will make on site and hopefully keep going into the future.

Well, it's fantastic to hear how you're driven by your ethics and values. Glenn, coming back to you, how did your professional background shape the vision and direction of CXO Portals?

Well, both myself and Charmaine, apart from us meeting at an event company, and actually my office closed down when I had to move to the Bristol office. And my first meeting, my first impression of Charmaine, where it was a hot desking environment. But as you know, any hot desk environment, people have their favourite seats.

And as I got there early, I sat in a seat and this very forward Bolshe woman came up to me and said, excuse me, you're in my seat, move. And that was my first meeting with Charmaine, actually, at another event company. My professional background is a bit different to Charmaine's, but both of us have worked in the event industry and worked with lots of different events, with lots of different cultures, lots of different regions.

I actually worked for and very much started off my career as in customer service. So I worked for Centrica, I was the business support manager and headed up customer service and store reception for the UK and Ireland for Tesco. And I think that customer service side has always wanted me to maybe be a bit of a people pleaser.

But more importantly, I think the value of valuing others, recognizing others, actually appreciating the difference in people. And I think that not just the professional background, but I think the way that both myself and Charmaine are and how we are brought up, how we are as people. Charmaine mentioned about the ethical considerations.

I think the empathy side, being able to understand the hardships people have to go through, whether you're a CIO and you're drowning in work and you can't really talk to anyone, you don't have time to network or speak to your peers. And events are actually the platform for you to be able to meet other CIOs. Or whether it's a marketing manager who is trusted people to spend their budget with us, you know, and also trusts us to deliver for them, because non-delivery of that could really impact their careers.

So I think both our professional backgrounds, but I think also our ethical standpoint and the empathy we have for people around us. I think that has helped us shape the direction of CXO Portals, shape what we want it to be and shaped, again, most importantly, how we treat people, whether that's our partners, our clients, our delegates, our staff. And, you know, treat people as you want to be treated is one of the mantras I go by.

And I think CXO Portals definitely has that in abundance.

Well, I absolutely love that story. That's fantastic around those first impressions. Charmaine, who is your primary audience and what challenges are you helping them solve?

So I suppose that the name of our company, CXO Portals, can be a little misleading, but it does highlight the caliber and the quality that we tend to have at our events. But we work with multiple job titles, industries. It depends really on what our clients want.

So the main bulk of who we work with are IT, security tech, data, AI. They are the key industries and job titles that we'd work with, manufacturing, telco, healthcare. But we'll also, to have a more technical conversation, we'll also have Salesforce.

We do a lot with Salesforce users. We do a lot with data architects and data scientists. So it all depends on the actual event and whether it's going to be a technical conversation or whether it's going to be more high-level, board level.

We do a lot with our advisory board and they gear us in the right direction on what we can discuss, what should be discussed in our program or which titles will get the most traction. It can range. It could be a security session, it could be an AI session, or it could be something really, really broad on getting the right answers from your board, getting the best out of your team.

How do you get a high-performing team, working from home, mental health? All of these topics are really, really important, especially in startup companies or companies that work from home, or again, the bigger companies where you can sometimes disappear because there's so many people working in blue chip companies. And this is how we put together our events with all of our executives in mind.

So when an event is built, it's tailored. So we work to a brief, we work to a towel. And I suppose that's how we're a little bit different.

We try to step away from the bottoms on seats mentality. We will stick to that, that's how that target account lists for our clients. And all of our executives are pre-qualified before attending an event, before attending a conference or a roundtable, because they are limited seats.

We want decision makers, we want budget holders, we want those that can talk at a high level in the room, because it's all about networking. Networking is so key in this day and age, because a lot of people don't have time anymore, and you hear people going to an event and they leave it not learning anything. So for us, what challenges are we helping our network, I suppose, overcome?

All depends on the reasons to why they're attending the event. So we have for our upcoming conference, for example, an AI matrix, and all of our executives will answer where they are in that level of maturity so that we can build a program around the questions that they've essentially answered. So for us, the program is around learning, education.

A lot of our speakers in the conference will be sharing co-pilots that have either been a success or a failure. So for us, it's all about the here and now. And it's about teaching our, I suppose, our network what they can take back personally as well.

So for us, it's not just about professional learnings, it's about personal learnings. So we're here to kind of help all walks of life, be it somebody that's at the start of their journey, they might just be a data scientist or a data architect all the way up to the C level. So CXO Portals kind of covers an umbrella of different job titles, industries.

And we like that. We love that we deal with all walks of life daily.

So coming back to you, Glenn, can you talk through what were some of the biggest hurdles you faced in getting CXO Portals off the ground?

Gosh, Dave, how long have we got? It feels like actually, myself and Charmaine talk about this daily. It feels like actually there's been more hurdles than there has been a flat run sometimes in what you have to do.

And I think, you know, what I'm going to talk about here, I think it's going to be no surprise for any business owners who are starting out. You know, our reputation is key, making sure that we're delivering in all aspects of what we want to do. I think that revenue, revenue, revenue, revenue, it's always key for a new company.

