She might be right. Yet for twenty years I've sold my own industrial vacuums to hundreds of companies in more than thirty countries. A system did that selling, not a salesman — which is why I won't build your website until I know exactly who's going to buy from it.
Research first, message second, website third — that's the system, and it's exactly what the $199 Blueprint starts building for you: the research and the message, on a page you can look at, before a dollar goes into a build.
$199 to start
The Blueprint round — stage one of three · typical all-in $1,479
A few minutes, from me
The nine-minute version
Who I am, the research-first process, and every dollar involved — landing here shortly
Pay the $199 straight away — I'll call you to arrange a time.
We don’t just sell you a fancy website created by a young web designer and hope for the best.
We discuss your experience, skill set and idea for your career change.
We then research your target market. We get the raw data and analysis and then align what we find with what you know.
We write the message and the offer off the back of it, matched with your expected ideal customer. We build a two-page site that says what you fix and who for. We set up & launch a small, cheap Meta campaign to test whether those people react.
Once we get results from the campaign and do expert analysis, we then modify the message, because the first one usually needs it.
That's the process I run every time I've got something new to sell to a large company. And when the numbers come back, you're not reading them on your own — you get twenty years of B2B selling telling you what they mean and what to change.
Because I'm not a website builder who's picked up some business words. I've spent twenty years designing my own products, launching them and selling them into mining, oil, aviation and heavy manufacturing — and correcting the course, with my own money on the line, every time a message wasn't landing. That's the experience you're hiring: not the software, the judgement.
This is how you open the door for your new business. From this point on you will have clear direction and we can help and advise on all the next steps we suggest you should take… including:
Pay the $199 straight away — I'll call you to arrange a time.
8 founding places · selected by application
“Thirty years in food manufacturing. Mostly quality and compliance, latterly plant management.”
“I help mid-size food processors pass their first BRC audit without shutting a line down.”
Same person. Same career. One is a résumé, the other is a starting point.
I'm a stranger on the internet asking you to trust me with a career change. So I've made the first step small enough that trusting me isn't required. For $199 you get a thirty-minute session where we pull apart what you actually know and who's paid for it over the years. Then I go away and do two things: a one-page website concept — a designed mockup of what your starting point would look like, with your positioning sentence on it — and a written one-page read on who your buyer is, what the offer would be, and roughly what it's worth.
Both are yours to keep, whatever you decide. And if the message isn't right yet — if you read the mockup and it doesn't sound like the business you meant — another round is another $199. Not another chat: a fresh round of research and a revised mockup and buyer read, each one a finished deliverable you keep. Most people need one round. Some need two. And here's the line I'll hold myself to in writing: if we're not there by round three, the problem isn't the wording — it's the niche, and I'll tell you to stop before you spend a dollar on a build. No credit arithmetic, no deposits, no arm-twisting toward the next stage. Every payment buys a finished thing, and you decide at each gate whether to carry on. You've still spent $199 finding out what your thirty years look like as a business instead of a résumé, which is more than most people get from a four-figure strategy engagement.
Why isn't it free? Because free sessions fill up with people who want to chat, and I'm one bloke with a manufacturing business to run. $199 means we both turn up serious. That's the same reason I make purchasing managers issue a PO before I ship a demo unit — it's not about the money, it's about finding out who's real.
Who I've spent twenty years selling to
Mining, oil, aviation, freight, wholesale and heavy manufacturing — mostly inside large corporations. Not consumers. Not impulse buyers. People who ask for the spec sheet, compare three quotes, involve two departments and take a fortnight to decide. If you can build something that sells to them, everything else is easier.
A confession: I hated sales. It was the one part of the business where I felt completely out of my depth — my wife wasn't wrong about that. So instead of learning to sell harder, I built a system that does the selling before anyone talks to me. My products aren't cheap, and I'm up against companies with advertising budgets I'll never match. And still, this is how a sale usually arrives:
Can your vacuums pick up sugar dust and vegetable matter, and if so which one is best?
