“Hi, I’m Lachie.
Nice to meet you.”

Dear friend,

If you’re reading this, you probably just typed my name into Google.

Maybe we’re about to do business. Maybe you found me on YouTube. Maybe you’re just nosey.

No judgment. I’d do the exact same thing.

Either way, you’re here to answer one very simple question:

Is this bloke the real deal — or just another 20-something renting a Lamborghini on the internet?

Fair question. So let me give you a choice.

I can give you the polished LinkedIn version. The one the corporate blokes read out at the country club — “results-driven visionary, passionate about synergy and scale.” Beige. Forgettable. A lie in a nice suit.

Or I can tell you the truth.

The real one. The wins and the losses, no rose-coloured glasses. It’s been a decade of building, pushing hard, chasing down dreams, and yeah — copping a few beatings along the way. That’s the fun part of the story, not the sad part.

So if you actually want to know who I am, I’ll tell it to you straight. Like we’re two mates, a few beers deep, on a Saturday night, and you made the mistake of asking me how I got here.

Fair warning: I don’t have a “polished filter” switch.

Before we’re done, I’ll tell you about:

• The 4am cold call that got me told to get fucked — and nearly ended it all on day one.
• The roof that flooded my first office (and the nicked podcast foam that saved it).
• The best mate who robbed me blind — and what it cost me to learn the lesson.
• The afternoon I handed my old man a set of car keys and wiped out twenty years of shame.

But you’ve got to earn those. So we start where I started — at the very bottom.

I was the broke kid nobody wanted to learn from.

I grew up in Melbourne, one of five kids, in a family that never had two dollars to rub together.

And I got bullied for it. Properly. Kids can smell broke on you a mile off, and they are absolute savages on the playground about it.

I still remember the day I found out we were poor — twelve years old, realising the reason I had holes in my shoes and the other kids didn’t wasn’t bad luck. It was just us.

Here’s the bit the private-school kids will never get their heads around:

I had no rich dad. No rich uncle. No rich mate. No rich neighbour. No silver spoon shoved up my ass.

Not one single human in my orbit who’d ever made real money and could show me the ropes. Abundance wasn’t a value in my house — it wasn’t even a word we knew.

So no, I didn’t grow up with big dreams and a vision board full of Ferraris.

I grew up with a knot in my gut and one thought on loop: how the hell do I make this stop?

(Remember that question. It runs under this whole story.)

That’s what shoved me onto the internet. Not ambition. Not passion. Pure, sweaty desperation — pay the bills, keep a roof over my family, and don’t get roasted at school on Monday.

And that kicked off a ten-year journey of getting kicked in the nuts by business, over and over — and, in between, building things I’m genuinely proud of. It was equal parts brutal and the best fun I’ve ever had.

I’m not the golden boy who cracked it in eighteen months. I stumbled through it for a decade — and I’ve still got a long way to go. But I wouldn’t trade a day of it.

Equal parts brutal — and the best fun I’ve ever had.

My first job was Macca’s. My daily habit was weed.

That’s me. Golden arches. Name badge on crooked. A wage you could count in shrapnel on the bus home, the smell of old fry oil baked into my hair.

And look, the beer’s open between us here, so I’ll be honest — back then I was a bit of a dropkick. I was smoking weed every single day, mostly to blur out how flat and miserable my life felt.

I wasn’t the hungry young gun yet. I was a stoned teenager hiding from his own life behind a deep fryer.

Then came the night that grabbed me by the collar.

My family was about to get evicted. The whole lot of us, out on the street.

That was the wake-up call. That’s the night I typed those four hopeful, clueless little words into Google:

“how to make money online.”

And then I failed at it for years. Which is the next bit.

Then I failed at everything. For years. Spectacularly.

Name the shiny object. I chased it, tripped over it, and face-planted.

Dropshipping. eBay arbitrage. Shopify stores. Amazon FBA. Print-on-demand. Every “make money online” fairytale the internet swore would save my life.

I bombed at all of it. For years. But every flop taught me something, and I kept swinging.

Here’s lesson number one I’d tattoo on the forehead of younger me: chasing trends with no actual skill is just gambling with extra steps. What changed everything wasn’t another hack — it was finally deciding to build a real skill.

I got a job at a movie theatre, and on my breaks I started reading Tony Robbins and How to Win Friends and Influence People.

That’s the unsexy bit that flipped the switch. Social skills, discipline, real money-making skills — instead of chasing the next shiny thing.

Then I heard Mark Cuban say the line that redirected my whole life: “if you want to make money, learn how to sell.”

So I did. Sort of. It went horribly.

The 4am phone call that nearly ended it before it started.

I’d heard Alex Becker banging on that SEO agencies were the way to go — this is way back in the day — and I thought, righto, that’s me.

I set up shop at a desk in my parents’ basement to start my own little agency.

I made exactly ONE cold call.

A voice like gravel picked up: “Mate… do you have any idea what fucking time it is?”

