Peter Forrest was not thinking big when he typed out his first advertisement. It went up on Gumtree in 2013, and the pitch could not have been simpler: “I’m Peter. I’ll fix your computer. $50 an hour. No fix, no charge.” He expected very little. What he got was the beginning of something that continues to surprise him.
Thirteen years later, Forrest and his wife Jane run Launceston IT, a full-service technology company in Prospect Vale that has grown from that single Gumtree listing into a nine-person business with clients across Tasmania and on the mainland. It is the kind of understated success story the Meander Valley does not always shout about loudly enough.
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“We said yes to everything,” Forrest says of the early days. “’Can you do this?’ Yeah, absolutely we can. And it just went from fixing computers to installing cabling, to Wi-Fi, to phone systems, to internet.”
The business Forrest and his wife have built positions itself as the one-stop technology shop for small and medium enterprises. Where most businesses manage a separate provider for every service, Launceston IT aims to cover the lot. His wife handles web design, a division of labour Forrest credits with some affection. “She’s super creative. I don’t have a creative bone in my body, so that works well.”
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Running a business with your spouse is not without its challenges. It took the Forrests around six years to find a rhythm, eventually landing on a simple rule: if either one calls time on work talk outside business hours, that is that, no debate.
Across the Meander Valley, the work takes many forms. Launceston IT has laid kilometres of fibre optic cable across large rural properties, connecting buildings and security cameras across sites too vast to manage any other way. It has built custom apps that let farmers control irrigation pivots from their phones, monitor rainfall data, and manage livestock across hundreds of hectares without leaving the house. For businesses drowning in paper-based processes, Launceston IT builds software that eliminates manual steps entirely, moving data straight from a customer’s phone into a central database and cutting out the printing, scanning, and human error in between.
What separates Launceston IT from the crowded field of technology providers is something straightforward: when a client calls, they reach an Australian technician who knows their system. No offshore call centres, no being passed between departments, no starting the explanation from scratch each time. In an industry not always known for its customer service, Forrest has built something more personal, and it shows in how the business has grown.
The company is now in an active growth phase. Forrest has acquired one IT business and is in discussions about two others. The team is about to hit ten staff. Systems are being rebuilt to handle thousands of clients rather than hundreds. It is the kind of expansion that requires, as Forrest puts it, getting the whiteboard out and rethinking everything.
“Scaling is difficult because I didn’t really plan on this being so big,” he says. “At the very beginning I just thought I was going to fix computers.” What the self-deprecation glosses over is the years of hard work, technical skill, and sharp business thinking that got the company to where it is today.
The $50-an-hour Gumtree listing feels like a long time ago now. What the Forrests have built in its place is a local business doing serious work in a competitive industry, and growing fast.