Yes, our vacuums are ATEX rated for combustible dust, which is advised for sugar dust. Best model would be a 60 L dust vacuum, explosion proof, 100 cfm — ATEX certified.
OK, can you please quote that model with an extra 10 metres of AS hose, delivered to our site.
A real exchange from my inbox. The customer's name and delivery address are withheld for their privacy — everything else is as it happened. The questions were small because the website had already answered the big ones. That's what the three stages build for you.
About Rob →There's a whole industry built on telling people in your position what they could do. Frameworks, workbooks, a slide with four quadrants on it. You leave with options and no site, no message and no idea whether anyone would buy.
A traditional consultant advises. They map out a plan of how you'd do it all, hand you the roadmap, invoice you for it, and the engagement ends the day the document lands. Executing it is your problem, and so is finding out — months later, alone — that the plan was built on an assumption nobody tested.
I build the thing. Then you get my read on what comes back — twenty years of selling B2B, applied to your numbers, telling you plainly what they mean. Then we optimise, modify and change it as the feedback and the research data arrive. Built, read, changed — and when the course is wrong, corrected, the same way I've corrected it on my own products for twenty years. That's the differentiator, and it's the whole of it.
What I'm offering is narrower and a lot more boring than a strategy engagement. It is the procedure I personally run whenever I have a new product or service and I need to sell it to a large business. Not a version of it. The same one, in the same order, with the same steps:
Research the market. Write the message off the research. Build the offer off the research. Put up a page for it. Run a small cheap campaign at it. Read what came back. Change the message. Run it again.
I'm still doing it now — right this minute I test new pages by loading them onto my own live sites and pointing a small budget at them, because that's the fastest honest read you can get. Your version will run on your own domain instead of mine, but it's the same loop.
I've done it more than thirty times over twenty years. Some of those products went on to sell for years. Some of them the market told me nobody wanted, and I found that out in a fortnight for a few hundred dollars instead of a year and my savings. Both are wins. Only one of them feels like it at the time.
Twenty years manufacturing and selling my own products business to business means twenty years of trying almost every way there is to sell something. Some of it worked. Plenty of it was a costly detour. Either way, when you ask me "should I use this?" you're getting an answer from someone who has actually run it, paid for it, and in some cases ripped it back out again.
Run them, sold through them, and worked out where they earn their keep and where they're an expensive way to look busy.
Built my own from the ground up across five live domains, in three countries. I know what breaks and what it costs to fix.
Written, sequenced and sent them for years — including learning which ones nobody reads and why.
Producing sales brochures and technical documentation for genuinely technical products, using AI properly rather than as a novelty.
Selling through other people's channels: margins, terms, minimum orders, and what you give up to get shelf space.
The one that pays my bills. Purchase orders, procurement, credit terms and quotes — from a website, to a corporation.
I'll point you at what applies and what doesn't, and tell you plainly when a question is past me. I'm not an accountant, a solicitor or a tax agent, and I'll say so rather than guess — but knowing which of your questions need a professional and which just need answering saves most people months.
This isn't theory and it isn't a workshop. It's how you actually operate in 2026, selling to the world.
Pay the $199 straight away — I'll call you to arrange a time.
Ask people leaving a long career what's stopping them and it isn't capability, and it usually isn't even courage. It's that there's no front door. No first phone call, no first thing to build, nobody whose job this obviously is. So the idea stays an idea, and another six months go past.
of people who changed careers after 45 reported a successful transition. 87% said they were happy with the change, and 65% found the new work less stressful.
American Institute for Economic Research, career change studyof consultants get zero leads or calls from their website in a given month. Having a site isn't the same as being found.
Consulting Success, Marketing for Consultants Studyof Australia's young businesses are led by mature-aged founders — the fastest-growing group of new business owners in the country.
Swinburne / QUT research funded by National Seniors AustraliaIndependent research, not my own claims. I don't have client results to show you yet — that's exactly why the first eight places are priced the way they are.
