You're here to figure out if I'm the real deal.

The fundamentals — TSA Group / Telstra, 6 years, Perth

During uni I started on a Telstra sales floor doing data entry and screening broadband applications. Not exactly the dream.

But I fell in love with the craft of sales. Not the hustle. The craft. Figuring out what someone actually needs versus what they say they need. I ended up being recognised as Top National Consultant out of hundreds of reps, which honestly still feels a bit surreal for someone who never planned to be in sales.

Then I moved into retention; running campaigns to save customers who wanted to cancel. That’s where something clicked for me that I still use today: the stated reason someone leaves is rarely the real reason. Discovery changes outcomes more than persuasion ever will.

I also got my first taste of leading people. Four of my team members got promoted into management roles during my time, and watching them grow into those roles was probably the most rewarding part. It taught me that coaching (real coaching, not just feedback) is what turns individual performance into team performance.

Six years in that pressure cooker taught me three things. Sales is craft, not personality. Retention is where trust is really built. And developing people is how the whole thing scales. I didn’t have the language for it yet, but everything I build today started here.

• 6 years
• Top National Consultant
• 40–55% save rate
• 4 team members promoted

Fundamentals become systems — Accor Plus

At TSA, I’d learned retention one customer at a time. At Accor Plus, I got to see what happens when you zoom out and design for it at the programme level.

I took on an underperforming loyalty programme and rebuilt the sales strategy and team culture from the ground up. It ended up being the programme’s highest growth period in a decade, with a 71.67% renewal rate, the highest in APAC. But honestly, the numbers weren’t the interesting part. The interesting part was seeing how retention and expansion compound when the customer experience is designed deliberately.

The other thing I learned, the hard way, is that managing people at organisational scale is a completely different discipline from coaching a small team. You can’t just be a good coach. You have to build the system that makes good coaching repeatable.

• Decade-high growth
• 71.67% renewal rate (highest in APAC)

Creating demand from nothing — UberEATS Perth and Sidekicker WA

This was the chapter where I learned that early-stage growth is a completely different muscle. Not retention, not systems. Pure demand creation.

At UberEATS, I was on the Perth launch team. Contrary to popular belief at the time we had no brand recognition, no case studies, no playbook. Just cold outreach, in-person visits, and selling a vision that hadn’t been proven locally. I personally closed 117 restaurant partnerships, 39% of the entire platform at launch. Not because I’m some sales genius. When you’re launching from zero, there’s nobody else to do it. You just show up every day and figure it out.

At Sidekicker, same thing. First boots on ground for the WA market. Building the team, the pipeline, and the GTM from scratch.

Both taught me the same thing: early-stage growth has nothing to do with funnel optimisation. It’s about proving the thing works by doing it yourself, before there’s anything to systematise. That lesson shapes everything I do with founders today.

• 117 restaurants closed personally
• 39% of Perth UberEATS at launch
• 2 markets launched from zero

The full stack — Perth is OK · Austal Ships / MARINELINK · Photography

Between Sidekicker and CorePlan, I didn’t take a break. But I did let myself explore.

I picked up a camera and got serious about photography. Travelled across Western Australia shooting landscapes and eventually moved into model photography. It had nothing to do with commercial work, but it taught me something about creative storytelling and visual communication that quietly showed up in everything I built after.

Perth is OK was one of the most fun things I’ve ever worked on. It started organically; I was a regular at Perth events, constantly posting and promoting the city. I bought a bunch of their “Make Perth OK Again” hats and started handing them out at parties (I may have gone slightly overboard). Eventually the founders, Luke and Blake, reached out and asked if I could help them win commercial clients. So I came on as their BD and campaign strategist and we ended up landing IKEA, Buy West Eat Best, Captain Cook Cruises, and a bunch of others. What I loved about it was taking something genuinely grassroots; a community built on people loving their city; and figuring out how to make it commercially sustainable without killing what made it special.

Austal Ships was a completely different world. I led product marketing for MARINELINK Fleet; a system that gave ferry operators a live, integrated view of their fleet’s performance, schedule, comfort, and fuel. The challenge was making deep technology make sense to traditional buyers who cared about uptime and cost, not dashboards and AI. COVID killed the industry before we could scale, which was gutting. But bridging complex tech and conservative industries turned out to be the perfect warm-up for what came next.

This era taught me I could move between brand, product marketing, partnerships, B2B sales, and creative work, and enjoy all of it. That range is what I took into CorePlan.

Building the whole thing — CorePlan, Founding COO, 5 years

CorePlan is where everything came together.

Alex Goulios had built Springtech with a vision to digitise the mining industry. When I joined, I talked to anyone and everyone in mining to understand what was really going on. And then it hit me. We had to reposition and rebrand the whole thing. Focus on the drilling contractors first (bit like ‘save the cheerleader, save the world’ from Heroes 😅) and build from there. The early days were a blur. Figuring out GTM across contractors vs geos, mid-market vs enterprise. Most days felt like controlled chaos, but the good kind. We built the full commercial engine from zero; sales, marketing, customer success, hiring, RevOps. All in mining tech, an industry where trust matters more than features and relationships outlast contracts.

Over five years we grew to $6.5M ARR and 100+ customers. We found a super large (and super loud) gong and banged it every time a new customer came onboard. We threw legendary company parties (the CorePlan Bogan Bash being a personal highlight). And a silly line I wrote early on, “help people in mining work better together in the modern age,” somehow became the actual mission statement.

But tbh the part I’m most proud of is the team. A crew of eager, smart, and quirky people who were unusually passionate about the business. Watching them grow into roles they didn’t think they could do. That was the best bit. Because you can design the perfect sales process, but if you don’t have the right people running it, none of it holds.

• $6.5M ARR from zero
• 100+ customers
• 5 years

Why advisory — Now

After six chapters (call centres, loyalty programmes, marketplaces, community brands, maritime tech, mining SaaS) the pattern was clear. The thing I keep getting pulled back to is the zero-to-one commercial build. Taking a company with a strong product but no commercial engine, and building the machine that finds, wins, and grows customers. That’s the work I love most.

I could’ve done that again as an operator. Joined another startup, built another engine from inside.

But I realised something: the founders who need this most, the ones at $0 to $1M ARR trying to close their first 10 or 50 customers, can’t afford a full-time COO. But they can’t afford to get GTM wrong, either. One bad quarter burning cash on the wrong strategy, one premature sales hire, one pricing model that doesn’t stick, and they’re cooked.

So here’s what I do. I sit beside founders while they build their own commercial engine. Not by handing them a playbook. By building it with them.