As ex-CEO of the award-winning marketing consultancy, Stephanie Melodia is ranked as one of the UK's Most Influential Female Founders. Following the success of her business, Stephanie now serves as MBA faculty in Entrepreneurship and advises select private scale-up clients. 

Her eye-opening signature topic, Hacking Luck™, features research-backed insights, real-world stories, plus unique frameworks & formulas to stack the odds in our favour.

Trusted by global brands like Soho House, Qatar Airways, WeTransfer, Harvey Nash Group, and international conferences like Web Summit, TechBBQ, and Women in Tech, Stephanie brings a special kind of energy to her bold keynotes and dynamic workshops. 

Her talks on innovation, resilience, and creativity have been described as "pithy, positive and insightful" by Oli Barrett MBE, "engaging, informative, and insightful" by Rupert Englander of WeTransfer, and "engaging, professional, and talented" by Elissa Karakalla of Web Summit. She has a combined social media following of 20,000.

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Top 20 Most Influential Female Founders

Luck Is Not a Strategy, But It Might Be a Skill

The Advice Economy

The Conference Circuit Has a Women Problem, and Its Not the One You Think

We Need to Talk About What We Don’t Tell Founders

Substack: Hacking Luck™

Steph Melodia's Podcast Appearances (Playlist)

Forbes: The fastest path to your next 10 clients ft. Stephanie Melodia

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HACKING LUCK™ | MBA Faculty & Guest Lecturer in Entrepreneurship | Accelerating innovation

Stephanie Melodia

Flexible depending on the event

Engaging & Grounded

Keynote

Fireside chat / moderated conversation

Panel participation

Workshop / breakout session

Host / emcee

Inspire & Motivate

Educate & Upskill

30 min

45 min

60 min

90 min

Insights + Action

Business Growth

Business Model Innovation

Change

Future of Work

Branding

Digital Marketing

Marketing

Social Media

Adaptability

Crisis Management

Empowerment

“The horse has already bolted.”“It’s here, whether you like it or not.”“Get with it or lose out.”The story we’re being told about AI could not be more disempowering. It casts leaders and their teams as passengers: brace for impact - upskill, or be left behind.Here’s the problem with that story: people are calling this shift bigger than the Industrial Revolution, and it’s the first real chance in centuries to re-write how we work. We don’t have to let the tidal wave of Big Tech wash over us. We can take charge and write our own rules.The Industrial Revolution gave us the factory clock: linear hours, standardised output, productivity as the measure of a person’s worth. For 200 years, that made sense. Then machines learned to do linear work better than we ever could.So why are we still asking our people to compete on it?We must play games we can win. And if AI is winning the productivity game, it’s time to rethink our strategy for 2027.In 1930, John Maynard Keynes predicted that within a century the productivity problem would be solved, leaving humanity with its real challenge: “the art of life itself”. That deadline is 2030. The question for every people leader is whether their organisation arrives ready.Burnt out? Fed up of working like a robot? Neurodivergent? Uninspired? Leading a team that is?If you said yes to any of those, I have good news: the skills that matter most now are the ones the factory clock trained out of us.Productivity optimises the average. Opportunity lives in the outliers. Pluchino, Biondo and Rapisarda’s “Talent vs Luck” simulations found that the most successful people are rarely the most talented; they’re the ones exposed to the most lucky breaks. In a power-law world, you cannot grind your way to outsized returns. And as AI outputs converge on the average, the scarce inputs become distinctly human: the willingness to bear risk, the trust built through relationships, and the idiosyncratic thinking that creativity and neurodiversity bring.Hacking Luck™ re-imagines how we want to work in the Age of AI, and how we manage, motivate and get the best out of our teams. Its eight principles are Agency, Openness, Positivity, Resilience, Network, Visibility, Risks and Zagging. They draw on peer-reviewed research from Dr Richard Wiseman, Dr Nobuko Nakano, Daniel Kahneman and Mark Granovetter, plus firsthand data from 100s of entrepreneurs, and together they form a strategy for success in the latter half of the 2020s and beyond.People leaders will leave with:<ul><li>Why the productivity obsession is a mean strategy in a tail-distributed world, and what to reward instead</li><li>How to redesign work around the human comparative advantage: creativity, relationships and judgement</li><li>The 10% network hack, and how weak ties create the unexpected connections AI can’t</li><li>How to build strategic visibility, so the right work gets seen by the right people</li><li>How to make intelligent risk-taking and “zagging” (the seemingly illogical action) part of team culture</li><li>How to strengthen resilience and restore a sense of agency in teams running on change fatigue</li></ul>This isn’t anti-AI. It’s about grabbing this opportunity with both hands: making the most of this new revolution, and reclaiming our control and sense of agency in the process.Available as a 60-minute keynote, a 90-minute workshop or masterclass, or a 3-month programme for leadership, sales and innovation teams.

