I started my leadership journey at McDonald's at just 18 years old, more than 30 years ago. My biggest early lesson came when a new area manager made me stand with my arms crossed for a whole shift: don't rescue, don't jump in, just lead. I've been learning it ever since.

I've made the move into sales leadership twice. First as a Store Manager at Three UK, where I spent ten years learning what it takes to lead a team on the ground, day in, day out. Later into channel sales leadership at corporate Apple.

My Three team, back in the day.

One of the Three stores I ran.

I ran a B2B marketing franchise and built a local business community that grew to thousands of members, with networking events and some of those businesses on billboards. It was a completely different kind of pressure, and it taught me more about resilience and earning trust than any leadership course ever could.

Putting local businesses on the map — literally.

Helping small businesses network and connect.

At Apple I moved from a Regional Account Manager to a Field Sales Leader, a promotion that saw me leading the very team I'd been part of just months earlier.

In channel sales I was lucky enough to work with the UK’s major mobile networks and national retailers, contributing to record sales years and product launches.

I was nominated to attend Apple's Excellence Summit in Cupertino, represented EMEIA on Apple's Worldwide Carrier Advisory Board, and was recognised as one of the top managers worldwide for people development.

Across every one of those roles, developing the people around me has mattered as much to me as hitting the number.

More than a decade at Apple.

At Apple HQ.

Every one of those transitions felt different in the moment, but looking back, they all asked the same question: was I still measuring myself the way I used to, or had I actually become someone new?

I watched the same thing happen again and again, on every team I was part of — someone gets promoted because they can sell, and the day after, they're expected to lead, with nothing to actually teach them how. Targets still matter. Results still matter. But success now depends on other people, and nobody tells you that the rules changed until you're already struggling to keep up.

I lived that gap myself, more than once. Sales to Leader exists because I kept seeing good people — people with real potential — quietly struggle through a transition nobody prepared them for, simply because nobody had written down what actually helps.

Everything here, the book, the assessment, the toolkit, the principles and the programmes, is built around one simple system:

The goal isn't just this one book. It's for Sales to Leader to become the place people think of the moment they're handed a team for the first time — the resource that was missing when I needed it most.