I did not. It was 4am. On a public holiday. (I genuinely didn’t know any better. I thought that’s just… what you did.)

He told me, in extremely creative language, to get fucked, and hung up so hard I felt it through the phone.

So I did the only thing that made sense: I threw myself in the deep end and got a job at a cold-calling agency, so I’d have no choice but to get good.

And for the first time in my life, I got good at something fast. Faster than anyone thought possible.

At 18 I went from the bottom of the floor to number one in under 60 days.

I landed at the biggest digital marketing agency in the country, cold-calling tradies to flog them online ads.

Headset on. Find my own leads. Hundreds of dials a day. Rinse, repeat, all day, every day.

It was one of the toughest gigs going — and the single most valuable year and a half of my life.

Because at eighteen, running everything I’d drilled out of Dale Carnegie, I became the number one rep in the entire company in under 60 days. Self-taught. Records broken.

For the first time ever, I was making real money — about 60 grand a year, nearly 80 once the commissions kicked in and I really got humming.

Enough to help pay my parents’ rent and drag us out of that eviction hole. First proper breath of air we’d had in years.

That moment is still one of the best feelings I’ve ever had.

Funny thing, though — I didn’t get into sales because I loved it.

I got into sales because I wanted OUT of it. Figured if I mastered the bastard, I’d never be trapped by it again. And mastering it is exactly what set up everything that came next.

Which is why what I did next made everyone think I’d lost the plot.

The 30-second question that made me a millionaire.

While I was smashing sales, I was still tinkering at night — running my own dinky little Shopify stores, chucking five bucks a day at Facebook ads trying to crack the code by hand. (This is well before AI. ChatGPT wasn’t even a twinkle. You learned everything the hard way, one wasted fiver at a time.)

So I made a move that looked completely unhinged from the outside.

I walked away from the job where I was the top earner — the 80 grand — and took a junior gig at one of the fastest-growing marketing agencies in the country for 40 grand.

Half the money. On purpose. Because I wasn’t optimising for that year — I was optimising for who I’d be in ten.

And here’s the thirty-second conversation that paid for itself about ten thousand times over.

End of the interview, I asked the founder — a genuinely gun marketer — one question: “If you were me, what’s the one skill I’d learn to be the best in the building at this?”

He leaned in and lowered his voice. “You want to know a secret?”

I leaned in too. Obviously.

“I can get better results than anyone on my team — even with zero Facebook ad targeting — because I know how to write the words that make people take action. It’s called direct-response copywriting.”

I went home that night and started studying it. Fifteen-odd years later, I still haven’t stopped.

And I studied it like a man possessed. Here’s how much of a man possessed.

Why I read the words of dead men on my lunch break.

For the next year and a half I wrote, designed and ran Facebook ads and funnels for hundreds of businesses across hundreds of niches, managing millions in ad spend.

But here’s the bit nobody else was mad enough to do.

I stopped listening to music on the commute. Stopped watching YouTube. Instead I printed out old-school direct-response ads — real, physical print ads from the greatest copywriters who ever lived — and read them for hours, every single day, on the train, red pen in hand.

Lunch break? Didn’t sit with the team. Sat on my own in the corner, reading fifty-year-old adverts written by blokes almost nobody’s ever heard of.

Obsessive? Absolutely. And it’s still my single biggest unfair advantage — one barely anyone in my world even knows exists.

It was about to build me everything.

So I backed myself and started my own agency — off a dining table.

Eventually I stopped studying other people’s businesses and built my own digital marketing agency.

Ran it off laptops on a dining table and went from $0 to $40,000 a month recurring in 90 days — off the back of me writing the ads and doing the selling.

Then scaled it to around $3.5 million a year over the next few years.

Dining table, to three chairs, to a very leaky office.

Dining table, to a tiny office with three chairs, to a bigger office in a genuinely dodgy old building in Melbourne.

So rough that one day the roof pissed water straight through the ceiling in the rain, right across the office floor. That’s us that night — chucking down every bit of sound-deadening foam we’d half-inched from a podcast studio to soak it up off the concrete.

Real Wolf of Wall Street stuff, this.

But that agency was the first thing I ever built that genuinely worked. All up, we generated over $325 million in sales for our clients across every industry you can name.

And the first real money it put in my pocket? I knew exactly what I was doing with it. That’s the bit I’m proudest of in this whole letter.

The best money I ever spent had four wheels — and my dad behind them.

I bought my dad a car. After his got repossessed.

Same dad who worked himself into the ground so we could just barely keep the lights on. I still see his face when I handed him the keys.

That single afternoon wiped out years of holes-in-my-shoes, “Lachie Pior is a scab” shame. Right there, that’s the moment I’d been chasing since I was twelve years old.

That’s the actual point of the money. Everything else is just a scoreboard.

And here’s the kicker — I was still living at my parents’ place while all this was happening. Building an agency doing millions, still sleeping in the family home (granted, I was paying the rent, lol).

Which is exactly where the next chapter kicks off.

Then the world locked down — so I built a whole new business.

