Manny Sidhu

Madari Group

Fast, timely, and AI-enabled country-wide sales of home appliances

Founder and Managing Director

RevGenius

RevGenius is a group of revenue-generating sales and marketing professionals brought together to learn, share, support, and grow with each other.

Ambassador

Epic Inspections

UniSuper

Senior Solutions Architect

Informed

- Marketing collateral (technical enablement, roadshows and blogs)
- NSX and microsegmentation architectural design
- AWS solutions design (AWS RDS on Oracle, cloud bursting and migrations)
- SDWAN architectural design (Silver Peak)
- Private cloud to hybrid cloud migration strategies

Solutions Architect

VMware

- VMware SDDC design and deployment (vSphere, vRealize)
- NSX design and deployment
- VMware VSAN design and deployment

Design and delivery - NSX

- Xbricks design and implementation
- Citrix VDI move from Vblock 700 to 720
- Worldwide Hyper-V design and roll-out
- VDI optimization

Virtualization architecture and design

NEC Corporation

- VMware vSphere 5 design
- System Center 2012 design and implementation
- Commvault design and implementation
- Data Protector remediation

Virtualization design

Melbourne Water (Kinetic IT)

Systems Engineer at a 300+ server multi-domain environment with a 3000+ user base spread over multiple sites. Functioned as the Backups, VMware and Storage engineer, managed backups and restores, multiple ESX clusters and EMC SAN.

Systems engineering

ExxonMobil

Systems administration

Employee-focused business owner. I'm not an employer, I'm a builder of people. Everyone at Epic Inspections, Madari Group, and PowwerUp is an extension of me.

Epic Inspections was created after I was told of highway robbery costs of compliance checks being charged by a dinosaur of a provider in 2020. I thought, why shouldn't I create a business where A1 service levels are provided at reasonable costs so more money remains in pockets where it belongs.

PowwerUp seeks to erase mediocrity ingrained into most people by the 'system' which pounds you into being average. With PowwerUp, you learn from us so you don't make the same errors. While it's okay to make mistakes, it'll hell be great to leapfrog them, right? The goal is to send your rocket into orbit, fast.

Epic Inspections and PowwerUp are incubators of ideas and realizers of dreams. We are dreamers, too.

I have scaled two eCommerce brands from $3m → $30m, 2,000 → 15,000 products, 20 → 110 brands and without external funding. I am most proud that we built these eCommerce brands sustainably and profitably. Our team grew with us and many stayed with us from day 1 → day 4,015. ABOUT ME:👩🏻‍💼 Mum to two gorgeous kids who I want to inspire to achieve their goals in life. 🚀 CEO for 10+ years with a team in Sydney and Kuala Lumpur. Our eCommerce brands were no1 and no2 according to the independant voice of Australian consumers on ProductReview for our category. 🤝 Acquired by Kitchen Warehouse in 2023 to create the largest Kitchenware player in Australia. ⛰️ Founder of ProfitPeak, cognitive commerce for profitable growth. 

Carla Penn-Kahn

Last year, I was blown away by the quality of K:SYD, and I’m genuinely excited that it’s back 🚀

I was also incredibly privileged to take the main stage to speak, joined by two amazing customers on a panel - Aaron Langer from Arms Of Eve and Sam Reece from BABYBOO Fashion.

Join Klaviyo on 20 May for a high-impact day designed to turn insight into action.

Expect unfiltered conversations with leading eCommerce and retail minds, hands-on workshops to unlock the power of your data, and real customer stories showcasing autonomous CRM in action across AI, service and data. 

You’ll also get a first look at what’s coming next, with new Klaviyo innovations across marketing, service and analytics.

This is genuinely one of those events on the Australian commerce calendar that shouldn’t be missed.

If you’d like the link to register your interest, let me know.

Co-Founder & CEO @ ProfitPeak | Specialized AI agents across every data source that matters to brands. | 2 x eCommerce Exits

I used ChatGPT this weekend to help me find lightweight luggage that fitted a very specific brief.

It worked well up to a point.

The issue? 

