Award-winning full-stack marketer and entrepreneur with over 8 years of experience in building and scaling cutting edge marketing, businesses and teams, at category-leading SaaS businesses, Xero, Tradify, and A2X.I’m strategy focused, but execution orientated. As a product marketing and demand gen nerd, I’ve built my career off of building future demand, and harvesting existing demand with modern marketing strategies, and tactics.Practising what I preach, in 2017 I co-founded Paintvine, now New Zealand's largest creative events business hosting over 1000+ events annually.Previously, during the covid-19 lockdown, I created New Zealand's leading food delivery directory, delivereat. Acquired in 2020 by MOBI.To support NZ's digital transformation, I partnered with the Ministry of Business, Employment and Innovation to build The Right Tool™ a locally focused app and service marketplace tailored for Kiwi SMEs. Acquired in 2022 by TUANZ.I'm passionate about creating and growing new businesses and projects, so if you're working on something fun, throw me a note.

Active director:

[Events] Co-founder and Director of Aotearoa's largest creative events business hosting over 1000+ events annually.

paintvine.co.nz >

Building projects:

[SaaS] Building tools to help businesses get paid quicker through automated late fees and interest on top of existing invoices.

latechaser.com >

[Services] Helping growing companies turn their boring job descriptions, into engaging videos to help them attract the best talent.

heytherevideo.com >

A brief history of me, and my jobs:

Early life

Growing up I had a bunch of fun jobs, I grew up in a single parent home (just Mum raised me), so early on if I wanted something, I needed to work for it:Job #1, Dishwasher, local restaurant.
Job #2, Gardener, self-employed.
Job #3, Movie theatre attendant, Hoytts cinemas.
Job #4, Op-shop flipper, self-employed.
Job #5, Bowling alley technician, Zone Bowling.After I left high school, I worked at the local bowling alley for 18 months, one of my jobs was to empty out all the money from the arcade machines each week. This was easily my favourite job. Almost every time, the money I collected from these arcades was more than I was making each week! That was my lightbulb moment that I kick started the rest of my life (I needed to become an owner).

Job # 6 Coin-collector

Company: Self-employed
Taking my experience at the bowling alley, I used all my savings and bought a small coin-operated laundry business in Auckland. 6 months later, I bought 5 ice-cream vending machine and placed them around public swimming pools. I spent around 2 days a week driving around Auckland, picking up money and it was awesome.

[University break]

Degree: Bachelor of Business, Marketing and Information Systems
With my new business paying the bills, I took my spare time to study (I always promised my Mum I would). At the end of my three years, I was offered a scholarship to study in Hong Kong. The Prime Ministers Scholarship for Asia. With this amazing opportunity, I sold my laundry and vending business and set off for Hong Kong.

Job #7, Digital marketing coordinator

Company: Coachseek
After studying in Hong Kong, and spending a little time travelling around USA, I came back to New Zealand to get a ‘real job’, I met Ian and Shaun who liked my vending machine story so much they decided to give me a shot.Over 18 months, I learnt everything I could about digital marketing, sales and tech to drive thousands of leads for our business. We build an amazing SaaS product, but sadly after 18 months we ran out of money, never hit product market fit and I was now out of a job.

Job #8, Online merchant

Company: Self employed
Before Coachseek shutdown, somebody in my office came in with the coolest toy I had ever seen, a self-balancing hoverboard. I was so envious that I wanted one myself, when I baulked at the price of buying one locally, I worked out where I could find one (and many more) overseas. Bingo.In the months lead up to Xmas, I imported, branded and sold hundreds of these, all until they started to explode (not mine, thankfully, but others) and import restrictions tighted up forcing me to close up shop in the new year.

Job #9, Digital marketing manager

Company: Tradify
Our investors at Coachseek re-homed a few of us at growing job management tool Tradify to help accelerate their growth, and boy did I. I was the 2nd hire and during my two years at Tradify I worked to build out the growth team and to successfully scale the business from $500k of revenue to $5m of annual recurring revenue.

Job #10, Unqualified builder

Company: ANZ (Bank-employed)
While I was working at Tradify, my best-friend and I bought a small house down in Hamilton, New Zealand. Every weekend, for 9 months straight (and during winter too) we ripped the entire house apart completely renovating it and relisting it on the market. It went from this, to this. It was a lot of fun, I learnt a lot but, dang it was hard!

Job #11, Digital marketing consultant

Company: Hypergiant (Self employed)
During my time at Tradify, I was approached by dozens of companies looking for help with their digital marketing, instead of sending them on their way. I started to help them out in my spare time in the evenings and on the weekends. I became so busy, that I decided to freelance full time.All of a sudden I was completely self-employed at 25. It was a dream come true. I even celebrated with cake.

