Welcome to Any Other Business. Thank you for joining us for this special episode. I believe this is the first time we've ever had a guest on any other business, hopefully the first of many. And what a guest we are kicking off with. We are joined today by Sarah Field. Sarah is on the board of trustees at Sandams International. Now, in yesterday's episode of the property podcast,

you heard about the incredible work that they do and the incredible work that we are all going

to do together to build a sand dam. So you can go and listen to that episode and you can donate

if you haven't already at Property Hub.net slash water. But before doing that, Sarah had an

incredible business story. Sarah was the co-founder of a business

called Little Kickers, which a lot of people, especially if you've got kids, will have heard of.

And the story of how that business started and how it grew is amazing. So Rob recently caught up with

Sarah to hear that story and hear how that turned into the Sandams project that we're all getting

involved in now. Sarah, thank you so much for joining this on the podcast today. I've heard your story before, and the reason I've asked you on the podcast is because I want other people to hear it as well. I think it's an amazing story from a business that possibly wasn't intended. It wasn't like a vision that you had five years before and then we're

like going to go, oh, I must start this. We'll tell that story in a minute. But before we get to

your business journey and then your incredible work with Sandams, how did it all begin? You don't

have to take us back to birth, but your career, the foundations, your stepping stones for

what was built afterwards. Thanks very much for having me here. Obviously, Rob, it's nice to be talking.

I think actually there is a bit of an important foundational step. All of this really, you know,

as you said, sort of accidental, fell into things, definitely zero vision. But one of the things that really has helped me at different

points in time, which I didn't anticipate would, was my undergraduate degree. I did that at the London School

of Economics, but I did it in geography. And, you know, it wasn't very trendy at the time. But I did a

module, a few modules on sandy dry river valleys, which at the time was actually in Spain.

And I also did some work on kind of remote sensing, geographical information systems,

which was a brand new field at the time, because you're talking 30 years ago now.

But that stuff was quite handy, and I have referred back to at different points in my career. And also just being

at LSE meant I was in the city. In my final year of university, I just wandered down Fleet Street

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