McDonald's is about to start building a new restaurant in Phillip - the fifth owned by a man who started as a burger flipper.
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Brad Carroll started as a 14-year-old, part-time crew member at a Macca's in his home town of Wagga Wagga. One thing led to another - the worker worked hard and became a manager.
He bought the franchise to four stores in Wagga and then moved to Canberra.
Work is about to start on his fifth McDonald's. He already owns restaurants in Manuka, Weston, Westfield Woden and the Molonglo Valley.
The fifth will be on Hindmarsh Drive in Phillip. It will be a two-lane drive-through, the first in the area.
He's clearly got business in his blood.
He and his wife Kate bought his first property in their late teens. They realised that doing up houses and then selling them produced a tidy profit - a tidy enough profit to buy their first McDonald's franchise.
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"We financed the investment through our real estate projects - it enabled us to raise the capital required to purchase our first store in 2010," he told the trade paper Inside Franchise Business.
"This also gave us insight into business transactions, whether it be the purchasing process or negotiating with contractors, that proved useful in our later venture into the franchise world."
After expanding in Wagga, and in Leeton and Temora, they moved to Canberra in 2015.
He said the latest venture will be new for the area: "This will be the first McDonald's restaurant to feature a drive-through in Woden Valley, giving our customers another convenient and efficient way to access Maccas."
He said there would be 120 jobs in construction plus another 100 when the restaurant was open later in the year. That would take his number of employees in Canberra above 600.
When he started at the age of 14 just under a half century ago, he said he had no greater ambition than to buy a t-shirt.
But he was bitten by McDonald's which has programs to educate and promote promising managers - all four of his existing restaurants are managed by people who've come up through the ranks. There is a mentoring scheme.
"I could see the opportunities that were available when my mentor at the time became a franchisee, and I saw my dream of following the same path as a realistic goal," he told Inside Franchise Business.
"McDonald's was what I knew and loved and it made perfect sense to take it to the next level."
The "people side" is what he says he likes.
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Steve Evans
Steve Evans is a reporter on The Canberra Times. He's been a BBC correspondent in New York, London, Berlin and Seoul and the sole reporter/photographer/paper deliverer on The Glen Innes Examiner in country New South Wales. "All the jobs have been fascinating - and so it continues."
Steve Evans is a reporter on The Canberra Times. He's been a BBC correspondent in New York, London, Berlin and Seoul and the sole reporter/photographer/paper deliverer on The Glen Innes Examiner in country New South Wales. "All the jobs have been fascinating - and so it continues."
