I established Great Aunty Three in 2011, the year I signed the lease. Approvals, drawings and the build took the next year. Great Aunty Three opened in Enmore in August 2012, with my grandma's recipes and my mum's twenty thousand dollars. The shop carries my grandma's name. The recipes came down from her grandmother to her, and from her to me.
Mum passed away a month later, in September 2012. She never saw it. I promised her I'd see it through. I kept that promise until 2022.
Sydney turned up. So did the press. SBS, the Sydney Morning Herald, the Daily Telegraph, Broadsheet, Time Out Sydney, Sunday Life and Urban List. We were an UberEats launch partner in Sydney. We landed in the city's top ten for pho and banh mi.
And I was the bottleneck in every one of those eleven years.
Every decision came through me. Every problem, every service. Team paid, suppliers paid, rent paid, me last. Longer hours each year for less. I hadn't built a business. I'd bought myself a job.
In 2022 I handed the reins to the team and walked away to focus on myself.
Four years later, I could see they needed help
I want to be precise about this, because it matters.
I don't own Great Aunty Three. I haven't since 2022. The team who took it on have run it since, and it's theirs.
In 2026 they moved the venue from Enmore to Pyrmont. A new room, a new neighbourhood, and everything built since 2011 to carry across. The brand needed a bit of help with marketing, so I came back to give it a refresh and help with the transition.
So I run their marketing now, behind the scenes. Their brand, their website, their socials, their search and AI visibility. As their provider. Not their owner.
Why that's the only reference I need
Anyone can say they understand hospitality. What I can point at is this: four years after I walked away, with no reason left to be paying attention, I still knew that room and what a brand that age needs to stay current. So when the venue moved and the brand needed a hand with marketing, I offered. My grandmother’s name is on that shop, and her face is on the brand. I do not own it any more. I still want to see it do well.
I know that venue's services, its numbers, its suppliers and its margins in a way no agency could, because I lived in it for eleven years. And I know exactly which decisions eat an owner alive, because they ate me.
I ran all of Great Aunty Three's marketing myself for eleven years. The socials, the websites, the lot. We never hired anyone.
I'm not a marketer who read about hospitality. I'm the operator who was the bottleneck, and I build the thing I wish I'd had.
What I do for them now
Great Aunty Three has been trading since 2012. That is a long time in Sydney hospitality, and it brings a problem nobody warns you about. The room is an institution, the food has not slipped, and there is a new venue opening every month with a bigger budget and a louder feed. Staying known is a different job to getting known.
- Brand refresh, so a room that old reads as current without chasing whatever is trending
- Website, built and maintained
- Social media management
- Local SEO, and visibility in AI search and LLM answers
- Getting the story out, because the story is the one thing a new place cannot copy
- Systems so the venue runs without the owner standing in the middle of it
If your venue has earned its place and now has to keep it, that is the work.
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