If you told my younger self, the one standing in a boardroom explaining ERP and CRM systems to a group of executives, that one day I’d be writing about exploding cakes, eccentric space rangers and a lonely boy called Fred, I would have laughed. On paper, the leap from business systems to children’s fiction couldn’t be wider. Yet the older I get, the more clearly I see the connection.
Careers don’t move in straight lines. They wander, they loop, they double back, and sometimes they jump tracks entirely. But the skills we gather along the way stay with us. They settle quietly until one day you realise they’ve shaped exactly who you are and what you create.
For me, the world of ERP, CRM and business communication never really disappeared. It simply resurfaced in a new form, one where space-ships, shoelaces and intergalactic mishaps live side by side with structure, clarity and storytelling.
Communication: The Bridge Between Two Worlds
Before I was a children’s author, I spent years explaining complicated business software to people who didn’t have time for jargon. If you want to learn clarity, try telling a finance director why they should spend half a million pounds on a database that lives on a server they’ll never see.
It teaches you very quickly that people don’t buy features. They buy understanding.
That lesson followed me into writing. Children are the most honest audience on Earth. If something is dull, overly technical or unclear, they simply stop reading. They don’t pretend to understand. They don’t nod politely. They just move on.
So the skill I learned in business — turning the complex into the simple — has become essential in my books. I take scientific ideas, energy concepts, space travel, technology, and reduce them to something playful, accessible, and often ridiculous. Because children learn best when they’re having fun.
Knowing Your Audience
In marketing, every presentation begins with the same question:
Who is this for?
You learn to understand the audience before you speak. Their concerns, their goals, their sense of humour (or lack of it). Writing for children is remarkably similar. I have to imagine what will grab their curiosity, what will make them laugh, what will hold their attention, and what emotional note will keep them turning the page.
Children want adventure. They want silliness. They want heart. And most importantly, they want authenticity. If something feels forced, they know.
My background trained me to think about audience instinctively, and that habit now shapes how I write and how I plan each story.
Storytelling in the Boardroom
People often assume that sales and storytelling are separate creatures. They’re not. Every successful pitch I ever delivered followed the oldest story pattern in the book:
- Here is the problem.
- Here is the struggle.
- Here is the solution.
- And here is how your world looks after everything changes.
Swap out the boardroom for a spaceship, and that structure is identical.
In fact, I now speak about this in my talks on storytelling for business. Whether you’re selling a service, leading a team or building a brand, you’re still guiding people on a journey. You want them to feel something. You want them to see themselves in the story.
What surprises many people is that writing for children sharpened this skill. Children demand emotional truth, and once you learn to write for them, you can speak to anyone. Teaching business owners how to tell their own story, how to connect purpose with message, feels like everything coming full circle. The lessons I once used to sell systems now help others communicate their ideas more powerfully.
Structure, Logic and Space Chaos
Here’s a secret: my love of order never left me. Working with systems teaches you to think in processes, cause and effect, and the importance of clear structure. Strangely enough, this is exactly what plotting children’s books requires.
Even the wildest, most chaotic Space Ranger Fred story has an underlying system. Gadgets work (or fail) for a reason. Ridiculous events follow a pattern. STEM concepts hide beneath the humour. Every absurd moment — whether it’s a countdown timer with Roman numerals or a peg taped to a seat handle for zero-gravity grip — has logic behind it.
Business systems taught me how to build worlds that make sense, even when they are completely mad.
Creativity Was Never Just for Writing
Marketing demands creativity. You need fresh ways to tell old stories, new angles to make someone sit up and listen. That creativity carries directly into character creation, worldbuilding and the playful energy of my books.
The bold colours, the odd inventions, the big-hearted chaos — those all come from years of thinking, “How do I get someone to care about this?” The difference now is that instead of convincing a managing director, I’m trying to delight a seven-year-old.
And in many ways, that’s far more fun.
The Human Element: Empathy in Business and Books
People think business is all numbers. It isn’t. It’s feelings, fears, ambitions, personalities. When you strip away the jargon, marketing and writing share the same foundation: empathy.
You must understand others before you can reach them.
In my books, I weave in moments of loneliness, bravery, friendship and curiosity not because they’re required, but because children feel these things deeply. A good children’s story speaks to the heart just as much as the imagination.
The same is true when I speak about communication and storytelling for organisations. Whether your audience is a child reading in bed or a director in a meeting, you have to know how they feel.
When Everything Finally Makes Sense
There’s something satisfying about looking back at a winding career and realising that none of it was wasted. The years spent in boardrooms gave me discipline, clarity, empathy and a natural instinct for narrative. The years spent writing gave me creativity, freedom and a sense of play.
Together, they’ve shaped the stories I tell, the talks I give, the projects I lead and the way I help others communicate.
The journey from ERP systems to exploding space cakes wasn’t a leap after all. It was a circle — one that led me from business storytelling, through children’s fiction, and back into teaching businesses how to tell better stories of their own.
And somewhere along the way, it all started to feel exactly right.
