Operational leader and managing director. Twenty years in property and construction, a decade running Draftee, and a habit of building the systems that run the business.
I think about business in frameworks because the alternative is guessing. Twenty years in property and construction, a decade as a founder, and a career built on understanding which decisions compound and which ones do not. Capital discipline, contract structure, compliance posture, team design. These are not operational details. They are the strategic surface area that determines whether a business endures.
Most of the systems in the businesses I have run, including a self-hosted AI assistant trained on the National Construction Code, are ones I designed and deployed in-house. I am most useful where strategy meets execution, and where the work actually matters.
Ten years managing a cross-border team across Australia and the Philippines. Async workflows, documented processes, QA systems that run without me in the room.
I build what the business needs. Self-hosted AI, custom web platforms, automation tooling. Python, PostgreSQL, Linux are my defaults but the stack follows the problem.
Contract structures, compliance frameworks, capital discipline. I design the layer that sits under the operations and keeps the business solvent.
AI-supported operations and productivity system · 2026
An internal operations platform that turns live time, project, and financial data into a single decision surface for a distributed drafting team. Tracks live project margins, weekly team activity, and per-drafter productivity, with AI summaries that convert the numbers into a written brief in one click.
View case study →Running a distributed drafting team across four states and an offshore production floor produces a constant stream of operational questions that never get answered consistently. Which projects are running over budget, where the team's time is actually going, which drafters are clearing their budgets and which are silently burning margin. The data sat across Xero, time-tracking exports, and project records, and turning it into a defensible read meant hours of manual reconciliation that rarely happened on time.
Draftee Ops is an internal operations platform built around three linked surfaces. A live Projects view tracks margin, budget consumption, and balance status across every active job. A weekly Operations snapshot reads team hours, attribution, and watch lists for approaching-budget, over-budget, and stale work. A Review layer audits productivity through a drafter performance matrix, quadrant, and project-type pricing calibration. AI summaries sit on top at both period and individual level, giving the weekly review and one-on-one coaching conversations a written starting point rather than a spreadsheet.
React 19 and TypeScript on Vite 6 for the dashboard surface, Node.js 22 and Express on TypeScript for the API, SQLite via better-sqlite3 for storage, and Google Workspace OAuth for access control. AI summaries run on Gemma 27B served locally through llama.cpp. Self-hosted on internal infrastructure, built and deployed end-to-end in-house.
The weekly operations review collapsed from a multi-hour reconciliation exercise into a dashboard load and a generated brief. Over-budget and stalled projects now surface in the period they occur rather than at project close, and per-drafter coaching and the quarterly team bonus system run off the same auditable data layer.
In-house compliance assistant · 2025
A self-hosted AI assistant trained on the National Construction Code, sitting inside team Slack and answering compliance questions in seconds. Removes the bottleneck of senior reviewers fielding the same questions repeatedly.
View case study →Architectural drafting depends on accurate, up-to-date interpretation of the National Construction Code and state-based planning frameworks. In practice, drafters stop constantly to confirm code requirements, interrupting senior reviewers and searching dense legislative documents. The result is a steady flow of internal requests for information that slow every project down and concentrate compliance knowledge in too few people.
DrafteeAI is a self-hosted AI assistant fine-tuned on the NCC and related Australian compliance material, embedded directly in the team Slack workspace. Drafters ask questions in plain language and receive specific, citation-backed answers in seconds. The system runs entirely on internal infrastructure, with no client data passed to third-party AI vendors.
Python and the Slack Bolt SDK for the bot interface, llama.cpp as the local inference server, fine-tuned open-weight model with a custom compliance dataset. Self-hosted on internal hardware. Built and deployed end-to-end in-house.
Internal requests for information dropped 60 to 70 percent per project. Senior reviewers freed to focus on higher-value work, project velocity lifted across the team, and compliance reasoning kept fully auditable inside the business.
Scope and revision management platform · 2025
Proprietary PDF annotation platform that captures every client change request against the original scope, flags variations before work proceeds, and protects margin on every project.
View case study →In drafting work, scope-creep is the single largest source of margin erosion. Every client revision that is not captured against the original scope is unpaid work, and every undocumented change becomes a potential dispute at sign-off. Manual tracking through email and PDF threads breaks down at any meaningful scale.
Draftee Markup is a proprietary annotation platform that captures every client revision against the original scope, flags variations for approval before work proceeds, and generates a clean change record at handover. It sits between the drafter and the client, making every scope change visible to both parties in real time.
Python and PostgreSQL. Custom-built web platform with structured annotation capture, document-version control, and per-project change ledgers. Integrated into the studio's project management workflow. Built and refined in-house.
Project turnaround time cut by 50 percent. Client design disputes reduced sharply, with measurable improvement in the proportion of projects reaching sign-off without contested revisions.
Lead generation tool for owner-builders · 2025
An interactive decision tree that interprets Australian planning regulations into plain-language answers for owner-builders. Users answer a handful of questions and get a clear yes/no on whether their project needs a permit — something that normally requires navigating dense government documentation or paying for professional advice. Built and shipped independently. Also functions as a qualified lead channel for Draftee.
Visit doineedapermit.au →Founded an entirely online architectural drafting practice and scaled it into a regulated, systems-led business operating nationally without a physical office. Built and manage a distributed team across Australia and the Philippines.
Finance Manager, 2015 — 2018
Ran finance and operational reporting for a private investment vehicle with exposures across property, lending, and venture.
Co-founder & CEO, 2015 — 2018
Co-founded an early proptech venture and led product design for a full-stack platform covering estimating and take-offs, tender management, quoting, invoicing with API integrations, CRM, and project management for SME construction companies.
System Administrator, 2014
Brought in to architect an ERP system and migrate operations to an enterprise cloud platform, covering build-data, CRM, and the full sales-to-construction workflow.
Treasury can rewrite the tax code. It can't pour a slab.
An economy built on land, rocks, and debt.
In Australian property, the foreign buyer, migrant, and boomer takes are partially right. None can actually fix the problem.
The fiscal, household, and structural price of one closed strait.
Master of Business Administration
Bachelor of Business
Diploma of Information Technology
Diploma of Finance
Diploma of Business Management
Diploma of Graphic Design
Diploma of Multimedia
Victoria University Business School — Master of Business Administration
Victoria University Business School — Graduate Certificate in Business Administration
Victoria University — Bachelor of Business
I’m interested in strategy and operations roles where industry knowledge, technical literacy, and commercial judgment are valued.