From Collins Diary to Agentforce: How The Grout Guy Architected a Trade Business

About this event

Architecting for Innovation — Lunch & Learn #87 From Collins Diary to Agentforce: How The Grout Guy Architected a Trade Business for the AI Era Grout Force One has landed back home. ✈️🇦🇺 Fresh off the Dreamforce stage in San Francisco, with a 2026 Salesforce Customer Success Award in the carry-on, CEO Brad Young (https://www.linkedin.com/in/brad-young-66a52a3b/)https://www.linkedin.com/in/brad-young-66a52a3b/and CTO Anthony Messina (https://www.linkedin.com/in/anthonysmessina/) fromhttps://thegroutguy.com.au/The Grout Guy (https://thegroutguy.com.au/)https://thegroutguy.com.au/are joining us to lift the tiles on one of the great Australian tech stories you’ve probably never heard of. It started with one man, one van, one very specific obsession with grout… and a Collins diary. Today it’s 150 techs, 50,000+ jobs a year, and a multi-agent system that does the admin the diary used to. Emailed work orders that used to take two days to process now take two minutes. Agents reviewing photos of mouldy showers helps push a quote out in minutes, not days. One admin used to look after four techs; now it’s 25+. And the business is growing 40% year on year. No big bank. No telco. No army of architects. Just a trade business that worked out the data had to be sorted before the AI could get clever, then went and built it. We’ll get into: • The foundations — what had to be unified before a single agent was worth switching on • The agent crew — how their multi-agent system handles scheduling, quoting, lead management and tech prep, and where the humans stay in the loop • The build vs buy call — what they bought, what they built, what they partnered on, and what they’d do differently • The plot twist — why the system they built for themselves is now a product (Servly (https://servly.au/)) for other tradies, and what that did to the architecture • The scar tissue — the lessons learnt along the way, what they’d tell anyone starting the same journey, and what they’d never do again The format: Less keynote, more yarn over the back fence. Brad and Anthony will walk us through what they built, how it fits together, and the lessons they learnt the hard way, including the bits that didn’t work the first time. Anthony will sketch the architecture, warts and all, and Brad will tell us what it looked like from the tools side. Bring your hardest questions. They can take it. About the Speakers Brad Young (https://www.linkedin.com/in/brad-young-66a52a3b/)https://www.linkedin.com/in/brad-young-66a52a3b/— CEO (and self-appointed Chief Grout Officer), The Grout Guy Brad Young is founder, CEO and self-appointed Chief Grout Officer of The Grout Guy, which he's grown into a national tile and grout restoration business. He's the co-founder of Servly, which brings TGG's Salesforce-based operating model to other Australian trade and field service businesses. TGG won a Salesforce Customer Success Award at Dreamforce 2026, and Brad is a 2024 Business News 40under40 winner. Based in Perth. Anthony Messina (https://www.linkedin.com/in/anthonysmessina/)https://www.linkedin.com/in/anthonysmessina/— CTO, The Grout Guy Anthony Messina is CTO of The Grout Guy and co-founder and CTO of Servly. He led the design of TGG's 'agentic tradie', the multi-agent system that handles scheduling, quoting, lead management and tech prep on top of its Salesforce platform. Servly now takes that same operator-built approach to other Australian trade and field service businesses. Based in Perth. MC Andrew Blades (https://www.linkedin.com/in/andrewblades/) Principal – The Bridge Search (https://thebridgesearch.com/) Founder – Architecting for Innovation From leaking showers to the big stage and back to your lunch break. Let’s go! Wednesday, 28 October 1:00 PM – 2:00 PM AEDT \| 10:00 AM – 11:00 AM AWST \(online\, with overrun\)