Grant Kelly is the business co-founder of a virtual roundtable company: Xpanse Connect. Since completing his studies at UCW, he has since gone on to have many roles, including working in Zante for Thomas Cook, working in a car dealership, as well as working at another events organisation where he worked his way up to Head of Performance and managed a team of approximately 40 people.
Whilst working for the events company, Grant met Ben. They had some experience with virtual roundtables within their role at the time; however, Grant stated that “One evening, after a few beers, we decided that we could probably do it better ourselves”.
After this in January 2024, they co-founded Xpanse from Grant’s spare room. After some growth, they now have a total of 11 employees working out of an office in Central Bristol, planning to grow to 20 employees within the coming months, likely needing a bigger office fairly soon.
Xpanse was operating as a virtual roundtables service for senior executives. The goal of this enterprise is to bring leaders together to share best practices in order to discuss issues and nominated topics to better equip themselves to grow as businesses through their co-operation.
Each session is sponsored by companies such as Thomson Reuters, Nintex, Palo Alto and RingCentral. The goal of Xpanse that sets them above the competition is their premise of genuine executive dialogue rather than simple sales pitches for maximised session value for all parties.
Grant said: “It has been good fun. A bit of a rollercoaster at times. There is plenty of stress, but you learn a lot from the challenges and there is a big responsibility when you are employing people.”
“UCW helped by giving me the extra support I needed. I am dyslexic, so the team helped me learn to read and write at an academic level. That made a massive difference and gave me the foundation to get into business”.
He also found that the highlight of studying at UCW was the supportive nature of the staff as well as the trips, naming the amazing trip he experienced to Gambia.
If like Grant, you would like to study at UCW, you can find our courses, here.
