The Agentic Tradie: Tammi McDermott in Conversation with Brad Young

Introduction

This interview is with Brad Young, the founder of The Grout Guy and BIGGI by Servly (BIGGI) and Tammi McDermott, Managing Director of leading Gold Coast headquartered, commercially focused legal and corporate advisory firm Lawnch – who Brad has engaged to help him navigate the R&D Tax Incentive.

It explores the intersection of gritty blue-collar experience and high-end enterprise technology. It traces Brad’s journey from packing pallets to being on the tools as he scaled his own tiling company to 200 staff across Australia, right to his new software venture as he seeks to transform the way trades can run and grow their own businesses – with all of the knowledge he has accrued over two decades. 

Our conversation delves into the structural backbone of his success, from navigating the complexities of growing to a national client base to leveraging high-level business advisory services to scale his vision. We discuss the transition into the world of venture capital, the importance of specialist business advisory in the tech space, and how he is utilising the R&D Tax Incentive to fuel the development of his innovative platform.

Q&A

Tammi McDermott: Brad, it’s great to finally sit down for a proper long-form chat. We’ve spent the last few months buried in the technicalities of your R&D tax claims and mapping out the scaling of your tech stack, but I’ve always wanted to pull back the curtain on the origin story. You’re a bit of a legend in the Perth scene for your trajectory, going from loading 18 pallets at a bottle shop as a 17-year-old to managing a national workforce of over 200 people. When you look at the evolution from The Grout Guy to this new beast, BIGGI by Servly, what core problem were you originally trying to solve?

Brad Young: (Laughs) Honestly, Tammi, if I’m being 100 per cent transparent, the very first problem I was trying to solve was making enough money to get out of that bottle shop! But once I got on the tools, the reality of the industry hit me. The shower is the most abused, most high-traffic, and ironically, the most neglected part of a house. It’s where water meets high-wear surfaces daily. I saw a massive gap for a professional, specialised regrouting service. It’s one of those jobs that sounds like a weekend DIY project, but it’s a total pain to do right, and most people botch it.

As we scaled from me in a van to a team of 200, the problem changed. It wasn’t just about grout anymore; it was about the “tech pain.” We realised that to grow at that pace without the wheels falling off, we needed a blueprint, not just a calendar. That’s where Servly and our product, Biggi, were born. We needed enterprise-grade power but without the “nerd-speak” and complexity of traditional Salesforce setups.

Tammi: It’s a massive shift, moving from a service-based manual labour business to a global software-as-a-service (SaaS) solution. At Lawnch, we’re seeing a real rise in what we call “Tradie-preneurs” – business owners who realise their internal systems and “way of doing things” are actually their most valuable intellectual property. But there’s a big question most people ask: Why did you choose to build on Salesforce? Why not just use one of those off-the-shelf trade apps that you see advertised everywhere?

Brad: Because most of those off-the-shelf apps break the second you actually start to scale. We hit a wall when we got to about 18 employees. Suddenly, push notifications weren’t firing, the APIs were lagging, and the system couldn’t handle the volume of data we were throwing at it. Salesforce is the gold standard – it’s incredibly powerful, but for a tradie, it’s “painful.” You usually need a multi-million-dollar tech budget just to get it to talk your language.

With Servly, we’ve created what I call a “lift and shift” model. We take the blueprint we used to scale The Grout Guy – every automation, every workflow, every scheduling trick – and we can drop it into any home service business, whether they are plumbers, cleaners, or sparkies. They shouldn’t have to choose between “simple but basic” or “powerful but painful.” We’re giving them the power of a billion-dollar company in a way that makes sense on a job site.

Tammi: You often talk about the “Digital Transformation” journey, which can sound a bit corporate, but for you, it was very real. You went from paper clipboards and messy Google Calendars to implementing Agentic AI systems that read PDFs and automatically generate work orders without a human having to touch a keyboard. How do you manage the “human element” of that? Construction is full of guys who are brilliant with their hands but often tech-averse.

Brad: You’re not wrong there. I’ll never forget “Brian,” one of my old-school tilers. This was years ago when the iPod Touch first came out. I gave him one so he could sync his calendar and see his jobs. He just stared at it, looked at me, and said, “What the f** is this? Just give me a pen, mate.”* That battle is mostly gone now because everyone has a smartphone, but the tone still matters. When I walk into a discovery call with a potential client, I’m in my shorts and my Birkies (Birkenstocks). I am not a “shirt and tie” Salesforce executive from a glass tower. I’ve got the calluses on my hands. I’ve spent my time in hot Perth bathrooms in the middle of February. Tradies and home service owners trust people who “know the lane.” If you haven’t been in the trenches, they won’t listen to your tech advice.

Tammi: That authenticity is exactly why we love the Servly story at Lawnch. It’s the “callus-led” innovation. From our perspective, we’ve been focusing heavily on the R&D Tax Incentive for your BIGGI product. People often think R&D is only for scientists in white lab coats, but what you’re doing—integrating deep field service logic with automated AI work order processing – is world-class. It hasn’t been done globally with this specific trade focus. How has the R&D process actually changed the way you grow?

Brad: It’s been a game-changer. Working with you and Sofia has allowed us to stop seeing that technical “muck work” as just an expense and start seeing it as a legitimate investment. It’s turned our dev time into a claimable asset, which gives us the capital to keep building the “Agentic Tradie” vision.

For example, we are currently implementing the standard field service app for our BDMs. We’re moving them entirely into Slack via a custom integration. We want our guys to be able to run the entire business through a chat interface. No more clunky forms. That’s a massive project we’re doing in-house because off-the-shelf solutions just don’t capture the nuance of how a trade sale actually happens.

Tammi: Looking at the next 12 months, the calendar is looking pretty packed. You’ve got the Salesforce World Tour in Melbourne coming up, and we’re talking about Dreamforce in San Francisco. What is the ultimate “North Star” for the Servly and Lawnch partnership over the next year?

Brad: The immediate goal is getting our first few big customer wins, the early adopters of the BIGGI product, up and running smoothly in the next eight to 12 weeks. We want to prove that this isn’t just a “Grout Guy” tool, but a universal trade tool. From there, it’s all about the white-label “accelerator” program.

I want to help trade businesses move from reactive – constantly chasing their tails with paperwork – to proactive. But I want to do it without them having to read a 30-page discovery proposal and needing an LLM handy to decipher it. That’s my rule. If a proposal is more than a one-pager, a tradie isn’t reading it. They’ll just throw it into a LLM and ask for the highlights anyway! We’re building for the way people actually work today.

Tammi: (Laughs) Precisely. We’ve definitely taken that on board at Lawnch; we keep our advisory to you just as streamlined. I’m incredibly excited to see Servely move from a local Perth success to a global player. Before I let you go, I have to ask – as a massive West Coast Eagles fan, how are we feeling about the rest of the 2026 season?

Brad: (Sighs) Look, we’re the richest club in the country, but it shouldn’t be this painful to watch! I’ve been saying it for a while: we should have headed to the pavilion and started the rebuild years ago. But you know what? It’s just like business. Sometimes you’ve just got to grind through the “s*** years,” keep your head down, and do the work so you’re ready when it’s time to head back to the flag.

Tammi: Spoken like a true founder, Brad. Grind now, win later. Thanks for the time.

Brad: Cheers, Tammi.

Key Takeaways: The Evolution of Servly