How we got here
The two founders met in 2007 running adjacent residential lawn-care routes in southside Brisbane. Both had spent four to five years on the same buying cycle: buy a deck on its spec sheet, watch it under-perform inside three months, replace it, repeat.
The realisation was simple: nobody was publishing the buyer guide they actually needed. Manufacturer marketing was self-serving. Hobbyist forums were dominated by people who did not pay their kids' school fees with the gear. The trade media was either driven by display advertising or aimed at the fleet manager rather than the working operator.
So in 2009, we started publishing buyer guides built around what trade operators actually wanted to know: how does this thing perform under fleet load, what fails first, who in Brisbane keeps parts on the shelf, and what is the realistic five-year cost of ownership?
The studio today
Six full-time testers (three field, three desk-research) plus a network of thirty-eight trade operators across South East Queensland who run our test rigs in their normal operations. Test pools are held for typically twelve to eighteen months. Findings are published as buyer guides on this site and as private brand-and-model matrices made available to trade-verified buyers on request.
We do not sell direct to consumers. We are a trade-only merchant. Trade verification (ABN, certificate of currency, operator type) is required for matrix access.
The editorial policy
We do not take vendor money. We do not take affiliate commissions. We do not run display advertising. We have turned down every sponsorship offer made to us since 2011, including six in the last calendar year alone.
Our revenue comes from product margins on the equipment we stock and trade-counter sales on the fleet-purchasing service we run. When we recommend a machine, the recommendation is what we would buy ourselves with our own money.
If a brand changes hands and the build quality drops, we say so. If a dealer's trade-counter response degrades, we say so. If a tool we previously recommended becomes uncompetitive, we update the guide and tell readers what we are recommending instead.
The guide is the product. The trade-counter is the revenue. We never confuse them.
Where we stop
We do not test gear we have not seen used in trade conditions. We do not write buyer guides for gear that does not have at least two operators running it in our test pool. We do not publish recommendations for products we have not personally serviced when they fail. We will not be the kind of buyer guide that recommends gear based on press releases.