We Couldn't Find Books That Taught Our Son About Business - So We Wrote Them
By Sanjeev and Sonia
Some of the best things in life start with a simple question you can't quite answer.
Ours started with a camera, a lockdown, and a fitness journey that had already changed my life.
In the nine months before the world shut down, I (Sanjeev) lost 27 kilograms. I'd thrown everything into the gym, and it had paid off in a way I was genuinely proud of. When lockdown hit and the gyms closed, I found myself wanting to properly capture and document that transformation - the kind of progress photos that actually show what sustained hard work looks like. But with photographers not working and gyms shut, I figured I had one option: learn to do it myself.
So I bought myself a camera. I opened YouTube. And I started learning.
What began as a very personal mission - can I take my own progress photos with a professional camera? - quietly became something much bigger. I kept learning, kept shooting, kept experimenting. And because Sonia and I do everything together, I'd share every breakthrough with her too on Zoom or YouTube links, so she was learning alongside me. That curiosity turned into a passion, and that passion turned into a real photography and videography business, TriggerSanj - now primarily geared towards fitness photography, with over 60 five-star Google reviews and hundreds of personal trainers and fitness clients through the lens.
But to understand why we created Rebel Rio, you need to go back a lot further than lockdown.
The Graduate Who Graduated at the Wrong Time
I studied Business AVCE at sixth form, then went on to do a full BA in Business Management at university. I genuinely loved it - understanding how businesses grow, how markets work, what separates the ones that survive from the ones that don't.
And then I graduated. In 2009. One year after the banks collapsed and the job market all but disappeared.
Despite everything I'd studied, I found myself doing what so many graduates did that year - applying for anything and everything, just trying to get a foothold somewhere. Not because the knowledge wasn't valuable, but because qualifications alone were never the whole picture. The economy had other plans.
Sound familiar? Honestly, not much has changed for young people entering the workforce today either.
The Business That Failed - And Everything It Taught Me
Here's the part of my story I'm most proud of, even though it didn't end the way I hoped.
Rather than waiting for the job market to open up, I decided to back myself. I launched a DJ comparison and booking website called Rated DJs. I invested my own money. I took out a £20,000 loan. I pitched the business to investors and received investment. I learned how to work with web designers, how to build something from nothing, how to run and manage Google Ads.
And ultimately - it didn't work.
Looking back, I think the business was probably ahead of its time. Comparison websites were still a relatively new concept, and I hadn't fully accounted for how small the market actually was. Not everyone is looking to book a DJ. The addressable audience was far narrower than I'd assumed, and the business couldn't sustain itself.
It failed. And I had to sit with that.
But here's what failure actually gave me: a skillset. The Google Ads knowledge I built running Rated DJs opened the door to a full-time career in marketing. The experience of pitching to investors, managing budgets, briefing developers and making decisions under pressure - none of that was wasted. Every single bit of it compounded into something useful, even when the business itself didn't survive.
That's the lesson no classroom ever taught me. Failure isn't the opposite of success. It's usually the first draft of it.
Sonia's Story: Brave Enough to Start Over. More Than Once.
If my journey is about learning through failure, Sonia's is about something equally important - the courage to walk away from something that isn't right for you, even when you've worked incredibly hard to get there.
Sonia qualified as a Radiotherapist. That's not a small thing. It's a demanding, skilled, deeply meaningful profession - one where you work directly with cancer patients going through some of the hardest moments of their lives. She was good at her job. She was qualified. She showed up.
But over time, the emotional weight of delivering difficult news - day after day, patient after patient - became something she couldn't sustainably carry. So she made a decision that most people would have found terrifying: she left. She walked away from a career she'd trained hard for, because she was honest enough with herself to know it wasn't where she was meant to be.
So she done a complete pivot into the professional world and started a career in Project Management while studying a short course in writing children’s books and Beauty Therapy at the weekends.
Sonia’s Project management book
But she didn't stop there, she focussed on obtaining her certifications like PRINCE 2 and in between, she launched not one but two businesses – one on Etsy and one on Instagram. She designed personalised Christmas baubles. She curated and sold seasonal party bags and hampers. She learned what it meant to make something, sell something, serve customers, and build a little corner of the internet that was entirely her own.
Eventually, life took over in the best possible way. We got married. We moved in together. We had Rio. Those Etsy business quietly closed as the next chapter opened - not as failures, but as chapters that had simply done what they were supposed to do.
What Sonia's story shows - and what she'd probably tell you herself - is that there's no single straight line to a life you're proud of. There are qualifications and pivots and side businesses and hard decisions and fresh starts. And every single one of them counts.
Why We Wrote the Books
Between us, we've got degrees, qualifications, skills learned on YouTube, businesses that worked and ones that didn't, careers that were built and careers that were left behind for good reason. We've pitched to investors, designed baubles, managed projects, photographed personal trainers, families, professionals and events, and filed more lessons-learned than we can count.
And yet when we went looking for books that could introduce our son Rio to these ideas - not in a dry, textbook way, but through a story where he could see himself starting something, earning something, building something - we couldn't find quite what we were looking for.
So we decided to write them ourselves.
That's how Rebel Rio was born.
Sanjeev and Sonia
Each book follows a child - Rio or Jessie - as they discover a hobby they love and take their very first steps towards turning it into a small business. Photography. Cooking. Plumbing. Real skills. Real lessons. Wrapped in beautiful watercolour illustrations and a story that even a two-year-old can sit with.
And because every child deserves to see themselves as the hero, every book is personalised. Your child's name on the cover. Their adventure. Their business.
The World Our Children Are Growing Into
We live in a world that's changing faster than any of us expected. The job market our son will graduate into doesn't exist yet. Some of the industries that seem stable today may not be by the time he's an adult. The pace of change - driven by technology, by AI, by forces none of us can fully predict - means that adaptability isn't just a nice trait to have. It's the skill of the century.
But one thing has never let anyone down: owning a skill, understanding money, being willing to build something of your own - and being willing to start over when the first path doesn't work out.
We didn't want to wait until Rio was a teenager to start having those conversations. We wanted to start now, with a bedtime story.
If you're a parent who thinks about these things - who wants to raise children that are confident, curious, resilient, and a little bit fearless - then Rebel Rio was written for your family as much as it was written for ours.
Two parents. A business degree. A radiotherapy qualification. A PRINCE2 certification. A £20k business loan, a pitch to investors, and a very honest lesson in resilience. Personalised baubles on Etsy. A photography business built on YouTube tutorials. And a short course in writing children's books that somehow tied it all together.
Imagine if someone had shown us all of this when we were little.
Now we're showing our son. And we'd love to show yours too.
Browse the Rebel Rio collection and personalise your child's copy today - available for boys and girls.