The Long Way Round
to LIP Services
Twelve years of doubt, five years fencing for Jim's, two years on the road, and a vacant block in the bush. Not the highlight reel. The actual story.
Twelve Years of Playing Pretend
For twelve years I chased an idea a hundred different "gurus" online were all selling: build websites, run ads, do SEO for other businesses, and get paid well for barely any work. I bought the courses. I did the tutorials. I learned how to build and rank websites, and run paid advertising on Facebook and Google. All of it while I was still working a normal job and living a normal life. This wasn't the main event. It was the thing I did on the side, trying to make it the main event.
It never felt real. The results were uncertain. There was no guarantee I was actually doing a business a service, rather than taking their money and throwing mud at the wall to see what stuck. I couldn't commit to offering people hope, taking their money, and not being able to guarantee I could deliver. I hadn't achieved that kind of success for myself. I wasn't going to promise it to someone else.
Jim's Fencing
Around 2019, while all that was still simmering in the background, I started a fencing business, Jim's Fencing, under the Jim's banner. If you live in Australia you'll know the name; it started with Jim's Mowing and grew into a franchise covering so many trades it's become a meme. "There's a Jim's for that."
Five years in that business, through the worst of it (the pandemic, the shutdowns, all of it), and I came out the other end successful. Not because the work got easier, but because I finally understood the system Jim's had built underneath the trade itself: how they generate leads, distribute them, and hold every franchisee to a standard that gets results. That's a big enough lesson that it's its own story. I've written it up separately, because it's where the system behind LIP Services actually came from.
Hitting the Road
Early 2024, the time came to get on the road. The plan was twelve months travelling Australia. It turned into nearly two years.
Magpie Rest
Somewhere in that stretch we bought five acres, vacant land with nothing on it, with a plan to build a self-sufficient, off-grid homestead. We call it Magpie Rest. Right now, that's still mostly what it is: a plan mapped onto a block. We're living in a caravan on the land while I build the house myself, as an owner-builder. Realistically that's another 12 to 18 months before we're living in a finished home.
I'm not telling you this because it's finished and impressive. It isn't finished. It's the same thing running through everything else in this story. Deciding to actually do the thing yourself, on your own timeline, without a guarantee it'll be quick or easy.
The Idea That Wouldn't Let Go
Even on the road, I couldn't leave the original problem alone. How do you actually help a small business owner navigate the parts of running a business that eat their time and their evenings? The call they can't take. The quote that goes cold. The invoice nobody chases.
Travelling gave me the space to actually look at it properly, and that's where I found AI. Not as a buzzword, but as a genuinely different way to solve the same problem I'd been circling for twelve years. Tools that could answer a call, follow up a quote, chase an invoice, without needing a call centre or a franchise fee to do it. The thing I couldn't guarantee twelve years ago, I finally had a way to actually build and prove.
LIP Services Today
That's where LIP Services came from. Not a pivot dreamed up in a boardroom, but the answer to a problem I'd been personally stuck on since long before I ever set foot on a jobsite for Jim's. Twelve years of doubting the sell. Five years learning what a real system looks like from the inside. Two years of distance to actually see the shape of the problem. And AI as the tool that finally let me build something I could stand behind.
Want to see what that system actually looks like in practice, the four phases it's built around, and how they map onto the everyday problems of running a trade business? That's the next part of the story.
See what it looks like for your business.
No sales pitch, no call centre, no franchise fee. Just the same system, built for you.