David Jones, Strandbags and several other retailers are currently running “spend and save” promotions rather than straightforward markdowns. 

Those offers didn’t surface in the results.

Why? 

Because LLMs are optimised to identify clear, comparable price signals. 

A clean red-line discount is easy to interpret. 

Conditional promotions, spend thresholds, bundled savings, member pricing, are far harder for AI to evaluate and rank when a customer is searching for “the best deal”.

The implication is significant.

Brands that avoid visible markdowns in favour of more complex promotional mechanics may increasingly miss out on LLM-driven traffic when customers are actively deal-seeking.

And let’s be honest in 2026, it’s rare that a customer isn’t shopping for the best deal.

As AI becomes a primary discovery layer, promotional strategy isn’t just about margin protection anymore. 

It’s about machine visibility.

How will this change your brands discounting strategy ahead of BFCM2026?

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I often hear that it’s really hard to get an entry-level role. 

That it’s difficult to cut through the sea of applications and stand out as a candidate.

I’m going to flip that on its head.

It’s not hard.

I recently posted an AI-first entry-level marketing role. I wasn’t looking for work experience, more experience with AI tools and an understanding of what they can do in the world of content and multimedia.

At the bottom of the job description, I wrote: don’t send me a CV — I won’t read it. 

Instead, send me an email with a specific subject line, along with a piece of AI work you’ve built or a video introducing yourself.

I received a huge number of applications.

Most of them were just CVs.

To the future workforce looking for jobs: you need to put in the effort and stand out from the crowd.

When I applied for my first internship at Credit Suisse, I built a portfolio risk analysis tool in Excel. 

It allowed you to plug in your asset allocation and see the risk profile of the investment portfolio — and inversely, plug in your risk appetite and receive a suggested asset split.

I wasn’t asked to build it. 

I did it to show the interviewer what I was capable of so I could know for certain when I walked out the room, the role was mine. 

That internship turned into a full-time role by the end of the summer and a five-year accelerated career. 

My Excel model was used throughout my time there and for many years afterwards by the entire investment team. 

Today, building something in Excel might not impress in the same way. 

I could probably replicate that tool quickly using Claude or similar AI coding tools. 

But back then, it took me several days to build while I was at university and working at Aldo Shoes.

The principle hasn’t changed.

If you want the opportunity, demonstrate your value.

I recently saw an epic piece of content on Instagram from a candidate showcasing her skills and tagging her dream employer, Meshki.

If you want the link let me know 👀. 

That’s how you stand out.

If you have a friend or loved one graduating from school or university and looking to enter the workforce, tag them below.

Wasn't That Thoughtful.

This is how I walked away from Thoughtful Minds Connect at Google on Friday evening — a room of incredible operators, both brand side and agency/tech side, all sharing, connecting and supporting each other in the most thoughtful way.

You'd have been hard pressed not to hear the words AI and data every 120 seconds and they were a standout theme of the day.

Some of my favourite moments:
🎯 Bronte Howard shared how she used data to secure budget from leadership by demonstrating that 20% of new customers first engage with DECJUBA through denim — so it's no surprise the stunning new campaign from the brand is denim-focused. 

Her reminder landed perfectly: you need data-backed ideas to get the resources to execute them.

💡 Rachael Ward spoke brilliantly about how she approaches securing budget for new tech solutions — and how it's a journey, not an overnight transformation, when you suddenly have data you never knew was possible.

❤️ One thing that genuinely blew me away was how incredibly authentic Raquel Bouris and Adam Bouris from WHO IS ELIJAH are. 

Adam candidly shared that for too long they believed "more at the top", the revenue devil, would fix everything. 

They've learnt, just as we did, that it simply isn't the case and we are proud to have you as a client of ProfitPeak.

Sometimes you need to step back and focus on your cost base, not just chase more revenue.

Raquel, in my mind and I have no doubt in the mind of every operator in that audience,  is an absolute powerhouse who embodies everything a successful creative, founder-led brand leader should be. 

Yet on stage, she cut herself down. 

I had to hold myself back from saying, "No, you are incredible."

🌍 Jordana Macfarlaine Macfarlane shared how community-led brands are so important, referencing both Havaianas' brand activation with our brilliant client Arms Of Eve and Incu's incredible in-store experiential events. 

She also made the point clearly: brands that don't invest in content will fall behind.

What I loved was that so many of the insights brands are searching for are already at their fingertips inside ProfitPeak with Sherpa, our agentic workforce — something I was fortunate enough to speak about on a panel alongside Rev de Silva and Jacqui Cole.

As usual, I dropped a few truth bombs (want to know what they were? Drop a comment below) — and possibly stunned or unsettled a few in the room. 

But after 20 years in business, I've learnt that hard truths and honesty are always the best policy.

And what a way to close. 

Rev brought Jacquie Fennell, who normally works behind the scenes forward on stage to acknowledge her in the most thoughtful, genuine way. 

Pun very much intended.

So authentic. So real. 

What a pleasure to be part of such an extraordinary community — who, yes, are also incredibly well dressed. 🖤

Wondering how brands like Culture Kings, SABO and Outcast have grown profitably from 8 figures to beyond? 

Join us on Tuesday 17th March from 8:30am at Greenhouse, Howard Smith Wharves up in Brissy for mimosas and breakfast which you hear from the greatest minds in our beautiful commerce community. 

We only have a few seats left and this is a room you will want to network in - I guarantee it! 

I hope to see you there...

There are a lot of so-called experts weighing in on OpenAI’s step back from agentic commerce.

Almost all of them are missing the real point.

What failed wasn’t the idea.

What failed was the infrastructure. 

For agentic commerce to actually work today, the entire commerce stack needs an overhaul.

When the partnership with Shopify was first announced, my immediate reaction was: this is going to be messy.

I’ve been very pro-Shopify for a long time. In many ways it’s the best commerce platform out there.

But let’s be clear about what Shopify is not: 

1. An inventory source of truth
2. A live data platform
3. A detailed product information source

Those three things are absolutely essential for agentic commerce.

Now.

MCPs plugged into ChatGPT or Claude is a start, but only a start. 

Why?

Because AI only works properly when it has full business context.

If you’ve connected 10% of your data via an MCP, how are you supposed to make genuinely intelligent decisions?

You can’t.

Here’s a practical example.

You connect your Klaviyo MCP to Claude and ask:
 “Which of my flows generate the most revenue?”

You get an answer. Now what?

You know the top-performing flow but you don’t know:

Which products are actually driving retention
 
Whether margin, not revenue, is the real story
 
When customer behaviour suggests you should adjust timing
 
Whether performance is incremental or cannibalised

How that flow interacts with paid, seasonality, or lifecycle stage

That’s the difference between isolated AI and connected AI.

When your entire business context is connected and you ask ProfitPeak,

 “Which of my flows generate the most revenue?”

You don’t just get an answer.

You get:

The products driving retention
 
The margin impact
 
The optimal timing based on behavioural signals
 
Incrementality insights with channel overlap 
 
Strategic recommendations to boot retention

That’s not a chatbot response.

That’s an agentic commerce workforce working across your data.

AI without context is interesting. AI with context is transformative.

The Hidden Cost of "Build Don't Buy"

There's a cohort telling brands to rip out their tech stacks, build proprietary tools, and manage their own ads. 

Own your infrastructure. Cut dependency. Move faster.

There's something to it. 

Bloated SaaS contracts do kill margin. 

Off-the-shelf tools aren't always the best fit. 

And yes, AI has made building genuinely more accessible.

But the pitch has a hole in it nobody wants to talk about...

You have no moat in AI either.

If building your own CRM or automating your ad buying is accessible to your brand, it's accessible to every brand — same tools, same cost, same learning curve. 

That's not a competitive advantage. 

It's table stakes the moment your competitors catch up. Which they will.

More importantly: every hour a founder spends maintaining a data environment, debugging a custom integration, or optimising a media buying algorithm is an hour not spent on brand and product. 

For most DTC founders, that's where the actual edge lives.

