In March 2020 I was running a PR consultancy I’d built carefully over seven years. Within a week, two-thirds of it was gone.
Clients who’d been with me for years called to pause retainers. Some never came back. I spent that summer doing the maths most small business owners did that summer: working out how long I could go, marketing my business like never before, writing emails I’d never imagined writing, keeping things up appearance-wise on calls while inside I was triaging.
Thankfully, I came out the other side of it. But it took roughly eighteen months of quiet, careful rebuilding, and I think it’s the first time in my working life I’d properly understood that everything worth having has to be hard earned.
That’s where this story starts. Because what came next made the pandemic feel like the easy bit.
In March 2021 my wife Rachel and I had our second son. We named him Alfie. Within hours of his birth, we were given a postnatal diagnosis: Alfie has Down Syndrome.
I want to be careful how I write about this part, because it’s his story as much as ours, and I don’t want to flatten it into a neat lesson. The honest version is that the first weeks were extremely emotional, frightening, and also full of love in a way it’s hard to describe to anyone who hasn’t been through a diagnosis. We learned quickly that almost everything most people know about Down Syndrome is either out of date or just wrong. We met other parents. We found a community. Alfie is brilliant, funny, stubborn, kind. We call him the Joy Bringer.
What he also did was sharpen the question of what I was working for. Why I was running a business. Who I was trying to make proud. What kind of dad I wanted my older son to grow up watching. I didn’t have neat answers. But I started showing up to the work differently.
Rachel and I got married in the summer of 2022. We moved to a bigger house in 2023. Things were starting to feel solid again.
Then in November 2023, Alfie was diagnosed with leukaemia.
He was two and a half. The treatment plan was two years long. The first eight months, the intensive phase, involved several chemotherapy drugs and a newer immunotherapy that, until recently, hadn’t been available to children of Alfie’s age. One of the chemo drugs left him with temporarily paralysed vocal chords, and he spent time in paediatric intensive care at Queen’s Medical Centre in Nottingham. He was there over Christmas 2023.
He recovered. His vocal chords are fine now. The treatment worked. He finished his two-year course on the 15th of December 2025, and in April 2026 he rang the bell.
I’m not going to write the play-by-play of those two years here. Some of it isn’t mine to tell, and some of it I’m still putting words to. What I will say is that it teaches you very quickly which things in your life are real and which are decoration. It’s a brutal kind of clarification, but it is a clarification.
I worked through all of it. I don’t say that as a badge.
There were days I shouldn’t have been on calls. There were nights I drafted press releases on a hospital chair. I took client calls in hospital corridors. There were also long stretches where the rhythm of the work was the thing that kept me upright, somewhere I could be useful, somewhere the variables were small enough to handle, somewhere I knew what I was doing.
The clients who’d been with me for years stayed. All of them knew what was happening. Honest communication is essential in a crisis. The standard couldn’t slip. Press releases still had to land. Auction results still had to be written by lunchtime. Founders still had to sound like themselves on the page. The work had to be done well, because the work was the thing I’d promised, and a promise made before a hospital admission is still a promise.
The business had its two strongest years on record across 2024 and 2025.
I’m aware of how that reads. I’m not telling you so you’ll be impressed. I’m telling you because I want to be honest about something I find hard to articulate in pitch meetings: a lot of what I’m good at, I’m good at because of what’s happened. Not despite it. The judgement, the steadiness, the resilience, the ability to read a situation and know what’s worth saying and what isn’t. Those things have been forged in places I wouldn’t wish on anyone. But they’re real now in a way they weren’t before.
Alongside the work, I made a decision early in Alfie’s treatment that if I was going to ask my body and mind to carry this, I had to look after them. I doubled down on running, as stress relief and a way to process things. Eventually I ran five half marathons. Along the way I lost close to three stone, and we raised over £10,000 between charities that mean something to our family, Pasic and Footprints Conductive Education Centre.
Personal development sounds like a LinkedIn word. What I mean by it is much simpler: I read more than I used to. I think more carefully about how I spend a day. I’m more deliberate about what I say yes to and what I don’t. I’m a better husband and father than I was. I’m also, I think, a better consultant.
So why am I writing this on a business website?
Because the work I do is, in the end, about people trusting me with how and where they’re seen. Founders who have spent years building something hand it to me and ask me to find the right words for it. That’s not a transactional relationship. It runs on judgement, character, and whether I’m someone they want in the room when something matters. The five years I’ve just described is the closest I can get to telling you who I actually am.
It’s also why the next phase matters. Our third son is due in August. Alfie is in remission and starting school. Rachel and I are at the beginning of a chapter that, two years ago, we weren’t certain we’d get to.
I want to build a consultancy and community of clients that’s worth the time I spend away from them. I want to do work I’m proud of, for people I respect. And I want to be successful enough at it that I can keep showing up, for Alfie, for our older son, for the boy on the way, and for the Down Syndrome and childhood cancer community.
That’s the work now. Same craft I’ve been doing for fifteen years. Different reasons. Now, more important than ever.
If any of this lands with you, if you’re building something that matters to you, and you’re trying to work out how it gets seen properly in the world we’re now in, I’d genuinely like to hear from you.
Chris
Nottingham, May 2026