Instead, there is a simple mindset that has guided him from the very beginning: do better.

Growing up and building a career in Mackay, Corey never set out to become an inventor. As a young apprentice at Max Engineering, his ambitions were practical and grounded. He wanted to become a tradesman. Once he achieved that, he wanted to become a leading hand. Then a supervisor. Then a business owner.

It was never about chasing a title. It was about creating opportunities and continually finding the next challenge.

“I had kids very young, so my motivation was always about wanting better,” Corey reflects. “When I was an apprentice, all I wanted to be was a tradesman. When I was a tradesman, I wanted to be a leading hand, then a supervisor. It was always: what’s the next level I need to get to?” 

That same mindset would eventually lead him to create a technology now helping mining operations around the world prevent equipment failures before they happen. For more than two decades, Corey and his team worked in the Bowen Basin, supporting mining and mineral processing operations across the region. It was during one of those jobs that an unexpected question changed everything.

A worn pipe had failed and been discharging material for hours before anyone realised. By the time the problem was discovered, environmental damage had already occurred. A site manager asked a simple question: could there be a way to know when a pipe was about to fail before it happened? 

Corey went looking for a solution. What he found was a gap in the market.

“There was a lot of measuring, but not a lot of monitoring,” he says. “We went looking for it and couldn’t find anything on the market.” 

For many people, that might have been the end of the story. For Corey, it was the beginning.

Drawing on years of hands-on experience, he and his team began developing a solution themselves. The result was 2CENSOR, a patented wear-monitoring technology designed to provide real-time visibility into the condition of critical equipment and infrastructure.

Today, 2CENSOR’s sensors are installed in some of the harshest operating environments in the world, helping operators identify wear, reduce downtime, minimise environmental risk and make maintenance decisions before failures occur.

Corey is quick to downplay his role, often describing himself as an “accidental inventor”. But his success speaks to something bigger than invention alone.

It highlights the power of solving problems from lived experience.

“We were in the industry. We dealt with the problem we were solving daily,” he says. “It wasn’t that we invented a sensor and hoped it worked. It was a calculated risk.”

What started as a response to a local industry challenge has since grown into a business with global reach. Through partnerships and customers across North and South America, Africa, Asia-Pacific and beyond, the technology developed in Mackay is now supporting operations on multiple continents. Despite that growth, Corey remains deeply connected to the region where the idea began. He believes one of Greater Whitsunday’s greatest strengths is the depth of knowledge that exists across its industries.

“There’s a lot of intelligence and learning in this region from being a mining region for so long,” he says. “There’s so much opportunity to take the learnings we’ve had within the industries here in Mackay and export them around the world. 

That belief aligns closely with the Greater Possibilities story. The region’s future is not built solely on its natural resources. It is built on the people, ideas and expertise that have developed around them. Businesses like 2CENSOR demonstrate how local capability can evolve into globally relevant solutions, creating new opportunities for diversification, innovation and growth.

Looking back, Corey still finds it hard to comprehend just how far the journey has come. “If I look back ten years, there’s no way we thought we’d be in this position,” he says. 

Yet perhaps that is exactly what happens when you are focused on continuous improvement rather than the destination itself. From apprentice to entrepreneur, from service provider to technology innovator, Corey has spent a career asking what comes next.

In doing so, he has shown that some of the world’s most complex challenges can be solved from regional Queensland, and that greater possibilities often begin with a simple determination to do better.