Rocketeer Leadership Behaviors. Welcome.

I'm having a Vittoria espresso ☕️, what would you like?

The journey of starting a company is well documented. Over the past two decades, along with the explosion of the web and web 2.0, starting a company has also become a much more common thing.

But surviving and scaling isn’t as common. It’s mostly documented in press releases of successes and fundraisings.

For me, the growth and scale of our company has matched almost in parallel my personal development and learnings of myself, my past and how I show up as a man, a husband, father and leader.

I started our company in Australia in 2001, CustomWare Asia Pacific Pty Ltd - yup, that was the name - I created it out of necessity. I needed to invoice customers.

I had just returned to Sydney from what seemed like a time-warp in Silicon Valley - 2000-2001.

I was teaching training courses for a company named CustomWare (founded by Salil Deshpande) in the US in Enterprise Java, using platforms like WebLogic & webMethods when the infamous dotcom crash came and left its mark.

I flew back to Australia and continue the next stage of my life with Aimee. But there was still demand for training in Australia and Asia, so I picked up some work. I needed to invoice that work and hence the long, convoluted company name.

I taught courses, together with my high school friend, Alex and we took the money from one course and used it to grow a little, step by step.

Twenty one years later we’re still in business. But I’ve almost killed the company a couple of times. And in this Substack I’ll share some of my perspectives and what I’ve learned along the way.

There’s two main audiences for this Substack. Those that I coach/mentor and those that I work with on our team (or might be interested). Whichever you are (or not!), welcome.