Most engineers start a business by selling their own technical skills, then slowly build a team around themselves. Jonathan Bannister took the opposite approach from day one. His rule was simple: he doesn’t touch the mouse.

Jonathan is the managing director of The Design Technology Company, a Melbourne-based team of mechanical designers who embed directly into other engineering and manufacturing businesses’ project teams. In this episode, he shares how a side hustle grew into a 20-person operation, and why he focused on business development and revenue from the very beginning.

The conversation covers the reality of adopting new technology, including a virtual reality investment the business eventually abandoned. Jonathan also opens up about taking on debt to buy out his business partner, the recent sale of the business, and how to remove yourself from the day-to-day.

Naming a business after your core values means every client, employee and decision gets measured against those words. For Jo Garretty, that was the point.

Jo is the managing director of SALT3, a traffic, transport, waste and environmental engineering consultancy with offices across Australia. The name spells out the firm's four values: service, approachability, loyalty and transparency. A civil engineer with an MBA, Jo co-founded SALT3 in regional Victoria in 2014. She has since helped grow it into a nationally accredited practice with more than 20 staff.

In this episode, Jo explains why she left a corporate role to make her own mark, and how persistence and delivery built the client trust a new firm needs to win significant projects. She talks through why delegation is a necessary decision for any founder who wants to grow, how SALT3 keeps one culture across multiple offices, and how ISO accreditation made its processes more rigorous. She also covers bringing waste engineering and ESD into a traffic engineering firm, and a goal that taught her to do her homework before committing.

Most engineers never see their own designs fail. Doron Levy has built a career on standing in the wreckage to work out why.

Doron founded Fahrenheit Global, a fire engineering consultancy based in Sydney with offices in Milan and Buenos Aires. He trained as a structural engineer but left after three years, it wasn't the right fit. His first day as a fire engineer was spent at a still-smouldering, burnt-out vodka distillery, and that experience hooked him for life. He went on to complete master's degrees in both fire engineering and fire investigation, giving him a rare dual perspective: designing fire protection systems and investigating why they fail. Last year, his team won Fire Protection Project of the Year at the Fire Australia Awards for a COVID ward at Canberra Hospital.

In this episode, Doron traces his path from structural to fire engineering and explains how working both sides of the industry, design and investigation — shapes everything he does. He talks through starting a business during the GFC, moving from solo operator to a brand built to outlast its founder, and holding quality standards even when it means walking away from work. He shares his philosophy of dropping a client every year, the sign above his office door that reads "Can you sleep tonight?", and how he keeps quality consistent across three international offices. He also covers the weight of responsibility fire engineers carry, the role of certification and due diligence, and what he's learned as an expert witness investigating fires.

A must-listen for engineers, business owners, and anyone interested in fire safety and risk management.