About Us

It’s likely that most of us already know “job security” has been an illusion for years. We’ve just found it easier not to look at that too closely — kept our heads down, worked the hours, kept the pay cheque coming, and hoped it would be enough.

I know, because I did exactly that for years — right up until the moment I didn’t have a choice about it anymore.

In November 1995 I was made redundant from a job I didn’t even like all that much — a partner at a commercial surveying firm, well paid, but never really the right fit. I didn’t have a plan, a following, or anything I’d have called “expertise” at the time. I just had something I’d worked out for myself that people around me kept asking about.

So I wrote it down. My first article — about residential property investing — was published in a magazine in 1989, while I was working as a commercial surveyor with no residential experience of my own. I got paid £75 for it anyway.

That one article became a book. The book became a business. The business eventually reached thousands of people, and let me build a life I could never have designed sitting in that office.

The Knowledge Trade exists because I think most people are sitting on something valuable — not because they’re a certified expert, but because they’ve lived it, worked it out the hard way, and could save someone else years of trial and error if they just wrote it down.

That’s what this site is for: showing you how to start, using the same unglamorous, one-step-at-a-time method I used myself. No overnight get-rich-quick schemes. No pretending to be someone you’re not and faking it until you make it. Just a starting point — and then the next step after that.