Too busy building to tell it: the long version.

Where it starts

I’m Gen X, so I think in terms of influences. Mine were close to home. My parents. My incredible brother and my incredible sister, all of them taking a real bite out of life.

The life lessons came from the mentors in my life: Mum and Dad, my brother and sister, and a few brilliant bosses you’ll meet below. And I’ve always paid attention to frequency. We each have a working style: fast, considered, steady or responsive. That’s your coding as much as anything else. I live and breathe it, and it’s found its way into almost everything I’ve built, including the frequency read on this site.

What it means for you: I don’t expect your people to all work the same way. I start by working out how they actually operate.

Cape Town: the earl, the cricket match and the lightning

I lived in Cape Town from 1995 to 1999, working for Earl Spencer.

It was fun, and my complete lack of interest in the flashy and the who’s who made me the perfect person for the job. Most of the time I didn’t know who anyone was. It didn’t matter to me, and that took care of any worry that I might talk.

I put together a cricket match between the old boys from Eton and a bunch of guys from Cape Town. In August 1998 I met Bear Grylls, a few months back from Everest, with the climb still written on his face.

Then the house was struck by lightning. I learned the hard way how complicated logistics get when there’s a family to look after, insurers to deal with, and furniture ruined by soot and fire hose foam. That’s a story for another time.

What it means for you: I judge ideas on what they are, not on whose title is attached to them. And I’ve been handling the mess after the lightning strike since the 90s.

London: consistency I can work with

When I moved to the UK, the earl’s letter of recommendation opened every door. I wanted film and TV.

At my first interview, the woman leaving the role asked how I handle difficult bosses. I asked if he was difficult all the time. She said yes. I said, well, consistency I can work with. I got the job, and it lasted nine months, through post-production.

Then came one of my all-time favourite roles: EA to the head of Cartoon Network, at Turner Broadcasting. My boss was Australian, the first Aussie I really knew, and later one of only three people I knew when I landed in Sydney. He showed me a boss can be brilliant, shrewd, funny and kind, well liked, and still deliver.

What it means for you: I can work with almost anything once I know what it is. It’s the surprises that hurt, and finding them early is a big part of what I do.

South Africa: meeting the Crohn

Then I got sick, and my whole world turned upside down.

I went back to South Africa and learned what it means to not have your health. It was a harsh lesson, and it would be at any age. Twenty-five years on, “the Crohn”, as I affectionately call her now, has taught me more about myself than anything else.

Getting my health back under control was only half of it. I had to restart my life, and that was much harder than you’d think. When you’ve been unwell for that long, you learn to keep moving forward even on the bad days. You can’t stop everything because today is hard.

What it means for you: I’m steady when the plan changes, because mine always has. When things go sideways in your organisation, I won’t be the one who panics.

Johannesburg: the easy start that wasn’t

A great friend suggested flowers might be a nice, easy way back into work. I loved it, and it was the hardest job I’ve ever had.

That’s where Ryan and I came together. I was a florist, he was a horticulturist with a landscaping business, and we were both saving to move to Australia.

We worked for a woman who was something like the godmother of the South African flower trade. Very tall, rolling up to the Johannesburg flower auction in her big Mercedes truck. If you’ve never seen that auction, it’s a sight to behold.

She had a booming stand at the Rosebank flea market, on top of the shopping centre. A full day of prep on Saturday with a team of five. Up at 4am on Sunday. Deliver, set up, sell all day, restock, pack down, stocktake, and keep the flowers safe overnight. She offered us a slice of the business to run it for her, and that’s how we saved to leave.

One Mother’s Day, we took 164,000 rand in a single day, with bunches selling at 50 to 120 rand each.

What it means for you: I know what real effort and real margin feel like. Margin is physical. You feel it in your back before you see it on a spreadsheet.

Sydney: $5,000 and blind faith

We moved to Australia twenty years ago with $5,000. Ryan brought brute force. I brought something close to blind faith.

I already knew it wouldn’t always be fine. That turned out to be an advantage.

Australia was beautiful, and hard. I worked as a florist. Ryan was with a labour hire company in Hornsby, leaving at 5am and getting home at 7 or 8. I worked weekends. We hardly saw each other. I was terribly homesick and didn’t know anybody.

What it means for you: I know how to start with very little and an honest read of where you stand. It’s where I start with every organisation I work with.

Vision CRC: learning the boardroom, and the one that got away

I spent ten years at Vision CRC, the largest vision correction research centre in the world.