And I think differentiating ourselves and trying to get our message across, trying to get through the noise of all the other event companies. You know, myself and Charmaine are very aware there are a lot of companies doing very similar things that we do. There are, across the UK, I could probably reel off 30 or 40 that we've had to work around and get ahead of, and so to speak.

But I think that the biggest challenge, the biggest hurdles, recruitment was a big hurdle, especially with a small business. You know, with a larger business, we see people that recruit on a mass scale and then, you know, they're able to keep the good staff and we'd all through. For us as a small business, when we recruit a person, you know, we need that person to be good and we need that person to deliver on their outcomes.

We need that person to have the right ethics. We need that person to follow our journey and be on the same pathway as us. And sometimes that just doesn't work out for some one reason or another.

And of course, every time you recruit someone, there's a cost involved to a small business, but there's also the risk of non delivery for our clients. As we're so client facing and we're so desperate really to deliver well for our clients and make sure that we're, you know, delivering the best we can. Sometimes recruitment I think can be that can be, it's probably the biggest hurdle in my opinion.

Charmaine and I have a different, slightly different opinion here. But I think for me, it's actually been the recruitment finding the right staff. What I will say is that that was the hurdles getting us off the ground.

What I will say, we have a very small team, but we have an extremely dedicated team, an extremely productive team, and a team that delivers again and again for us. You know, at this moment in time, I don't think myself and Charmaine could be any happier with who works with us. And they don't work for us.

And that's why I said with us, Dave. You know, we really try and bring them on the journey with us. We listen to them.

They all have great ideas. You know, I've been in the industry 15 years and so has Charmaine. So you'd think that we'd seen it all and done it all, but we haven't.

And our team, you know, we try to encourage them, we try to let them come with new ideas to the table. And we've implemented some of those new ideas to great effect. We have actually implemented an audience management pathway, which again, the team helped us produce that, helped us drive it forward.

And of course, they're now delivering that for us. So yeah, biggest hurdle, recruitment. That's not saying that the other hurdles like differentiating ourselves, visibility in the crowded marketplace, and of course, being able to work with cash flow challenges, should we say.

I think, yeah, I think recruitment's up there ahead of those, but they're all still huge hurdles.

And Charmaine, what about you? What were the hurdles that you found most challenging?

Yeah, so for me, the biggest hurdle is, when I've worked for competitor companies or any other company actually, you have different departments specializing in different things for obvious reasons. Finance doing finance, HR doing HR, training departments giving training. We as a relatively new startup or now, I suppose, a fledgling company, are trying to do all of that ourselves with the knowledge that we have.

Myself and Glenn can run an event. We have the knowledge to put an event on from start to finish and do a really good job. Do we know how to run a company?

Not really, actually. Not having that knowledge about accounts, not having that knowledge necessarily around HR. And you're trying to tickle these boxes and get it all right and do what's right by the company for yourselves and your staff, while still trying to actually run the company.

And like Glenn said, we're a really small team, team of six, all trying to run the events, find the venues, sort the food, get in touch with our clients, book flights. And that for me is the hurdle, is actually the learning curve of what's a priority, what needs to be done, but also ensuring that we are giving our clients the experience of A, they pay for or B, that they're attending. So I've learned a lot in the past 18 months, then the real nitty gritty of actually just running a business that actually you probably take for granted when you're just a normal employee doing a day-to-day role.

You know, myself and Glenn have to really sit down and say, what this needs doing? You know, we need to contact HMRC, we need to contact our accountants, we need to make sure that everyone's done their health and safety risk assessment. There's so much more to a business, even when you just work from home, that you do take for granted.

And I suppose for me, as well as the obvious that Glenn has said, revenue, it's actually just getting it right and making sure you're doing a good job for your clients, yourselves and your staff.

Well, that certainly sounds like a lot of multitasking and learning new skills along the way. So Charmaine, staying with you, how do you see CXO Portals influencing the future of executive networking and knowledge sharing?

So I would say for us, it's not forcing our agenda on our clients. We're letting them share their agenda. You know, we really do listen.

The beauty of our events is that they're very interactive. They're incredibly engaging. We are not advocates of death by PowerPoint.

Any of our speakers, we vet. You know, we vet our attendees. We make sure they're going to be a good fit.

Will they follow the flow of an event? Are they going to be inspiring, engaging? You know, for us, it's not necessarily around the brand.

It's around the experience and what they can bring to the conversation. A lot of our advisory boards aren't in roles at the moment, but that doesn't mean to say that they've lost their experience. And that's what we absolutely love about our advisory board.

They are there to advise. You know, they give us continued support forever. So for us, the influence that we can bring to our clients is that we're letting them benchmark and be kind of the leaders of what an event will look like.

We can absolutely put together a title and a synopsis and go after the right people, but we have these conversations to ensure that they can bring value and they're going to learn. So our dinners and our sessions that we host in person are always interactive. You know, it's a chance for everyone around the room to share their story, give an example, have a voice.

So we're kind of influencing how networking is done by not having people sit in an audience and just be talked to and talked at. They're engaging. You know, if someone's giving a business case, they are providing it to those in the audience that will actually learn from that business case and can take it back to that organization and use it and improve on the way that they perhaps are working from the learnings that they're going to get.

