The Trials and Tribulations of Going It Alone

This is my 4th business. Well, 3rd real one (I’ll explain later).

I started this one the same way I started the others — with almost nothing.

If I had 3 businesses prior, why did I start this one with next to nothing, you ask? To explain that, I first have to give you a brief history.

1st Business: The backpacking plumber

It was 2007. I was travelling around Europe when I got a gig doing price work — building plant rooms in London, to be more specific.

I kept being handed larger jobs until I had 18 plumbers working for me. Great stuff, right?

One small problem: I’d just turned 20. I had no idea how to manage 18 plumbers and no idea how to run a company. I hadn’t even been foreman on a job before. The only things I had were audacity and naivety.

Enter a little-known financial crisis called the GFC. It sent me home with my tail between my legs and no hope of ever seeing the outstanding receivables I was owed. Nevertheless, I am quite proud of what we achieved whilst my debtors were paying their invoices. I learnt many things that can only be taught by experiencing them first-hand.

2nd Business: The reluctant sole trader

Things were not much better back home. My dream of coming back cashed-up and starting a 50/50 venture with my father were dead in the water — I was flat broke.

Things were not exactly going well for him either. When I left for Europe my father had a plumbing company with more than 300 employees. When I returned, he had fewer than 50 and had been losing money for 6 months straight. Developers were going belly-up on his contracts left, right and centre. The bloodbath was as bad in Brisbane as it was in London.

Having only ever worked in commercial plumbing construction (an industry completely decimated in South-East Queensland in 2008 to 2010), I was running out of options. The only other skill I had was IT — I had spent my whole life building, breaking and tinkering with computers.

With no formal qualifications, I taught myself HTML and CSS and built a website. I got a few local gigs managing office IT services. It was a lifestyle business, and a modest one at that, but it was better than driving a haul truck out in the mines, which is what most other commercial construction workers were doing at the time.

3rd Business: The father and son joint venture

In 2014 the market had recovered and my father saw I didn’t really have much of a plan for the future. He made me an offer: a 50/50 joint venture in a pipe relining business that I was responsible for setting up and growing, with essentially no start-up capital.

I was handed a barely roadworthy ute, a second-hand drain jetter we had paid cash for, a hand-me-down first-generation black-and-white drain camera, and my own hand tools.

Within 18 months we had procured lots of new equipment, put on staff, and had a balance sheet reaching new heights most months that passed. Everything was paid for with business revenue.

I saw a problem. Being in a niche industry, I could see us hitting a ceiling soon. We were already number one on Google for our targeted keywords and I didn’t have much experience in any other form of marketing beyond digital.

I always looked at national search data and could see Sydney as the A-league in terms of market size. My father had reservations — the Sydney market was very developed with well-established companies who have much bigger wallets.

I was not deterred. We sat down and I was informed in no uncertain terms that should I proceed with my plans to go to Sydney, I would relinquish control over the pipe relining business in Brisbane and have my shares bought from me. Still not deterred, we negotiated a deal over the course of the next 3 months, where I received title to some plant and equipment (all the old stuff we owned outright) and a small cash settlement that enabled me to survive while I got things off the ground.

4th Business: Maida

As I wrote this article, Maida had just hit the front page of Google — an awesome achievement considering we had only been open for trading for 3 months. But being 8th on Google is about as advantageous as being 108th. A milestone achievement, but a long way to go yet.

Maida is only just getting started here in Sydney. For anyone interested, I wanted to give a candid account of how it began.