Trevor Dowswell
Author ● Entrepreneur ● Dishwasher
Trevor is an author, with six published children's books to date, as well as thirty more in the works that will be released over the next couple years. The topics of these stories span from the simple adventures of an eclectic group of forest friends to a young boy's wild journeys through space and time, as well as to the whimsical mysteries of a hidden faerie land. He is the creator of the Storybook Crate product that features these stories and pairs them with a bedtime system to help children master their sleepytime skills.
Trevor is a product architect, designer, and developer who has produced numerous video entertainment solutions that are in use in hotels and gyms in over 36+ countries. He has also done the copywriting, UI/UX design, frontend, and backend development for public access WiFi authentication systems that have been used in hundreds of hotels, resorts, student housing, casinos, and conference centers over the past 15 years.
Trevor is a creative director, typesetter, graphic designer is a copywriter who has created campaigns and pieces that have reached millions through the mediums of magazines, brochures, billboards, poster, websites, and the like. He has also been the subject or author of numerous professional pieces, appearing in trade journals and professional publications both online and in print, such as:
- Today's Hotelier: Strategize, Organize, Mobilize; Creating a plan to tackle hospitality’s leading cybersecurity risks
- Authority Magazine: The Future Is Now: Trevor Dowswell of Hotel Internet Services on How Their Technological Innovation Will Shake Up the Tech Scene
- Hospitality Technology: A Smarter Approach to Hotel Wi-Fi Network Management for IoT and AI-Based Services
- Hotelier Magazine: Hotels are taking in-room entertainment to the next level
In whatever spare time he has left, Trevor finds himself mostly washing the endless piles of dishes that come with having a family of five, and he being the only family member who can't cope with a messy kitchen. (Seriously though, when putting dishes in the sink, what sort of sociopath stacks plates on top of bowls?!)
In the Beginning
A Canadian native, Trevor was born in the middle of the Rocky Mountains in Cranbrook, B.C., the jewel of the East Kootenays, with a staggering population of ten thousand in the early '80s, and reportedly the sunniest town in British Columbia.
However, by the age of 3, his family had moved to Richmond, just outside of Vancouver, the ninth rainiest city in Canada, and he considers Vancouver to be where he "grew up." It was here he firmly solidified his lifelong love of hiking, camping, skiing, and all things outdoors. It was also here where he received the bulk of his education. An avid reader and a sponge for knowledge, he started high school at age of 10, on track to graduate at 13.
Yet, not having any clue what he wanted to do in life, instead of hurdling towards an early graduation, he began exploring various subjects, doing deep dives into etymology and physics, and picking up new subjects such as architectural drafting.
Then life really took a turn. Plucked from the simple, quiet life in sleepy, semi-rural Richmond, his family move to Los Angeles - the opposite of simple, quiet, and rural. It was in LA that he finished his last year of high school (after taking almost a year off post-move) at 15, and by 16, opting not do to any college at that time, he was into the workforce.
A Whirlwind of Professionalism
Taking his sponginess of knowledge into the workforce, Trevor churned through tasks like butter, picking up a diverse skillset from being a 35mm film projectionist to fluency in Quark Express and Adobe InDesign, all the while being promoted within the first couple months in every industry he tackled.
After a descent stint working in a museum, Trevor took his first professional writing job in 2002, becoming a copywriter and expanding into the roles of campaign manager and marketing director.
After establishing a since-failed marketing company in 2006, and struggling with finding competent partners, he set a goal of becoming a professional in enough trades that he could again venture out on his own one day and have zero reliance on others - not that he didn't want to work with others, but he didn't want to be forced into dependency on another because of his own shortcomings. This goal would shape all of his subsequent career choices.
The next many years would be a whirlwind. Having already worked over 30 different jobs at a professional level up to this point, it was time to tackle whole new areas of technical skill, as well as those areas he felt the weakest in.
This next chapter started in the film industry, managing a post production audio studio, where he had the opportunity to work on all manner of fascinating projects with fascinating people, along with dabbling in media conversions, sound recording, dialogue editing, and sound effects editing (go ProTools!).
From movies, he took a hard right into sales and learned the joys of cold calling, door-to-door, and the close.
Then, it was onto years of stacking invaluable layers of experience and talents one on top the other including: web design, computer networking, project management, product architecture, software development, and public speaking.
Creating the Future
Along the way, Trevor would simultaneously embark on one of the most important and life-changing endeavors he could ever conceive - parenthood.
His first child, a step-daughter of 2 years old, was his stepping stone into fatherhood - or perhaps it was more of a cliff jump. Nothing prepares one better for parenting than hurtling headfirst into the Terrible Twos. However, he was up for the challenge and evidently not deterred by a bellyflop or two, as evidenced by a subsequent daughter and son. With a 5-year age gap between the eldest, and an 8-year gap between the youngest, Trevor and his wife were apparently attempting to have young children around for as long as humanly possible.
Trevor always felt that "father" was one of the most important positions he would hold in life, as through this role, he was helping the shape the future - not just for his own children, but for every life they touched, for every corner of the world they helped, and for generations to come. Being a father of young children were the glory years, filled with trips to the zoo, hikes, bike rides, games, and endless laughter.
Yet, the forward march of time is indeed as inexorable as it is inevitable, and Trevor and his wife are now closer to the era of grandbabies than they are to those sleepless nights and snug-filled days of yore.
However, there is one aspect of the "father" role Trevor realized he might not have to relinquish. From the beginning, he read to the kids every night, and if he didn't have a book, he made up a story. For literally hundreds of nights, year after year after year, he and the kids churned through books. It was "their time", a time of magic and wonder, as large as the universe of their imagination. As the kids grew older and their interests and bedtime routines changed, he saw the unavoidable end of bedtime storytime. Though not exactly the same, he realized that if he shared his stories with the world, it didn't have to end, and while not exactly the same as lying in bed with ones own children, helping to create that same experience for other parents and children would have to act as a sufficient replacement.
On Writing
Trevor wrote and illustrated his first book, "Pierogi and Weevil," when he was three. Terrible at printing and spelling at that young age, his mom did the lettering for him, and while that first work was sadly lost after one too many family moves, and along with it its storyline and details, Trevor still vividly remembers the little blobs that were the characters Pierogi, that little pocket of potato and cheese, and Weevil, Trevor's favorite type of beetle (still to this day, despite having an infestation in his pantry years later).
Since that time, Trevor has tried his hand at many forms of writing, some for fun and some professionally. For fun, he wrote short stories, poetry, jokes, and even gave a shot at fiction novel writing. Professionally, he was a copywriter for many years, writing everything from magazine articles to billboards, later on he did a significant volume of technical writing as the Chief Technology Officer of a wireless networking company, and then finally brought his "fun" writing over into the professional arena by combining short stories and poetry into children's books.
And it turned out that children's books were Trevor's favorite form of writing and all of his experiences and all of the many roles he's held and talents he's accumulated happen to perfectly blend into what it takes to not only write children's books, but get them out to the world. Therefore, he rearranged his entire life to focus exclusively on producing books and sundry items, such as stuffed animals and stickers.