I started on a shop floor. Menswear, then Games Workshop, where I learned the thing that has shaped everything since: if you spend ten minutes teaching a child to paint a miniature and ask for nothing, the parent standing behind them will often buy the whole kit. Not because you pushed. Because you gave first, and they wanted to be part of it.
After that came Three UK, selling phone contracts under a target board, which taught me speed and taught me pressure. Then digital marketing partnerships with Endsleigh, Lenovo and PlayStation, where I stopped being a discounted vendor and became a strategic partner, and annual spend went up fivefold. Then motorsport and charity sponsorship, which is where the real education happened.
The part I would keep
Raising money for a niche charity from cold outreach is the hardest honest version of this job. Nobody has to fund a small cause. There is no product, no commercial return, no scarcity to lean on. You cannot pressure someone into a five-figure sponsorship, and if you try, they simply stop taking your calls.
So all you have is the approach, the relationship you build from nothing, and whether you can make something worth belonging to. I did that more than once, into five figures each time. Over £18,000 in year one on one motorsport programme, at a 2.4 return.
That is the result I point at, because it is the only one that could not have been faked. Revenue can come from pressure, from a warm list, from a product that sells itself. Cold charity funding can only come from relationship and conviction.
Why any of this needed a method
For years I ran two systems in parallel. The sales system, which worked. And the faith, which sat somewhere off to the side, mostly used to feel guilty about the sales system. I was good at the job and quietly uneasy about it, which is a very common place for Christians in sales to live, and a very tiring one.
The thing that eventually broke the deadlock was not a business book. It was noticing how much of scripture is set in commerce — weights and measures, wages, contracts, negotiation, hospitality, craft — and how little of it treats trade itself as the problem. What it treats as the problem is dishonesty, exploitation, and the loss of a person’s soul in the pursuit of gain. Those are not the same thing, and I had spent a decade acting as though they were.
“A false balance is an abomination to Jehovah; But a just weight is his delight.”
Proverbs 11:1 · ASV
That verse is not about sales technique. It is about honest trade, and it assumes trade. There is a whole framework sitting underneath that assumption, and Commissioned is my attempt to build it out properly rather than proof-text my way to a comfortable conclusion.
What I will not teach
I will not teach that God wants you wealthy, or that income is evidence of favour. Prosperity teaching is not a stylistic disagreement for me; it is a distortion that has taken money and hope from people who could not afford to lose either.
I will not teach manipulation dressed as psychology, or urgency that is not real, or any technique whose purpose is to make it harder for someone to say no.
And I will not stretch a passage past what it says. Some of the verses most commonly used to sell things are not about selling at all. Where that is true, I say so in the teaching, and use the text as an analogy with its real subject named.
The rest of it
I am a millennial dad in the north of England. I like Christian metal, poetry, philosophy and arguing about history. I am non-denominational and reasonably stubborn about wanting claims to be defensible. If a discerning pastor or a sceptical journalist would wince at something I have written, it does not go out.
You were commissioned, not conscripted.