Most people don’t come to me with a neat outline. They come with a body of experience, a set of decisions, and a sense that there’s something worth capturing before it gets flattened or lost. My role is to turn that into a coherent, readable narrative. That means structuring the material, asking the questions that get beyond the obvious version, and shaping it into something that holds together for a reader. Not just what happened, but why it mattered and what was at stake at the time. You don’t need to arrive with it all worked out. In most cases, it’s better if you haven’t.

If it’s done properly, it can be one of the few things that genuinely differentiates you. Most people in business communicate in fragments. Interviews, panels, podcasts, LinkedIn posts. Useful, but partial. They show moments, not the underlying judgement that shaped them. A book allows you to set out how you actually think, how you made decisions, and what you learned when things didn’t go to plan. That has value. It gives you a level of credibility that doesn’t come from a press release or a well-turned post. It shows depth, not just presence. For founders and executives who are already established, that matters more than visibility. It also creates something that stands outside the current cycle. Most communication now is immediate and disposable. A serious piece of work cuts through that simply because so few people take the time to do it. There’s also a practical angle. A well-constructed book can support speaking, advisory work, board positions or future ventures. It gives people a way to understand you quickly, without relying on second-hand versions. And one thing that’s becoming more obvious by the year: it’s very difficult to fake. You can’t generate a credible, experience-based account of a career through AI or outsourced content. It either holds up or it doesn’t. That’s why it works. Not because it looks good, but because it’s hard to produce properly, and people recognise that.

Most of the stories you encounter about people who've built or led things have already been tidied up. They work well on a stage or in a profile piece, nice clean progression from from problem to solution, a couple of near-misses thrown in for texture, a lesson at the end that makes the whole thing feel inevitable. They're not dishonest exactly, but they're not the full account either. The full account is more useful, and for a fairly simple reason: it shows how you actually think. When someone can explain, without too much performance, what decisions were made under real pressure, what nearly went wrong and why certain calls were taken when they were, it tells people something that a profile or a speech doesn't. It shows judgement rather than just outcomes. That tends to matter quite a lot to the people whose opinion you actually care about. There's also the internal version of this. Organisations lose their own history faster than anyone expects. The people who were there at the beginning move on, the founding logic gets diluted, and what made the place distinctive gets replaced by something blander and easier to explain. A properly written account gives people something solid to refer back to, not a set of values on a wall with nice emojis, but a record of actual decisions and behaviours. That turns out to be surprisingly useful when half the room wasn't there when it mattered. And then there's the personal version, which nobody talks about much but most people feel. You spent years making decisions that affected other people's lives, livelihoods and futures - including your own. At some point it's reasonable to want that properly documented, not because you need the validation, but because it actually happened and deserves more than a glossed over LinkedIn summary and whatever your family half-remembers. The problem is most of this gets lost. Stories get shortened, details fall away, and what you end up with is the version that travels best at dinner parties. Which is fine for dinner parties and not much use for anything else.

At a basic level, I take what you know, remember and have lived through, and turn it into something that can be read and understood by someone who wasn’t there. In practice, it’s a bit more involved than that. We work through a series of structured conversations, usually recorded, where I ask the kind of questions that don’t tend to come up in day-to-day life. Not just what happened, but why it happened, what alternatives were on the table, what you thought at the time and what you think now. That’s where most of the substance sits. From there, I start to shape it. Not in the sense of rewriting history or tidying things up, but in giving it structure so it can actually be followed. A life doesn’t arrive in neat chapters. It arrives in fragments, overlaps, contradictions. The job is to make sense of that without losing what made it real in the first place. You’ll see drafts as we go. You’ll correct, add, push back, sometimes rethink things you haven’t looked at properly in years. That’s normal. The aim is not to produce something polished for the sake of it, but something that holds together and stands up. It’s part listening, part structuring, part judgement. And a fair amount of patience on both sides.

