The story behind Evolve to Grow.

The story

Everything I teach, I learned the hard way.

The full story

From Seight to Evolve to Grow.

The first business that broke me.

I started Seight in 2008. Engineering and industrial design degree from Swinburne, a head full of how things are made, and a cycling habit that turned into a business. We made custom cycling kit — teams, clubs, brands — manufactured offshore, sold across Australia.

For seven years it worked. Then in 2014–15 the Australian dollar fell off a cliff. Our import costs went up 35% inside twelve months. The margins that had funded the business evaporated. I'd signed personal guarantees on supplier terms when I was 28 and didn't know what they meant. I learned what they meant.

By the bottom of it I was carrying around $200,000 of debt, my marriage had ended, I was renting a bedroom from a friend, and I was running a business that was eating me alive. The business was technically still operating. Nothing about it was working.

Two years of cutting.

The rebuild took two years. Not because it was complicated — because there was no shortcut. Every supplier had to be renegotiated. Every cost line cut to the bone. Every relationship I hadn't yet burned, I had to keep. I worked harder than I'd ever worked, on a level of operational discipline I didn't know I had until the alternative was bankruptcy.

What I learned in those two years became the spine of everything I now do as a coach. Foundation comes first. Cash discipline, legal posture, real operating data. Without that, every other layer cracks under load. I knew it because I'd lived it backwards — built the business on a Foundation that couldn't hold weight, then had to rebuild it underneath the structure while the structure stayed up.

I sold Seight in 2017. Not for a fortune. But the business that walked out the door was profitable, sellable, and didn't need me to operate. That was the win.

The phone call that became coaching.

The moment that pushed me into coaching was small. A friend running a $1.2M creative agency called me — not for advice, just to vent. Within 15 minutes I could see the four things he needed to do in the next 90 days. He didn't have access to those four things because he was inside the problem. I was outside it.

That conversation made me realise something obvious that I'd missed for two years. The lessons I'd been forced to learn the hard way — through bankruptcy threat, through divorce, through the rebuild — were the same lessons every other service-business owner was about to learn. Most of them weren't going to learn them the way I had. Most of them were going to lose the business first.

There wasn't anyone offering what I needed back then. Not someone selling a framework they'd read in a book. Not a hype merchant. Not an accountability buddy. Someone who'd been to the bottom and built back. So I started coaching, in 2017, because that gap shouldn't exist.

Eight years deep — what that produces.

My longest active coaching relationship started in 2018 — eight years and counting. That doesn't happen by accident. It also doesn't happen with a framework someone bought at a conference and applied to everyone.

What happens at year five of a coaching relationship is very different from what happens at year one. Year one is foundation work. Year two is systems. Year three is the Triad — strategy, marketing, sales, fulfilment. Year four onwards is Inner Core work — the founder's own evolution, the team's leadership, the harder conversations about identity and what next. By year eight you're in genuine partnership. You're not a coach. You're not a consultant. You're the person they think with, on the conversations that count.

21 active clients sit somewhere along that arc. Some at year one, some at year five, one at year eight. The Business Evolution Framework is what holds those relationships together — it gives us a shared map so the work is sequenced, not random.

How the BEF actually got built.

The BEF wasn't built from theory. It was built from patterns — eight years of watching the same five layers go wrong in the same order across different businesses. Foundation cracks first. Then Supporting Systems. Then the Success Triad bottlenecks. Then the founder hits an Inner Core ceiling. Then Core Fulfilment — the business serving the life — drifts further out of reach.

The five layers are paired with five stages because what matters at Survival is not what matters at Take-Off, and what matters at Take-Off is not what matters at Resource Maturity. The map locates the business in two dimensions: which layer needs work, at which stage. Then we sequence the moves.

It's not a productised framework I sell on a course. It's the operating model behind every 1:1 coaching engagement. There's a full breakdown on the framework page.

What outlasts me.

For now, I am Evolve to Grow. 1:1 with me, or it isn't E2G. That works at this scale — 21 clients, 5 spots a quarter, real attention to each one. It doesn't scale beyond a certain point. The brand needs to outlast me as sole coach.

The Altitude book is part of that. The 35-chapter playbook of the Business Evolution Framework, designed to give founders the same diagnostic discipline whether or not they ever work with me. The AI-powered version of the Altitude Audit, in development for later in 2026, is part of that. So is the eventual second-generation coach who'll work alongside me, then ahead of me, then in place of me.

In ten years the goal is for someone to find a brilliant service-business coach in Australia and discover the lineage runs back through E2G. The framework outlasts the founder. The work outlasts the framework. The clients outlast all of it.