Walked away from a decade
in hospitality.
Rebuilt around systems and AI.

My mother carried me across open water when I was eight months old.

A fishing boat out of Vietnam. Open sea. No promise of what waited on the other side. Only the certainty that staying was worse. We made it to Australia.

Everything I have ever built starts with that crossing. She gave me life twice. Once on that boat. Once when she handed me her savings and told me she believed in me.

My father opened a take-away shop in Kingsgrove when I was eight. Food was how my family showed love. Every weekend, everyone around a table. My parents divorced when I was ten. The dinners stopped.

By eight I was already working at my father's takeaway shop in Kingsgrove. Lugging twenty-kilogram bags of potatoes, washing dishes, learning what work is by doing it. By ten I had a newspaper round before school, pushing a wheelbarrow through the streets each morning. Nothing arrives unless you go and get it.

By fifteen I had made decisions no child should have to make. I moved out. I kept going.

I went red every time I had to speak. Then I trained sixty people.

In 2003 I walked into my first corporate role with no degree, no office experience, and one-finger typing at twenty-five words a minute. I had earned my way in. Volunteer work, course after course, every cent I had bet on myself.

At Ingeus I started as a Job Placement Consultant. In a single month I helped over thirty-five people secure full-time work. Twelve months in, I was promoted to Employment Advisor.

What I saw across that desk has stayed with me ever since. I sat across from professionals with double degrees and a decade more experience than me, and watched them stay stuck. Not because they lacked knowledge. Because knowledge without awareness has a ceiling.

The skill that opens doors isn't on your CV. It's reading a room. Adapting. Making the other person feel understood. Once I saw that, I knew I could go anywhere.

So I went into IT. Commonwealth Bank. From the bottom rung. Service Desk Analyst. Within a few years I was offered Trainer and Knowledge Manager.

I should have run. My face turned red the moment anyone looked at me in a group. I felt it before I heard the words. I went toward the role anyway.

I trained more than sixty staff inside Australia's largest bank. Their soft skills, their interpersonal skills, the things that move people up faster than any certification. I oversaw the knowledge management system for the department. Build once. Let it work without you. The instinct that runs every business I own today formed there.

She gave me her savings. She never saw what they built.

Inside the bank, I felt a nudge I couldn't ignore. I had no idea how to cook. No idea how to build a brand. So I asked. Chefs at restaurants I respected, owners of brands I admired, anyone who would answer me. When the student is ready, the teachers appear. I soaked up everything.

Then I flew to Vietnam. A plastic stool on a Saigon footpath. Steam rising off a bowl in front of me. The whole street alive with the same kind of cooking my grandmother had been doing my whole life. That was the moment my resignation letter wrote itself.

Every person I told about the plan discouraged me. One person believed in me. My mother. She had been saving for years while driving a sixteen-year-old car with broken wipers, a rattling engine, and no air conditioning. Instead of replacing it, she handed me twenty thousand dollars and told me she knew I could do it.

Great Aunty Three opened in Enmore in 2012. One month later, my mother passed away. She was fifty-five. She never saw the shop.

The brand carries my grandmother's name and her recipes. The woman who taught me how to cook, who made food the language of our family. The shop became my mother's legacy too. I kept going for both of them.

Featured in Sydney Morning Herald. Daily Telegraph. Broadsheet. Time Out. Sunday Life Magazine. Uber Eats launch partner. A Vietnamese institution built from nothing in the middle of Sydney.

Watch the Uber Eats Australia launch feature →

I wasn't six-foot-two. I showed up anyway.

While the restaurant was still going, and the pressure was still mounting, I made a decision that made no sense on paper.

Sixteen weeks of strict dieting. Daily training that started before service and resumed after close. I stepped on stage at ANB Oceania 2016 and walked off as Men's Over 30 Fitness Model Champion.

It wasn't about a trophy. It was an answer to a question I had been asking myself for years: how you do one thing is how you do everything.

What followed wasn't on the plan.

Wink Models signed me in 2016. I'm still with them today. Brand activations. Television. Print. Online. I worked with brands I had grown up watching, and travelled across Australia for shoots that taught me the commercial machinery behind every brand I had ever admired. Every campaign. Every set. Every brief. Quiet schooling in how the best in the world think about brand.

Read the full 2016 Wink Models profile →

I've never said that publicly before. Not on a website. Not in a pitch. Not in conversation unless someone already knew. Part of it is habit. I tend to keep personal things personal. Part of it, if I'm honest, is imposter syndrome. The quiet voice that says: that world isn't really for someone like you.

I'm putting it here because this is my site, and because someone reading this might be hearing the same voice. If you've ever looked at something and talked yourself out of it before you even tried, this is for you. I almost did. I'm glad I didn't.

I'm not six-foot-two. I never have been. I followed my heart, showed up, and never looked back.