About me
I know how hard it is to run a small business and the problems that come with it.
I started selling fruit off the back of a truck when I was 17. Then I joined the Army, where I was managing budgets up to $20 million. After that I've spent the last 27 years in implementation, sales, solutions, and leadership. Some of those roles meant expanding hardware and auction businesses. Others meant scaling software operations globally with companies like IBM and TechnologyOne in the mix. I've also managed a 30-person consulting firm delivering solutions across Asia Pacific.
More than half of those years were in implementation, pre-sales, and solution design. Works management, asset management, inventory, and field service systems. For hospitals, freight and transportation, power and water utilities, local councils, and businesses ranging from small operators to large enterprises. I designed the UX for three separate enterprise apps' first mobile rollouts, the ones maintenance crews, field service teams, and trades workers actually used out in the field. I designed maintenance and quoting systems used across entire state housing networks.
I've also spent time on the other side of those systems, running the operations they were built to support. Army workshops. Council workshops. P&L responsibility for trades teams. The profitability of operations that had to make money or close. I know what the people using these systems are dealing with, what they're responsible for, and what they need those systems to deliver.
For 15 years I designed solutions like these and handed them to development teams to build. That's how it had to work. A real application meant a real development team, a real budget, and timelines measured in months. Hundreds of thousands of dollars at minimum. Sometimes millions. Out of reach for most small and mid-sized businesses no matter how well the problem was scoped. AI changed that. Now I can scope the solution and build it myself, without a full development team behind me, which means small and mid-sized businesses get enterprise-grade design thinking at a cost and timeline that actually fits.
What most consultants don't have is the operator's perspective. I've sat through the late nights chasing things that should have been done. I've made the calls that didn't go well. I've had the weeks where everything piled up at once.
I'm based on the Mornington Peninsula. I work with small and mid-sized business owners across Australia, in person locally and on video everywhere else. If you're not sure where to start, or whether AI is even the right answer for your business, that's exactly the kind of conversation I want to have.
Have a quick question instead? There's a chatbot in the bottom-right corner of this page. Ask it anything and it'll give you a straight answer. Good for one-off questions that don't need a full hour.
