A young entrepreneur has revealed how he went from sleeping rough to building an award-winning tech business worth millions. At 17 Harry Sanders became homeless after his parents split, sometimes living on the streets of Melbourne alongside heroin addicts, but eight years on the company he founded as a teenager is now Australia’s largest SEO agency.
Mr. Sanders’ first night after his family upheaval was spent under a bridge in Preston, but he kept focusing on his unlikely dream of building a business, even working on his laptop outside in the dark. ‘It is intimidating when it gets dark. You can hear noises and it feels like you’re constantly on edge,’ he told The Project. ‘You wake up every morning tired and groggy. Not wanting to get up and do anything.’ In the daytime, he charged his phone and laptop, used wifi, and made work calls from his local St Vincent de Paul. Still, Mr Sanders found himself struggling to get benefits from Centrelink, and when he did he ended up in dire living quarters.
When he was given government housing, he found himself rooming with people who were battling drug addiction. Mr. Sanders said it was ‘insanely tough’ to get onto Centrelink, even as a homeless 17-year-old, and he found himself jumping through ‘many hoops’. However, his experiences living on the street and relying on Centerlink taught him valuable lessons he still applies today. No matter how much shame and exhaustion he endured during his ‘very grim situation’, Mr. Sanders persisted. His daily grind paid off when he finally earned enough from a handful of clients to pay for a room in a share house. ‘I remember moving in, just getting in and just sobbing, like oh my god I have a room, I can close the door and this is my room. That was a life-changing moment.’
Among the strategies he used and still swears by are getting eight hours of sleep each night, researching his industry, and dressing in clothes that reflect the ‘real’ him each day. Today Mr. Sanders’s agency StudioHawk has three offices – in Melbourne’s Prahran, at Surry Hills in Sydney, and London’s Hackney. He owns property in London and is building his own dream home in Melbourne. StudioHawk is worth over $ 4 million and has won awards such as SEMRush’s Agency of the Year and Optus Media Marketing & Advertising Business of the Year. But Mr. Sanders, who is still the youngest person in his team, is a long way from finished. ‘My vision is to lead and grow StudioHawk to be the largest dedicated SEO agency in the world, and have a boatload of fun while doing it,’ he says.
That doesn’t mean he’s setting out to join the superstar tech billionaire club. ‘Unlike Elon, my mission is not to get to Mars,’ he said. ‘I just want to leave the world a better place, by providing opportunity and education to at-risk youth, or other such people going through difficult hardships in their life.’ Aside from StudioHawk, Mr. Sanders works with the youth homelessness organization the Lighthouse Foundation. If you are experiencing homelessness you can call Link2home at 1800 152 152, the Domestic Violence Line at 1800 656 463, Link2Home Veterans and Ex-Service at 1800 326 989, or the Child
