Built from scratch.
The hard way.
Seven chapters. Each one taught a specific skill that now powers what I build. Read it once and you'll know who you're talking to.
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.
My first uniform was McDonald's.
Sydney Entertainment Centre at sixteen, rotated to George Street in the CBD. Cashier. Front of house. Every transaction under a minute was the target. I thrived in that pressure. School never taught me efficiency. McDonald's did.
By twenty I had moved into property. Junior Property Assistant. I was the youngest in the room and I knew it, so I learned the room. Who moved the deals forward. Who got the calls returned. What got noticed. What got forgotten.
By twenty-two I was offered a retail management role. Forty thousand a year. To a kid who had moved out at fifteen, that wasn't a salary. It was proof. I grabbed it with both hands and ran the floor for two years.
Three jobs. Four years. One lesson:
Show up. Pay attention. Outwork the title on your business card. That formula has built every company I have owned since.
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 qualification for it, 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 WorkDirections, later 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.
I signed the lease in 2011. Then came approvals, drawings, and a build that ate the year. Great Aunty Three opened in Enmore in August 2012. One month later, on Father’s Day weekend, my mother passed away. She was fifty-five. She never saw the shop.
The brand carries my grandmother's name. Great Aunty Three is her. The recipes came down from her grandmother to her, and from her to me. She is 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.
The full story of walking away, and why I run its marketing again today →
Featured in Sydney Morning Herald. Daily Telegraph. Broadsheet. Time Out. The AU Review. Uber Eats launch partner. A Vietnamese institution built from nothing in the middle of Sydney.
I had not built a business. I had bought a job.
Eleven years in, I was still the bottleneck. Every decision routed through me. The business could not run without me. I was the system.
I had watched this happen to my father at the takeaway in Kingsgrove. I had seen what it cost him. The pressure, the toll, the way it pulled the family apart. And then, without realising it, I had built the same prison. Different industry. Same bars.
Balancing the floor and parenting, I was missing the moments that don't come back. The weight of always being needed, in the restaurant, on the floor, in the kitchen, put serious pressure on my marriage. Eventually something had to give.
Then COVID hit. Hospitality shut down. What was already fragile became impossible.
Around the same time, my grandmother passed away. The woman whose recipes I had built the whole thing around. The woman whose name was on the sign.
I was exhausted. And for the first time I saw it with complete clarity:
Talent and effort without systems is just expensive labour.
I left worse off than the day I started. Eleven years in. Drained, financially, emotionally, every way that counts. The only thing I walked out with was clarity, and the certainty I'd build again. Clarity, earned the hard way, is starting capital all of its own.
I walked away. The hardest decision of my life, and the right one.
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.
I went back to property because it had the lowest barrier to entry.
I got my licence. I never really enjoyed the work. I did it properly anyway, and going further than anyone expected turned clients into people who trusted me. Some of them are friends today. Managing commercial portfolios. Recovering arrears, selling assets above reserve. And it put the lesson right back in front of me. Every operation that ran clean ran on systems. Not on one person holding the whole thing together.
Then it crept up on me. I was falling back into a job. Becoming the bottleneck again, in a different disguise.
I thought about CommBank. I thought about the restaurant. I thought about my father's takeaway. The same pattern, across three decades: the person who builds the thing becomes the thing the business cannot run without.
Systems were the lever. Build them once. Document everything. Let them run. Get your life back.
So I built the system I needed. One operator running the whole thing without becoming the thing it cannot run without. I tested it on myself first, in real estate. It worked for agents. It worked for small businesses. Anyone running the lot on their own.
Then it dawned on me. I already knew exactly who needed this most. Venue owners. I had been one for eleven years, running a restaurant on nothing but myself, and nobody had built it for me.
This is my story. Now let’s build yours.
You have the vision. Helping you build it is what I love doing.
Start with The Note. Real stories from the rebuild, sent when there is something worth saying.