What made you want to do the work you do? Please share the full story.
Honestly, it started with my hands. I’ve always been the kind of person who needed to understand how things work, not just read about them, but actually get in there and figure it out.
I got into the trade in my early twenties. There wasn’t some big dramatic moment that pushed me toward it. It was more that I kept noticing how much people got taken advantage of when they didn’t understand what was happening inside their walls. Tradies who’d show up, throw out a scary number and leave homeowners with no real explanation. That always bothered me.
So I started learning. I did my apprenticeship, put in the years on residential and commercial sites and kept pushing to understand more of the system, not just the internal wiring side of things. That’s eventually what led me to Level 2 accreditation, which lets me work directly on the network infrastructure, the consumer mains, meter connections, underground supply and the parts most electricians can’t touch. I wanted to be someone who could handle the whole picture, not hand off the hard stuff to someone else.
Calibre Connect came together in 2018. And I’ll be real, the first couple of years were tough. Building a business while running jobs, managing compliance paperwork, quoting, sourcing materials… it’s a lot. I made plenty of mistakes early on with systems and processes.
But the thing that kept me going was pretty simple. I kept seeing the same problem on every job. Homeowners had no idea what they were actually getting, no fixed price upfront, no documentation after the fact, no one standing behind the work. So we built the business around fixing exactly that, fixed quotes before we start, a Certificate of Compliance on every job that needs one and a Lifetime Workmanship Warranty because accountability shouldn’t be optional.
Tell us 3 surprisingly easy and 3 surprisingly difficult things about your business.
People always assume running a trade business is either all hard or all easy. The reality surprised me on both sides.
3 Things That Were Surprisingly Easy
Building a reputation came faster than I expected. Sydney homeowners are so used to tradies not showing up or explaining anything that just doing the basics properly made us stand out. Turn up on time, explain the job, leave the place clean. People remember that.
Getting Level 2 work was steadier than I thought too. Most electricians can’t touch network-side repairs, so when a point of attachment fails or the consumer mains are down, the pool of people who can actually fix it is small. That works in our favour.
Word of mouth basically ran itself. Strata managers, real estate agents, designers we’d worked with on lighting jobs, they all sent people our way without us asking.
3 Things That Were Surprisingly Difficult
Pricing honestly is harder than it sounds. Some clients push back on a real fixed-price quote because they’re conditioned to expect a lowball number that gets padded later. Teaching people to compare what’s actually included, not just the dollar figure, takes real effort.
Compliance paperwork genuinely caught me off guard. Every Certificate of Compliance, every documented test result. Getting the back-end systems right so that stuff doesn’t swallow your day was one of the harder problems we solved early on.
And managing the emotional weight of the work. When you walk into someone’s home after a near miss, you have to be calm and competent every single time. That responsibility adds up.
What are the 3 things you like best about your work and why?
People ask me this more than you’d think. And honestly, the answers have shifted a bit over the years as the business has grown.
The first one is solving problems that aren’t obvious. Electrical fault finding is genuinely satisfying in a way that’s hard to explain. You’re dealing with something invisible, and the symptom you can see, like a tripping breaker or flickering lights, is almost never the actual cause. Tracing it back to the real source, especially on older Sydney homes with decades of layered wiring, feels like proper detective work. I get a lot of enjoyment out of that.
The second thing is the moment a client actually understands what was wrong with their place. Not just that we fixed it, but why it was a problem and what it means for their safety going forward. I spend time explaining that on every job. Most people have never had a tradie walk them through what was actually happening inside their walls, and you can see the relief on their face when it clicks.
The third one is the scope of what we get to do. Some weeks we’re upgrading switchboards in older homes, installing EV chargers in new builds and doing Level 2 network work that most electricians never touch. The range keeps it from ever getting stale. I think if I was doing the same type of job every single day I’d struggle to stay as sharp as the work requires. So yeah, the variety genuinely keeps me engaged in a way I didn’t fully expect when I started out.
What are the three things you need in work to achieve purpose? Why are they important to you?
I’ve thought about this one a lot, actually. Purpose isn’t something I chased consciously when I started out. It sort of revealed itself over time through the jobs that felt meaningful and the ones that didn’t.
The first thing is accountability. I need to be able to stand behind what I do. That’s why every job we complete comes with documented compliance paperwork and a Lifetime Workmanship Warranty. It’s not a marketing line. For me, doing work you’d walk away from and never think about again isn’t really work you’re proud of. When I know my name is attached to something permanently, I approach it differently and I think that shows in the output.
