In Season Six of Doing the Opposite: Business Disruptors we’re turning the spotlight onto host of the podcast Jeff Dewing. Jeff is Founder and CEO of Cloudfm Group, keynote speaker, bestselling author, and a leader who rebuilt his life and company by doing the one thing most people fear: the opposite.

In this episode, Jeff and Sam explore what legacy really means to a leader; not as a monument to personal achievement, but as the living proof of the people you’ve empowered to thrive without you. Jeff opens with Turn the Ship Around, the story of a struggling US Navy submarine that became the fleet’s best performer once its new captain stopped granting permission and started demanding intent. The lesson, Jeff argues, translates directly to any organisation: specialists own their craft, and the leader’s job is to provide context and remove friction.

Jeff traces how grief, reflection, and a Vistage CEO peer group helped him move from instinct to language, from knowing what good culture felt like to being able to articulate it, measure it, and embed it across the business. He shares how, after losing his father in 2017, he made a decision that changed everything: stop being a machine and start trusting the people around him. The result was going from 300 emails a day to three a week. His message to leaders who fear flexible working is blunt: if your people are killing time, the failure is yours, not theirs.

From there, Jeff makes the case for leaving ego at the door. He used to ask his teams to physically remove their shoes before entering a meeting room as a daily reminder that responsibility doesn’t make anyone better than anyone else. He names curiosity as the single most powerful leadership trait: be the last person to speak, ask what others think, and assume everyone in the room knows something you don’t. It’s a habit that keeps him close to people who think completely differently to him, and it’s where most of his learning comes from.

Jeff closes with Ikigai - the Japanese framework that helped him define success not as results, but as fulfilment. When his leadership team debates a hard call and someone asks, “What would Jeff do?” the answer is always the same: he’d ask what you would do. And when Sam gives him the pen and paper to write down the one message he’d send to any young entrepreneur, it takes just five words: It’s not about you.

In 2026 Cloudfm Group celebrates its 15th anniversary.

Find out more about Cloudfm here.

Hosted by Sam Walker

Watch the podcast on YouTube

Discover Cloudfm Group:

Website | LinkedIn

Find the best-selling book Doing The Opposite by Jeff Dewing HERE

In Season Six of Doing the Opposite: Business Disruptors we’re turning the spotlight onto host of the podcast Jeff Dewing. Jeff is Founder and CEO of Cloudfm Group, keynote speaker, bestselling author, and a leader who rebuilt his life and company by doing the one thing most people fear: the opposite.

In this episode, Jeff and Sam explore what it truly means to do the right thing in business - not as a PR exercise or a tick-box, but as a daily habit that reshapes culture, attracts talent and creates real competitive advantage. Jeff traces his own turning point to 2015, when a childhood memory of two lungs in a pharmacy window, one black, one pink, collided with his love of petrol engines and he could no longer justify the roar of a V8 over the health of the people around him. From that moment, he went fully electric personally and then drove the same shift across the entire Cloudfm fleet.

Jeff unpacks ESG beyond the jargon and brings it to life through the story of CloudFest: a solar-powered event for 250 people that produced just one bin liner of non-recyclable waste. The lesson was simple - it didn’t cost more money, it just required focus. And the pride that followed rippled back into everyday office behaviour, shaping how people saw themselves and the organisation they worked for.

Jeff and Sam consider the cultural pushback on ESG playing out in parts of the world. Jeff’s response is to point to norms that have already shifted permanently: nobody throws litter from a car window or lights a cigarette in a restaurant anymore, not because they were told to stop, but because the culture changed. The same trajectory is possible for ESG. His message to leaders is direct: find someone who cares deeply about it, appoint them, set goals you can measure, and let ethics quietly guide every decision.

In 2026 Cloudfm Group celebrates its 15th anniversary.

Find out more about Cloudfm here.

Hosted by Sam Walker

Watch the podcast on YouTube

Discover Cloudfm Group:

Website | LinkedIn

Find the best-selling book Doing The Opposite by Jeff Dewing HERE

In Season Six of Doing the Opposite: Business Disruptors we’re turning the spotlight onto host of the podcast Jeff Dewing. Jeff is Founder and CEO of Cloudfm Group, keynote speaker, bestselling author, and a leader who rebuilt his life and company by doing the one thing most people fear: the opposite.

What happens when you stop chasing numbers and start solving problems? Jeff and Sam explore why purpose-driven leadership isn’t just a feel-good philosophy but a practical strategy that changed everything at Cloudfm. Drawing on his years in corporate environments where financial targets trumped client outcomes, Jeff explains the moment he decided no one would ever be fired for missing their numbers—and how that single shift unlocked a culture built on honesty and accountability. Using the Carillion collapse as a cautionary tale of what happens when reported performance drifts from reality, he shows why truth has to be baked into the operating system, not bolted on afterwards.

They dig into the hard work behind defining a company purpose, including a gruelling three-day offsite that produced one sentence the entire team could carry: restore trust in a failing industry by changing the rules. Jeff walks through how values—humility, integrity, empathy, and freedom—were given plain-language definitions so they could be lived rather than laminated, and why saying no to misaligned clients protects the system that creates real value. Day to day, it comes down to a single rule on the wall: do the right thing, whatever it costs.

Culture becomes the engine for growth. Jeff shares how listening to detractors instead of removing them lifted employee engagement from around forty percent to eighty-five percent, and why the most engaged company on the planet makes oil in a can. They unpack why engagement must be measured at the manager level, how coaching replaces command-and-control, and what it means to invert the traditional pyramid so frontline teams can act fast for customers. Profit and purpose are not in competition here—profit emerges as the byproduct of solving meaningful problems with integrity and speed.

In 2026 Cloudfm Group celebrates its 15th anniversary.

Find out more about Cloudfm here.

Hosted by Sam Walker

Watch the podcast on YouTube

Discover Cloudfm Group:

Website | LinkedIn

Find the best-selling book Doing The Opposite by Jeff Dewing HERE