Rick

Twenty years of building businesses from the ground up - co-founding 21six Group and guiding Platform Media through the UK podcast market's biggest ever deal. Now helping other founders do the same.

Rick started his first business in 2006 - a print management company he built alongside his wife, Amanda. That partnership grew into 21six Group, developing, nurturing and acquiring companies across media, publishing and technology over the next two decades.

The biggest test came with Platform Media, which he co-founded and helped guide through some of the most difficult years a business can face. When it was acquired by global podcast group PodX in 2024 - the largest deal in the UK podcast market at the time - Rick put the success down to something simple:

"We developed this business through some of the most difficult times of our generation. The reason for its success has been our absolute focus on the human element of business. Personally, I have only ever been interested in working with good people."

That instinct - that the people matter more than the playbook - runs through everything Rick has built since, and is one of the core beliefs at Volando. He's spent two decades founding, scaling and exiting businesses across media, sport and wellness, and has come to understand the messy middle of growth better than most: the stage where things are working, but not quite working how they should be, and there's more at stake than there was at the start.

He co-founded Volando because he kept seeing good businesses either getting advice that never translated into action, or bringing in M&A support too late, once value had already been left on the table. It's the kind of support, he says, he would have wanted himself.