Job #12, Co-founder

Company: Cryptosaver (Self employed)
With a growing interest in Bitcoin, two friends and I started a Bitcoin savings product, Cryptosaver. However, we ran into early hurdles when nobody would give us a bank account. So we moved across the ditch to Australia, found a bank who would bank us and launched our automatic Bitcoin savings product - but during the worst of times (2017-2019 crypto bear market).Unfortunately, after 3 years, and bucket loads of money spent keeping it alive, we put it to bed at the end of 2019.

Job #13, Co-founder

Company: Paintvine (Self employed)
My best friend text me after his trip to see his girlfriend in the US with an idea and a proposal he picked up while there. It was a painting class, in a bar. I didn’t think much of it until he said it was a $50m a year business in the US.We decided to give it a punt in NZ, after convincing a local bar we wouldn’t get any paint on the seats. The event was a success, but we did get paint on the seats. Sorry Phil.Since 2017, Alex and I have steadily grown Paintvine to over $1m in revenue, and to become New Zealand's largest, and most loved (NPS of 90+) paint and sip evening.

Job #14, Director of demand

Company: A2X
I met Paul and Ashley early on in their journey of creating A2X, their passion and drive to make the lives of ecommerce sellers was infectious. I hopped on board their vision, and helped them early on to build out key marketing foundations to support their product led-growth strategy.After the Covid-19 pandemic shutdowns forced me to slow things down with Job #13, and at Job #11 - I launched head first into A2X.Since starting in 2017, I built a team of demand generation experts to leverage best-in-class SaaS marketing tactics and strategies that have helped take A2X from 0 to over 12,000 customers, and 2000+ 5 star reviews (and counting).

Job #14, Founder (1st acquisition)

Company: Delivereat (Self employed)
During the depths of the pandemic in New Zealand, only our supermarkets were open, but all other shops could trade via online delivery. I setup Delivereat over a weekend to as a little hobby, listing businesses I knew of that were, and asking users to submit theirs for a small fee.It completely blew up, so I brought Alex onboard to help me handle the growth. In a little under 4 weeks, we had over 1,000,000 Kiwi’s come visit, and 3 acquisition offers on the website.

Job #15, Co-founder (2nd acquisition)

Company: The Right Tool (Self employed)
Off the heels of the Delivereat acquisition, Alex and I were shoulder tapped to help drive digital adoption for NZ businesses by MBIE's Small Business Digital Boost™ initiative. We received funding to build The Right Tool™, a directory for Kiwi business owners to find, evaluate and rate apps that they need for their industry, and that work in New Zealand.After 19 months of hard work building this awesome directory, we received an acquisition offer from TUANZ.

Job #16 C-list celebrity

Company: AUT
My university asked me to appear in an ad campaign, which after 3 years they still use in most of their marketing collateral. I surprised my Mum and didn’t tell her about it until she saw the billboard on the highway one day. I’ll never forget that phone call.

Job #17 Co-founder

Company: Latechaser (Self employed)
After dabbling in the world of accounting, and digital marketing for over 5 years with A2X, I decided to go out on my own and start Latechaser. Building tools to help businesses get paid quicker through automated late fees and interest on top of existing invoices.

What guides me, and why I think it's important:Unapologetic curiosity
I’m a sucker for a new idea, an afternoon digging into new concepts and travelling to far flung places. I caught it when I studied in Hong Kong, and it's fueled me ever since. From working out how to pull apart (and put back together) a ten-pin-bowling pinsetter, drive millions of dollars of sales via Facebook ads, and build, and sell a business in under a month (and much more). Curiosity needs room to thrive, and I’ll forever be unapologetically curious.Ownership
The only way to control your destiny, or of those you support is to become an owner. For me, this means; taking accountability and ownership of my projects, from ideation, to implementation to delivery - the buck stops with me. It means becoming an owner of equity, in businesses and projects, where my time and skills are leveraged to the max.Partnership and trust
Co-founders, partners and friends should never compete with each other, only ever complement the skills, personality traits or interests they have. So when it comes to business, relationships or projects. I only partner with people that I (a) trust, to back me, and to see it through to the end, and (b) complement my skills (marketing and growth) completely.

Consulting:I help SaaS, event and marketplace businesses grow. Some of my proudest highlights over the last 8 years:- I have scaled A2X & Tradify from $1m to $5m ARR in under 3 years.
- I have grown Paintvine, from 1 event a week to over 1000 annually.
- I have built (and sold) two marketplaces that have served millions of Kiwis.My circle of competence is in engineering and implementing lead generation, digital marketing and customer retention strategies that enable you to scale with pace.I am available on a project-by-project basis for consulting to help you and your business reach your growth goals, whatever they may be.If you're looking to grow, throw me a note below to see if I can help.

Contact me below: