I was working in hospitality, going to uni, and honestly doing everything except my studies while trying to figure out what else was out there for me. Deep down, I had this feeling that I was meant to do more. I wasn’t content with the situation I was in. I felt like I was just coasting through life, and I knew I needed to push for something bigger. The idea of building a business, something that was actually mine, felt far-fetched, but I think that’s exactly why I was so drawn to it. I still remember sitting at uni watching YouTubers around my age on my laptop, just filming day-in-the-life videos as ecommerce drop shipping business owners. At the time, it looked unreal to me, the freedom, the lifestyle, the cool cars, the fact they were doing their own thing. It pulled me in. It made me curious. And that curiosity is what led me to dive straight into learning drop shipping through YouTube & then eventually paying for a 1 on 1 mentor myself.

Then during COVID, alongside childhood friends, I co-founded and helped scale an ecommerce education company that eventually grew to over 5,500 students and around 20 staff. I want to be really clear about something, that was not something I did on my own. It came from hard work, yes, but also from being around good people who had skills and knowledge that were stronger than mine in certain areas. That experience taught me something really powerful: you have to lean into your strengths. And when it comes to your weaknesses, you have two choices. Either you spend the time developing them, or you bring in someone who is already great at that thing. In reality, if you want to grow something properly, you’ll probably need to do both. You can’t do everything alone, and as a business grows, it forces you to grow too. You have to keep learning, keep adapting, and keep pushing. If you’re not doing that, you end up standing still. 

I started in sales by taking calls myself, before moving into hiring, training and developing the team as we scaled. We hired aggressively, built out our departments, and I became heavily involved in creating the systems behind the growth — hiring processes, onboarding, SOPs, KPIs, training frameworks, and leadership structures across multiple roles. As the team expanded across Australia and internationally, I gained hands-on experience in hiring, managing, and building structure within a fast-moving digital business. At that point, my role became about balancing execution and innovation — keeping the machine running through strong people, culture, and performance, while also constantly looking for ways to optimise systems, improve delivery, and support further growth. That season taught me how to grow with a business — from doing the work myself, to building teams that could do it at scale.

I built an 8 figure business without AI. The foundations I have in business, from strategy and systems through to leadership and decision making, all came from real experience. They came from being in the trenches, making mistakes, learning fast, and figuring things out through action. So when AI started becoming more mainstream and landed on my radar, I paid very close attention and went deep on it. What I realised quickly was that AI changes the speed of everything. Things that once took months can now be done in days, and sometimes even hours, minutes or seconds if you know how to use it properly. Over the last few years, I have focused on integrating AI into real workflows that support better thinking and stronger execution. The goal is not to rely on AI to do the work for you. The goal is to use it as a tool to move faster, think more clearly, and execute more effectively.