I Never Had a Plan. I Just Kept Building Things.
In 1998, I was fifteen years old, teaching myself HTML and Photoshop, charging people money for websites so I could get someone to buy me beer, and fronting heavy metal bands with the complete conviction that this was going to be my life.
Two of those things lasted. One of them got me my first job.
Nearly thirty years later, I am the Executive Creative Director of an agency I founded, the President of a board, a coach, a podcaster, and apparently the kind of person who gets written about in white papers. I did not go to university. I did not follow the expected path. I did not plan any of it. What I did was keep building things and stay honest about whether what I was building was worth the time.
That is the whole philosophy, if you need one summarised.
The line people expect
There is a version of a career retrospective that goes like this: humble beginnings, early recognition, strategic pivots, upward trajectory, arrival. Each step confirms the one before it. The narrative is tidy. It suggests foresight.
Mine does not go like that.
My career spans events management, digital strategy, public relations, management consulting, creative agency leadership, podcast production, and community governance. If you laid it out on a table you would not immediately see a shape. You would see someone who kept saying yes to things that were interesting and no to things that weren't, and ended up somewhere unexpected as a result.
The unexpected place turns out to be exactly where I wanted to be. I just didn't know that when I was booking venues for conferences in 2006.
What the early years actually were
I did not go to university. I studied at McClay College for a year. That is the full extent of my formal education, and for a long time it was the thing I expected to be held against me.
It wasn't. But getting to that realisation required a conversation I still think about.
When I was trying to get my first real job, the obvious problem was the CV. No degree. Non-traditional background. The kind of profile that gets filtered out before it reaches a decision-maker. What I had instead was the bands.
Through high school and into my early twenties, I had convinced five teenage boys not just to form something, but to stay formed. To rehearse, to write original music, to perform, to show up when it was inconvenient, to trust that the thing we were building together was worth the effort. I had led them, organised them, managed the competing personalities and the competing egos, and kept the whole thing moving in a direction. We wrote music from scratch. We put it in front of audiences. We did the thing.
When I sat across from the right person at the right moment and needed to explain why I was qualified for something I had no paper credentials for, that was the argument I made. Not in those exact terms. But the substance of it: that I had built something from nothing, that I had led people who had no obligation to follow, that I had created original work and seen it through from idea to performance, and that I had done all of it without anyone telling me I had to.
That argument got me in the door. Getting in the door with the right people changed everything.
The lesson I took from it: credentials describe what you have done inside a system. The interesting question is what you have done outside one. Most people undersell the outside work because it does not fit the expected format. It is usually the most revealing thing about them.
Then came the formal career. Events at Aimia. Marketing at CBS Interactive. Social media at Switched On. Each role was a small education in a different kind of problem. Events taught me execution: the work is not the idea, it is the thing that happens on the day. Media taught me distribution: who controls attention and how they use it. Social media, in 2009, when it was still genuinely new, taught me that the tools people use to connect are always more interesting than the platforms that host them.
None of these roles were the destination. All of them were useful.
Hong Kong and what scale actually means
Weber Shandwick in Sydney was where I got my first real footing. VP of Digital for Asia Pacific, Hong Kong, by 2012. Responsible for digital strategy across 18 offices. Co-leading the build of regional digital and content operations across 11 countries through six studios.
I was asked once what my biggest career achievement from that period was. My honest answer: not having another breakdown. Co-building those studios with Jon Wade is the less honest but more professional version of the same answer.
Hong Kong was where I understood scale. Not in the abstract MBA sense. In the practical sense of what happens when you are responsible for something that involves a lot of people across a lot of countries who all have different interpretations of what you meant when you sent that email. Clarity becomes the most valuable thing you own. You either develop it or you drown in the ambiguity.
I developed it. Eventually.
