Speaker, and founder of Optiphone
I spent my career inside the books of the businesses I now build for. First as their accountant, then advising the large operators who had already solved the problem the small ones were drowning in. Now I build the fix, and I speak about it: on stages, at founder events, and anywhere a room is ready to hear what their phone is costing them.
Some of these are employers, some are communities I am part of, some are events I have crewed or spoken at. None of them are Optiphone customers, so I have said which is which.
KPMG has no involvement in Optiphone Innovations. Dylan’s former role with KPMG is separate from his work with Optiphone Innovations.
I did not come to this problem through a pitch deck. I came to it through my parents.
My dad built a pool maintenance business on the Gold Coast over twenty years. Mum tried helping by taking the business calls but she was still running her own accounting firm. Both of them are exceptional at what they do. Both of them spent years losing jobs to missed calls, drowning in admin, and working evenings they should have had off.
As a kid I did not have language for it. I just knew the phone always won.
Conversations inevitably landed on what was going on with the schedule, if an invoice had been chased, why we weren’t charging for the extra acid we used on that job. The dinner table became a boardroom most nights.
For a long time I assumed it was a my family problem.
Then I became an accountant. Across MQ Accountants and Vincents I worked hands-on with more than a hundred solo operators and small businesses: plumbers, sparkies, pool techs, landscapers, cleaners. Later at KPMG I saw the other end of the spectrum, advising businesses turning over $100M and up.
The pattern made me feel sick, because it was not unique to my family at all. Every single tradie I worked with was losing jobs to a ringing phone they could not answer, and beating themselves up for it after hours.
The bigger the operation, the more systems protected the owner’s time. The smaller the business, the more the owner became the system.
Voicemail. A part-time receptionist they could not really afford. An overseas call centre that did not know a pool from a pump. None of it fixed the actual problem, which is that the call arrives while your hands are full and there is nobody to take it.
The data makes it visceral. Eighty percent of callers sent to voicemail hang up without leaving a message. Eighty-five percent never call back. Sixty-two percent have already called a competitor. Every one of those was a person who needed help and got nothing instead.
You did not lose that job because you were bad at your trade. You lost it because you were busy being great at it.
I started building Optiphone in early 2024, using my dad’s pool business as the very first test customer, because if it could not survive his calls it could not survive yours. In December 2025 I left KPMG to go all in.
Optiphone is my answer to a problem I felt before I understood it, and confirmed with my own eyes across dozens of businesses before I built a single line of it.
I am not a tech founder who spotted an industry to disrupt. I am a tradie’s kid who became an accountant and got tired of watching good operators lose to a phone.
The thing I noticed across those hundred businesses was not a plumbing problem. It was that in a small business the owner is the system. Every repeating conversation runs through one person, and when that person is busy, the conversation does not happen.
An unanswered call is only the most obvious example. The web enquiry that sits for four hours is the same failure. So is the registrant who never confirms, the customer nobody asks for feedback, and the invoice that goes quiet at six days over. All of them repeat. All of them leak. None of them are anyone’s actual job.
That is what Optiphone builds now. Not a receptionist. A way to make the conversations your business repeats run properly, every time, without depending on somebody remembering.
It started with trades, and it has not stayed there. Optiphone now runs the phones for multi seven figure operators and handles call volume for teams as large as twelve, across multi location and national businesses. The problem turned out to be the same at every size. What changes is how expensive it gets when nobody is watching it.
Speaking
I have spent the last few years on both sides of the event business: crewing them, running rooms, fixing what breaks at the back, and speaking from the front. The events and personal development space is the thing I care most about outside the business itself, and it is where I have learned the most about how people actually decide.
What I bring to a stage is not a product pitch. It is a working read on how customer expectations have moved, what AI is actually changing about the experience a business delivers, and which of it a leader should act on this quarter, delivered by someone who has sat in the books of more than a hundred small operators and advised companies turning over $100M and up.
What people now expect when they contact a business, how fast that expectation moved, and what it means for everyone serving them. Not a technology talk. A talk about what your customers have quietly started assuming, and what happens to the businesses that have not noticed.
They leave withA clear read on what their customers now expect, and where they currently fall short of it.
Most of the AI conversation is stuck between "it is coming for everyone’s job" and "it fixes everything", and neither helps a leader making a real decision this quarter. This is what the best-run operators are actually changing, what they are deliberately leaving alone, and how they tell the difference.
They leave withA practical way to decide what to hand over and what to keep human.
You are not the bottleneck. One rung down, somebody is. Every department ends up with a manager who has quietly become the system: the approvals, the escalations, the handovers and the chasing all route through them, and when they are in back to back meetings, on leave, or simply flat out, their whole department slows to their pace. It is hard to see from above, because the work still gets done, just later and worse. This is how to find which of your departments runs on one person remembering, and what to take off them first.
They leave withA read on which of their departments is one person deep, and what to systemise before it breaks.
What grinds teams down is rarely the work itself. It is the call that lands mid task and the twenty minutes it takes to get back. Do that thirty times a day and you do not have a workload problem, you have someone who finishes at six feeling like they achieved nothing. A wellbeing question wearing a technology question’s clothes.
They leave withWhich interrupt-driven work is quietly wearing their team down, and whether a machine should carry it.
Rooms I have worked
Tell me the room, the date and what you want them to walk out with. If I am not the right person for it I will say so, and I will usually know who is.
Speaking is half of it. The other half is crewing: running the room, fixing what breaks, and watching how people actually behave when somebody has their full attention.
“I had Dylan support me recently to run the biggest event I have ever hosted on the Gold Coast. I am so grateful for his help, he was incredibly switched on and very proactive when I was experiencing some challenges with the venue while trying to present to the audience. Apart from his incredible people skills and being a reliable person you can count on. He is overall a really great human and someone you want to have in your corner.”
“I've had the pleasure of knowing Dylan through Fxrge over the past two years, and he's been one of those rare people who shows up not just as an attendee, but as someone who genuinely wants to help... His reliability, positive attitude, and willingness to pitch in without being asked is something you truly don't take for granted...”
“One of the best people I know to bounce ideas off. Sharp thinker, genuinely insightful, and always brings a grounded practical perspective. The kind of person who actually wants to see you win and shows up like it too. Great guy, highly recommend without hesitation!”
If your business has a conversation it has over and over, I would genuinely like to hear what it is. Sometimes the answer is that it is worth building. Sometimes it is that you do not need us yet, and I will tell you that too.
You can hear one of our agents in about thirty seconds, book a call with me directly, or just ring 0468 016 589 and talk to the agent yourself.