Hacking Luck™ in the Age of AI: The New Rules for Productivity & Growth

The way customers discover and choose brands is changing faster than at any point since the arrival of the internet. Buyers who once searched, compared a handful of websites and weighed up prices are now asking ChatGPT, Claude and Perplexity for a recommendation and acting on the answer. Meanwhile, social feeds are more crowded than ever and every marketing pound has to prove its worth. In this practical, interactive masterclass, Stephanie Melodia shows founders and marketing leaders how to build a brand that cuts through, and how to make sure it gets found and recommended in an AI-first world.The session moves through four connected areas. Each one opens with a round of “true or false” to bust the most common myths, then focuses on what actually works.Brand: your rootsA brand is not a logo, a colour palette or a set of fonts, and you already have one whether you created it deliberately or not. Using examples from Tony’s Chocolonely, Careem and Harley-Davidson, Stephanie unpacks how a strong brand drives higher profit, price premium and valuation. You’ll work through your MVVP (mission, vision, values and purpose, including what you are not), find your brand archetype mix, narrow down to a maximum of three keyword associations, define a sharply specific ideal customer and write an internal positioning statement your whole team can rally around.Social: character, not corporateNot everyone sees everything you post, and posting more doesn’t automatically mean more traffic. Drawing on Duolingo’s rise, Stephanie explores why audiences engage with personality rather than preaching, and how smaller businesses can turn speed, customer closeness and creative freedom into their biggest advantage. Expect the Hook, Line and Sinker framework for short-form video, proven hook formats, the metrics that matter at each level of “ask” (from watch ratio to link clicks), and how to map content pillars against content types.Campaigns: triage, test, trackWhen everything feels urgent, prioritisation is a strategy in itself. Learn how to assess your situation honestly, apply an 80:20 split between what you know works and genuine experimentation, and design campaigns as experiments with a clear hypothesis, expected results and a decision tree agreed in advance. You’ll place your channels across the full funnel, from awareness to loyalty, and leave with simple tracking methods (discount codes, UTM links, dedicated landing pages or WhatsApp numbers) plus ready-to-use planning and briefing templates. AEO: being found, and trusted, by AIAnswer engine optimisation is the new frontier of discovery. With AI tools delivering recommendations directly and zero-click journeys making some traditional metrics less meaningful, ranking alone is no longer enough; brands need to be trustworthy. Stephanie walks through AEO best practice, from solid SEO foundations and llms.txt files to dedicated landing pages, Q&amp;A-format content, reviews, trusted mentions and digital PR. She’ll also show real examples of how brand presence, sentiment and ranking are tracked across ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity and Google’s AI Overviews. What you’ll leave with:<ul><li>A self-assessed baseline across brand, social, cross-platform coherence, AEO and strategic confidence</li><li>A checklist for your MVVP, archetype and keyword associations</li><li>1-2 priority channels to focus on for the next two quarters</li><li>A one-page plan for your next campaign: objective, audience, messaging, offer, budget, measurement and decision point</li><li>Your funnel mapped with metrics at every stage, and the biggest drop-off identified</li><li>A clear view of where AEO sits in your priorities, and how to start acting on it</li><li>Complimentary AEO audit</li></ul> Who it’s for:Founders, scale-up leadership teams and marketing professionals who want a joined-up strategy rather than a collection of disconnected tactics.