I didn’t win the $100 million round that funded it. My job was to keep the organisation that had been funded on track: its systems, compliance, risk and reporting to the Commonwealth. I ran the ethics committees and the board and audit committees. I also managed the submission for a $5 million plus Commonwealth project to build a rugged auto-refractor for blindness screening, and we won it. I learned how a board actually works, and how compliance lives inside a real organisation, not just in a policy folder.

The part I loved was working out which ideas could leave the lab and become something real. Preventable blindness. Concussion. Education programs.

I worked on a concussion device that should have made it, and didn’t. Brilliant people and good science weren’t enough. Nothing gets built in isolation, and the order you do things in matters as much as the idea itself.

I learned more from my boss there than I knew at the time. Four kids, huge pressure, so focused, so quick to laugh, so brilliant. I still marvel at how she did it.

What it means for you: I know how boards think, what compliance really costs, and why good ideas fail. I’ll help you get the order right before you spend the money.

EcoGroup, COVID and meforme™: building through the punches

Ryan started EcoGroup in 2008, the year after we married, with two teams of five. I started as board secretariat and became the business manager and partnerships lead. It grew into an operation across three states with more than 100 staff at its peak.

Then drought, a bushfire season and COVID hit in close succession. Every business in the group was still exited cleanly. That’s where I learned to build systems that assume the punches will come.

I also got clear on what I wanted next. Something that earns while I sleep, with real meaning and a properly technical challenge.

I found it in meforme™. During COVID, I worked out how to translate Monique Etkind’s dietetics practice into something digital that could reach far more people. I’d had incredible carers and so much access. Most people don’t. But they don’t all need to sit across from a dietitian. If someone picks up three new health habits, it can change their life.

So we set a working hypothesis. Face to face, a dietitian gets sustained results around 90% of the time. What’s a reasonable success rate for a digital program to still be meaningful? We landed on 15 to 35%. We’re writing up the research now.

Picture someone who drinks only Fanta and eats takeaway every day. If they start drinking a few glasses of water and make their own lunch a few times a week, that’s a marked health improvement. It’s not sexy. It’s steady, measured and real. That’s meforme™.

What it means for you: I’ll help you work out what success actually looks like, not what looks good in a press release. Steady beats sexy.

Key360: one clear view

Building meforme™ taught me so many technical skills that when AI took off, I dived straight in. Now it’s just part of how I work.

Key360 started as a system I built to map one student’s learning: the curriculum, the NESA requirements, wellbeing and values, all turned into outcomes. Not “read this text”, but “by this age, you should be able to do these things”. One place to see where things stood and what came next.

Then I spoke to Fabian Conrad, my old colleague from Vision CRC. We’d both lived with the same problem for years. Data everywhere. Reports put together by hand every cycle. Dashboards that showed activity but never position. So we built Key360.

It’s a thin layer of tech that doesn’t replace anything you use. It reads where you are, from your compliance system to the spreadsheet someone keeps by hand, and measures it against what you need to achieve. If you need 300 SOPs and you have 200 plus a pile of drafts, it shows you that.

We’ve tested it in three very different places:

A logistics company whose IPO fell over in 2023. The obvious fixes were all huge. What they needed was a leaderboard: we’re 30% of the way there, and these are the eight things between us and 100%. We didn’t implement it, because the business was mid-change, and that taught us Key360 is timing specific.

A carbon capture project in South Africa. We built the model and prototype, and their reaction was that it would change how they go to market.

Aged care, where the rules were changing again. What if your audit recommendation became a live model, so you always knew what compliant looked like and where you were up to?

The secret is the team. A user experience specialist, so the right person sees the right thing. Someone who gets genuinely excited about compliance and risk. That’s me. A data specialist who understands messy, fragmented data. And someone whose job is to grill us.

What it means for you: Key360 drastically reduces the time and complexity of compiling reports and recommendations, so you can see where you stand and what to do next.

Why I want the naysayer in the room

In a room full of people excited about what they’re building, the most important person is the one who says it won’t work. The naysayer is almost the same as the risk. Saying it out loud early makes the work, and the product, better. I’ve always wanted them in the room.

What it means for you: Make room for your sceptics. I’d rather they were in the room than in the corridor afterwards.

COREMEN™: Ryan's

COREMEN™ is Ryan's brainchild, and its story is his to tell on the COREMEN™ site. My part was using what I’d learned building meforme™ to help him shape the program.

What all of it adds up to

Almost nothing went to plan, and every detour taught me something I now use in other people’s rooms. How to judge an idea on its merits. How to stay steady when everything changes. How to find what’s in the way, and get the order right.

There’s real joy in the hard stuff, and in working through the mess. It won’t always feel like that, and that’s ok. You can handle it. Just keep going.