We start with a conversation. No commitment, just enough to understand what you’re trying to do and whether it makes sense to proceed. If it does, we map out the shape of the project. Scope, likely length, how deep we need to go, and how we’ll work together. After that, it becomes quite structured. We schedule a series of interviews, usually over a few weeks. These are not rigid question-and-answer sessions, but they are directed. I’ll keep things moving, circle back when something doesn’t quite add up, and push where it matters. You’d be surprised how often the important parts sit just beyond the first answer. Everything is recorded and transcribed. From there, I start drafting. You’ll see sections as they develop, not just at the end. We refine as we go. That’s where the work really happens. Depending on the project, there may also be supporting material. Emails, documents, other people’s perspectives where relevant. Not always, but sometimes it helps anchor things. It’s iterative. It takes time. But it’s controlled. You won’t be left wondering where things are or what happens next.

Longer than people first assume, shorter than they fear once it’s underway. Most projects sit somewhere between three and nine months. That depends on scope, availability and how detailed you want the final account to be. The early stages tend to move quite quickly. Conversations, material gathering, the first sections taking shape. Then it slows a little as the structure settles and the work deepens. That’s normal. You don’t want to rush that part. There are also practical realities. People have businesses to run, travel, other commitments. We work around that, but it does affect pace. What matters is momentum. Once it starts, it needs to keep moving. Leave it too long between stages and you lose continuity, both in memory and in the thread of the narrative. It’s not something to squeeze into spare time and hope for the best. It needs a bit of space to be done properly.

They are structured, but not rigid. Most of the work is built through a series of one-to-one conversations. These can be in person or over video, depending on what is practical. In person is often better if we’re covering a lot of ground early on, but it’s not essential. What matters more is that the conversation has space and continuity. In terms of frequency, it usually works best to keep some momentum. That might mean one or two sessions a week at the start, then spacing out a little once the core material is on the table. Leave too much time between sessions and you spend half the next one remembering where you got to. Each session tends to run somewhere between 60 and 90 minutes. Long enough to get into something properly, not so long that it turns into a slog. Occasionally we’ll go longer if we’re in the middle of something important, but there’s no need to force it. They are recorded, with your agreement, so you don’t have to remember what was said or worry about getting things “right” in the moment. The point is to talk it through, not to perform it. I’ll guide the conversation. There’s a loose structure behind it, but I won’t run through a list of questions like an interview panel. We follow the thread where it needs to go, double back when something doesn’t quite hold, and stay with things that matter. You’ll find that some of the more useful material comes out slightly sideways rather than head-on. Some sessions will feel straightforward. Others less so. That’s part of it. We’re not trying to produce a neat version of events in real time, we’re trying to get to something accurate. It’s a process that builds. Each conversation adds a layer. By the time we’re a few sessions in, the shape of things usually starts to emerge, and it becomes much easier to see what matters and what doesn’t.

Most projects run somewhere between three and nine months. That depends on availability, scope and how quickly we can move through the material. A private record is usually more contained. A public memoir takes longer because it has to stand up to a general readership. The main thing is maintaining momentum. Leave it too long between sessions and the energy drops off. Keep it moving and it builds properly.

That’s entirely up to you. Some clients want full authorship. Others prefer discretion. Both are standard in this type of work. If it’s a private record, it will usually remain exactly that. If it’s a public memoir, we’ll decide early on how you want to be presented.

Yes. Most of the work can be done remotely without any loss of quality. Where it makes sense, I’ll travel for in-person sessions, particularly at the start of a project. The important thing is continuity, not geography.

Completely. For many clients, discretion is not a preference, it’s a requirement. That’s understood from the outset. Nothing is shared, referenced or reused without your explicit agreement.

Because I understand both sides of this. I’ve spent years inside businesses, making decisions where outcomes mattered, not just writing about them afterwards. That changes how I approach a story. I’m not here to smooth things into something sentimental or safe. I’m interested in proportion, context and consequence - reality if you like - and in turning that into a story people will actually want to read. If that’s what you’re after, we’ll get on.