Hey, I'm Guy 👋 

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.

As for my professional background, I started building business' and associating websites 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 I think makes a real difference.

After battling away with a few 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 from the pros. 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 brought with it an extremely stressful work environment as conversations with our merchants began to change from helping them grow their business to instead helping them save their business. Additionally, touch points with individual merchants were extremely low so we weren't able to see any of the results from the advice we'd provide.

So I left, became a Shopify Partner and built tradienet. A local brand 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 🎉

Branding and Web Design was always going to be the original service we provide as it's personally what I'm most passionate about and therefore, its become my biggest strength. 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, which provided some precious early wins, and second, it's an industry where I personally could offer the most value and therefore, deliver the biggest results because the tools we build provide great value for service based business models.

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