Innergame

I started my business journey in 1989 at the tender age of 24. The world of academia wasn’t for me, but I had a will and a determination to succeed, and I knew I loved business. It’s something about having control of your own destiny without limitation that caught my imagination.

This was a time before mobile phones and the internet…hard to imagine a world like that now with the information superhighway literally, in the palm of our hand. It was these early years building a business in the retail space that gave me a background on how to meet customer expectations and was a foundation to hold me in good stead for years to come.

Over the last 33 years I have placed my fingerprints on many business ventures. Buying and selling, starting some from scratch and ending some abruptly with many stories of success and failure along the way.

You could split up my business journey into 2 halves. The first 19 years leading up to the GFC (Global Financial Crisis of 2008) and then the 14 years after it.

I thought it was over for me, we nearly lost everything. After 19 years in business under my belt I was feeling “successful”. From the outside looking in, it would seem things were going well…. But the 2008 GFC nearly destroyed me…

The threat of losing our home broke my heart… as did the thought of having to uproot my 2 girls from school where they were thriving and bundle them down the road to another school. It was difficult realising my world was falling apart but worse, unbearable that I was causing the lives of my family to be disrupted through no fault of their own.

I pushed through the agonising sleepless nights, running on pure adrenaline, feeling disconnected from my work, and not knowing where the next mortgage payment was coming from while hustling to make ends meet.

I felt trapped, thinking do I give this all away and get a real job or do I persevere and try and make it through.

On reflection it was courage that got me through. Something I now value extremely high.

It took me 3 years to get back on my feet after losing a lot of money, equity, and confidence that I could make it work.

I now know that the GFC was the catalyst that helped me find a new pathway forward. It turned out that it wasn’t the 2008 GFC that nearly destroyed me but an external view of my business world…. I created.

Over the next few years, I was influenced to look inwardly for the answers to my business and personal challengers. I wanted to know how I got into that mess in the first place.

I became obsessed with finding out the answer to this burning question.

Why don’t we get what we say we want?

Since 2011 I have been looking deeper to find more sustainable answers to business growth problems by challenging myself to answer this question.

This led me to spending a lot of time studying the engineering of human behaviour and why we often don’t get the results we set out to achieve.

The more I learned the more I realised I didn’t know. I took on coaching, studied high performers, listened to experts from around the world and invested in myself at every opportunity my resources would allow.

As I implemented what I was learning the results started to flow and so I doubled down on it. The result was exponential growth in a systematic way that at a previous time, I didn’t believe was possible.