I've made this transition myself more than once. It started at McDonald's, then Aldi — early jobs that taught me what it actually looks like to earn trust on a shop floor, one shift at a time. Later came Three UK, where I worked as a Store Manager, learning what it took to lead a team on the ground, day in, day out.

My Three team, back in the day.

One of the Three stores I ran.

At one point I bought into a marketing franchise, selling B2B marketing services to small businesses. Over the years, I also worked directly with small businesses, helping them get noticed and bringing local business owners together. I built a local business community that grew to thousands of members — running networking events, promoting independent businesses, and even putting some of them on billboards.

It was a completely different kind of pressure, and one that taught me more about resilience, relationships, and earning trust than any leadership course ever could.

Putting local businesses on the map — literally.

Helping small businesses network and connect.

Then came Apple, where I moved from Regional Account Manager into leadership — a promotion that saw me leading the very team I'd been part of just months earlier. Across every one of those roles, developing the people around me has mattered as much to me as hitting the number — some of whom have gone on to lead teams of their own. I spent six years as a mentor on Apple's own Mentorship Programme, completing six full mentoring cycles.

Over a decade at Apple, and still learning.

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 Academy, the principles — 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.