About Amplify

Meet the Amplify team, see our clients and discover our story.

The Amplify Team

Stewart Bewley

Founder and CEO

Stew founded Amplify back in 2011, and to date has coached more than 20,000 people in 75 different countries to become confident communicators. He has Google, Microsoft, Salesforce, Hitachi and Arsenal FC on his client list and has helped 400 startups to raise over $9 billion. He published his first book The Storytelling Hero with Wiley in 2022 and is currently working on another. Whoever is in front of him – prisoners, PHD students or pensioners, he is deeply, deeply ambitious for them to unlock their voices and unleash a confidence they never knew they had. He coaches senior executives one-to-one and has most recently travelled to Seattle, to coach (alongside Gemma Hunt) 2,000 Microsoft graduates in the Seattle Convention Centre on confidence, vocal skills and presence. He loves to travel and embrace all that life throws at him – from bhangra dancing with Microsoft graduates in Hyderabad, India, to coaching ex-NASA rocket scientists in the US. He is a big fan of flat whites, an enthusiastic husband and father, and a keen musician.

Meet Stewart

Steve Morris

Chief Strategy Officer

Steve breathes strategy and story everywhere he goes. Since joining Amplify in 2019 he has coached Visa, Google, BCGDV, Multiverse (founded by Euan Blair), Wayra, Rlabs (Capetown), Startup Bootcamp (Dubai), Rainmaking Innovation (Copenhagen), London School of Economics, Imperial College London, LSBU, City University and Arsenal FC. He is a brilliant storyteller and won’t let his clients leave a coaching session until they have theirs! As CSO his job is to translate Stew’s vision into reality. Most recently he designed, alongside Stew, the three day coaching work that Amplify delivered for Microsoft's Start Strong Plus conference in Seattle. Alongside this Steve runs his own company coaching on leadership and has used his wisdom to help and startups and corporates thrive. Before joining Amplify, Steve spent five years in South Africa working for the Sozo Foundation, where he founded a youth café in a township and an artisan bakery to lift young people out of poverty. He is a lover of good coffee, a husband and father, and staunch Arsenal fan – he was delighted to have the chance to coach them!

Meet Steve

Gemma Hunt

Head of Training

Gemma has spent thousands of hours presenting live television and hosted live festivals to more than 25,000 people. She started in 2003 and has simply never stopped! She has worked for ITV and Channel 5 but is most recognised for her role in ‘Swashbuckle’ for the BBC. She received an honorary doctorate in 2016 as an alumna from the University of Bedfordshire in recognition of her outstanding services to the media. In 2017 she was nominated as Best Presenter in the Children's BAFTAs. On the corporate side she has filmed for Samsung, CEWE and Utility Warehouse. She runs her own presentation and coaching workshops and most recently collaborated with us at Amplify to coach alongside Stew in Seattle, 2000 global Microsoft employees on unlocking confidence, elevating your voice and bringing presence to the room. What you see is what you get with Gemma: real, authentic, warm, charismatic. As Head of Training at Amplify, she has made sure we are the best we can be for our clients. She is also an accomplished author and has recently written ‘See! Let’s Be A Good Friend’.

Meet Gemma

The Amplify Story

Amplify was born on 16 February 2011 in a freezing portakabin behind Woodside Park tube station.

Our founder Stew Bewley was meeting with his friend Mia, who had a big presentation coming up and wanted some help getting over her fear of public speaking. He hadn’t done any coaching before, but his career as an actor had naturally made him comfortable on stage – and his simple tips managed to transform Mia from a quiet, anxious speaker, whose nerves made her throat dry up so she couldn’t talk, into a fantastic, confident presenter!

Mia was so excited that she decided to pay for Stew to go on a presentation coaching course – she was convinced that the work they’d done together in that portakabin had all the makings of a great business, and she figured that taking a look at what other coaches were offering was a great way to get started. As it turns out, the course did have the intended effect of pushing Stew to action. Just not quite in the way Mia had expected…

There were 35 people on the course, who had all parted with their money to be taken through a programme that was meant to grow their skills as speakers. But it did the exact opposite. They were being led to believe that the only way to become a good public speaker was to keep coming on these courses and to work hard, fail a lot, feel miserable, compare themselves with everyone around them and then one day, maybe, make it as a proper speaker. Confused, appalled, and angry, Stew left early and said to himself, ‘That’s it – I’m starting a business that will actually encourage people’s potential rather than make them feel inadequate and afraid.’

The rest, as they say, is history. From Amplify’s first official coaching session – a meetup with five people in the back of a Brick Lane coffee shop – and our first ‘proper’ job teaching interview skills to soon-to-be-released prisoners at HMP Pentonville (yep, both as interesting and as unnerving as it sounds), Stew has led the team to deliver coaching to Microsoft, Google, Hitachi, Dow Jones, Siemens and even Arsenal Football Club!

To date we’ve coached more than 20,000 people from 75 different countries, working for the smallest of start-ups and the biggest of corporates. And all with the same approach – filling people with confidence to communicate their message, so that they can connect with their audience and win more business.