9:09 am, December 24, 2025
Peter Vardy is aiming to bring business and community leaders together in Glasgow next year for a new leadership conference designed to ‘inspire’ and ‘equip’ adults across Scotland.
Speaking on the Car Dealer Podcast – which you watch at the top of this story – the motor industry veteran said the event, called The Calling, will take place at Glasgow’s Armadillo on October 2, 2026. Tickets will be available to pre-order from January and going on general sale in February.
Vardy said the idea grew out of his family foundation’s work, which commits 10% of the profits each year to long-term projects.
Speaking to hosts Podcast hosts James Baggott and Jon Reay, Vardy said: ‘We were trying to work out how to give money to going forward that has a lasting impact.’
He explained that the Peter Vardy Foundation’s focus has shifted beyond one-off charitable acts and towards something he believes can create ‘generational change’.
That thinking led Vardy and his sister to develop leadership initiatives aimed at children in Scottish schools.
‘We’re interested in early intervention – helping people out before the problem starts, which is going to kids who are having a tough time, and we also believe in the power of good leadership and how we can train people to make better decisions,’ he explained.
‘We put together a programme called Gen+ which is going into all the schools in Scotland. It teaches meta skills in a computer game-type of way – we’re trying to train a whole generation of young people to be better leaders and make better decisions. We’ve got a really big take-up on Scottish schools with the aim eventually being to get that product to a million young kids a year.’
But, he said, it felt incomplete not to invest in adults too.
‘It’s quite strange to be helping young people make great decisions, but not to be doing any investment in older people like me – essentially, “how can I get better as a leader so I lead a better example for my kids and the community I’m in?”
The answer, he said, was to build ‘the best leadership conference we could put on in the world’, with speakers focused on ‘servant leadership, values-based leadership, authentic leadership — not how much money you can make and how many followers you can get, but about telling the truth.’
Vardy said the event is intended to be practical, not just inspirational.
He said the line-up will blend high-profile Scottish names and international guests. Among those he highlighted were Sir Chris Hoy, former NHS Scotland chief strategy officer Chris Hopson, entrepreneur Sir Brian Souter, and figures from sport and the armed forces.
Crucially, Vardy said the foundation is underwriting the event to keep it accessible.
The aim, he added, is to gather ‘3,000 leaders’ and ‘create a space where you can meet people, like-minded folks, because we believe when a leader gets better, everybody wins.’
If the first year works, Vardy said, the family hopes it could become an annual fixture.
The conference is just one part of the Vardy’s efforts to improve people’s lives, though.
Through the Peter Vardy Foundation, Vardy puts 10% of his family’s organisation’s profits away each year. In the podcast, he describes the process of building schools and helping 24,000 children get an education in Uganda, which was just one of the recent things the Foundation has achieved.
You can find out more information about The Calling conference here.
You can watch the full podcast above, or listen on Spotify, Apple Podcasts and all good podcast platforms.