Covid hit, and Melbourne got shut down harder and longer than just about anywhere on the planet.

Nearly all our clients were local. So when Melbourne slammed shut, we lost the whole agency, basically overnight.

But here’s the thing about building a skill instead of just a company: they can take the company. They can’t take what’s in your head.

So — still at that fold-out table — I asked myself one question: how do you make money when the entire city’s locked in their houses?

And I started an education business, teaching people all over the world how to build the exact skills I’d used to claw my way up.

I took it from $0 to $650,000 a month in 90 days. In trackies. During a lockdown. Some of the best fun I’ve ever had building anything.

The view I used to only dream about.

Then I finally moved out. First high-rise apartment, floor-to-ceiling glass, looking straight out over the lights of the Crown Casino in Southbank.

From the family that couldn’t make rent, to standing at that window at midnight thinking, how in the hell is this the same life?

I put my head down and went to work. Over the next stretch I pushed that education business to a million dollars a month in cash collected — within 16 months of starting it — and built it out to over 30 full-time staff.

And somewhere in the middle of it, the press came knocking. Yahoo Finance. MSN. Business Insider. Writing up the $325 million we’d generated for our agency clients and the 1,000-plus people whose lives we’d changed in the education business.

Broke kid from the op-shop… in the financial press. Still doesn’t feel real when I type it.

But here’s the honest part I won’t skip: I’d won the game and forgotten to actually live. Which brings me to the best decision I ever made.

Then I read one book and blew my whole life up (on purpose).

I read a book called Die With Zero, and something just clicked.

I’d spent years sacrificing everything for a number on a dashboard. So I packed up and moved to Bali — and it was the best call I’ve ever made.

Ran the education business out of Bali for another year, made the best mates I’ve ever had, and stacked up experiences I couldn’t have bought at any price a few years earlier.

I flew my entire team over and put them up in a mansion — a $100,000 all-expenses-paid luxury holiday, the lot of them, just to say thank you. Watching a team I’d built from nothing lose their minds in that villa is still one of the most satisfying things I’ve ever done with money.

Then I did something that scared the hell out of me: I fully exited the education company. Walked away clean, ready for the next thing.

And walked straight into the hardest lesson of the lot.

Then I trusted the wrong bloke and got stabbed in the back.

Because it hasn’t all been up and to the right — and I’d be lying if I pretended otherwise.

I went into a government contracting business with one of my best mates. Ran it for about 10 months.

Until he completely scammed me. Turned out he’d been lying to me since day one and quietly siphoning off the money the whole time.

Lesson, paid for in full: a handshake and “he’s a good bloke” is not due diligence. Trust people — but get it in writing, and watch the money like a hawk. Some of the most expensive lessons don’t come with a course.

It stung. But I dusted myself off, because I knew the one thing nobody could ever take: the skills. So I did what I’ve always done — started again from scratch.

So I moved to Thailand and rebuilt from zero.

I moved to Koh Samui, opened the laptop, and got straight back to work.

I became a growth operator — plugging my sales and marketing skills into a bunch of different offers and businesses to help them grow.

Spread across a stack of clients, doing bits for everyone. And after about three months, an old lesson came back around and smacked me in the face again:

Split focus does not equal success. Doing a little for everyone means doing nothing great for anyone — including yourself.

So I did the only thing that’s ever actually worked for me. I locked in, went all-in on one thing, and started building my own company with everything I had.

So here’s where I’m at today.

That one thing is a software company in the financial sector — and right now it’s got my full, undivided, no-more-shiny-objects focus.

While I build it, I’m travelling the world to soak up as many different cultures as I can, have a laugh, and stack up experiences — and I’m documenting the whole ride on YouTube.

And here’s the callback: that kid who got told to get fucked at 4am and nearly quit on call one? I still pick up the phone. I still sell. I still love it. The thing that nearly ended me became the thing that built everything.

The reason I make the content comes down to three things.

One — to give back. When I was that broke kid in the basement, I had nobody. No father figure in business, no older brother who’d done it, no role model to hand me the shortcuts. So I make this stuff for the younger version of me who’s watching right now — so he can get there faster than I did.

Two — to document the journey. Because I’m still a student, and I’m nowhere near done. I want the whole thing on the record — the wins, the stuff-ups, the doubts — so one day I can look back and see how far I’ve come.

Three — to find my people. Like-minded, hard-working entrepreneurs and young hustlers who think the way I do. I’m building this to make real mates and go have cool experiences with them.

That’s the whole plan. I’m not here to flog you anything today — just sharing the stuff I wish someone had handed me twenty years ago.

So — how the hell do I make this stop? The kid who asked that question finally got his answer:

You don’t wait for it to stop. You build until you’re the one calling the shots.

If any of this landed — if you’re where I used to be, or you just like watching someone build it out loud and honest — come say hi. My DMs are open. I actually read them.

And if we’re about to do business and you just wanted to know if I’m the real deal? Now you know the whole story.

Nice to meet you.