The second thing is seeing a real outcome. Electrical work has a before and after that’s pretty clear. An unsafe switchboard becomes a compliant one. A home without proper circuit protection gets it. An EV charger goes from a question mark to a working installation. I need to see that the work I did actually changed something for someone. Vague contributions don’t do it for me.
And the third thing is growth inside the work itself. I went from standard residential wiring to Level 2 accreditation because I kept wanting to understand more of the system. That push didn’t come from anyone else. It came from not being satisfied with knowing only part of the picture. For me, purpose dries up pretty fast when there’s nothing left to learn or get better at. So yeah, staying on the harder end of the work is kind of non-negotiable for me.
Tell us about a time where you saw a surprising outcome that you did not expect.
There’s one job that still comes to mind pretty regularly.
We got called out to an older home in the Hills District. The homeowner had been chasing an intermittent fault for months. Lights flickering in one part of the house, occasional tripping on a circuit that seemed totally unrelated to anything obvious. Two other electricians had been through before us and both called it fine after checking the usual suspects.
So yeah, expectations were low on the client’s end when we arrived.
We started tracing it properly, back through the circuit rather than just checking the visible connection points. And eventually we found it. There was a concealed junction inside the wall cavity that had been incorrectly terminated, probably decades earlier during a renovation, and the connection had been slowly degrading under load over time. It wasn’t causing a continuous fault. It was only showing up when the circuit hit a certain draw, which is why it kept getting missed.
Here’s the part I didn’t expect. When we opened that wall and showed the homeowner what we’d found, he went quiet for a moment and then told us his family had been in that house for eleven years. He’d been writing the flickering off as an old house quirk the whole time.
That termination was sitting about thirty centimetres from the main bedroom wall.
I expected relief from him. I got something closer to shock. And honestly, that job changed how I talk to clients about intermittent faults now. I don’t let anyone write those off anymore, because the thing is, the ones that hide are usually the ones worth finding.
How do you get yourself out of a funk? Please share the details.
Honestly, the thing that works every time for me is getting back to a small win.
When I’m in a funk, the temptation is to sit down and do a big planning session or make some sweeping change. I tried that approach a lot in the early years of running Calibre Connect and it never really helped. You end up staring at a whiteboard full of ideas and feeling worse than when you started.
So what I actually do now is find one concrete thing I can finish that day. Could be following up a quote that’s been sitting in the drafts folder, getting a compliance document sorted or fixing something minor that’s been on the to-do list for two weeks. It sounds almost too simple, and I get that.
But here’s what I’ve noticed. The funk usually isn’t about energy. It’s about momentum. When things feel stuck, your brain starts telling you that everything is stuck, and that’s when the spiral starts. Finishing one real thing, even a small one, breaks that story pretty fast.
I think it carries over from the trade, actually. On a job site, when something goes wrong and the day starts falling apart, the best thing you can do is find the next step you can control and do it well. You don’t fix a bad day all at once. You just find the next right move and go from there.
That’s basically my whole approach to getting out of a funk.
What do you value most and why?
If I’m being real, the thing I value most is doing what you said you’d do.
It sounds simple. And I think that’s actually why most people underestimate it.
In the trade, that means showing up when you said you would, charging what you quoted and leaving the job in better shape than you found it. We built Calibre Connect around that idea from the start, fixed-price quotes upfront, documented compliance paperwork on every job that needs it and a Lifetime Workmanship Warranty because walking away and hoping for the best isn’t good enough.
But it goes beyond the business for me. I’ve worked with people over the years who were technically brilliant but couldn’t be relied on. And I’ve worked with people who maybe weren’t the most talented in the room but you always knew exactly where you stood with them. Every single time, I’d take the second person.
Here’s why it matters to me personally. When you do what you say you’ll do, consistently, you stop spending energy managing your own reputation. People trust you by default. Your team trusts you. Your clients trust you. And that trust compounds over time in a way that no amount of marketing can replicate.
I think I learned this early in the trade when I watched clients get burned by promises that didn’t hold up. Dodgy quotes, undocumented work, no one to call when something went wrong six months later. That stuff stuck with me and I made a decision pretty early that Calibre Connect would be the opposite of that experience.
At the end of the day, your word is either worth something or it isn’t.
What achievement are you the proudest of and why?
The thing I’m proudest of is building a business where the paperwork matches the work.
