Cullen Haynes, the 35th person I’ve met on my quest to have lunch with 500 strangers, must be the busiest person in Sydney.

He wakes up at 3.30am. He reads. He exercises. He arrives at the office just after 7am. He spends his days rushing from meeting to meeting (our lunch was his fourth appointment of the day). Twelve hours later, he goes home, ready to do it all again the next day.

Cullen is a mortgage broker with Legal Home Loans, so most of his meetings are with lawyers. He looks the part with his three-piece suit, and he’s got bucketloads of charm, so I’m not surprised that his business is going from strength to strength.

There’s a bigger picture to Cullen’s manic work schedule, as he explained when he recounted one of his favourite fables.

“Three men were working on a building site. They were asked what they were doing. The first said: ‘I’m laying bricks.’ The second said: ‘I’m blowing glass.’ The third said: ‘I’m building a cathedral.’”

All those early starts, all those meetings, all those deals are about building a tall, robust, handsome cathedral.

I would’ve loved to have spent more time with Cullen – but he had to rush to his fifth meeting of the day.