Billy Bubbles

Where they started

Billy Sheldon runs Billy Bubbles, an Australian business that delivers, swaps and refills CO2 gas cylinders for home sparkling-water machines (SodaStream-compatible). It is a physical-logistics business — cylinders are filled, loaded onto trucks, and delivered and swapped out at customers’ homes — with a growing pool of repeat refill and trade-in customers.

By early 2026 the business had real momentum. It was running a city expansion test in Brisbane, building an operations team, and trading at its strongest levels to date. But the growth was outrunning the structure underneath it. The founder was still the person every practical problem routed back to, and the financial and operational instrumentation needed to scale across cities hadn’t caught up with the pace of execution.

The real problem

The central pattern coaching named was founder dependency: the operations team had effectively been built around the owner being the one who resolves every practical and mechanical issue. As the notes put it, the team was “solely reliant on me to resolve practical issues.” Until that shape changed, the owner’s hours wouldn’t free up no matter how much revenue grew or how many people were hired — the bottleneck would just move, not disappear.

Underneath that sat several connected issues:

• A mechanical-aptitude gap on the ops team. Heavy-equipment operations need staff who can fix and troubleshoot independently. Every mechanical question was routing back to the founder personally. Coaching reframed this as a hiring-spec problem, not a training problem — mechanical aptitude is screened for, not taught in 90 days.
• Communication that didn’t propagate. A truck-door incident during delivery exposed that even a safety-flagged instruction failed to travel reliably down the supervisor-to-driver chain — a sign the operational system lacked a way to confirm critical instructions actually landed.
• Expansion moving faster than measurement. Brisbane, a large inbound cylinder order, and a major filling-system investment decision were all hitting inside a tight window, while the financial models needed to sequence them were still being built. Prioritisation was happening on intuition rather than data.

The founder was explicit about what he wanted from coaching. He did not want AI-summarised financial reports — he wanted judgment he couldn’t get from his own numbers: “I want to know stuff that I’m not able to tell from my finances.” He wanted experience from comparable business models, scaling mechanics, and real-world lessons.

What we worked on

The coaching focused on converting a fast-growing, founder-led operation into something that could scale beyond the founder:

• Operations hiring spec. Rather than trying to train aptitude, we worked on screening for it — filtering ops candidates explicitly on what they’ve built or fixed themselves, and on experience in time-sensitive, founder-led environments. By late May a vacancy had opened and a structured recruitment process was underway, deliberately run through direct job ads rather than recruiters, with a target to have a new operations manager in place before the next expansion push.
• Instrumenting service quality. A pay-per-inquiry customer-service compensation model was designed and readied for launch — rewarding fast, high-quality resolution, tracked on a dashboard with a customer-rating feedback loop. The coaching framing was to treat high-quality service as a retention moat, not just a speed metric, and to borrow that same “instrument whether it actually worked” discipline back into operations.
• Sequencing the expansion and the money. Coaching pushed for proper financial instrumentation behind the multi-city plan — modelling city-by-city break-even, the payback case on the major filling-system investment, and the cashflow runway needed to fund a large cylinder order and a new-city launch at the same time. The honest internal read in the notes is that some of these models were owed and deferred — a candid record of where the engagement had work still outstanding, not a polished win.
• Founder as coach, not doer. Recurring work on leadership: helping the founder support and develop his operations manager rather than stepping in to do the thinking himself, and naming the structural unlock — defining what the owner stops doing, not just who gets hired.

Where they are now

This is an active, in-progress engagement, and the honest picture is one of strong momentum with real structural work still underway.

On the growth side, the business recorded its best-ever sales month in March 2026 (around 40% year-on-year growth), the Brisbane expansion test was trading profitably against its break-even, and the customer base had grown materially since the mid-January in-person campaign. The founder also reported a positive financial recovery in late May by recycling old cylinders.

On the structural side, the core themes are still live: hiring the right operations talent to break founder dependency, getting the financial models in place to make multi-city expansion a data decision rather than an intuition call, and launching a new branded product line. The business is moving from a founder-resolves-everything operation toward one with the systems and people to run and scale without him at the centre of every problem — the throughline of the coaching relationship, and the work that continues.