That sounds like a strange thing to be proud of, I know. But let me explain why it matters to me. When I started Calibre Connect in 2018, I made a deliberate decision that every job would be documented properly. Certificate of Compliance where it’s required, fixed pricing before we start, no corners cut on compliance with AS/NZS 3000 wiring standards. And I stuck to that even in the early years when it would have been easier and faster not to.
The trade has a reputation problem in that space. Undocumented work is genuinely common, and homeowners often have no idea it’s happening until they go to sell a property or make an insurance claim and something unravels. I’ve seen that situation play out for clients more times than I’d like.
So building a business where clients get a real paper trail, where the work is tested properly and where we actually stand behind it with a Lifetime Workmanship Warranty, that took consistent effort over years. It wasn’t a single moment or a single job.
For me, the pride comes from the fact that it’s still true today at the same standard it was on day one. We’re bigger now, we cover more of Greater Sydney and the team has grown. But the standard hasn’t moved. And honestly, keeping that consistent is harder than people think.
That’s the one I’d point to.
What is your favorite movie and why?
Gladiator. No hesitation.
I’ve watched it probably more times than I’d care to admit, and it still holds up every single time.
The thing that gets me about it is Maximus never loses sight of who he is, even when everything is stripped away from him. His status, his family, his freedom. Most people in that situation would fold completely. He doesn’t. He just keeps moving forward with whatever he has left.
I’m also just a sucker for the way Ridley Scott built that world. The scale of it feels real rather than manufactured, and the fight sequences actually have weight to them.
But honestly, it comes back to the character. I think there’s something in that story about dignity under pressure that I find genuinely compelling every time I watch it.
If you could go back 2 years and give yourself advice, what would it be?
Two years ago I was deep in a growth phase with Calibre Connect. More jobs, more team members, more moving parts. And if I could go back, the advice is pretty clear.
Stop trying to hold everything yourself.
I was the bottleneck on too many things for too long. Quoting, compliance checks, scheduling, client follow-ups. I told myself it was about maintaining standards but if I’m being honest, a big part of it was just not trusting the systems we hadn’t built yet.
The thing is, holding everything personally doesn’t protect the standard. It just slows everything down and burns you out quietly in the background. I didn’t notice how much energy it was costing me until I finally started letting go of pieces and saw that the quality didn’t drop.
So the advice would be this. Build the system first, document how the job should be done properly, then trust the people you’ve brought in to follow it. Your job as the founder shifts from doing everything to protecting the standard through better processes rather than personal involvement in every single decision.
I also wish I’d invested in the back-end administrative systems earlier. The compliance paperwork, the job tracking, the client communication workflows. Getting that infrastructure right earlier would have saved me probably six months of unnecessary friction.
Basically, work on the business and not just in it. I’d heard that advice before two years ago. I just didn’t act on it fast enough.
Who has been your biggest mentor in life (personal or professional) and how have they helped you?
There’s one person who comes to mind without much deliberation. My first boss in the trade.
I won’t go into his full name here, but he was a senior electrician who ran a tight residential operation in Western Sydney and took me on as a young apprentice who honestly didn’t know much beyond enthusiasm. He was the kind of person who didn’t waste words. If he told you something once, he expected you to remember it.
The biggest thing he gave me wasn’t technical knowledge, even though I learned an enormous amount on his jobs. It was a standard. He had this unspoken rule that the work inside the wall had to be as clean as the work you could see. Nobody was ever going to open that wall again and probably nobody would ever know. But he knew. And that was enough for him.
That stuck with me in a way I didn’t fully appreciate until years later when I was running my own jobs and making decisions about how to handle something the client would never see. I kept hearing his voice in the back of my head.
He also never let me blame the tools, the timeline or the conditions for a substandard result. You adapted and you delivered. Full stop.
I think about that a lot now when I’m managing my own team. The standard doesn’t move because the day got complicated. That’s something he lived out in front of me every single day and I genuinely don’t think Calibre Connect exists the way it does without that foundation he gave me early on.
Just for fun, what is your favorite dessert?
Tiramisu. And I’ll stand by that all day.
There’s something about the combination of the coffee, the mascarpone and the soaked sponge that just works in a way nothing else really competes with for me. It’s rich without being heavy and when it’s made properly it has this balance that feels almost effortless.
I’ve had it at a lot of places across Sydney and the honest truth is the homemade versions almost always win. You can tell immediately when someone has cut corners on the ingredients. The mascarpone gets grainy, the coffee flavour falls flat and the whole thing just loses that layered quality that makes it worth eating in the first place.
A good tiramisu also has to be cold. Not slightly chilled. Properly cold, straight from the fridge. That’s non-negotiable for me.