This is the path almost everybody takes, and it is worth understanding before you spend a dollar — because from the inside it feels like doing everything right.
And they do. It takes weeks, sometimes months, and it looks like a real business. What nobody mentions is that every word on it is a guess — yours, or theirs. A designer's job is to make the message look good. It was never their job to find out whether it's the right one.
Your credentials. Your résumé. Thirty years of experience, the qualifications, the companies you worked for. It reads like a job application, because that's the only way most of us have ever been taught to describe ourselves. A buyer isn't reading to assess you. They're scanning for their own problem, and it isn't on the page.
Pointed at whoever seems about right, carrying the same untested message the site carries. The ads aren't asked a question, so they can't answer one.
And wait. A fortnight. A month. Three. You check the inbox more often than you'd admit to anyone. Nothing arrives, and there's no information in nothing — you can't tell whether the wording is wrong, the audience is wrong, the offer is wrong, or the whole idea is.
New designer. New ad person. A fresh few thousand dollars. And underneath it, the same untested message goes up a second time, because that was never the thing anybody looked at. That's how people spend five figures over two years and end up exactly where they started, convinced the problem was the tradespeople rather than the sequence.
A beautiful site doesn't fail because it's ugly. It fails because nobody checked whether the message on it was one a buyer would respond to — and by the time you find out, it's the most expensive thing on the page to change.
The fix isn't a better designer. It's starting at the right point. Two pages, built fast, that can be changed quickly and expertly in a matter of days — not weeks, not months — because your first version will almost certainly need changing. You don't need business theory. You need to put the idea in front of real people and find out. So we do these in sequence, each stage with its own fixed price payable only when you start it — and you decide at each gate whether to carry on.
We sit down and I pull out the five problems people kept bringing you across thirty years. Then I go away and research the market behind them — who's already selling into it, what they charge, what language they use, where the gap is. The message and the offer come out of that research, not out of a brainstorm. Then I put it on a page — a designed mockup of your starting point, with a written read on who your buyer is and what the offer is worth — so you can see the business rather than imagine it.
What you get out of it — a message worth building, and a market you can name
Once the Blueprint says what you fix and who for, I turn it into the real thing — fast. Not a fifteen-page monument that takes three months and resists every change. Two pages, live on an address you own, built from a message we've already agreed rather than a guess a designer made look good.
What you get out of it — something real to point at, on an address you own
This campaign's job is not to find your first customer. If one turns up, good — but that isn't what we're paying for. Its job is to prove whether the track you're on is the right one, and to tell us what to change in the message and on the two pages so they match what the market is actually responding to. And I'll say the second half louder than most people selling you something would: I expect the first message to need changing. Mine always has — twenty years in, and I have never once put up a page and had it land perfectly first go. So the first change round is inside this stage, not an invoice that turns up later.
What you get out of it — evidence instead of a hunch, and a message the market has agreed to
That's the whole offer. There's no monthly, no retainer, no membership and nothing that renews. When the message is landing and you're getting enquiries, we're done and you own the lot. That's also the point at which building the rest of a website finally makes sense — more pages, case studies, articles, the lot — because you'd be expanding something the market has already agreed with, instead of decorating a guess. If you want more help after that, we can talk about it then — once you've got paying clients and you're deciding with money, not hope.
The typical path — one Blueprint round, the build, the launch — is $199 + $790 + $490 = $1,479 all-in, plus your own ad spend of about $500 paid direct to Meta. All prices in Australian dollars and include GST. No price on this page is quoted plus GST.
