Because the security industry wasn’t built for a 20-person business.
Most security firms are built for the enterprise: a six-figure retainer, a partner who sends the invoice, an account manager who takes you to lunch, and a junior graduate who actually runs the tools.
When a small business asks for help, it usually gets one of two things — an automated scanner report nobody can read, or a quote nobody can afford. Then you are politely told to come back when you are bigger.
I have spent years on the other side of that line — the one between “someone who sells security” and “someone who does it”. A Master’s degree in cybersecurity, over five years of hands-on network and offensive security work, and a daily familiarity with the exact toolkits most agencies just repackage and resell.
I also know what a small business in Australia actually loses when it gets compromised. It isn’t just a line item on a balance sheet. It’s a customer list built over ten years, a trusted supplier’s invoice getting hijacked, or the cash flow a family depends on.
The gap between “we ran a scan” and “we actually tested your doors” isn’t a $40,000 difference. Once you strip away the sales teams, the city office rent, and the bloated retainers, it takes a few hours of focused, manual work by someone who knows where to look.
That shouldn’t cost tens of thousands. It starts at A$99.
What you are buying is a specialist, not a software subscription. A plain-English report you can actually hand to your IT provider or cyber insurer, not a 50-page PDF of coloured circles. And a clear price before the work starts, not after.
What that looks like in practice
| The usual offer | A portal login, an unverified automated scan, a scary-looking “grade out of 100”, and a sales call to upsell you a monthly retainer. |
| What I do | Automation handles the heavy lifting first; then I look at the output and manually test what matters. Every finding comes with the exact request and evidence that produced it, so your IT team — or your software vendor — can reproduce and fix it in five minutes. |
| What I will not do | Touch anything invasive before a scope is signed. Send you a generic report nobody can act on. Charge you for false alarms or findings I couldn’t manually verify. |
| Who does the work | The same person you email. No ticket queues, no offshore subcontractors, no chatbots. |
| When there is nothing to fix | I’ll tell you straight. And if it’s a quick five-minute configuration change, I’ll just tell you how to fix it yourself for free. |
Three engagements, written up the way they happened �� including how long it took and what was behind the door.
Read the evidence →Melbourne, Australia · independent · no resellers, no affiliates
Master’s degree in cybersecurity · 5+ years network and offensive security
Start with the free check.
Twelve things anyone can see from outside. If it turns out you need more, you will know what it costs before we start.