The opportunity cost of technical distraction is enormous, and it's almost never factored into the "build don't buy" calculation.

And that's before the APIs break.

Because they will. 

MCPs get deprecated. 

Platforms change their data structures. 

Authentication protocols update overnight. 

The AI tool your custom build depended on quietly changes its output format and suddenly nothing works.

Who's on call for that? 

Who owns the fix when your bespoke stack falls over on a Friday afternoon before a product launch? 

With a SaaS platform, that's someone else's emergency. 

When you've built it yourself, it's yours — at 11pm, in perpetuity.

The "build don't buy" crowd talks about ownership as pure upside. 

They rarely mention that ownership includes maintenance, fragility, and the ongoing tax of keeping pace with an AI infrastructure landscape that is changing faster than any other in history.

The same logic applies to managing your own ads.

Removing agency margin improves unit economics on paper. 

But a founder deep in Meta's campaign manager three days a week isn't doing the creative thinking, brand positioning, or product development that compounds over time. 

You're not saving money. 

You're trading your highest-leverage hours for your lowest.

AI will raise the ceiling for lean operators dramatically. 

But the advantage won't come from building the same tools as everyone else, or from owning infrastructure that quietly becomes a liability.

It will come from being exceptionally clear on what you're best at and ruthlessly protecting the time you spend doing it.

The coaches selling technical complexity as sophistication are solving the wrong problem.

“The CEO / Founder wants us to be AI-first.”

But “AI-first” has quickly become one of the most overused phrases in commerce.

Most brands interpret it as:

Writing better ad copy with AI
 
Generating product descriptions faster
 
Automating customer service chats

That’s not AI-first. 

That’s AI-assisted marketing.

Being an AI-first DTC team is something far more fundamental.

It means embedding intelligence into how you trade.

It means removing guesswork from the commercial engine of your business -margin, inventory, pricing, acquisition and channel strategy.

What being AI-first really means:

It isn’t about replacing commercial instinct.

It’s about upgrading it.

Decisions are grounded in live margin data

Inventory risk is visible before it becomes urgent

Acquisition performance is judged on contribution, not vanity revenue
 
Promotions are deliberate, not desperate
 
Leadership operates with clarity, not lag

AI like Sherpa doesn’t just improve reporting.

It improves: decision quality, speed, margin durability and capital efficiency. 

Is there anything actually more important than that in business?

I shared this recently in a comment and felt that it had it's place as stand-alone content, so if you've seen this twice from me, I do apologise ;)

The hardest thing about AI isn’t the AI. 

It’s the data underneath it.

In 2023, getting a clean answer out of your own business data was a project. 

SQL. Export. Pivot. Cross-reference. 

Then you’d still end up with a number you only half trusted, delivered two weeks after the fact, by which point the business had already shifted.

That’s exactly what we’re changing at ProfitPeak, because someone has to do the hard structural work. 

We’ve already connected the foundations: ads, inventory and finance, with context baked in.

AI without that doesn’t give you insight. 

It gives you slop. 

Confident, well-formatted slop, at that.

Now, questions that wouldn’t survive a pivot table come back in 15 seconds. 

And not as reporting to tick a CEO box, but as an outcome with a “how” and a clear action. 

That’s where most analytics tools fall over.

Build vs buy matters here too, and for brands it isn’t really a technical question. 

If your edge is developing and distributing the best products in your category, data infrastructure shouldn’t become a two-year internal project. 

Buy the context. Use the time.

And back to the original point: every query should be thought through, not just executed.

Fact-check the output. Store it. Re-run it over time. 

See whether the predicted outcome actually occurred.

That feedback loop is where AI becomes genuinely useful.

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The Battle

Manny Sidhu

Carla Penn-Kahn

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The Battle

Manny Sidhu

Carla Penn-Kahn

Followers

Posts

Engagements

Likes

Performance Score.css-goub6s{font-size:var(--chakra-fontSizes-md);font-weight:500;color:var(--chakra-colors-gray-600);display:block;margin-top:var(--chakra-space-1);}Carla Penn-Kahn's LinkedIn Performance

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