And it's so important for us that all of our attendee's actually learn something from our events. There's nothing worse than going somewhere and not learning something new. And that's why we say to all of our speakers and our solution providers when they are showcasing, you know, engage with the audience, ask questions, make sure it's on the level, make sure people can understand it, but also take it back professionally, personally.

And for us, it's certainly around the educating of generations to come. So we're trying to change the status quo by not just bringing people into a room and leaving them kind of fight it out.  For us, it's about bringing the right people in the room, the right level, and getting them to network on a real high level, but with learnings at the forefront.

So Glenn, my last question for you, what is next for CXO Portals and where do you see CXO Portals in the next five years from now?

Gosh, big question. I suppose it's sometimes hard to say that. It has been, it's been a very enjoyable time setting up CXO Portals with Charmaine and going forward with it.

But it's also, we've had our challenging moments as we talked about, we've had difficulties there. So looking at five years in the future, when sometimes I'm looking two months in the future and thinking, right, what are we gonna be doing next? But I think for us, we want to grow the brand, obviously.

We want to get more well known. We want to be a global brand. So we'd like to be, you know, do more events around the Middle East, in Southeast Asia, North America.

You know, we have held events already as a small company, you know, from San Francisco to Melbourne, and every city in between. But I think for us, it's about reputation. It's about people understanding that CXO Portals is an event they want to go to.

I think if in five years time, if I could go forward five years and look back at what has happened in the last five years, I think where I'd be really happy is for us to be an event company of trust. That, you know, executives choose to come to our events rather than us, you know, targeting people and bringing the minds together. We actually have people who are putting it in their calendar.

You know, I always look over at Gartner, and I'm always with a bit of jealousy. They've got legacy. They've got a great event they do annually.

And it's one of those annual events that you know that solution providers feel they have to be there, because it's a Gartner event. We know that people market in their calendars and get their tickets early to go to Gartner because it is, you know, a really big event of thought leadership and so forth. And, you know, whether it is or not is another thing.

But that's the reputation that they have in the marketplace. I think in five years from now, if we've got that reputation, we've grown to a great level. We've got, you know, people in positions all over the globe who are working on events globally in those different regions.

That's where I'd be really pleased. Myself and Charmaine, I've got a huge passion for events. We absolutely love what we do.

Otherwise, there's no way we'd both be working 16 hours a day, six days a week, if we didn't love it. So we both really love what we're doing. So I think if CXO Portals can, I suppose, display that love and show everyone who comes to our events that they can feel that they can enjoy the event, they can have a great time, they can learn something new, they can make partnerships that they maybe wouldn't have made if they hadn't come to our event.

I think for me, that's exactly where I'd like it to go, and exactly where I want it to be.

And finally, Charmaine, for the listeners who want to get involved and learn more, what's the best way to contact you and Glenn and explore more of CXO Portals?

So naturally, they can reach out to us both on LinkedIn. We use LinkedIn daily. That's kind of our Bible for networking and sharing what we're doing within CXO and within the team, but also reaching out to our clients and our potential attendees.

So certainly, they can get in touch via LinkedIn. You know, our email is always the same. It will be first name at cxoportals.com.

Get in touch that way, but also just on our website. Our website details exactly what we are, you know, details about us, our upcoming events, our advisory board. We've got 20-plus fantastic C-level execs on our advisory board.

You know, you can have a look over that. It shares about the brand, the AI Now brand, which is around our AI conferences that we're hosting. And then it's just got the newsfeed as well.

So, you know, they certainly have a little look on there, and then you can get in touch that way. And that goes through to our info at the email address that we can monitor. But it's not just us that they can get in touch with.

Anybody can get in touch with any of the team. You know, Phil Ashwell oversees sales, and then you've got Trea Mystery, Scott Raven, and then the head of delegates, Roberta Wallbank. They oversee the delegates.

Get in touch with them as well. They are really knowledgeable about the products. They are really knowledgeable about the conference.

They are advocates, as Glenn has said, of CXO, and they are testament, actually, to the success that we have so far as a small company. Everybody is all hands to the pump. But we'd love to hear from people.

We'd love to sort of speak with clients that perhaps you can't find normally, a needle in a haystack kind of scenario. But we'd also love to work with some real biggies, you know, like the Oracles of the World and the IBMs. Like Glenn said, Gartner is a name for us.

It's also to work with some really big clients. So we'd love to hear from people, but LinkedIn is probably the best, or email if you want to reach myself or Glenn.

Well, that's fantastic. Thank you both so much for talking with me today. It's been a pleasure to learn more about CXO Portals and this amazing journey that you've been on since its formation.

Thank you once again for being part of the Inspiring Tech Leaders podcast.

Thank you, Dave. That's been really enjoyable.

Thanks, Dave. It's been great to actually share our story and hopefully show a bit more about ourselves and let people know what we're about.

If you've enjoyed today's episode of the Inspiring Tech Leaders podcast, don't forget to subscribe and leave a review. Thanks again for listening and until next time, stay curious, stay connected and keep pushing the boundaries of what's possible in tech.