I do not believe business should break you.

In their own words

At 22, becoming a dad was not part of any plan I had.

Honestly, there was no real plan. Then I was standing in Southampton General Hospital holding my first son, Archie, and figuring it out as I went stopped being a sufficient approach to anything.

What followed were three years of juggling Holiday Inn night shifts, an unpaid PR internship in London, and a university degree, all at once, none of them optional, none of them half-hearted. It was not elegant. But I had something I had not had before: a reason that was bigger than the discomfort of the doing. That habit, showing up on the days you do not feel like showing up, became one of the foundations of everything I built afterwards.

What I have built

Since then, I have built businesses across Bournemouth, Christchurch and Poole, and watched some of them work and some of them not. I ran Leadtree Global for eleven years before handing it over to the next generation of leaders in 2024. I founded Golden Sands Capital to help founders tell their stories clearly and access the right investors. I started The Spark, a community for founders in BCP, because the area had real talent and what it lacked was connection. Bring people together. Create honest conversations. Let the value emerge.

In 2019, one of my businesses went into administration. That experience is in this book: the grief of it, the professional fallout, and the slow patient work of starting again. Not tidied up. Honestly.

Why I wrote this book

I am neurodivergent. My brain runs fast, generates constantly, and connects things across distances that a more conventionally ordered mind might not attempt. That has been genuinely useful in building things, in spotting things early, in moving with energy. It has also, with complete honesty, got me into various kinds of trouble over the years. Fast minds make fast mistakes.

So this book is not written from a position of having it all figured out. I am still in it, still learning, still occasionally staring at the ceiling. What I have learned is that it does not have to be this hard. Building a business does not require you to destroy yourself in the process. What it requires is clarity about what you are actually trying to solve, the honesty to test your assumptions rather than just defending them, the discipline to build trust through consistent action, and the wisdom to protect your own sustainability alongside the sustainability of what you are building.

"The world does not need more noise. It needs better businesses, built by better people, for better reasons."

The rest of it

I am a dad of four boys. That matters more to me than any business title ever will. Success is worth very little if the people you love most only get the exhausted, distracted, half-present version of you at the end of every day. I have learned that lesson. I keep relearning it.

Three times a week I coach under-7s football. It is complete and joyful chaos and I recommend it as a recovery strategy unreservedly. I live by the sea in Poole, which helps with perspective, which is something you occasionally need when you spend your working life thinking about business.

I also stopped drinking. Not dramatically. There was no single moment. I just noticed, over time, that something which had felt normal was consistently taking more than it was giving. The mornings got clearer. The patience got longer. The anxiety about the things I could not control got a bit lower. I mention it here because the book is honest about this kind of thing, and I would rather be consistent.