Justine Youl On Recovery, Her Children And Building From Bali

By Justine Youl

In a LinkedIn Pulse piece titled "Five years ago my kids were just glad I'm alive," Justine Youl reflects on how far her life has moved in half a decade. The founder of SiteSherpa, an Australian…

In a LinkedIn Pulse piece titled "Five years ago my kids were just glad I'm alive," Justine Youl reflects on how far her life has moved in half a decade. The founder of SiteSherpa, an Australian workplace safety and compliance technology company, writes from a vantage point that is both personal and candid, measuring her progress not in commercial milestones but in what those years have meant for her and her family.

The title points directly to the recovery that underpins much of Justine's public writing. Justine says she is in recovery from alcohol addiction and, in recent accounts, describes herself as over three and a half years sober. That history gives the piece its frame. Where her children once measured things simply by whether she was alive, the five years since mark a different chapter, one she now spends raising her three children in Bali, Indonesia, while running SiteSherpa.

The move to Bali sits at the centre of that chapter. Justine sold her possessions and relocated from Australia with her children and limited savings in order to build the company. She says she lived in one bedroom shared with her three kids, had $20,000 in the bank, and homeschooled the children while developing SiteSherpa. From there she taught herself to code using YouTube and built the company's first minimum viable product before AI tools were in widespread use.

That founder story draws on more than 20 years of frontline experience in mining and construction, where Justine started as a heavy machinery operator before moving into workplace health and safety leadership and consulting. Justine explains that she built SiteSherpa because, as a WHS consultant, she could not find software that worked for the businesses she was helping. Everything was too complex, too expensive, or built for enterprise companies with dedicated safety teams. SiteSherpa has since grown into a WHS compliance platform and consultancy serving high-risk industries including mining, construction and civil infrastructure.

The LinkedIn piece reads less as a company update and more as a marker of distance travelled. Justine's writing connects her recovery, her role as a mother and her work as a founder into a single account, told in her own words, of a life rebuilt on her own terms.