How I helped Bill Buckley get his incredible founder story out of his head and onto the page

It’s never too late to start.
That’s just one of the many lessons I learned from Bill Buckley while working with him on his book ‘Ion Man: The Life & Adventures of Bill Buckley.’

Bill was in his mid-40’s before he founded Buckley Systems in 1987. Within a couple of years, Bill and his company were recognised as global players in the semiconductor industry.

Like Bill’s business, his book took time. But I couldn’t have guessed when I first met him that it would take seven years to tell his story and publish his book.

For anyone that knows him, Bill’s story is pretty special. As well as being a successful technology entrepreneur he’s been involved as a designer, competitor, and promoter in speedway, sailing and MotoGP. More recently he built a machine to treat brain cancer.

We started working on the book together in 2019. As well as spending a lot of time with Bill, I interviewed 30+ people who worked with him over the years to flesh out his story and fill in the blanks. Then, Covid hit and so Bill pressed pause on the project to focus on his business.

I kept in touch with him but he kept putting the project off. It’s not uncommon for people to get cold feet in the middle of a book project. It’s pretty confronting to read your life story and sometimes you need a little reassurance that people will be interested in it.

So in 2023, I emailed Bill with an ultimatum: “Have you made a decision on whether to finish your book, or not? I think it would be a real shame not to finish it after all the work you have put into it.”

I also sent him this feedback from my editor who read the first draft. She said: “This is so well written, I just wanted to keep reading. The early material about Bill’s family life is fantastic – it’s a superb evocation of life in country New Zealand in the 1940s and 50s … and that’s before he even gets to the stories about the business, Bill’s inventions and his passion for speedway! In short, it’s a cracker of a story from a fascinating man who I’d never heard of but now really want to know more about.”

That was enough to convince Bill his story was worth telling and Ion Man was finally published in 2025.

What story did the client want to tell?

Bill didn’t, at first, particularly want to tell his story.

Like a lot of founders, he’s a doer, not a talker. “He’s not a ‘gonna’ guy,” as his brother puts it. When we started, Bill was reluctant to look back — his default setting is full speed ahead, on to the next machine, the next problem, the next market.

There was also a practical hurdle. Bill had spent his career building machines without drawings. “I didn’t write much down,” he told me. “Because I didn’t write things down, people thought I was winging it. I wasn’t. It was all in my head.”

So the brief was clear, if daunting: get a remarkable engineering life out of one man’s head and onto the page — including the parts he’d never thought to record, and the parts he didn’t think mattered.

What was the process?

The work started with Bill — hours of interviews, pulling out the story of the farm, the apprenticeship, the toxic boss, the moment in 1978 when he decided it was “now or never” and went out on his own.
But I didn’t stop there.

I interviewed his family and friends. I sat down with the engineers, the physicists and the long-serving staff who were in the trenches with him during the early years.

They filled in the blanks and added the colour:
Bill remembered the inventions. His team remembered the late nights making them work.
Bill remembered the deals. His staff remembered the culture that won the client’s trust.
Bill remembered what happened. His people shone a light on the how and the why.

Letting different voices tell their side of the story didn’t just add detail. It added depth and it validated everyone’s contribution to the journey. The finished book is part autobiography, part oral history.

What was the result?

Ion Man was described by the NBR as “the most overlooked business book of the year.”

Another reader emailed Bill’s company to say: “I doubt very much your boss will give two shits about a book review, but having just finished Ion Man this weekend, I wanted to say what an entertaining and inspiring read it has been. New Zealand can be a tough place to do business but what a fab recollection of the ups and downs that a rollercoaster ride like this can be. I wish we had more stories like this instead of the polished media bollocks that only wants to focus on the ‘success’ stories without giving credence to the hard work of many years behind them (and occasionally, the odd dash of ‘luck’).

Thanks for sharing Mr Buckley.”

But the result that matters most isn’t the reviews. It’s that a life’s work — one that would otherwise have lived only in one man’s head — is now recorded for posterity on the page, in Bill’s own unmistakable voice, for his family, his staff, and the next generation of New Zealand engineers.

Working with Bill also reinforced something for me. Founders are often the last people to recognise the value of their own story. They’re so busy building the next thing that they never stop to appreciate what they’ve already made.

How did the client feel after telling their story?

The process gave Bill something he hadn’t expected, a chance to pause and see his own work clearly.

He stopped looking at the business as just a series of problems to solve and power bills to pay, and started to appreciate how much he’d loved the work itself.

“Machining is my artwork,” he reflects in the final pages of the book. “The engineering shop is my studio and a new job is like a blank canvas.”

That’s the real value of capturing a company history. It isn’t just for the readers, or the staff. It’s for the founder and their family. A legacy isn’t only about what you built — it’s about how much you enjoyed building it, and being able to step back and appreciate what it took.

If you’re waiting until you retire to tell your story, you might be waiting too long.

Don’t leave it too late.