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Harriet Beveridge

Executive Coach, Stand-Up Comic, and Author

‘Will It Make The Boat Go Faster? Olympic-Winning Strategies for Everyday Success’, a guide for success in business and life, drawn from the story of Great Britain’s Gold-Medal winning rowing team
Acclaimed and award-winning stand-up comic, boasting three renowned solo shows at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival as well as a nationwide beloved Radio 4 Talk
Amassed more than 20 years of experience in coaching individuals, teams, and entire workplaces to achieve peak performance and success in a variety of fields

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Harriet Beveridge is a coach, stand-up comic and best-selling author of Will It Make The Boat Go Faster? Olympic-Winning Strategies for Everyday Success. Her energetic, accessible, style engages audiences from the boardroom to the shop floor. She is adept at building rapport and creating a warm, buzzing atmosphere. She makes the audiences howl with laughter, whilst delivering powerful, practical messages they can implement easily.

As a stand-up comic, Harriet’s Radio 4 talk exhorting us to ‘take humour more seriously’ was chosen as a pick of the week and she has been asked to deliver an upcoming TEDx talk. She is a Funny Women Award semi-finalist and regular WOMAD festival MC. She’s taken three critically acclaimed solo shows to the Edinburgh Festival Fringe. ‘Fresh and relaxed...hilarious’ Fringe Review. She’s even written a spoof nanny-advice book called Turnip Led Weaning. As a coach, Harriet has more than 20 years’ experience, helping individuals, teams and organisations to achieve stellar performance.

Harriet is an experienced MC in both the comedy and business worlds. She has a strong track record in keeping conferences ‘glued together’ – providing seamless segue between speakers, effective Q&A management and facilitation of panel discussions. She manages the energy levels of the audience so that interest and interaction is maintained. She has a huge bank of energisers and mini-exercises to inject relevant activities which will build on the messages of your conference whilst also getting delegates talking and collaborating.

Harriet has a number of clean stand up comedy sets, suitable for the corporate world. She will work with you before the event to craft bespoke jokes to suit your context and people. She has a range of jokes about the trials and tribulations of the corporate world, as well as a set specifically focussed on the challenges of women in business.

Her best-selling book, Will it Make The Boat Go Faster? has garnered rave reviews from both the sporting and business world – from Sebastian Coe to Lord Digby Jones - and been rated 5 stars by Amazon reviewers. It has also spawned a highly successful coaching consultancy of the same name. Harriet graduated from Oxford University with a degree in Philosophy, Politics, and Economics and has raised nearly 100,000 pounds for various charities throughout the years. Her self-described life’s mission is to save the world and “be back in time for tea.”

Stand Up! How humour can help you raise your game. Harriet believes that we don’t take humour seriously enough, it’s a woefully misunderstood and under-appreciated tool. This laugh-out-loud keynote has a profound underpinning. Harriet shares comedians’ techniques which the audience can apply in their contexts to challenge the status quo, build rapport or deal with the unexpected. Delegates will walk away able to be constructively irreverent, and to find the humour and the opportunity in the most challenging situations.

Will It Make The Boat Go Faster? Olympic-winning strategies for everyday success. How to stay focussed on what’s important, build belief and work as a team. When Harriet first met Olympic Gold medallist, Ben Hunt-Davis, she was hugely sceptical of the relevance of sport to business and life. Once she’d seen the spectacular results, however, she co-wrote a book about applicable strategies and talks passionately about the simple, powerful, Olympic-Winning Strategies we can all use to drive success. At the heart of this keynote is a message of focussing on what’s important, building self-belief and working as a team.