the story
About Scott Bywater
THE REAL PROBLEM
I left home at 17 on a train in the middle of the night.
My parents were on holiday in Fiji. I didn't leave a note. I just packed a bag, caught the train from Coffs Harbour to Sydney, and decided I was going to figure out how the world worked by going and living in it.
What followed was years of doing every sales job imaginable. Door to door in Sydney. Cold call telemarketing in Melbourne, Brisbane, Christchurch, Auckland. Inbound sales. Call centre training. Face to face. I wasn't great at all of it - but I learned something from every single version of it. Specifically, I learned what makes people say yes. And more importantly, what makes them say no.
Then I stumbled across a seminar by Jay Abraham.
If you know, you know. If you don't - Jay Abraham is one of the greatest marketing minds of the last fifty years, and his core idea hit me like a freight train: that the difference between a business that struggles and a business that thrives is almost never the product. It's almost always the marketing. More specifically, it's the strategy underneath the marketing.
I was instantly hooked.
How the Career Actually Started
My wife spotted a career ad in the newspaper and told me I had to reply to it.
I did. And that was the beginning of a career in strategic copywriting that's now spanned more than two decades.
The early years were obsessive in the way only the early years of something can be. I reread every great sales letter I could find. I rewrote ads by hand - a technique the masters swore by for developing an instinct for what works. I studied the craft the way a tradesman studies his tools, because that's what it is. A craft. And like any craft, the difference between average and extraordinary is in the details most people never bother to learn.
The results followed.
A Bodytrim launch campaign that generated over $500,000 in seven days. Six-figure launches in the fitness space. A decade-long relationship with one of the largest natural health companies in the United States. A reputation in the events industry that brought almost every major name in Australia through the door.
I joined Perry Marshall's mastermind in the US - USD$25,000 a year, a room full of some of the sharpest marketers in the world - and came back with frameworks that sharpened everything I'd already built.
In 2019 I founded Elite Marketers - a peer group for serious marketing professionals that's since become one of the leading groups of its kind in Australia. What started as a way to stay connected with the smartest people in the industry has become something more valuable: direct access to specialists across every marketing discipline. Whatever a client's Marketing Masterplan calls for - Google Ads, Facebook, direct mail, content, email, SEO, conversion rate optimisation, podcasts, PR - I can bring in the right person to execute it at the highest level. I'm not tied to any one methodology. The strategy drives the recommendation, not the other way around.
How the Career Actually Started
Here's the thing I kept seeing, across hundreds of campaigns and dozens of industries.
Two businesses could have almost identical marketing - same channels, similar spend, comparable creative - and get completely different results. One would thrive. The other would scratch around wondering why nothing was working.
The difference was almost never in the execution.
It was in what was underneath the execution. The positioning. The messaging. The strategy that determined who they were speaking to, what they were saying, and whether any of it was aligned with the clients they actually wanted to attract.
The businesses that thrived had done the work before the work. They knew their story. They knew their USP. They knew exactly who they were talking to and what that person needed to hear. The ones that struggled had skipped all of that and gone straight to execution.
Why Builders
My relationship with the building industry started with a phone call from Russ Stephens (who later founded the Association of Professional Builders) in the early 2000s.
We worked together on several projects and stayed in touch over the years. Built a genuine relationship. Russ eventually became part of Elite Marketers, and from there invited me to become one of the founding members of the APB Rewards Programme - a recognition of the results being produced for builders in the programme.
It's a relationship that's only deepened since. I was recently told I have more five-star reviews from industry client’s than any other member in the programme.
That's how the builder relationship deepened. Not through cold outreach or a niche pivot. Through trust built over time with someone who understood the industry from the inside.
The more I worked with builders, the more I realised how unique that market is.
They're not short on leads. The SORCI Report consistently shows builders can generate enquiries. The problem is the enquiries are wrong. Wrong budget. Wrong project type. Wrong client mindset. And the builder ends up spending hours on unpaid quoting, taking jobs he didn't really want, and wondering why the marketing isn't working - when the real issue is that the marketing is working perfectly. It's just pointed at the wrong audience.
The fix isn't more ads or a better website. It's doing the diagnostic work that should have come first - getting the core story right, defining the USP precisely, understanding the avatar deeply, and building a strategic roadmap that attracts the right clients and filters out the wrong ones.
The builders I've worked with who've done that work - Victor Myers in Texas, Edwards Family Homes in Sydney, Adam Stanley at Unique Residence - didn't just get more enquiries. They got different enquiries. Better ones. Clients who arrived already trusting them, already sold, already quoting the website back in the first conversation.
That's what happens when the Marketing Masterplan is built properly.
What I'm Like to Work With
I'll tell you what I actually think.
Not what you want to hear - what the situation calls for. If your core story isn't landing, I'll tell you why. If your messaging is attracting the wrong people, I'll tell you why. If the fix is simpler than you expected, I won't complicate it to justify a bigger engagement.
I've spent 20+ years in this industry. I've seen what works and what doesn't across enough situations that I'm usually not guessing. And I think the most valuable thing I can offer any client isn't a clever campaign - it's a straight answer about what's actually going wrong and what it would take to fix it.
That's what the diagnosis call is for. One conversation. No pitch. No obligation.
If it makes sense to work together beyond that point, we'll talk about what that looks like.
If it doesn't, you'll leave knowing more about your marketing than you did before.
Either way, it's a worthwhile conversation
Let's Find Out What's
Actually Going Wrong.
One conversation. A clear diagnosis. And if it makes sense to go further, a Marketing Master Plan that tells you exactly what to build, what to say, and what to do first.