In July 2018, Peter O'Connell took a job at a company he had helped invent. Amaysim was nearly eight years old. It had customers, a stock-market listing and a broader collection of businesses than the mobile service with which it had started. Its co-founder had already been chairman and a non-executive director. Now he would be chief executive. There are easier ways to renew an acquaintance.
A founder returning to management is an appealing business story because everyone knows the first act. The idea arrives. The company launches. Customers follow. The return is harder to narrate. It involves inheriting decisions, including decisions made while you were in the boardroom, and discovering how much work the original promise now requires.
For O'Connell, that promise concerned simplicity. Amaysim had offered Australians a less complicated relationship with their mobile provider. By 2018, running the company meant making difficult choices about what it should keep doing. The person who had helped open the door was back to sort out the rooms.
The founder comes back
O'Connell became CEO and managing director on 1 July, succeeding Julian Ogrin. He had chaired amaysim from its incorporation until June 2015, then stayed on the board. This was a change of responsibilities within a familiar business, with the added pressure of a competitive mobile market.
Chairman Andrew Reitzer later described O'Connell volunteering for the assignment. The phrase he recalled was “unfinished business”. It is an unusually revealing description of a CEO appointment. The company was already established; the founder still saw something that needed doing.
Price competition had made the task more awkward. Reitzer explained that amaysim's early advantage had narrowed as network operators reduced prices and introduced competing offers. Winning customers with a cheaper service was one thing. Holding their attention when competitors learned the same trick required more.
During O'Connell's first financial year in charge, amaysim closed its mobile device store and sold its broadband business. In his 2019 AGM address, he described a year spent resetting the company. The changes reduced the range of activities management had to juggle. Simplicity, it turned out, could require a disposal as readily as a product launch.
Four Germans and an Australian connection
O'Connell's route to amaysim passed through the legal profession and the formation of Australian telecommunications competition. He practised law from 1979 to 1994; his career included partnerships at Minter Ellison and Gilbert & Tobin. He was involved in establishing Optus and BellSouth New Zealand, serving on their boards from inception.
Those details matter because the founding story can otherwise resemble a happy accident involving a catchy name and inexpensive SIM cards. O'Connell knew the institutions, contracts and relationships underneath a phone service. His education combined an honours arts degree at the University of Sydney with a law degree at the Australian National University. Later came Hargrave Consultants, his telecommunications and technology advisory business.
His professional map extended to Ireland. He held senior executive and board roles at eircom and Meteor, among other telecommunications businesses. Ogrin had worked with him for years. That relationship helped connect the future Australian company to Rolf Hansen and the European mobile business simyo.
Ogrin recalled O'Connell's wish to bring four German founders to Australia. They were Hansen, Christian Magel, Thomas Enge and Andreas Perreiter. Together with O'Connell, they launched amaysim in November 2010. Their previous experience offered a working example of an online mobile business; Australia supplied a different market in which to apply it.
The responsibilities were divided. O'Connell was chairman; Hansen was CEO. Magel led marketing, Enge finance and Perreiter operations. It was a founding team with several distinct jobs, rather than a single entrepreneur wearing five imaginary hats for a photograph.
The expensive work of making things simple
Amaysim ran over the Optus mobile network. Its founders concentrated on the service customers bought: pricing, access and the experience of dealing with a provider. At launch, distribution included the company website and a national network of third-party retailers. The business could offer its own proposition while relying on another operator's mobile infrastructure.
For a former corporate lawyer, the customer appeal contained an entertaining occupational twist. Here was a business whose charm depended partly on reducing the customer's need to contemplate contractual complications. Someone still had to understand the arrangements behind the service. Preferably, that person would be paid by the company.
The company listed on the Australian Securities Exchange in July 2015. Expansion followed into other household services, including broadband and energy. By the time O'Connell moved into the CEO role, amaysim's ambitions had become broader than its original mobile offer. The subsequent retreat from broadband shows the distance between having a useful founding idea and deciding how far to extend it.
