Grace Beverley is the founder of three businesses – SHREDDY, TALA and The Productivity Method – and the co-founder of AI-powered talent agent Retrograde.
The businesses employ around 100 people and are reported to have a collective value of £70m.
She’s the host of the chart-topping podcast ‘Working Hard with Grace Beverley’ and the author of the bestselling book ‘Working Hard, Hardly Working’.
Beverley has around 3m social media followers – including 1.1m on Instagram – and has raised in excess of $14m in investment.
According to the Speakers’ Corner website she commands between £10k-£15k for speaking fees and has just got married in the South of France.
All this and she’s still only 28.
Yesterday she added speaking at the 2025 Web Summit in Lisbon twice in an hour to her growing list of achievements.
But what did we learn about Grace Margaret Beverley from her twin appearances at Europe’s biggest tech event?
Fresh from last week’s opening of TALA’s second London store, Beverley made her first Web Summit appearance on the main stage alongside fellow social media influencer, entrepreneur, actor and CEO of CrossCheck Studios, Josh Richards, in a panel entitled ‘Next-gen boardroom’.
Befitting for someone who has written a book at productivity, she immediately hotfooted it across the site to stage 15 for a one-on-one interview with host Lucy Blakiston, CEO of the Shit You Should Care About media company.
Beverley came across as an accomplished speaker on both sets but particularly the second, where she had more time.
Like all good entrepreneurs she has a good story to tell and she sticks to it.
After watching her I read an interview she did with the Financial Times in July this year – headlined ‘TALA founder: ‘We weren’t going make payroll – so I sold my car’ – and it was basically the same narrative.
It didn’t make her story any less compelling to hear but what struck me about Beverley was she knows what she wants to say and she knows how to stay it.
The seeds to her burgeoning business empire can be traced back to 2015 when she undertook an internment at IBM as a new client acquisition analyst.
She received a perfect score in her end-of-placement evaluation and was invited to extend her stay at the tech giant.
More significant was what she did away from IBM.
“I was selling £5 recipe books here and there,” she told the audience. “They were eBooks and digital products. I’d spend my whole Saturday making 8-10 recipes, taking photos and posting them on Instagram.
“I started to sell these products. Fast forward a year and that was probably making me £500. I was really excited by that because I was an intern and £500 was £500.”
The following year she went to university in Oxford when a single letter changed the direction of her life.
Grace Beverley in interview with Lucy Blakiston at Web Summit
“In my first term at university I get a letter from the bursar saying that my student loan hadn’t been received and I was not allowed back on campus until they received my £9,000,” she told host Blakiston (although she shared exactly the same memory on the main stage).
“I was obviously quite shocked and stressed because that was meant to be coming straight from the government.
“I thought ‘what do I know that can make some money?’ I decided to sell workout guides. I literally stayed up until 5am making those workout guides. I paid my friend, who was a graphic design student, £50 to mock them up and make them look nice.
“Then I put them on sale a week later. I was quite particular about the marketing and the messaging I was using. I said they were only available for x amount of time. You kind of had to get them before that date.
“On the first day alone they made £14,500. It completely blew me away.”
The rest, as they say, is history.
Within two weeks the venture generated a reported £80,000 in revenue and Beverley never needed to worry about her student loan again.
“The whole thing felt absolutely unbelievable,” she said. “I could not imagine that could almost have been pulled out of thin air.”
The young Beverley opted to keep her success under wraps.
“I wasn’t doing something that was considered respectful at the time, particularly at the university I was at,” she said. “A. You weren’t allowed a job; B. It wasn’t considered aspirational to be on social media and selling on social media.
“It didn’t feel like something I should be shouting about. Pretty much no-one knew until I bought my house two years later.”
In 2016 she launched the fitness app SHREDDY, which also sells its own range of supplements.
Beverley recognised the value of story-telling to different audiences.
For example, on SHREDDY’s Instagram account a glamorous photo of the bride-to-be is accompanied by the headline: ‘Inside Grace Beverley’s Wedding Prep.’
Switch over to her TikTok account and her pinned video is from her wedding and has had 6.7m views.
It’s classic horses for courses and reminded me of the way Diary Of A CEO podcast host Steven Bartlett tailors his content to the target audience.
In 2019 the fitness entrepreneur launched her own sustainable activewear brand TALA, which moved away from the idea of fast fashion.
The company has a combined Instagram and TikTok audience of 700k and in 2024 raised a fresh £5m investment but a seven-month process.
Raising investment is like driving on a motorway while building the car
Beverley, who also launched The Productivity Method to help people improve their productivity, admitted to being slightly obsessed.
“Entrepreneurship is not glamorous at all,” she said. “You have to have an element of obsession to carry it through. A lot of the time it’s illogical to want to make something out of nothing when there are so many more secure careers you can go down.”
But she added: “Just because you’re obsessed by something doesn’t mean you need to be doing it all the time. It doesn’t mean you have to do it at the expense of every other single thing in your life.
“That’s what I’ve learnt in the past two years especially. Obsession is important but so is consistency and so is being true to yourself.”
Beverley’s second interview ended by discussing her latest business – Retrograde – which she co-founded in 2024.
One of the buzz themes at Web Summit has been ‘creators’ and Retrograde plays to that.
“Retrograde is essentially an AI talent agent,” she said. “There are 200 million creatives in the world and there are definitely not 200 million great agents. People are not earning their worth.”
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Retrograde’s mission is to create an AI alternative to talent management for creators and last year raised $2m in pre-seed funding.
After joining the audience on both of Beverley’s appearances at Web Summit I would have much preferred one longer 40-minute interview rather than two superficial ones that barely scratched the surface.
As for Beverley herself, she’s as impressive as she is formidable. She’d be the perfect personality for the panel of Dragons’ Den but that will be dwarfed by what she achieves in business.
Grace Beverley: An entrepreneur for our age,