About us
Our story & people
Our story
Over the years, we’ve trained more than 30,000 enterprise employees to change how they communicate, think and lead at work.
But that’s not where we began.
Before founding Magneto in 2005, we ran a copywriting agency for 10 years. We wrote speeches, ads, direct-marketing campaigns, white papers, tenders – pretty much anything you could pay someone to write.
We distilled that experience into the Magneto Method – a set of principles for applying copywriting psychology to workplace communication. Whether you’re writing, presenting or influencing, this approach can dramatically lift your results.
Our mission is to create communicators who are:
- Clear
- Concise
- Commercial.
Our clients are large enterprises with mostly technical teams – finance, engineering, insurance, resources, consulting, construction. Smart people whose brains are often wired more for numbers than words.
We help them bring clarity to their often complex subjects. To stop and think before communicating. To consider their audience, their objective, their strategy. To not tell everything they know. But to distill their message so it hits the mark.
Not easy. But vital in a fast-moving, multi-stakeholder environment.
Why the name ‘Magneto’?
It has nothing to do with Marvel’s levitating super villain. But everything to do with engines.
In some engines, a magneto is a crucial component that generates a spark.
That’s our goal for you: To generate a high-energy spark of interest in your audiences’ minds, helping you engage and persuade them.
So that’s our story. We’d love to be part of yours 🙂
Our vision
Our mission
Our Team
Petrina Buckley
Co-Founder, Managing Director
Petrina co-founded Magneto Communications with Paul in 2005. She leads the team and the standard across training design, systems, product and client outcomes. Her career has been about creating unique learning experiences that last and has spanned creative and commercial industries.
In 2014, she led the creation of Credosity, our business writing software. Now she’s leading Magneto Mentor AI, which helps enterprise teams get consistent, high-quality work from AI.
Fave things? Ocean swims, exquisite stationery, quirky comedy and dark, dark chocolate.
Paul Jones
Co-Founder | Trainer | Speaker
For 18 years, Paul’s principles and frameworks have helped blue-chip CXO teams through to graduates change how they communicate, think and lead at work. He’s a highly engaging keynote speaker and corporate communications expert who’s passionate about the intersection of psychology, behavioural change and communication. A copywriter by trade, Paul co-founded Magneto Communications in 2005 with Petrina. Magneto has grown to be a leading enterprise offering for communication skills globally.
Fave things? Audiobooks by the dozen, fitness hacks, navigating the waves from Maroubra to Bondi on his ocean ski, anything gluten free.
Jon Maxim
Trainer | Communications Evangelist
Jon is a copywriter, trainer and communication strategist with 42 years’ experience helping organisations say what they mean – and be heard. For 31 of those years he’s trained thousands of clients across the UK and Asia Pacific, from global enterprises to boutique brands. He’s designed advanced copywriting programs for the Australian Direct Marketing Association, the New Zealand Marketing Association and Australia Post. His sessions are lively, practical and full of insider techniques. Whether it’s a board paper, campaign, AI-assisted first draft or influential presentation, people leave with skills they can use the next day.
Fave things? His kids, cooking, sharing great writing tips, films and film festivals, and anything to do with France.
Glenn Murray
Customer Experience (CX) Lead
Glenn has 32 years of experience in business analysis, user experience, writing and digital product development across global enterprises and tiny tech startups. He’s founded three software startups and worked with 400+ clients shaping the comms and digital products, including Telstra, Westpac and Toyota. At Magneto Mentor AI, Glenn smooths out the customer journey and designs the thinking behind your first moments in the product so it’s useful at scale. His core belief ‘if software feels hard, that’s the software’s fault and not yours’.
Fave things? Craft beer, volleyball, 4WD-ing beneath the open skies and music.
Jocelyn Damian
Client Success & Learning Events Lead
Jocelyn is the driving force behind our training events and systems making sure everything happens on time, is tailored to your needs and is smooth from start to finish. She’s an engineer by trade and a passionate learner by nature. She uses that combination of curiosity and systems-thinking to create reliable outcomes for the training and software sides of Magneto. Both our clients and our team turn to Jocelyn (‘J’) to solve tricky challenges and she will always engineer a fix so the future is bright.
Fave things: Grandma’s pork soup, beating her nephews and nieces at badminton and community work.
Tere Mendoza
Client Success Support
Tere is the anchor for us all, expertly managing day-to-day operations with quiet efficiency. She’s our silent powerhouse – highly organised, detail-oriented, and always ready with a heart emoji to keep things calm, positive and client-focused. Her diverse experience in finance, content management, research, office administration, and sales support ensure our core systems run smoothly every day.
Fave things: Nail art that would blow your mind, catching sunsets and keeping up with her energetic sons.
Virginia Edwards
Design & Product Lead
Virginia (‘VV’) is a consummate all-rounder across marketing, technical, design and client delight. She has a broad background in publishing, education and product development. A self-confessed tech enthusiast, she’s famous in these parts for brilliant design thinking. And a mum to three cool (and not so small anymore) humans! Her talent? Making the extraordinary happen online and in real life for the Magneto crowd. Fave things? Learning new things, reading, ocean swims, live music and good, strong coffee.
Mike Dijkstra
Technical Lead - Magneto Mentor AI
Mike has over 15 years of experience designing and building digital products. He works across the entire product lifecycle — from ideation and design through to full-stack development. His strength is connecting business goals, user needs and engineering realities. He’s currently leading the technical transformation of Magneto Mentor AI, architecting the shift from prototype to an enterprise-ready platform. When not at the keyboard, Mike can be found in the surf with his young boys or in the kitchen baking sourdough bread and enjoying a filter coffee.
Stuart Edwards
UX/UI Lead - Magneto Mentor AI
Our big WHY: Raising the global literacy rate
When you engage us, you become part of our ongoing work to advance global literacy, starting in our own backyard with the Australian Literacy and Numeracy Foundation (ALNF).
Only 1 in 5 Australian children in remote Indigenous communities can read at the national standard. Being able to read and write is a basic human right. It solves many of our greatest social challenges.
You book training: we sponsor a mentor
For every enterprise team that completes our training, we sponsor one Indigenous high-school student to mentor a group of young children. It helps little ones fall in love with the magic of words and reading. And imagine what it does to boost the teenage mentors’ self-esteem and sense of purpose!
You can see the progress we’re making with our ALNF ‘Wall of Hands’ here.