These aren't numbers I've made up to look good. They're the published 2026 Australian ranges for each piece of work, from the agencies and freelancers who do it. Look them up yourself — the sources are underneath.
| The job | Typical Australian quote | With me |
|---|---|---|
| A small business website, built and designed | Local freelancer $1,500–$2,500+. Small agency $3,000–$7,000+. Creative agency $10,000–$50,000+. | $1,479All four, staged: Blueprint $199, build $790, launch $490 — each payable only when you start it. Founding-eight pricing; rises when the eight places are filled. |
| Website copy, researched and written | Freelance copywriters $90–$160 an hour. A full small-business site $1,000–$4,000. Through an agency, $4,000–$15,000+. | |
| Market and competitor research behind the message | Usually a separate line item, or simply not done — you're asked to supply the positioning yourself. | |
| Ad creative, campaign build and launch | Setup fees commonly $1,500–$5,000 before a single ad runs. | |
| A strategy or roadmap from a business consultant | Sold as a document and a plan. The engagement ends the day it's delivered — building it, launching it and finding out whether the market agrees is yours to do, on your own. | BuiltNot mapped. You get the site, the campaign, and my read on what came back. |
| A career transition coaching program | Published Australian guides put career coaching around $195 an hour on average, and a standard eight-session program around $2,450. Sessions and a plan — nothing built, nothing put in front of a buyer. | $1,479The conversation and the research — plus the site, the campaign, and the market's actual answer. |
| Changing the message when it doesn't land | Billed by the hour, or folded into next month's retainer. Either way you're paying to fix a message you were told was right. | IncludedThe first round is inside the launch stage, because I expect one. Any further round — before the build or after the campaign — $199, fixed. |
| Ongoing management | Retainers commonly $500–$5,000+ a month, or 10–20% of ad spend. Most agencies won't take you below $1,000–$3,000 a month in spend at all. | $0There isn't one. Nothing monthly, nothing that renews. |
| Your ad spend to find out if it works | Australian agencies generally treat $1,000–$1,500 a month as the realistic minimum before they'll bother. | ~$500Once. Ten days. Paid by you, direct to Meta. |
| Sources: published 2026 Australian pricing guides for web design, website copywriting and career coaching, and 2026 Meta ads agency pricing surveys. Ranges vary by scope and provider and are indicative, not quotes. Where a range spans several sources, the wider figure is shown. Published ranges may be quoted before GST; my prices include it, so the real gap is a little wider than the columns suggest rather than narrower. | ||
The difference isn't skill with software. It's that an agency has never had to make rent off a message it wrote. I have, every year since 2006. When your campaign comes back middling, the question isn't "does it look good" — it's "what does this mean and what do we change." That's a business question, and it's the one I've been answering with my own money on the line for two decades.
I changed careers myself at 48. I designed an industrial product, built the website, wrote the ads, and then had to sell it to purchasing managers and engineers who had no reason on earth to buy from a bloke working out of a shed. Every part of what I'll build for you is a part I built for myself first, and rebuilt more than thirty times since across my own companies and their sites. Not a course, not mindset homework — the starting point itself, and you own it.
Which is the real difference between me and a website builder. Twenty years of designing products, launching them and selling them into mining, oil, aviation and heavy manufacturing means I've had to run every part of this job myself — the research, the pricing, the message, the campaigns, the wholesale terms, the procurement paperwork. And more than once the market told me I'd aimed wrong. Knowing how to correct a bad course — new message, new offer, sometimes a new market entirely — is the most valuable skill in this whole exercise, and it's the one nobody learns building websites for other people.
Nobody's message is right first time. The trick isn't getting it right — it's finding out cheaply that it's wrong, and changing it. — Rob
Worth saying plainly, because most people selling this sort of thing won't. I can make the right person find you, understand you in eight seconds, and send you a message. I can't sit in the meeting. If the idea of that conversation is what's really stopping you, read the left column honestly before you book anything.
Here's the part people don't expect: once someone has arrived through a page that describes their exact problem, the conversation stops feeling like selling. They came to you. That's why I won't run the campaign before the research is done — the wrong message brings you the wrong people, and then you conclude the whole idea doesn't work.
You start with a $199 Blueprint round — yours to keep either way. A session, the research, a one-page website concept and a written buyer plan. Another round, if the message needs one, is $199 again — and if we're not there by round three, I'll tell you the niche is the problem and to stop. Don't go ahead, and we shake hands.
You own your domain from day one. Registered in your name and yours the whole way through. It starts with the address.
