About Protocol Digital: how I got here, what I do, and how I think about growth

I started with websites, but the real interest was always how things performed.

I didn’t come into this through an agency pathway. I started by teaching myself how websites worked because I wanted somewhere to publish photography while I was at university and couldn’t justify paying someone else to build a site for me. That was back in 2010. At the time I was using WordPress themes, slowly working out what everything did, trying to make things look right, and learning the hard way that a website can technically work while still feeling clunky, slow, or frustrating to use.

In the beginning it was design, layout, publishing, and trying to make a site feel better. I moved across different platforms because I cared about how the experience actually worked, not just how it looked. WordPress started to feel bogged down for what I was doing at the time, so I explored other platforms like Squarespace and Wix and kept teaching myself.

By the time I’d spent five or six years building and tweaking my own sites, I had a solid feel for the basics of web design, online products, and what people quietly notice when they land on a website. Not in a theory-heavy way. More in the practical sense of what feels smooth, what feels off, and where friction starts to build.

That foundation mattered later because it meant I never looked at ecommerce as just an ads problem.

My background is self-taught, but it’s also grounded in real commercial work.

I studied economics, which probably explains why I naturally think beyond surface-level metrics. I care about what is actually driving a result, how a decision plays out over time, and whether the underlying model makes sense, not just whether a dashboard looked good over the last seven days.

The first real opportunity to apply that inside a business came through The Beach People, where I worked as an ecommerce coordinator. That role gave me room to build deeper knowledge across Shopify, Klaviyo, GA4, Meta Ads, and Google Ads. Even where I wasn’t the person fully running a channel, I had access to the moving parts and the chance to work closely enough to understand how the decisions were being made.

After that I moved to Lahana Swim, where I spent the next five years building far more depth across ecommerce and digital ads. That period sharpened a lot of what I do now. I worked across Shopify, Shopify Plus, web design, Meta Ads, Google Ads, Pinterest Ads, and broader ecommerce operations. More importantly, I got to see how growth looks when you’re inside a brand for long enough to understand its patterns instead of just dropping in for a quick round of recommendations.

I later worked with Oroton as an ecommerce coordinator, which gave me experience inside a much larger business and exposed me to a different scale again. I’m currently with TacMed Australia, along with other labels where I run ecommerce and digital ads.

At this point I’ve got roughly a decade of experience, and most of it has been built by doing the work rather than talking about it.

Protocol Digital looks at the full picture, not just the channel that gets blamed first.

The simplest way to describe Protocol Digital is that it sits across ecommerce management, digital ads management, and online-store optimisation.

That sounds broad, but the logic behind it is straightforward. Most businesses don’t have one problem. They have a chain of smaller ones. Sometimes the ads are wrong. Sometimes the ads are fine and the product positioning is weak. Sometimes traffic is coming in, but the store is leaking trust or usability. Sometimes the pricing strategy is doing more damage than the founder realises. Sometimes post-purchase is being ignored and the business is asking acquisition to carry too much weight.

I’m interested in that full picture.

What I try to do is make the store as leak free as possible and stay proactive enough that founders can focus on the rest of the business without constantly being dragged into reactive decisions.

I care more about pattern recognition than panic.

One of the biggest problems I see is businesses focusing too heavily on ROAS and very short time frames.

If one seven-day period randomly flanks, or performance softens for a week, a lot of people immediately want major changes. Sometimes they want to change the ads. Sometimes they want to cut spend. Sometimes they panic and go on sale. In my view, that kind of thinking often creates more problems than it solves.

A short-term sales injection can feel good in the moment, but it can also train customers to wait for the next discount and slowly weaken the brand. The same goes for overreacting to one rough period without properly looking at longer-term trend, offer strength, pricing, conversion behaviour, and customer quality.

This is why I’m more interested in pattern recognition than panic. I want to know what the store is doing over time. I want to know where the leaks are. I want to know whether the issue is really acquisition, or whether the ads are just being blamed because they’re the most visible part of the system.

I value clarity over theatre.

There’s a lot of noise in digital marketing, and a lot of language that sounds polished but doesn’t really say anything. I’m not interested in phrases that make everything sound more impressive than it is. If something is working, I’d rather explain why. If something is weak, I’d rather say that plainly and figure out what sits underneath it.

That approach comes from being inside brands for long enough to know that every decision has a downstream effect. Discount too often and you change buying behaviour. Ignore store friction and you ask ads to do too much. Focus only on headline metrics and you can miss what is actually eroding performance.

Good growth work is rarely about chasing one lever. It’s about understanding the commercial shape of the business properly.

This journal is where that thinking gets put in public.

Protocol Digital isn’t built around trying to say the same things every other digital marketing business says. The journal is here to do something more useful than that.

It’s a place to write down practical thinking about ecommerce, digital ads, online-store performance, pricing, retention, and the kind of decisions founders are constantly forced to make. Some pieces will be more ecommerce-heavy. Some will lean more into digital marketing or local business context. But the thread running through all of them will be the same: clearer thinking, less fluff, and a better understanding of what is actually driving outcomes.

I’m based in Yamba and work with brands across the stretch from Coffs Harbour to the Gold Coast, as well as businesses in other places when the fit is right. That local angle matters, but I don’t want the work to read like local SEO copy. The thinking should stand up on its own regardless of location.