Who Is the Wizard Behind
the Zen Window Cleaning Curtain?

My window cleaning career started with a holiday, would you believe... In 2009BC (before covid) I decided to spread my wings and move away from the Gold Coast for a year to do the standard working holiday in Canada that half the millennial population seemed to do at the time. With pretty much 0 skills or life experience, I talked my way into a job wearing a skirt for a living. No, it's not what you think, this is before all the woke stuff became popular and it actually honoured my Scottish heritage (definitely where I get my red hair and beard from, thanks Mum). That company was Men In Kilts window cleaning, at the time a growing start-up that used the kilt as the marketing 'gimmick' to get attention, but as their founder used to say, it's only a gimmick if you can't produce a high quality service. During that time I picked up the basics of cleaning, and blew the company away with my customer service talents (apparently I doubled the positive reviews of their second best tech at the time). But all good things must come to an end and I returned back to my home town here on the Gold Coast.

I returned and worked for a local company for a few years and further honed my skills before getting fed up with the way I saw other companies operating, so being the delusional optimist I was, I started my own business. Streakers Window and Exterior Cleaning was my first business, and over the next 4 years I grew it to be a well known local powerhouse with up to 6 staff for a time. But this too had its own expiry date looming, as I had a childhood dream to fulfil and at 25 I was getting on in the years (or so I thought at the time, again the naivety of youth).

In 2015, I chose to completely change directions with life and join the army as an infantryman. After completing basic and employment training, I was posted to 3 RAR (aka the Pack of Bastards) in Townsville. In 2017 I deployed to Afghanistan with Bravo Company. Upon returning to Australia, in 2018 I ended up talking my way into competing on the army Biathlon team (I wasn't any good at that but I had fun and looked amazing in the purple condom suits we had to wear). Unfortunately the stresses of trying to keep up with 18 year olds and doing stupid things with heavy packs in the bush was starting to show on my body, so in 2019 I finished up my service and again returned home to the Gold Coast.

Other than vowing to never shave again, what does a guy do when he gets out of the army? No, I didn't start a coffee company, but I went into working for an auto dismantler, but unfortunately the physicality of it aggravated too many injuries. Also, after being told what to say, wear, do and when I could do it for the previous 4 years, I may have developed a little bit of a problem with authority. Angry with the world and a little at being in the situation I was in, I took a little bit of time to do some self reflection, and realised that I actually did enjoy window cleaning when I was doing it, and I'd already had 1 successful business before, so why not do it again.

And so Zen Window Cleaning was born. Why Zen, you ask? Well, 3 reasons:

1. I wanted a short name that's easy to write out a million times (because I'm lazy that way).
2. Bit of an angry man at the time and needed to find a bit of calm again (my zen perhaps...)
3. The imagery it presents along with the Japanese inspired philosophy ties in well with a high end cleaning business.

And then Covid hit.

How does one build and grow a brand new business when the whole world is locked down? Quite easily it seems, as everyone was stuck at home and got sick of looking at their own dirty windows. I grew to having a couple of really good guys in a small team by the end of 2021, when I got hit by a pair of massive life changers.

September 2021, my wife and I (actually mostly her, I put like 3 minutes and 12 seconds into the effort a few months earlier) took delivery of our future child labour force, however they seemed to be as impatient as their parents and decided they wanted to arrive early and underdeveloped at 25 weeks. After a really rough start, the 2 pulled out every miracle in the book and dodged every bullet that came their way and left NICU and hospital with 0 further complications as 2 little healthy boys. I understandably took the 3 months on reduced work to take care of everyone at that time and the business took a downturn during that time. The big wet and flooding we had in 2022 put a massive damper on any rebuild opportunities for the business and I sadly had to let the 2 rockstars I had working for me go. At the end of 2023 I performed a full reboot of the business, moving it back to a solo operation, and decided to do a ground up rebuild of everything.

That brings us to now, 2026. I'm older, fatter and have less hair, but some may consider me wiser (I definitely don't consider myself that). I'm still happy being known as the go to window cleaning specialist on the Gold Coast, that guy you call when you want the job done right, on time, and with no fuss. Staying as a solo operator is the right call for Zen Window Cleaning, it seems being really really good at what you do makes it hard to hire. So I've made the decision to forgo managing staff and bigger jobs and take the much harder job of trying to take care of the chaos that is my family instead.

So you know what I do for work, who am I outside of Zen? Mostly, I'm a husband to my lovely wife Tammy, and father to my twins Axel and Archer, and dog father to a pair of Great Danes, Taco and Goose. As you can see I like to play life on hard mode and all 5 are more chaos than work could ever be (lads, stay clear of short fiery women, they can put you in both heaven and hell). Seems that the hard start in life has made the kids fearless in almost every way, so my wife and I spend most of our time trying to keep them alive.

Reading all this you must think I should have a nice quiet and relaxing hobby to keep me sane, and that I do. In my spare (almost non existent) time, I like to race suspect quality race cars for hours and days on end in the name of charity. I run the POORAGAIN Racing team in endurance events running up to 24 hours (our shortest sprint race is 7 hours long). Starting with the 24hrs of Lemons in 2019 before its demise during covid, we have been competing with MOTOR EVENTS RACING for the past 4 years. To put it bluntly, this event is full of cheap shit box cars with no right to last the distance and be driven as hard and as fast as they all do. Although winning is nice (and we have done a few times when the racing gods smile upon us) the name of the game is fundraising for Rare Cancers Australia, with a total of over $400,000 being raised in the last 4 years and growing.

If you want to help support us, feel free to donate to the event under our name at motorevents.com.au/we-are-on-a-mission, or if you want to get involved with the series, head to motorevents.com.au to find out more.