What I'd Tell My 25-Year-Old Self About Building a Career

25-year-old me had energy, zero patience, and absolutely no idea what mattered in a career. I thought success was about being the smartest person in the room. Turns out it's about being the most useful person in the room. Different skill entirely.

I'm not writing this as some kind of career guru. I'm a franchise operator on the Gold Coast who builds AI products on the side. But I've learned a few things the hard way over the last decade that I wish someone had told me earlier.

Pick the unsexy role that gives you leverage.

When I was starting out, everyone wanted to be in marketing or strategy. The roles that sounded impressive at a dinner party. Nobody wanted to be in operations. Operations was the boring back office stuff — rosters, compliance, KPIs, process documentation.

But here's what I figured out: operations is where you learn how a business actually works. Not how the PowerPoint says it works. How it actually works. The gap between those two things is where most businesses lose money.

I chose operations, and it gave me something the marketing and strategy people didn't have: leverage. When you understand how every part of a business connects — labour cost to roster design to customer wait times to revenue — you can pull levers that actually move the numbers. The strategy people had ideas. I had control.

If I were 25 again, I'd look for the role that nobody fights over but that touches everything. In most businesses, that's operations.

Systems thinking matters more than individual heroics.

I used to pride myself on being the person who could jump in and fix anything. Store falling apart? I'd go in, work a double, sort the roster, retrain the team, and get it back on track. Felt great. Very heroic.

The problem is that heroics don't scale. The store would drift back within a month because I'd fixed the symptoms, not the system. I was a bandaid, not a cure.

The turning point was when I started asking a different question. Instead of "how do I fix this?" I started asking "how do I build something that prevents this from happening again?" That shift — from firefighting to system building — changed everything.

The Operations Review Cycle I built at GYG came from that mindset. Instead of personally coaching every underperforming franchisee, I built a framework that identifies underperformance, triggers a coaching intervention, and tracks improvement on a fixed cadence. The system does what I used to do manually, but it does it across 200+ locations simultaneously.

Build skills that compound.

Some skills have a linear return. You get a bit better at them each year, and they're worth a bit more. Other skills compound — they get exponentially more valuable over time because they multiply the impact of everything else you know.

The three skills that have compounded the most for me: management, data literacy, and communication.

Management is obvious. The better you get at leading people, the more you can accomplish through others. A great individual contributor hits a ceiling. A great manager's ceiling is the combined output of their team.

Data literacy is underrated. I'm not talking about being a data scientist. I'm talking about being able to look at a P&L, a set of KPIs, or a dashboard and immediately identify what's wrong and what to do about it. Every business decision I make is informed by data. Most of my peers at 25 couldn't read a balance sheet. That gap has only widened.

Communication is the multiplier. You can be the best operator in the world, but if you can't explain your framework to a franchisee, write a clear email to your CEO, or present a case for investment, it doesn't matter. Communication is how your other skills create impact beyond your own hands.

These three skills compound because they're transferable. They worked in QSR. They work in AI product development. They'll work in whatever I do next. Skills that are tied to a specific tool or platform depreciate. Skills tied to how humans and businesses work appreciate.

Stop optimising for prestige.

At 25, I cared way too much about what my job title sounded like. I've since learned that the people building real wealth and having the most impact often have titles that mean nothing to outsiders.

Nobody at a barbecue is impressed by "Franchise State Manager." But the skills and systems I built in that role are directly responsible for every product I'm shipping now and every dollar of independent income I'm generating. The title was meaningless. The capabilities were everything.

If you're 25 and reading this, optimise for learning speed, not title. Take the role where you'll learn the most in the next two years, even if it sounds boring. The compound interest on skills dwarfs the compound interest on prestige.

One more thing. Start building something on the side before you need to. I wish I'd started shipping products five years earlier. Not because I needed the money then, but because the muscle of building — ideation, execution, shipping, learning from failure — takes years to develop. You don't want to be learning how to ship products for the first time when your livelihood depends on it.

None of this is revolutionary. But sometimes the most useful advice is the obvious stuff that nobody bothers to say out loud.

If you're early in your career and want to talk through where to focus, shoot me a message — daine@dainereid.com.