I left school with a Diploma in Interactive Multimedia and a head full of what I could build. Then I went looking for a job in the industry and found nothing. Not a foot in the door, not a maybe. So I did what a lot of people do when the plan falls over. I took the job that was going. I went into sales.
That could have been the end of the story. It was actually the start of it.
The detour that wasn’t a detour
My first proper role was selling blinds and awnings for a furniture business out in the country. Unglamorous, hands-on, and exactly where I needed to be. My manager there, Barbara, taught me three things that still run underneath everything Optimise Online does today.
Plan before you execute. Understand the outcome you want before you start and chase perfection, not because you will ever reach it, but because the pursuit is what makes the work worth doing.
I did not know it then, but that was my real education. Not the diploma. Out selling and installing blinds, awnings, and curtains.
From furniture I moved into telecommunications, then into management, then into business development. Different products, same job underneath: understand a person, understand a problem, and connect the two honestly. Somewhere along the way the roles grew to include marketing and sales and development all at once. I stopped being someone who sold a thing and became someone who built the whole path a customer walks down.
The thing I did at night
Here is the part I never advertised. The whole time, in every one of those jobs, I was building websites.
Evenings. Weekends. For mates, for their businesses, for a gaming community I was part of. Nobody asked me to. There was no plan to turn it into anything. I just could not leave it alone. When you find the thing you would do for free, pay attention to it. It is usually trying to tell you something.
Developing a business in Kalgoorlie taught me the other half. I stepped into a role where the business was at risk of losing its licence, first goal kept it, and then built it into a portfolio of more than 350 clients. But the real value was who I got to sit across from every day: business owners. People who had put their name, their money and their weekends on the line.
They gave me advice I still repeat. Never be the smartest person in the room. Value your time honestly, and anything below that rate you automate, delegate or hand to someone better. Never sit idle. Adapt, change, and know when to let go. I was in my twenties getting a masterclass in running a business from people who had earned every scar. I just had to shut up and listen.
The peak, and the itch
The corporate chapter is where the numbers get loud. I moved to Perth in 2012 having landed a role as a business development manager at CMI, an electrical products company. First year, I brought in $2.5 million in new business. Over my time there we grew revenue from around $10 million to $17.5 million, in a market that was shrinking, not growing.
On paper, I had made it. Good title, good result, a business that valued me and I was quietly restless the entire time.
Because the whole time I was hitting those targets by day, I was building my own thing by night. I had registered the business in 2013. It had already changed names twice before it became Optimise Online. The vision behind it kept getting sharper. Businesses were going to need to be found online, their marketing was going to have to talk to their sales and their systems, and the owners were going to need someone to guide them through all of it who actually understood the whole picture. Not a web guy. Not an ad guy. A guide.
I could see it clearly. I just was not doing it full time and a plan you keep putting off is not really a plan. It is a wish.
The leap
In November 2017 I quit.
No dramatic exit, no burning bridge. Just a decision that the safe version of my life had become the risky one, because it was slowly costing me the work I loved most. I moved into a converted shed and finally did, in daylight, the thing I had been doing in the dark for almost ten years.
The first few months were a strange mix. Everything I had never had time to do suddenly needed doing at once. Sales, websites, invoicing, systems, learning, then whatever shiny new idea had wandered into view that morning. I had to build routines that protected my attention, because freedom without focus is just a larger selection of distractions.
People assume the leap is the scary part. It is not. The scary part is realising nobody is coming to give you permission, and the standard is now entirely yours to set.
What I actually built
Here is the honest answer to why Optimise Online exists.
I built it because I wanted to learn, grow and get better every single day doing work I genuinely love and I built it so the people around me could do the same. Clients and team, both. That is not a slogan I reverse-engineered for a website. It is the reason the business exists at all.
Connections that Matter
When I made my first hires, that principle got tested straight away. A business is easy to talk about in values and hard to live in people. So we built the team around one word: challenge. Not challenge as in conflict. Challenge as in ask the question that makes everyone think harder. If someone on my team disagrees with me and can show me why, that is not a threat to the business. That is the business working exactly as designed.
One of the best things I have watched happen here was a team member who struggled to find her place and could not quite see her own value. Today she is our General Manager and challenges my thinking more than almost anyone. That is the whole point. Enabling people to do what they love is not a perk. It is the product.
We run the business the way Barbara taught me and the Kalgoorlie owners drilled into me. Three-year direction, yearly objectives, ninety-day focus. Plan, then execute. Know the outcome before you start and I keep a personal rule from those early days: I am careful about what I chase, because without a system, I will happily follow every shiny new idea off a cliff.
Proof, not polish
You can tell a lot about a company by its worst day with a client, not its best.
One of my very first customers was an automotive workshop who had taken the time to leave more than thirty negative reviews about a Digital Agency in Perth. Before us, an agency had gutted their website content and torn their rankings apart. They had every reason to never trust a marketing company again. Fair enough.
I did not lead with a pitch. I led with sharing my knowledge to help Simon out of an unfair situation., which led to my engagement. I earned his trust one honest step at a time, rebuilt what had been broken, and turned the thing around. 14 years later they are still clients today. We still catch up every quarter, usually over a burger and a beer, and it is a friendship more than a contract.
That is who we are. Real businesses, real results, real relationships. For the trades, the workshops, the local operators who put everything on the line, generic brand fluff is worthless. What matters is whether the work actually moves the numbers, and whether the people doing it are still in your corner two years later.
It is the same instinct that made me build websites at night for free. The same lesson Barbara gave me on a showroom floor. The same standard those business owners in Kalgoorlie held themselves to. It all connects. It always did. I just needed well over a decade and a shed to see the shape of it.
Why any of this matters to you
If you are running a business and weighing up who to trust with the part of it that lives online, you are not really buying content or rankings or a website. You are buying a decision about who gets to speak for you when you are not in the room.
I started Optimise Online because I wanted to spend my life learning, improving and doing work I love, alongside people doing the same, in service of owners who feel exactly the way I felt sitting in that corporate role: capable of more, and quietly certain there was a better way to do this.
The pursuit of perfection is not about arriving. Barbara had that right more than two decades ago. It is about who you become on the way there, and who you bring with you.
So here is the only question worth sitting with. If you found the work you would do for free, and the people you would happily do it beside, what would stop you from building your whole business around it?
