You may be wondering why I decided to start a new business in the middle of a global pandemic. With economic uncertainty higher than it has been for generations, it might not seem like an ideal time to start a potentially risky venture to go it alone.

The reality is that it was destruction that led to this creation.

I had toyed with the idea of starting my own venture for many years, but I had enjoyed incrediby rewarding careers in large organisations for a number of years. Those roles took me across the globe, and gave me exposure to projects that I would have never dreamed of. I learned incredible things - like why Brazilian pepper trees present challenges when operating road maintenance contracts in Florida - and why water leakage is an issue for water utilities in Northern England - and about the challenges and incredible importance of government provided social housing.

Those roles kept me in a constant state of challenge, and continued to provide me with a rewarding career that outweighed the risk of starting a business.

As a Chartered Accountant turned business improvement specialist (who is also the son of an Accountant), I was trained to identify risk - and I like to think that I'm good at it. However being able to identify risk is also a great way to find all of the reasons not to do things.

In early 2020, I made a move to a newly created role focussing on digital transformation within a Finance team. This role was again incredibly rewarding, and gave me an opportunity to work with some great individuals in a great organisation.

And then along came the pandemic, and with it, some incredibly challenging business conditions.

In order to respond to that, the organisation that I was working for commenced a restructure and unfortunately, having only been there a number of months, my role was made redundant.

I hold no grudges or regrets about my time there. The time I shared with the team (mainly over Microsoft Teams calls) over that lockdown period was fantastic and made working through that lockdown period enjoyable. I grew close to my team and we worked on some projects that I am genuinely proud of. As I said at the time, I cannot blame anyone for making my role redundant because as a business improvement specialist, I would have done the same thing.

To me, restructures and redundancies (particularly in this environment) are not about individual capability, but about organisational capability and right-sizing, so I do not take it personally.

When I think about it, I am reminded of Joseph A. Schumpeter. Those of you who are not economic history buffs might ask who Joseph Schumpeter is.

Story time

When I was about 16 in high school, I got the opportunity to complete a university subject at the University of Western Sydney in Parramatta. I was also doing accounting at TAFE as a high school subject, but for some reason I thought it would be a good selling point to get a job if I were to go to High School, TAFE and University all at the same time. So every Thursday night my mum drove me to Parramatta and from 6pm to 10pm I would study microeconomics.

I realise that this makes me sound like a very diligent student - I assure you - I was not. I was just looking for ways to make up for years of not doing homework or studying.

In the tutorials for this subject, each student was given an extract from an academic paper and tasked with summarising and presenting it to the class. My extract was a chapter from Joseph Schumpeter's book "Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy" first published in 1942. The chapter was titled "The Process of Creative Destruction".

It was a tough read at the time. Not due to the content - I couldn't even get to the content. I had no idea what he was saying! As a kid from a public school in Western Sydney, I had no idea who "the managing bourgeoisie" were. It damn near took me 3 days to work out that the managing bourgeoisie was a "who" and not a "what". I sat there for weeks with a dictionary going line by line translating this thing into Western Sydney english.

Having translated it into my English, I came to realise what this paper was about.

This paper was about the birth of innovation within an economy, and the cycles that occur within economies, and the opportunities that those cycles create. It was about the things that stiffle creative development and those that foster it. Destruction is an inherently creative thing, because it creates room to allow new things to grow.

It challenged some concepts about the way that market structures (like monopolies and oligopolies) might behave, and argued that even in the absence of a direct competitor, good organisations seek innovation and differentiation because competition might arrive, not just because it has arrived.

This chapter was fundamentally about the fact that existing ways of thinking (and working) are continually destroyed and new ones created in their place in the normal rhythm of economies. Schumpeter pointed it out in 1942 and it is as true today as it was then. One of the aspects of this is that while social environmental changes "often condition industrial change, they are not its prime movers...The fundamental impulse that sets and keeps the capitalist engine in motion comes from the new consumers' goods, the new method of production or transportation, the new markets, the new forms of industrial organization".

That paper resonated with me, and the concept of creative destruction has stayed with me ever since. To me, this paper makes me think about the economic situation that we are presently in. The motivations that lead organisations to fear competition from disruption are as present now as they were before the pandemic. The organisation that gets ahead in this challenging market is the one that finds a way to innovate despite the challenges. The one that automates that process, that masters their data and uses it to their advantage, that changes the way that they interact with their customers to be more aligned with how their customers like to work.

Despite the amount of upheaval and change, this time has the opportunity to be an incredibly creative period, so given that, I couldn't think of a better time to start a business to help organisations with Digital Transformation. It means that I can provide my expertise in doses that match my clients so that organisations can navigate the complexity of change but don't need to commit to full time resources. I can be small and agile, and mould to suit them during a time where their improvement investment really needs to matter.

I'm working in an industry that I love, and I'm excited about the future.