It took me eleven years and a business I loved to work that out. You cannot fix the business while the operator is falling apart. So I rebuilt both, the same discipline, and I call it The Return.
Opening your first cafe or restaurant? Thirty minutes before you sign the lease. No pitch. Or type your age, see every week you have left, then decide what to spend them on. No signup.
Three ways in. Everything here is written by me, and nothing is theory off a slide.
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Rebuilding a person with the same discipline you would rebuild a business. That is the whole idea, and it is not a metaphor. I ran a Sydney restaurant for eleven years and it took everything I had, and the lesson underneath all of it was the same one every time. You cannot fix the business while the operator is falling apart. Fix the person first, or the business just breaks again in a new shape.
Most people who talk about the return have never run a business. Most operators who have run one will not sit down and write about the return. I do both. 8S is the daily practice, the operator half. The 10 Laws of Alignment are the patterns underneath it. No Plan B is the long version. The essays are the field notes, written while it is still happening, not once it is safely over.
I built the prison, then I built the key. Now I hand it to operators ready to walk out.
Three ways in, free to read. The daily practice, the pattern language, and the long-form essay this whole idea is named after.
By eight he was helping at his father's takeaway shop in Kingsgrove. Seven days a week, lugging twenty-kilogram bags of potatoes, washing dishes, learning what work is by doing it. By ten a newspaper round before school each morning, pushing a wheelbarrow. Nothing arrives unless you go and get it.
His mother carried him across open water from Vietnam at eight months old. A fishing boat, no promise of what waited on the other side. The first family home, Enmore, early 1980s. The aunty who wanted a niece. The food, the work, the showing up. The pattern stayed.
Founded Great Aunty Three in 2011, opened in Enmore in August 2012. The brand carrying his grandmother's name and her recipes. Sydney Morning Herald. Daily Telegraph. Uber Eats launch partner. His mother passed a month after the doors opened, in September 2012, never seeing what her gift had built. He kept going. He walked away in 2022. Worse off financially, but with the kind of clarity you can't buy.
Now he writes The Return, and keeps a studio running underneath it, on purpose kept separate from the writing. Forkcast runs Day One, the 30 day launch package for Sydney venues about to open, already earning its keep. He builds its tools himself, including a booking system called EatNew and an AI receptionist called Cyan. This site carries the writing, the work with first-venue founders through First Venue, and the work with venue owners through the Full Plate Method. The studio stays on its own site. Working on his first book, No Plan B, the operator's manual for the founders walking the same road. Featured Wink Models talent since 2016.
It starts the way it always starts. Small drift, justified. Then bigger drift, defended. Then one morning you don't recognise the life you're in. No Plan B is the lived account of how that happens, and the specific work of coming back from inside it. Not self-help. A reckoning.
Written for the founder rebuilding quietly. For the operator done performing. For the person ready to stop outsourcing the only responsibility that ever mattered.
One email at launch. No nurture sequences. No noise.
If your question isn't here, email me. I read every message myself.
Sydney operator, founder, and writer. Takeaway shop at eight, a newspaper round at ten, then WorkDirections, Commonwealth Bank, and eleven years running Great Aunty Three, the Enmore restaurant he built from an empty locksmith's shop, with his nan's recipes and his mum's twenty thousand dollars as the first money in. He walked away in 2022. Now he writes about the rebuild and calls it The Return. The full seven-chapter story lives on the about page.
Rebuilding a person with the same discipline you would rebuild a business. Most people who talk about the return have never run a business. Most operators who run one will not write about the return. Michael does both. The idea, the 8S structure, the 10 Laws, and the essays are all one body of work about it.
Eight checks Michael runs on himself every morning, body, mind, and spirit treated as one job. Free to read on the 8S page. It is the operator half of The Return, the daily discipline side of rebuilding a person.
Ten patterns Michael has watched hold up again and again, in his own life and in the operators he has worked with. Free to read on the 10 Laws page. The pattern language behind The Return.
Michael's memoir, unpublished, waitlist open now. The lived account of losing everything and finding the way back, written for the founder rebuilding quietly, not the one performing it for an audience.
Michael's five-step restaurant revamp: Pinpoint, Lock, Attract, Train, Embed. Three ways in: the $27 Playbook (self-serve), the 10-Day Sprint (the diagnosis, by application) and the 90-Day Revamp (the full rebuild, one client at a time, by application). Pricing for the Sprint and the Revamp is shared after a call. Full details on the coaching page.
His main work is First Venue: sitting with first-venue founders in Sydney before they sign the lease. Once it is signed, Day One by Forkcast builds the brand, website and launch in 30 days. For venues already open and leaking, the Full Plate Method, one client at a time, plus the $27 Playbook. The writing is free. Off this site he runs Forkcast and builds its tools himself, including a booking system called EatNew and an AI receptionist called Cyan. The full list is on the ventures page.
Sydney, Australia. His mother carried him across open water from Vietnam at eight months old. He was raised in Enmore and still operates out of Sydney today.
Still got a question? Email me →
The Note is the newsletter for people following the build. Field updates, framework excerpts, advance reading from No Plan B. New subscribers receive the 8S Daily Tracker as a welcome gift: the same five-minute practice Michael runs himself.
Sent only when there is something worth sending.
Subscribe to The NoteNine guides on Australian restaurant profit, food cost, wages, rent, menu pricing and what it costs to open. Industry benchmarks, eleven years on the floor, and the answer in the first paragraph. Free to read. Numbers, or it does not go up.
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Short essays on drift, rebuild, and the specific work of coming back. Written the same way I build. Plainly, and from what it cost. Free to read.
Real Australian law, real numbers. What I wish someone told me before I signed my first restaurant lease in 2011.
Read the essay →