The ADHD Mind in Business: Strengths, Chaos, and the Occasional Accidental Genius

Seventeen years in marketing. Zero formal training or qualifications. Not a single certificate on the wall. It's all been one long, glorious, self-taught adventure fuelled by curiosity, a healthy appetite for trial and error, and — I'm increasingly convinced — the wonderfully wired workings of my ADHD brain.

My first proper plunge into self-employment came with GOSH, a women's and children's footwear shop. Pre-internet. Pre-social media. We're talking proper old-school marketing: newspaper ads, slightly wonky hand-designed flyers, and the sheer physical graft of getting the word out in person. Looking back, I realise this forced me to tap into something I didn't yet have a name for — the ability to think completely sideways.

My brain doesn't take the well-trodden path. It veers off, takes a detour, stumbles across something unexpected, and somehow ends up exactly where it needed to go. Turns out that's quite useful in business.

One of my proudest early moments was my slightly obsessive approach to customer data. Every single person who bought something was gently (and probably very enthusiastically) asked for their details in exchange for the chance to win a voucher. Over 90% obliged. Then I'd spend hours at the kitchen table — licking stamps like a Victorian postal worker — sending out handwritten quarterly postcards with discounts. It worked brilliantly. People felt remembered. They kept coming back.

Then there was the time I got a hundred laminated signs made and put them on every lamppost in town. Bold. Bright. Completely illegal. The council fined me £500. The increased business more than covered it. I'm still not sure whether to be proud or mildly ashamed.

Here's what I know now: the impulsivity and the creativity aren't separate things. They're the same thing. The ADHD brain that bounces between seventeen ideas simultaneously is the same brain that spots opportunities others walk straight past. The challenge — and it is a genuine challenge — is building enough structure around it so the good ideas get finished rather than replaced by the next shiny one.

That's what the systems I teach are really about. Not controlling the chaos. Working with it.