Haus of Business started in 2005 & we didn’t know

Haus of Business did not start with a logo, a content plan or a grand idea to consult and mentor other business owners. It started on 12 September 2005, when we bought a mechanical workshop.

At the time, we had been married for two years, owned our home and were thinking about starting a family. We were proud of what we had built already, but we could not see how we were supposed to make the life we wanted work on one wage.

Russ was a qualified mechanic earning a massive $500 a week. We lived within our means, but there was no real room to move. We couldn’t see a way to break through the income ceiling over us. We kept asking ourselves and each other how do we build a life full of all the things we love and all that we want to do, without sacrificing everything else to get there?

We toyed with the idea of Russ heading to the mines but it didn’t feel right for us. Then, out of nowhere, Russ’s boss approached us about buying the workshop.

A great business, for a reasonable price and the best part, it was something we could build together. We could see the possibilities, feel the excitement, this was our way to remove the income ceiling and a way to create more choices in our life.

Along comes the 12th of September 2005, we were climbing the walls with excitement. If you had seen us that week, you may have wondered what the hell we were on and honestly, fair enough. I would’ve thought the same thing.

For us, it was one of the most exciting days of our lives. Right up there with getting married and having our two sons. It felt like the beginning of something bigger.

We thought we had the plan. In the early days, we worked from sun-up to sun-down. We did not complain because we had a purpose, we had momentum and I had done the maths.

According to my calculation, we would take a $250,000-a-year workshop to $1 million in annual revenue in under three years.

The maths worked. Real life took 12 years.

That was one of our first big business lessons. A good plan matters but business rarely follows the neat timeline you imagined from the kitchen table.

Still, we kept building. We grew revenue and profit year after year. We learned how to make hard calls and along the way we made some expensive mistakes. We fixed what was not working, built systems, a team, a reputation and a business that could keep showing up long after the excitement of day one wore off.

More than 20 years on, Woombye Mechanical Repairs has generated more than $18 million in revenue and has paid us a healthy multi-six-figure income for years. FYI we still own it today, why because we love the community we’ve built there and that we get the honour of serving every day.

But the real win was never a revenue figure.

The workshop gave us something far more valuable. It helped fund our family life. From motocross, yes, one of the most expensive sports in the world. It gave us experiences such as travelling the globe, breathing room and the ability to build a life that felt bigger than a weekly wage.

That is where our belief was formed: a business should give you more than it takes from you.

Then we built again. The workshop was not our only business story. We also built a bookkeeping firm from scratch to more than 70 active clients, a team of three and over $300,000 a year. We learnt a different set of lessons there, from recurring revenue, client relationships, delivery, systems, team, capacity and the weight of being the person everyone looks to for the answer.

Across both businesses, we saw the same thing again and again. Great business owners were brilliant at their craft, trade or service but often had no one to help them make sense of the business around it. They were busy, capable and working incredibly hard, yet still feeling underpaid, overwhelmed or unsure what the next move should be.

Some had more work than they could handle but not enough profit to show for it. Some had the potential to grow, but no clear plan for how to do it without creating more chaos. Some were carrying every decision, every customer problem and every team issue alone.

We understood that feeling because we had lived it.

We knew that being good at what you do does not automatically make business easy. You still need to understand your numbers, you need services that make sense and sales, systems that support you, a team that can carry responsibility and the confidence to make the hard decisions before they become expensive ones.

And we knew that the business only becomes truly successful when it creates more for the life we live inside and outside the business.

That is why we built Haus of Business. The place where everything we have learned comes together.

It is built on more than two decades of owning, growing, getting things wrong, making changes, making money, building teams and figuring out how to build businesses that support a life not consume it.

We are not here to tell you what to do from the sidelines and leave you with a colour-coded plan you never implement. We are here to work with you, to help you see the truth of what is happening in the business, find what is costing you money and time, decide what moves to make and when and build what comes next.

Whether you are fighting to keep your head above water, sitting on a busy business that is not giving you enough back or ready to take a business you are proud of to its next level, we are here for all of it.

Because you can be proud of what you have built and still know there is more. More profit. More time. More freedom. More of the life you want.

That is the journey that led us here. That is Haus of Business.