The PwC chapter
In 2016, I left agency life for PricewaterhouseCoopers. Director of Brand and Marketing at the Experience Centre in Hong Kong. Big Four. Corporate. The kind of organisation where a creative director's instincts are useful in the same way a smoke alarm is useful: mostly ignored until necessary.
I'm being unfair. The PwC period was genuinely formative. It is where I learned what a brand actually is, in the enterprise sense: not a logo, not a tone of voice guide, not a website. A brand is what a business means, how it behaves, and what it does under pressure. I was working on M&A preparation and corporate advisory, watching brands be stress-tested at the moment they mattered most.
Less than 18 months. Long enough to understand something most agency people never bother to learn.
The decision that changed everything
I came back to Sydney in 2018. General Manager and Head of Strategy at Red Engine. The AdNews Emerging Leader of the Year shortlist. A growing reputation. A comfortable ceiling.
And an increasingly loud internal voice asking: why am I building things for someone else?
I kept watching agencies being run. Some badly. Some adequately. Very few well. I kept thinking I could do it better. Eventually that thought stopped being flattering background noise and became an actual plan.
The plan was: leave, build something honest, run it the way it should be run.
DOUBLESTAR CO
A brainwave, a business name, a founding partner in Baptiste C David who arrived at exactly the right moment, and a first client call that went: "Hey, do you still need that website done? We'll build the brand and everything else."
Month two: we were working with Adobe.
By 2023: $1.2 million in revenue, seven full-time employees, 66% year-on-year growth, a film production arm, a team of people under thirty who are better at this than I was at their age.
None of which happened because of a plan. It happened because of a philosophy: do honest work, charge what it's worth, tell clients what they need to hear instead of what they want to hear, and never confuse busyness with progress.
The creative constraints triangle is how we operate: fast, cheap, or exceptional. Pick two. Most clients initially resist this. All clients eventually respect it.
The other things
Alongside the agency, in the same years: You're Good, Get Better, the coaching practice. Vibewire, where I became President of the Board in 2021. Four podcasts across nine years. A coaching methodology built on the observation that most people in this industry know what they should do and simply need someone to stop letting them avoid it.
And the Strategy Action Cards. A physical product I designed and built from scratch: a card deck for strategists and creative teams, the kind of tool that exists because I looked at what was available and found it wanting. There is something particular about making a physical thing in an industry that produces almost nothing you can hold. The cards are real. They sit on a table. People pick them up. That directness — the absence of a screen between the idea and the person using it — was the point.
These are not side projects. They are the same impulse in different containers. The impulse is: find somewhere something is broken or missing or unsaid, and do something about it.
The Vibewire board is about young people and what the industry owes them. The coaching is about mid-career people and what they owe themselves. The podcasts have been about sex, creativity, bees, and advertising: four subjects united only by the conviction that the most interesting conversations happen when you go somewhere most people prefer to avoid.
What I actually think about all of it
I described myself once, in a B&T profile, as "middle-aged in advertising; not young enough to be considered innovative nor old enough to be considered wise."
That was accurate in 2020. It is still accurate in 2026, with the qualification that I have stopped caring about either category.
The career does not follow a straight line because straight lines are boring and because the most useful things I have learned came from the sideways moves, the chapters that didn't obviously fit, the roles that weren't the destination.
What connects all of it, if I'm being honest about the through line: I build things. Bands, because I needed to make music and needed other people in the room to do it. Websites, because I could. Practices within agencies. Studios across countries. Brands for clients. Podcasts for communities. A physical card deck because the industry needed a better tool and nobody else was making it. Platforms for young people. Coaching for people who are almost there and need one more honest conversation to get there.
The medium changes. The impulse does not.
In 1998, I was building websites for beer money and rehearsing with bands who thought they were going to change music. In 2026, I am building something I can actually be proud of.
The teenager with the HTML and the guitar had no degree and no plan. He also had exactly the right instinct.
Keep building. Stay honest. Pick the uncomfortable question every time.
Everything else is just the path between those decisions.