TOM CURPHEY STORY
RESUMEOUR #1 COMPETITION IS US! THERE IS NO EXCUSE FOR NOT LIVING TO OUR FULLEST POTENTIAL. BE THE ATHLETE YOU WERE BORN TO BE!
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Tom grew up on a goat farm in South Gippsland, Australia. From an early age all Tom asked about was how things worked. After moving into the township of Leongatha this curiosity lead to Tom to start a Lawn Mowing business at 12 years old with a focus to understand how people made money.
At 16 being amazed by the different models of value delivery, Tom had 5 jobs Fruit Shop, Paper Boy, Dish Washer, McDonalds & Dog Walker. The opportunities available were exchanging time for money & this didn’t feel right as the people making the most money in town weren’t doing this.
Being inspired to help people improve their Health & Fitness Tom studied Personal Training with the aspiration of opening his own gym.
When school finished Tom wanted to explore the world & got a job as a Gym Manager on cruise ships, this opened his eyes to the power of selling, communication & brand positioning. It was clear that the industry was focused on making money rather than helping its customers. Frustrated by this Tom went to university to get the message out & educate the people at scale. This is where Tom learnt about multi channel marketing leveraging data analytics to grow businesses.
With big ambitions in 2011 it was clear that in order to unite health & fitness education freely, an online business was required. As a result Tom launched Xenus Fitness! This fast paced industry was exciting, after getting funding for his idea, Tom sought the help of Website Developers, this excitement quickly turned to sour as developers burned through funding and delivered uncompleted featured. Then asking for more money to fix it, holding Tom captive to his idea. This went on for months, until one day Tom was so sick of not knowing how to fix these problems, he decided to learn how to code.
Building a complex product like Xenus Fitness at first seemed too overwhelming, so to understand the basics, Tom built a recipe website to promote the benefits of healthy eating.
This quickly grew as Tom was implementing all the marketing strategies from Uni, often in real time.
With a constant thirst to learn more, Tom asked his uni lecturer if he could go to the breakfast lectures that he was giving at CPA in Melbourne. Walking into that room at 19 years, Tom felt amazing. Instead of asking for a Job, Tom asked for hindsight advice on how to follow in the footsteps of these business leaders. This opened up a flood of opportunities to speak to business operators all over Melbourne, which lead to Tom meeting Paul Waldren who was also inspired to improve the quality of health and fitness education. This lead to Tom working on the code base that built white labelled apps for celebrity fitness trainers.
In the background Tom was still building his Recipe website & he was getting requests to do catering & functions. To make the business model work needed to go big on this opportunity & launched a health cafe in Melbourne. The vision was simple, create an experience to inspire people to eat more healthier. Fed Up Project was born fueling people up with delicious functional food.
The operations of running a cafe weren’t as simple. We were buying expensive quality ingredients & serving them in a market with a fixed price ceiling with no real way of knowing how much we were making per sale. After 2 years funds we low & we still had $100,000 in debt.
The only way out was to make my best, better.
I down scaled operations & with the programming knowledge I had learnt, I built a tool to calculate our recipe costs. It quickly became obvious that we weren’t making enough per sale. No matter how much I much revenue I made the business was just not profitable. Within 2 months of using the tool we were steadily increasing our weekly profits. I could see the light at the end of the tunnel. What I didn’t see though is that in the background my business partner had other plans which ultimately left me with nothing & $60,000 in loans.
This was the biggest opportunity for Tom to reflect. You don’t know what you don’t know & clearly something was missing. After studying how to get out of the situation, it was obvious that Tom wasn’t living his life in alignment to his values.
Moving forward Tom wanted more freedom & to continue his health & fitness pursuit. However the loans still needed to be paid, to align this task with the larger goal, Tom built a Marketing Agency doubling down on web development & sales funnel design. This created a great opportunity to learn faster & gave increased Tom’s confidence from the real world results he was producing. With a drive to do more in 2018 Tom launched of ,[object Object], focusing on improving the quality of food we serve in the hospitality industry.
The hurdle in completing the web app was that client side form rendering was still finding its feet. Tom learnt 13 different coding languages before find the right solution that Recipe Revenue is built on today.
This unique skill set that Tom had acquired quickly got the attention of recruiters for larger companies. Where he got his first contract as a Senior Front End Developer. Working with Golf Australia, Australian Super & Nissan. In 2020 this lead to my first Lead Developer role at Australia Post building out their form infrastructure.
With a focus on the future & wanting more freedom Tom’s partner inspired him to learn about Mindful Lifestyle Design. The question became how could we travel full time & meet more Mindful Mentors. Together we build an Off Grid Campervan to explore Australia, learning everything from RV System Architecture to product selection & design.
In 2023 Tom travelled Australia connecting with Mindful Mentors & Incredible Chefs as he promoted Recipe Revenue.
Tom’s life ambition is to improve the quality of food we consume by leveraging SAAS based business models to enhance supply & demand.