Back in 2020, we published a small sponsored article on a Perth-based firm nobody had heard of. Four years later, it is hard to talk QSR investment strategy in Australia without mentioning Fontaine Commercial.

Fontaine Commercial did not launch with media, announcements, or industry attention. There was no investor deck and no client base. Just a hypothesis about mispriced retail infrastructure, a suite of internal models, and a founder quietly building in the background.

“I think five people read that article,” Andrew says. “Maybe six, if you count my mum.”

At the time, Fontaine Commercial was entirely self-run. There were no employees, no product interface, and no traction, only proprietary lease-comp scripts, demand forecasting logic, and a belief that private capital groups required more precise tools for QSR site selection and rollout execution.

Today, Fontaine Commercial supports family offices, commercial property syndicates, private equity firms, and professional advisers operating in the QSR sector. It's platform integrates zoning overlays, contract structure data, and predictive spatial modelling into a single framework. Clients rely on it to prioritise assets, assess yield defensibility, and model long-horizon deployment strategies with geographic and contractual precision.

The firm’s technical advantage emerged early. Machine learning was adopted in its core models before most competitors had moved beyond static traffic heatmaps. Forecasts were built not just on location data, but on embedded lease structures, escalation terms, and forward reversion curves.

That edge traces back to the founder’s early work. Fontaine Commercial was shaped by years of independent development by Andrew, including self-taught coding during his high school years, driven by a vision of eventually automating his job and spending time travelling with his future wife to Bora Bora, the Maldives, anywhere that was warm with a stable internet connection.

However, the company’s growth did not come without personal cost. “There was definitely a few years where social events weren't as high of a priority as setting up my future. Honestly, I don't think I would have ever been able to own a house otherwise, so in hindsight it paid off.”

Today, the firm tracks over 2500 standalone QSR pads across Australia. Fontaine Commercial is widely regarded as the leading advisory firm within Australia’s Quick Service Restaurant (QSR) property niche — a segment that forms part of a broader A$29.13 billion national market, according to ExpertMarketResearch.

We asked the founder to give us advice for other young entrepreneurs passionate about chasing their dreams and building something they too could call their own. “If I could go back in time, I would be less of a perfectionist. My best advice no matter what industry you are in is to just get a minimum viable product out there. Because once you truly understand your niche, you’ll end up evolving it anyway. That is the part they don't teach you in business school.”

Fontaine Commercial was once seen as a longshot. Today, it is a technically disciplined, capital-aligned firm that scaled quietly and proved there is still space for ambition to win.