A fixed price per stage, payable only when that stage starts — no hourly rate, ever. $199 the Blueprint, $790 the build, $490 the launch: $1,479 on the typical path, for the founding eight — prices rise once those places are gone. Stop after any stage and you owe nothing further. If a stage takes me longer than planned, that's my problem, not your invoice.
You fund your own ads — about $500 for the test. Roughly $50 a day for ten days, paid to Meta from an account in your name, never to me. You see every dollar and can switch it off whenever you like.
The first change round is included in the launch stage, because you'll probably want one. I expect the first message to need changing, so it's in the price rather than an invoice that turns up later. Further rounds are $199 each, fixed — the same price as a Blueprint round, because that's what a revision is — decided after you've seen the result and never before.
There is no monthly anything. No retainer, no membership, no subscription, nothing that renews. When it's landing, we're finished and everything is handed to your own accounts — domain, site, ad account, enquiries, passwords.
No guarantee of clients — from me or from anyone honest. The test campaign might come back and tell us your chosen market isn't buying. That's a real possible outcome, and finding it out early for a few hundred dollars is the entire point of doing it in this order.
All of it goes in a one-page agreement we both sign before I start — so nothing rests on goodwill and nothing surprises you later.
Eight founding places, and I'd rather build five brilliantly than eight in a rush. Be honest with yourself against both columns.
Straight answers to what you're wondering before you spend anything with a stranger on the internet.
An agency builds what you brief them to build. If your offer is wrong, you'll get a beautiful version of the wrong offer, and you'll find out four months and several thousand dollars later. I start by pressure-testing whether anyone wants it — and I'll tell you if I think they don't. The other difference is who we've each spent our careers selling to. Agencies sell to marketing managers. I've sold to purchasing managers, plant engineers and HSE managers, which is much closer to whoever will be reading your page.
Because you haven't got a paying client yet, and signing up to a monthly before you've got revenue is how people end up resenting the whole exercise. The offer ends when the message is landing. If later on you've got clients coming in and you'd rather I kept it sharp than do it yourself, we can have that conversation then — with money on the table instead of hope. It isn't part of this and there's nothing to opt out of.
Because a twenty-page site is a way of not starting. Two pages force the decision: what do you fix, and who for. That's the hard part, and everything else is decoration until it's answered. Two pages can also be rewritten and relaunched in a matter of days rather than weeks or months, which matters enormously — your first version will almost certainly need changing, and a big site is expensive and slow to change. That's the part a web designer selling you a fifteen-page build has no reason to mention. It's also exactly what I build for myself when I've got something new to sell — I don't build twenty pages for a product I haven't proved yet either. Once the message is landing, expanding the site is easy and worth doing. Before then it's decoration on a guess.
Not for the first change. Everyone else sells you the idea that their version will be right first time. Mine never is — twenty years, more than thirty builds, and I have never put a message up and had it land perfectly straight away. It would be a strange thing to tell you that and then bill you for the consequence, so the first change round is inside the $490 launch stage. If you want further rounds after that they're $199 each — the same price as a Blueprint round, because that's what a revision is — fixed, told to you before you spend anything rather than an hourly rate you discover afterwards, and you decide each one after you've seen the result.
Then it's done its job. That's an odd thing for someone selling you a service to say, so let me be exact: I'd rather hand you a clear negative for about $500 in ad spend than watch you spend two years finding out slowly. And it's rarely a flat no. Usually it's "not that audience, this one" or "not that wording, this one" — which is precisely what a change round is for.
You know it from the inside, which is the most valuable knowledge there is and the worst possible angle for writing an offer. You know what goes wrong on a plant. You don't necessarily know who else is already selling advice about it, what they charge, or what words they use. I spend that time so your page isn't the eleventh identical one in your niche.
