People look at me these days and they reckon I'm a hobo.

I get it. Most nights you'll find me in a freezing garage past midnight, jumper full of holes, hair going every direction, talking to a plant like it owes me money. If you didn't know me and you walked past, you'd take one look and write me off. Poor bloke. Bit lost.

They've got no idea.

Because for most of my life I wore a suit and tie every single day of the week. I was the guy they sent into the room when nothing else was working. I could walk into a total stranger's house — never met them, never laid eyes on them — sit down at their kitchen table, and two hours later they'd be shaking my hand and thanking me for the privilege. Nine times out of ten. I'd sit with ten families, nine would say yes.

I'm not telling you that to boast. I'm telling you so you can feel the gap — the gap between the hobo in the garage and the bloke in the suit. Because that gap is the whole story. It's how a national sales manager with seventy-five staff ended up broke, scruffy, on his knees in the dirt at one in the morning — and happier than he's ever been in his life.

So let me take you back to the start. The real start.

I was eighteen when I knocked on my first door.

Kirby vacuum cleaners. And if you've ever done it, you'll know — selling Kirbys door to door is the hardest apprenticeship in sales there is. No salary, no leads, no one hands you a thing. You knock, you get the door shut in your face, you knock again. Most blokes lasted a week. Some lasted an afternoon.

I didn't quit.

I couldn't tell you exactly why, except I hated being bad at it. So while the others were down the pub, I'd be home going back over the day in my head — where did I lose them, what did they say, what's the comeback next time. I bought every book. I flew to Hawaii and sat through an Anthony Robbins seminar. I taught myself, line by line, how to turn a "no" into a "let me get my chequebook." Not with tricks. By believing in what I had so hard that it felt rude not to let them have it.

From vacuums I moved to home security. Alarm systems. And that's where I got properly good.

This was the nineties. Crime through the roof. I'd knock, a bloke would open the door, and I'd say — "G'day, I'm Claudio, can I borrow two minutes?" And I'd be inside.

Then I'd paint him a picture. I'd say: mate, picture your wife coming home from the shops, kids in the back. She pulls into the drive, gets them out, walks up, puts the key in the door. Who runs in first? The kids. Always the kids.

Now picture this. Some bloke's kicked your back door in — you can't see it from the front. He's sick, hanging out for his next hit, going through your wife's room. And as that key turns, his heart goes through the roof, because he never wanted to get caught, he just wanted to grab something and go. But now there's a woman and two kids between him and the only way out. And he's got something in his hand, because they always do.

Then I'd lean in and say: now tell me — if I could put something in your home so loud that bloke would never even pick your house, would ten bucks a week be worth it to make sure your family never walks into that?

They'd be throwing the money at me.

I'm not proud of all of it. But I believed every word, and I was the best in the country at it. Before long I wasn't knocking doors — I was running offices. Seventy-five staff. Twenty telemarketers. Three offices: Bankstown, Chatswood, Liverpool. My own dad came on as my admin manager. I closed deals in London, New York, New Zealand, South Africa — South Africa scared the hell out of me — and every state in this country. There's a suburb in Queensland, Brown's Plains, I used to call Claudio's Goldmine. House to house to house, just cleaning up.

I was twenty-something and I thought I was untouchable.

Then one night I'm in a stranger's lounge room training a new bloke, and out of the corner of my eye the telly's on. A Current Affair. And there's the bloke who owned our company — Brad Cooper, HIH — all over the screen. Sound's down but I can read it well enough: footage of little old ladies, and the word "pressure."

The business died overnight. Literally overnight. My telemarketers would ring and people would say "you mob were on A Current Affair — get lost." Gone. Just like that.

After that came the marble.

I became a stonemason — but not the kind that builds. The kind they call when something beautiful gets ruined. I was the Italian bloke they'd ring when they had marble in a mansion and someone had put a glass of red down on it and killed the gloss. I'd fix blemishes most people couldn't even see. You don't sand marble back — you polish it with diamonds. The expensive houses, the hard jobs, the stuff no one else could fix — that was me.

Until my back went. And that's a story for another chapter — along with a fair bit of the harder stuff, the kind that knocks the wind clean out of you and changes who you are. I'll get to all of it. I'm not going to dress it up.

Because here's what this whole book is really about.

I spent thirty years being the suit. The closer. The bloke who could sell anyone anything. And somewhere in the wreckage of all of it — the businesses won and lost, the body that gave out, a life that looked nothing like I'd planned — I ended up with my hands in a pot of dirt, watching a leaf unfurl, feeling something I'd never once felt in a boardroom.

I felt like me.

Not the performance. Not the pitch. Just a bloke who loves watching things grow, and loves helping other people grow them too. That's where Professor Monstera came from. That's where "the Prof" came from. And the funny thing — the bit I'm still working out — is that the hobo in the garage isn't the bloke who lost everything.

He's the bloke who finally found himself.

So that's where we're starting. Suit to soil. The fall, and what was underneath it.

I'm writing this the way I've lived it — one bit at a time, raw, no spin. If you want the rest as it comes, you know where to find me now.

— ClaudioThe Prof