Four years at Accenture convinced me that working for someone else was like trying to put a square peg in a round hole! I looked around at a bunch of business opportunities and ended up buying a restaurant franchise called Burger Fuel. At that stage Burger Fuel only had four stores and ours was the first outside of Auckland. After 4 ½ years I sold the business and turned my investment of $35,000 cash into $325,000 profit which was a great start. BUT the process of running Burger Fuel was a brutal introduction to business.
The hours, the staff, having a young family (and trying to have a life as well)…
One night I had a moment… At the end of a 13 hour shift I slipped on some oil, knocked myself out and broke a couple of ribs. When I got home that night at 2am my wife was feeding our 6 week old son Jack. I said to her, ‘This is ridiculous. This is not how I want business to be” and I vowed to her to find a better way to make it work. Which I did… I put the restaurant under management and sold it 18 months later.
Whilst owning Burger Fuel we purchased 3 investment properties. It was a magic time when houses were going up by 10% – 13% a year. After selling Burger Fuel I set up a property trading business called 0800webuyhouses and for the next 4 years we traded $15.2million worth of property (which was great for the first 2 ¾ years). In 2009 and 2010 the guts dropped out of the property market and like many we got burnt. At one stage we were facing a negative cash flow situation of more than 100K a year to pay my bills without a viable business to do it! Not a recipe for sleeping well at night.
During that time I went to a business coaching seminar looking for inspiration for my business. I listened to the speakers and thought ‘Gee I could do that’… so I did!!
Over the last 14 years we’ve worked with over 1,350 businesses and specialised in helping Plumbers, Electricians and other tradesmen make more profit and create freedom from their business.