Because we're buying information, not leads, and those are two different purchases. LinkedIn is built for precision targeting by job title, and it charges accordingly — reaching a thousand people there costs several times what it costs on Meta. That premium is worth paying when you know exactly who you're selling to and you're chasing a specific, high-value contract. At this stage you don't know yet, which is the entire reason for running the campaign. On a $500 budget, LinkedIn buys you too few impressions to read anything from. The same money on Meta buys enough volume to see a pattern — which message pulled, which audience leaned in, which one ignored you.
The other reason is simpler. The plant manager, the operations director and the finance manager you want are all on Facebook and Instagram in the evening, as themselves, and Meta's targeting is deep on interests and behaviour rather than job titles. We're not trying to catch them at work. We're finding out whether the problem you fix is one they recognise. Most consultants reach for LinkedIn because it feels professional and it's what the last consultant did. It's the right tool later. It's the wrong one for a cheap first read.
Everything except the live site. A thirty-minute session where we pull the sellable problems out of your career. The market and competitor research behind them. A one-page website concept — a designed mockup of your starting point with your positioning sentence on it, so you can see the thing rather than imagine it. And a written one-page read on who your buyer is, what the offer would be, and roughly what to charge. It's a mockup, not a hosted website — putting it live on your own domain is the $790 build stage, and testing it on real people is the $490 launch stage. The Blueprint is where you find out whether you want either of them.
Then you don't go ahead, and that's the end of it. The concept and the written plan are yours to keep — take them to another builder, do it yourself, or put the whole idea back in the drawer better informed. There's no follow-up sequence and no phone calls. And there's no credit arithmetic to track and no deposit tied up — the $199 bought the Blueprint outright, and it's done its job either way: you know what your thirty years look like as a business, which is more than most people get from a four-figure strategy engagement.
On the typical path, $1,479 — $199 for the Blueprint, $790 for the build, $490 for the launch with the first change round inside it. Each stage is payable only when you start it, so you're never in for more than the stage you're standing in. If the Blueprint takes a second round, add $199. And I'd rather say the ad spend three times than have you find it in the small print: about $500 for the test campaign, roughly $50 a day for ten days, paid by you directly to Meta from an account in your name. I never touch it and you can switch it off at any moment. The alternative is you handing money to me for ad spend, which is exactly the arrangement I'd tell you to walk away from.
The economics, mostly — and the tripwire I've put on it in writing. A Blueprint round is real research time; at $199 it barely pays for itself. This only works as a business if people go on to the build, so dragging the Blueprint out would be me burning my own margin to avoid my own payday. But you don't have to take my word on incentives: the rule is on this page and goes in the agreement — most people need one round, some need two, and if we're not there by round three, the problem is the niche, not the wording, and I'll tell you to stop rather than sell you a fourth round. You can hold me to that in writing.
Almost nobody does at this stage, and getting it wrong in either direction is the most common early mistake. We put a working number on it during discovery, based on what the market research turns up rather than on what feels comfortable, and we revise it if the campaign says we've aimed wrong.
An ABN, almost certainly — it's free and takes ten minutes online. A company, usually not to start with. Professional indemnity cover depends entirely on what you advise on and who you advise, and it's the one thing here I'd send you to an accountant and a broker for rather than guess at. I'm not your accountant and I won't pretend to be.
I started over at 48, so I'd be a hypocrite to say yes. It's also not just me: mature-aged founders lead 34% of Australia's young businesses and are the fastest-growing group of new business owners in the country, and research on career changes made after 45 finds the large majority describe the transition as successful. Thirty years of knowing what actually goes wrong isn't a liability — it's the entire product.
The discovery session, your materials when I ask for them, quick answers while the campaign is running, and — if you're one of the founding eight — your honest account afterwards and a couple of introductions to people like you. That's it.
Five minutes of questions so I turn up prepared, then we book your Blueprint session — $199, and everything it produces is yours to keep. If you're not a fit, I'll tell you on the call rather than sell you something — and you'll still leave with the concept, the plan, and a clear picture of what you'd be selling and to whom.
Start with the Blueprint — $199 →Pay the $199 straight away — I'll call you to arrange a time.
8 founding places · selected by application