These days I run Action Digital, a Local SEO and web agency based at Casuarina on the NSW far north coast. Small team, narrow focus: trades, home services and local bricks-and-mortar businesses. Painters, plumbers, the operators who live or die on whether they show up in the map pack when someone three suburbs over goes looking. The work is Google Business Profile, local SEO, websites, Meta and Google Ads, and the CRM and automation plumbing behind it so the leads actually get followed up.
When I spoke at the Summit in 2015 I was at Westpac, where I spent twelve years on the product and design side, running user design and business analysis on banking apps and origination platforms. After that came the vendor side: IBM, then Kenshoo (now Skai) on the paid search platform, then Emarsys and SAP, where I finished as Regional VP APAC. Enterprise martech, big logos, long sales cycles.
Going from that to running a two-person agency for small local operators has been the most useful education of my career. The decks get thinner and the accountability gets sharper. A painter in Tweed Heads does not care about attribution models, he cares whether the phone rang this week. Most of what I do now is translating enterprise-grade thinking into something a business with no marketing department can actually run.
What has my attention right now is what AI answers are doing to local search intent, and whether the map pack holds up as the front door for local businesses.