Meet Steve
Not the ego.
Businesses that worked and businesses that didn't. Big wins, proper losses, and a lot of years working out what actually matters. Steve's honest about the lot, which is why a room tends to relax about ninety seconds in. He isn't up the front lecturing. He's one of the people in it, meeting them exactly where they're at.
Why a room believes him
Steve didn't study this and turn it into a keynote. He's lived it, the good years and the ones that hurt, and he's straight about both. That's what people connect to, long before they connect to a framework.
Gingerbread houses out of the school kitchen at seventeen. Personal training through uni. A gym at twenty-six. Two ice cream stores by twenty-nine. Owned, run, staffed, sold and closed. He knows exactly what a bad month feels like.
Learn Awesome. Started as Steve freelancing and taking anything that moved. Now a team building learning experiences for organisations that could hire anyone. Run with no office and work-from-anywhere as non-negotiable.
Facilitator for hire since he was twenty-two. Eighteen years of running rooms. The craft that sits under the keynotes and the hosting, not a stepping stone to them. CSIRO keep him on call to parachute into sessions at short notice.
He's lost both his parents, carried far too much on his own, and burnt out properly. He'll talk about it when it's useful and leave it alone when it isn't. Mostly it just means very little in a room rattles him.
Thirteen minutes and twenty seconds on a cassette tape is everything Steve's dad left him. That's why he gives away what he works out instead of sitting on it, and why he's still doing this at all.
Ten years racing outrigger canoes around the Pacific. New Zealand, Hawaii, the Cook Islands. Still gets in the surf. Builds daft little tools for fun and puts them on the internet. He's a person before he's a speaker, and a room can tell.
What he actually does
Keynote, hosting, facilitation, coach-sulting. They look like four different hires. They're one thing: Steve draws out what matters, in people and in rooms.
Facilitation is the craft underneath all four, and it's the one he trained in first, at twenty-two. Most people on a stage learn to present. Steve learnt to run a room. Which is why the keynote feels less like a performance and more like a room being handled by someone who's done it a thousand times.
Forty-five minutes that leave a room with one thing to actually do on Monday. Framed by the outcome you need, not by his slide deck.
Speaking →The glue for a whole day. Keeps energy up, keeps time honest, makes every other speaker land better than they would have.
MC & Hosting →The original craft. Strategy days, offsites, hard conversations. Rooms that open up and leave with something they'll still be using Monday.
Facilitation →Fifty minutes one to one, for owners and founders who are stuck. Part coach, part problem-solver, no twelve-week programme.
Coach-sulting →Why he's safe with your event
No diva nonsense, no fixed set he performs at you regardless. Your day, your people, your outcome. He fits around it.
Before anything gets written he'll ask what you need people to know, what you need them to do, and how you need them to feel walking out. Everything is built backwards from that.
CSIRO keep him on call to drop into rooms at short notice. If your agenda moves at 9am, it isn't a problem.
He isn't up there as the bloke who's got it sorted. He's had the losses, the burnout and the bad months, and he says so out loud. That's why people actually come up and talk to him afterwards, which is usually where the useful stuff happens.
He reads every enquiry himself and replies within 48 hours. No account manager, no handover to someone you've never met.
Who he's done it for
"Steve is one of the best I have seen."
Kyla Campbell · CSIRO
If you want the long version
The saying yes, the method, the company with no office, the giving it all away. None of it is a business decision. It's one story, it starts with a cassette tape, and it's worth ten minutes of your time.
Tell him what your people need to walk away with. That one answer shapes everything else.
Book Steve