Colleagues described a customer philosophy as well as a commercial model. Former chief marketing officer Renee Garner credited O'Connell with teaching her about empathy. Her account put emphasis on understanding what customers wanted from a utility: straightforward pricing, less fine print and an offer that behaved as expected.
“I learned so much from him in terms of the power of empathy.”
Renee Garner, former amaysim CMO
That is a practical test for a business whose product is easy to compare on a screen. A data allowance can be matched. A price can be reduced. The customer's experience of asking a question or changing a plan depends on decisions made throughout the organisation.
O'Connell also put culture into his own public conversation. Ahead of an amaysim team day in Melbourne, he highlighted four company values: agility, empathy, reliability and simplicity. He paired them with the prospect of having fun together. The location was the Arts Centre Melbourne, a pleasingly theatrical venue for discussing the less theatrical business of being reliable.
Agility ↗ Empathy ↗
Reliability ↗ Simplicity
The network buys the neighbour
On 1 February 2021, Optus completed its A$250 million acquisition of amaysim's mobile business. The buyer was the network operator on whose infrastructure the service ran. O'Connell had helped establish that operator earlier in his career. The transaction brought two parts of his working life into the same corporate family.
The price belongs to the transaction, rather than to a personal fortune. It also describes a particular business: the mobile operation. Amaysim had already sold its energy business to AGL in 2020. Keeping those distinctions straight makes the outcome more intelligible than a single triumphant number.
Later in 2021, O'Connell accepted another telecommunications role. His appointment as Superloop's independent chair took effect on 2 November, succeeding Bevan Slattery. CEO Paul Tyler pointed to his consumer-market experience as a complement to the board's existing knowledge of business and wholesale customers.
The brief kept him close to the relationship between a network and the people using it. Superloop had infrastructure and ambitions for customer growth. O'Connell brought experience of the retail end, where the service must make sense to someone who has no wish to learn the internal organisation chart.
A different bill, a familiar problem
Another venture had begun while the amaysim chapter was still running. In 2018, O'Connell and Climatech Group founded the business later called Climatech Zero. Its work concerned the energy consumed by industrial operations, with engineering, monitoring and project delivery used to reduce costs and emissions.
The setting changed from a household mobile plan to factories, mining operations and other substantial energy users. The sales conversation changed with it. An industrial customer has equipment already in place, operating requirements and competing demands for investment. A promising idea must survive an encounter with an actual site and its budget.
In July 2024, Origin announced it had acquired a 20 per cent interest in Climatech Zero. At the time, the business had delivered 29 projects and helped customers achieve more than A$4 million in savings. Those were results from engineering and delivery teams, with guaranteed outcomes central to the offer.
Climatech Zero's cumulative record reported at Origin's July 2024 investment announcement.
O'Connell's public discussions of energy efficiency have addressed the difficulty of finding room for that investment. At a Melbourne industry summit in 2025, he discussed an energy-as-a-service model intended to let businesses improve efficiency without upfront capital. The proposed benefit had to be understandable in the language of the customer's own operations.
A guitar in the boardroom biography
Telecommunications and energy leave out an unexpected part of the career. In 1992, O'Connell co-founded The Chic Group, working in talent management across modelling and entertainment. It adds a rather different cast to a professional life populated by carriers, lawyers and engineers.
His board experience has also included Ticketek, Perisher Blue, Stadium Australia and public institutions such as Film Australia and the Australian Museum. In May 2025, he became chair of Autosports Group. The range is broad, though the individual roles carry different responsibilities and belong to different periods.
The smaller biographical details are more companionable. O'Connell enjoys writing and songwriting. He has described his solo guitar playing with conspicuous modesty. Skiing and walking appear among his interests too. The guitar, especially, is a welcome interruption to the procession of executive appointments: an activity where holding the chair offers little assistance with the chord.
His career has repeatedly returned him to businesses people use without wanting to study them. A phone needs to connect. Equipment needs to work economically. A customer needs a reason to change providers or authorise a project. O'Connell's part has varied from lawyer and chairman to founder and operator. In 2018, he went back inside his own company to take responsibility for the answer. That remains the revealing entrance.