The person your file had to convince.

I came to Australia for a master’s in accounting, believing effort would be enough. I took short leave from my job to sit exams. My position was promised back to me. It wasn’t there.

One week without work became five. By the time exams finished my savings were gone and rent was due in three days. I hadn’t eaten in forty-eight hours. On the Thursday I put on my best shirt, printed my résumé, and walked shop to shop until someone said yes at three in the afternoon — and I still wouldn’t be paid for weeks.

That evening a friend in Sydney rang and asked me a favour: would I hold $850 for him, so his housemates couldn’t borrow it. I said yes. I bought food that night. I returned his money months later and didn’t tell him that story for fifteen years.

I don’t tell it for sympathy. I tell it because it is the reason a stalled file is never routine to me. When you have known powerlessness you stop wasting power later — and you start recognising pressure in other people before they have said a word about it.

I worked construction sites, sold phones and internet door to door, and cooked as an assistant chef in a fifty-year-old Italian restaurant in Melbourne. Years later I would buy a hospitality business of my own. The kitchen came first.

I started broking in 2014, moved into credit as a Senior Credit Advisor, then to Bank of Melbourne as a Lending Manager with my own delegated lending authority. In 2019 I joined La Trobe Financial as a Commercial Credit Analyst, assessing portfolios above $5 million submitted through accredited brokers and business development managers.

I know what a credit committee reads, in what order, and what makes it stop reading.

Since 2014 I have not spent a single year outside finance and lending. Broker, Senior Credit Advisor, Bank Lending Manager, Commercial Credit Analyst, and back to broking — different chairs, one industry, twelve unbroken years.

Pearl Estate, since 2016. Property analysis, development, investment and consultancy. More than ten completed projects of my own: townhouse developments, subdivisions, rooming houses and co-living accommodation. I am still building, and still borrowing to do it.

A hospitality business. I bought it loss-making, rebuilt it to profit inside eighteen months, and sold it for two and a half times the purchase price. Hospitality has the thinnest margins and the worst survival odds in the country. It is also the best training in reading a set of books honestly that I have ever had.

Mandav Studio, 2020 to 2024. An architectural visualisation practice — 3D impressions, animation, virtual design and interactive VR walkthroughs — working with property developers, architects, builders and agents across Australia, the United States, the United Kingdom and Europe. The work was selling buildings before they existed. They weren’t my counterparties, they were my clients, and I learned their businesses from the inside: how a builder prices, where a developer’s programme slips, what an architect can and cannot change once drawings are lodged.

Prevail Finance, since 2017. Built from one desk.

Four businesses, four industries, one discipline: read the numbers, find the constraint, fix the structure. It is the same thing I do to your file.

Most brokers arrange finance. Because of the chairs I have sat in, the work goes further:

• Due diligence before you commit to a business or a commercial property — tested against IBISWorld industry research, and against the questions a credit committee would ask
• Financial feasibility on a development, stress-tested by someone who has carried those numbers on site
• Cashflow modelling across a property portfolio, so the next purchase does not quietly cap the one after it
• Entity structuring across companies, trusts, unit trusts and SMSFs — run with your accountant, not around them
• Negotiation on the purchase price itself, before the finance conversation starts

Master of Commerce (Professional Accounting), Federation University Australia. Bachelor of Commerce. Certificate IV in Finance and Mortgage Broking. Member of the Finance Brokers Association of Australia, the Australian Institute of Business Brokers, and the SMSF Association. Prevail Finance Pty Ltd holds Australian Credit Licence 509527 directly.

In 2026 I joined Chris Voss — former FBI lead international hostage negotiator and author of Never Split the Difference — and professionals from around the world as a co-author of Lead with Empathy. My chapter is The Currency of Empathy.

Empathy isn’t softness. It is accuracy: telling someone the truth in a way that preserves their dignity. It is the discipline this firm runs on — listen first, then structure.

A no is information, not a verdict. Decline reasons are almost always structural, and structure can be rebuilt.

If I can’t help you, you’ll hear it in the first meeting — with a plan for the next one to six months so that when you come back, we can.

Proof over adjectives. Everything on this website that sounds like a claim has a client’s name against it.