It started on
a front
lawn.

The problem was obvious.
The solution took work.

I bought my first trailer in 2021 with a simple idea — hire it out and see what happens. I threw it up on Facebook Marketplace and started renting it from my front yard in West Mackay. It worked. But there was one very obvious problem: I had to be there for every single hire.

Someone needed a trailer at 7am? I had to be there. Saturday afternoon? There. I was physically tied to that driveway. That's not a business — that's a second job with worse hours.

So I started getting creative. I bought a second trailer, then a third, and started experimenting with coded padlocks — sending customers a code before pickup so they could collect the trailer themselves. It was rough around the edges, but the concept worked: people could hire a trailer anytime, whether I was there or not.

By the time five trailers were sitting in my front yard in West Mackay, I knew this needed to be a proper system — not a patchwork of padlock codes and text messages. I worked with a developer to create a system that automated the process between customers booking trailers and accessing their trailer. It was initially all done through email and text which had its limitations but it was a huge step in the right direction and the foundation to what made Empire Trailer Hire what it is today. No calls, no waiting, no me in the driveway. Just instant trailers.

With the system built, it was time to find somewhere to actually scale from. I met an amazing bloke who was in the process of retiring from his trucking company — he had a block of land sitting unused and was happy to lease it to me at a rate that made sense. That became our first real base. We grew from five trailers to twenty-five in that yard, and then it was time to go further.

The first big partnership came from a cold walk-in. I walked into a Mackay City store, spoke to the manager on the floor, and within weeks we had trailers across four Porters Group locations. One conversation. That's how straightforward the model is to sell when you believe in it.

Every new town was another version of the same playbook — just refined a little more each time.

As the network grew, so did the demands on the system. What started as emails and text messages had to become something far more capable — so we built it out into a fully integrated platform handling everything from bookings and lock access to fleet tracking, maintenance scheduling, and customer communications. It's not just a booking system. It's the infrastructure that holds the whole operation together.

That first partnership opened the door. Once businesses saw how the model worked — trailers on their site, fully managed by us, earning them passive income with zero effort from their staff — it wasn't a hard conversation. Shopping centres, service stations, hardware stores, sporting clubs. The expansion picked up pace: Whitsundays, Moranbah, Ayr, Townsville, Emerald, Gladstone, Bowen.