The bloke behind it. And what he stands for.

I'm Antony Loomans. Thirty years in project management, with companies like Deloitte, Virgin and Commonwealth Bank, and with dozens of owner-run businesses nothing like them. Twenty-seven years in marketing, the last sixteen of them helping trade businesses get found and get chosen, some of the biggest in the country, Amalgamated Pest Control among them. At 40 I had a seven-figure agency I could run in a couple of hours a day. House on the Northern Beaches. Time to watch the whales. All the boxes ticked.

And something was still missing.

I'm not a tradie, and I won't pretend to be one. But I've spent my whole working life inside the same problem you live in: doing good work is one job, and getting paid what it's worth is a second job nobody trained you for.

My old man was an engineer. I grew up under a drawing board, out on site visits, around his mates who ran crews and factories. People who made tangible things. I spent my career on the intangible side of all that, and what I want now is to help the people doing the real work get paid properly for it.

Then life took the lot. In 15 months I lost my father, my marriage, and access to my daughter. What followed was four and a half years of court. $300,000 in legal fees. 900-kilometre commutes. Panic attacks I learned to manage in the car between meetings.

One commitment held the whole way through: the vow I made when my daughter was born, to be 100% capable and 100% present. The commitment held. Everything I build now comes out of that.

So when a painter writes that he's mourning the life he might've had, or a sparkie says he used to enjoy solving people's problems and now he hates people, I don't read that as market research.

I've been the bloke at the end of his rope. I know what the phone that never stops does to a person.

Sell My Service started life as something else. We were going to build software. Another app, another login, another subscription. The standard play.

But I'd watched too many businesses buy tools that didn't fix anything. So before we built it, we listened. More than 2,300 operators talking among themselves, across 40 trades, with nobody selling to them — every one tied to a source. Nine problems, ranked by how often they came up, and a quieter signal underneath: what the ones who win do differently.

The data killed the plan to sell software. You can't fix a belief problem with another thing to learn. Anything that has to be studied dies in the van.

So, yeah. The standalone app got shelved. The platform lived on as the glue — bundled in, free with the plan, not sold as one more subscription — and the listening became the foundation: visibility you own, proof you can show before the job starts, and nothing with a learning curve.

Here's the part I'd want to know if I were you, because anyone can write a nice about page.

Every decision we make is logged in a ledger. What we built, what we got wrong, what we changed our minds about. When testing showed one of our own tools wasn't ready to ship, we pulled it before launch and wrote that down too. It cost us a campaign. We'd do it again.

We don't do pay-per-lead. We don't gate research behind an email wall. We don't sell motivation at $750 a month. The full list of what we'll never do is published, and it stays published.

And I guess this is where most sites would promise you the world. I won't.

Here's what I'll say instead. We build things that are designed to still be standing in five years. We write down every step so you can check our work. And if something we offer isn't right for where your business is at, we'll tell you that too. The no has to be real, or the yes means nothing.