Hey, I'm Guy 👋 

When asked to send through a picture of myself for the new About us page I had to contemplate whether to send through my favourite photo of all time winning the New Zealand National T20 Cricket Championship, or my linkedIn profile picture.

I hope my decision gives you a bit of an immediate insight into who I am. I work hard in the areas I care about and I don't believe you need to wear a suit in order to offer great value.

Personally, I've always loved and found joy in tough challenges and building things, whether it be a bar leaner for the deck, an old car for the garage, or a brand that helps kiwi tradies build a business of their own. I find I'm generally attracted to tasks that produce the biggest reward which is why professionally I think I've always wanted to build a business that utilises my professional skills to provide great value.

As for my professional background, I started building my first business and associating website back in 2009 using the very software we now use for all our tradienet merchants today (Shopify). I love design, have always been reasonably coordinated with pen and pencil and I get excited about doing work that makes a real difference.

After battling away with a few small businesses of my own over the last 13 years, making many mistakes along the way and grabbing a few precious wins, I eventually decided to get a job at Shopify in 2019 to learn the ropes straight from the horse's mouth. I loved the job and found it to be extremely rewarding. Each day I was able to learn how merchants run their business' across every industry you can think of, while also providing business advice of my own so merchants were able to see faster results by avoiding the same mistakes I'd made previously. However, after 2 years in the role had passed I became extremely burnt-out and frustrated.

The pressure of COVID was causing conversations with our merchants to change from helping them grow their business to instead helping them save their business. This brought with it an extremely stressful work environment. Additionally, touch points with individual merchants were extremely low so I wasn't able to see any of the results from the advice I'd provided.

So I left, became a Shopify Partner and built tradienet, a local web design agency that allows me to be creative, continue to do what I'm great at while also helping the people I care about. What's even better, it allows me to provide value that we can see, measure and most of all celebrate 🎉

Web design and branding was always going to be the service we would initially provide as it's personally one of my main strengths. I also thought specialising in tradies and service providers would be a great fit for a few reasons. First, my family and network is full of them, and second, it's an industry where we can offer the most value and therefore, deliver the biggest results as the tools we build provide great value for service based business models.

After doing some market research trying to find out which tradies I could help the most, I found there to be three types of self-employed tradies; the single contractor tradie, the small team tradie and the tradie without tools, each facing different problems at different stages of growing their business. However, ultimately on the same path, attempting to reach the same goal of a healthy work life balance and financial freedom.

What surprised me the most was that the majority of the tradies we spoke to weren't reaping the full benefits of the hard work they had been doing for their happy customers. Simply put, the great work they'd been doing wasn't helping them to get bigger and better jobs in the future; jobs that would allow them to step back, get off the tools and pay their staff a decent wage to provide the quality workmanship they've always wanted to be proud of producing.

Once I'd found my market, figured out how tradienet would be able to help the most and had confirmed demand, I swam to sea and started building the tradienet boat we have today 🛥️