From country pubs to code

I spent more than fifteen years owning and running pubs and motels in regional New South Wales. If you've never done it, the job is hard to explain. You're a community hub, a sports sponsor, an employer of teenagers, an occasional family counsellor and a late-night peacekeeper, usually in the same shift.

I loved a lot of it. Regional venues are the last places in town where everyone still turns up in the same room — the footy club and the funeral wake and the eighteenth birthday, all in the same week, often with the same people. You don't get that anywhere else.

But it's also a job with an ethical tightrope strung through the middle of it. Serving alcohol responsibly isn't a policy question when you're the one standing there at 11:40pm. It's a judgement call about a real person, made quickly, with imperfect information, while three other things need you.

What I got wrong

For years I thought being a good operator meant being everywhere. First in, last out, fixing everything myself, holding the roster together with personal favours. I wore busy like a badge.

Turns out busy can just mean poorly designed. The venues ran best not when I was at my best, but when the systems were — an opening checklist a new casual could follow without asking, a roster built on rules instead of moods, a set way to handle the till being out. Heroics don't scale and they don't take holidays.

I learned that too slowly, and my family paid some of the interest on it. A business that needs you all the time doesn't just take your hours. It takes the relaxed version of you that the people at home should probably get first.

Stepping back

I've since stepped back from operating. That wasn't a tidy career pivot — it was a hard couple of years, and I'm not going to pretend otherwise or dress it up as a growth journey.

Part of what came out of it was looking honestly at my own relationship with alcohol, which is a strange thing to do when you've spent fifteen years selling it. I'm not anti-drinking and I'm not here to lecture anybody. I ran pubs; I like people enjoying themselves. But stepping away from it made me notice how much of our culture runs on autopilot, and that's changed how I think about venues, safety, and what "responsible" actually asks of the person on shift.

I've moved on from the pub game. I still care about the industry, the people in it, the communities it holds together, and doing something useful about alcohol-related harm.

Why I build now

When I stepped back, I finally had time to look properly at the tools venues get sold. Most of them are built by people who have never had to make that 11:40pm call. You can tell. Operators can always tell — usually within about ninety seconds of a demo.

So that's what I do now. I build software for venues, starting with OffTapWatch — AI-assisted alerts for human review, so staff can get onto trouble earlier instead of pulling up footage the morning after. It runs on the cameras a venue already has, and a person makes every call. It's still in build.

I write here about running venues, what tech companies get wrong about them, and what I'm learning building for an industry where a tool either works on a Friday night or it doesn't. Fifteen years of hospitality turns out to be a decent product filter. Punters and operators have the same core rule: they don't care how hard you worked. They care whether it helps.

Based in West Wyalong, NSW. If you run a venue or build for them, say g'day.