Our Past Speakers

	Karen Swinden MD of The Hothive

Karen Swinden
MD of The Hothive – Beating the recession

Karen Swinden has over 25 years' experience of working in the publishing industry. She started her career as a business journalist and took a gigantic risk in 1990, in the depths of recession, by becoming a founding partner of Kable Ltd, an events and magazine and online publishing company.  She and her team succeeded despite heavy odds and sold the company for a substantial amount to the Guardian Media Group in 2007.

Now the managing director of HotHive, a book publishing company, she is tasked with growing the business five-fold over the next five years. Having started and grown SMEs through three recessions, join us to hear her expand on her belief that smaller companies have a better chance of surviving difficult economic conditions if they keep to three golden rules: being able to adjust products/services to changing market conditions in as short a timeframe as possible; encouraging an entrepreneurial spirit across the entire team; and that being boring and safe is never the answer!