Sponsors and solution providers get a straight-talking guide to maximising their 1:1 meetings. Expect insider advice on framing conversations, understanding retailer priorities, and standing out as a trusted partner.

The conditions that made growth easier have disappeared. Cheap capital, forgiving customers, wide margins—all gone. Costs are harder to absorb, customers more deliberate, and familiar levers deliver less. This keynote examines how sustained pressure changes decision quality: where do assumptions break? How does complexity quietly erode performance? And why do small choices now carry consequences that compound faster than expected? A sharp reset for leaders who need to decide what matters, what to protect, and what to stop when there are no easy wins left.

Hailed as one of the most rewarding parts of the summit, business connect involves 5 x 10 minute meetings designed to float topline objectives and explore synergies. Delegates are required to request and confirm these meetings prior to the summit.

The official Welcome Dinner & networking reception held on the first night is the perfect avenue to build relationships with key conference delegates, speakers, and sponsors in a more relaxed atmosphere. 

Dinner Keynote | Leading When It’s Hard - Building Trust When Pressure Doesn’t Lift

Pressure affects more than strategy. It affects people. Confidence dips, energy thins, and teams look for clarity when the path forward isn't obvious. This session reflects on leading through sustained challenge: how trust is built when conditions stay tough, how to keep teams moving without burning them out, and why consistency, presence, and honesty matter more than big gestures. A grounded conversation about the small leadership behaviors that hold teams together when the pressure doesn't lift.

Day 2 begins with breakfast and barista coffee!

Hailed as one of the most rewarding parts of the summit, business connect involves 5 x 10 minute meetings designed to float topline objectives and explore synergies. Delegates are required to request and confirm these meetings prior to the summit.

Most retailers know where their biggest costs sit. Rent, wages, marketing, freight. What they don't see is where margin quietly disappears through operational complexity, silent inefficiencies, and invisible trade-offs that compound over time.

This session exposes the hidden P&L: the 2-5% of revenue that leaks through payment failures, returns fraud, inventory write-offs, promotional errors, delivery subsidies that don't drive incremental sales, and tech sprawl that adds cost without adding capability. These aren't dramatic failures. They're structural blindspots that worsen under pressure.

Rather than generic efficiency advice, this examines where to look, what to measure, and how to build visibility into costs that don't trigger alarms until they've already eroded margin. A practical reset for leaders who suspect they're leaving money on the table but can't pinpoint where.

Join us for lunch before you head out on your afternoon activities. Please also use this time to go back to your room and get changed for your activity if required.

Day 3 begins with breakfast and barista coffee!

Retail failure no longer comes from obvious mistakes. It comes from doing the right things in the wrong sequence, at the wrong scale, or for too long. Across global markets, retailers that appear disciplined, modern, and well-run still lose edge. Not because they lack capability, but because optimization quietly reshapes behavior, economics, and differentiation. This keynote examines: how best practice turns into sameness, why alignment can weaken advantage, where optimization creates fragility, and what separates retailers that keep compounding from those that plateau. No new frameworks. Only uncomfortable truths about what changes once competence becomes the baseline.

Alignment creates momentum. Momentum creates pressure. Pressure creates activity. Over time, retail organizations confuse progress with motion, layering initiatives without questioning what they're replacing. The result isn't confusion. It's dilution. Focus thins, ownership blurs, and outcomes soften even as effort increases. This session explores how leaders recognize when action reinforces strategy vs quietly erodes it, and why restraint has become one of the most undervalued capabilities in modern retail execution.

Strong retail teams move with confidence, but confidence isn't always proven. Early indicators, promising pilots, and anecdotal wins can quickly turn into conviction, especially under pressure. Over time, belief sets direction, investment follows, and assumptions stop being questioned. This session examines how confident decisions quietly outpace evidence, and why some of the most costly retail commitments are made not in moments of doubt, but in moments of certainty.

Take a break and refuel with morning tea.

Modern retail strategy assumes progress comes from improving everything at once: experience, efficiency, personalisation, speed, margin, loyalty. In reality, retailers make trade-offs constantly, whether they acknowledge them or not. When everything is treated as critical, something important is always compromised quietly. This session explores how retailers are implicitly choosing what to protect and what to sacrifice, often without realizing it. It examines where trade-offs show up across customer experience, cost-to-serve, team capability, and brand equity, and how unspoken compromises shape outcomes more than strategy ever does. Rather than solutions, this surfaces the choices retailers are already making by default, and the consequences that follow when those choices remain unexamined.

Retail stories are usually told from the vantage point of success. This conversation focuses on the gap between intention and outcome. Retail leaders reflect on decisions that were well-reasoned, widely supported, and carefully planned, yet produced unexpected or disappointing results once they met reality. The discussion explores what those moments revealed about customers, teams, and the organization itself, and how judgment evolved as a result. The focus isn't on failure, but on learning that only emerges after action, and how leaders recalibrate when real-world consequences contradict internal confidence.