I filled a passport, then spent six years going nowhere.

Climbed mountains in Nepal, Tanzania and Morocco. Did reef conservation in Madagascar. Spent six months learning kung fu in China. Lived in London, then Croatia. Turned up not speaking a word of the language. My dad’s side is from there. Won a bartending competition that had me working high-end bars around the world.

Filled the passport, cover to cover. Then I came home to Townsville.

Personal training, for six years. I loved it, honestly. Health and talking to people, my two favourite things in the one job. It was also a golden cage. Relaxed, pleasant, and I never really went anywhere the whole time I did it.

The pattern was always the same. Spark, push hard for a fortnight, fizzle, coast. Start something with mates, watch it go nowhere, coast some more. If you’d told 27-year-old me on a sailboat in the Bahamas that the thing which would finally light him up was a carpet cleaning business in Townsville, he’d have laughed you off the deck.

On purpose. I’d taken the big swings and the big swings had taken me. Flew home from Vietnam, looked around for the opposite of a pitch deck, and eventually landed on carpet cleaning: equipment, a checklist, a price list, happy customers. No charts. No 2am. Nobody gets rich in a week doing this, and that turned out to be the entire appeal.

Boring is the point. Boring compounds.

Then I looked properly at how the industry sells, and found the actual opportunity It wasn’t a machine or a chemical. It was that the bar was on the floor.

It runs on a simple trick: get in the door cheap, then renegotiate in your lounge room. The ad says one number. Then that room’s bigger than standard and then you’re standing in your own house feeling like you’re being hustled. Because you are.

Honest opinion on the $99 carpet clean: you’re not buying a clean, you’re buying a sales appointment in your lounge room. Nobody can drive to your house, do the job properly and keep the lights on for $99. The maths doesn’t work. So the $99 is the door, and the real price gets built once someone’s standing on your carpet.

I don’t think the guys doing it are evil. It’s just how the industry taught them to sell. But the race to the bottom has one finish line: a rushed job by someone who resents doing it.

Up before the sun loading the equipment. Quoting at the kitchen table at 9pm. And then the genuinely weird part for a carpet cleaner: building software until midnight. Most of this trade outsources the computer stuff and hopes for the best. I went the other way and taught myself, so the quoting system, the job checklists and the follow-ups all got built here, after the day’s jobs were done. That’s why none of how we work depends on anyone remembering it.

It means I read this business like an investor rather than a tradie. I don’t care how many likes an ad gets. I care whether it turned into a booked job that someone was happy with. Feelings lie. The numbers don’t.

That first month, people kept telling me the place felt like a different house. A hundred-odd homes later they still say it, and the doubt still turns up most nights anyway. I just don’t let it drive anymore.

Right now it usually is. But my days are mostly full with me on the tools, so the next step is a second pair of hands, and I’d rather you read that here than find out on the day.

Here’s why it changes nothing for you. Everything on this page that affects your job is a rule, not a personality. The price doesn’t move because that’s the rule. You pay after, because that’s the rule. You hear the bad news at the front door, because that’s the rule. None of it is me being in a good mood on the day.

A standard that lives in one guy's head walks out the door with him. A standard that’s written down, priced up front and photographed at both ends is one you can hold us to.

That’s the whole reason for the checklists and the fixed price and the before-and-afters. Not paperwork for its own sake. It’s the only way a second person can be held to the same job I’d do.

So when people ask what the plan is: biggest carpet cleaner in Townsville? Nah, that’s a size goal. Mine’s a standard goal. Reply in minutes, not days. The price up front, in writing. Turn up when we said. Tell you the truth about what won’t come out. I want that to be what this town expects from a tradie as standard, rather than the thing people are pleasantly surprised by.

And that second pair of hands only turns up when the diary forces it, and only if it’s someone I can train to exactly that standard. Then we’ll see how far north it travels.

Watch this space. I’m just getting started.