Marketing Masterclass: from Brand Strategy to AEO

We tend to talk about resilience as grit: keep your head down, work harder, bounce back. But the research tells a different story. The people and organisations who thrive through uncertainty aren’t the ones who simply endure the most. They’re the ones who understand how luck, risk and regret really work, and who use that understanding to recover faster, take smarter bets and create more of their own opportunities.In this research-led and highly interactive session, Stephanie Melodia introduces Hacking Luck™, her framework for turning chance into strategy. Drawing on decades of behavioural science, she shows audiences how to stop treating setbacks as something that happens to them, and start treating resilience as a skill they can practise.The Effort Myth“Work harder” is one of the most reassuring stories in business, and one of the most misleading. Physicists Pluchino, Biondo and Rapisarda modelled what drives success across a career and found the most successful individuals were rarely the most talented; they were the ones who encountered, and acted on, the most lucky breaks. Stephanie explores what this means for resilience: when effort alone doesn’t guarantee results, the real advantage lies in how many opportunities you expose yourself to, and how quickly you move when one appears.Why we play it safe (and why it costs us)Kahneman and Tversky showed that losses loom far larger in our minds than equivalent gains, and organisations inherit the same bias. In Accenture’s study of over 500 companies, 93% of executives said long-term success depends on innovation, yet only 18% felt their innovation efforts delivered a competitive edge, and almost half said their company had become more risk-averse. Stephanie unpacks how this caution quietly erodes resilience, and why the “safe” choice is often the riskiest one of all.The science of regretThomas Gilovich’s research reveals a striking pattern: in the short term, we regret the things we did; in the long run, we regret the things we didn’t do. Understanding this shift helps individuals and teams make braver decisions under pressure, and recover from mistakes without becoming paralysed by them.Rewriting the “what ifs”After a setback, our minds automatically run alternative versions of events. Neal Roese’s work on counterfactual thinking shows these “if only” thoughts can either trap us in rumination or become one of our most powerful tools for learning. Stephanie shares how to channel them deliberately, so that every disappointment becomes better preparation for the next opportunity.What audiences leave with:<ul><li>A new definition of resilience, built on adaptability and opportunity rather than endurance alone</li><li>An understanding of the biases that make people and organisations default to caution</li><li>Practical tools for reframing setbacks and using counterfactual thinking productively</li><li>A clearer, evidence-based case for calculated risk-taking, at both an individual and organisational level</li><li>Simple habits for increasing their exposure to luck, opportunity and serendipity</li></ul>Who it’s for:Leadership teams navigating change, sales and innovation teams operating under pressure, scale-up executives making high-stakes decisions, and any audience that needs to stay agile, confident and ambitious when the path ahead is uncertain. The session works as a keynote, an interactive workshop or a longer training format.

Resilience, Reframed: Hacking Luck™ when things don’t go to plan

"We recently booked Stephanie for a workshop at our business accelerator. I loved how she captivated the audience from start to finish. Her session was informative and delivered with lots of humour and thought-provoking insights. Really excited to get her back again in the future.”

Junior Ogunyemi, Enterprise Advisor at University of Greenwich

“I had the pleasure of working with Stephanie Melodia. I've been in the conference industry for 10 years, I've produced 100s if not 1,000s of events, I've worked with 100's of speakers - and I can honestly say Steph is - without a doubt - the most accomplished, confident, engaging, professional and just easy-to-get-on-with speaker. I couldn't recommend her highly enough. Her presence on stage was powerful yet friendly."

Michael Hughes, Conference Producer at TechEx Events

"As the opening keynote speaker for the Hustle Awards, Stephanie Melodia delivered a highly-inspiring talk which attendees - as well as the winners - came away from feeling like a winner. I would definitely recommend Steph as she knows exactly how to engage and inspire an audience."

Anna Wood, Editor at Startups Magazine

"It was a great joy to work with Steph, both on a professional and on a human level. This keynote speech was absolutely fantastic - so much energy, enthusiasm, interaction, and motivation. We all got really, really positive feedback from the attendees. Thank you for coming to Bolzano, for your passion, your inspiration, and just being an inspirational woman!"

Sonja Tetter, Producer, NOI TechPark

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