A roundabout route to finding your passion

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I never wanted to be a leader. I’m sometimes surprised to find myself running a 60-person team at Xero that looks after thousands of bookkeepers and accountants in Australia. I was a shy kid growing up.

I spent my 20’s as a bookworm. My first loves lay in literature, movies, travel and cooking. I graduated from the University of New South Wales with commerce and arts qualifications, but my dreams of travel pulled me away. I studied literature at Glasgow University in Scotland, trekked across Spain and tried my hand at French cuisine in Paris.

I eventually found my true passion – as National Partner Manager, helping Xero’s bookkeeping and accounting partners support almost 500,000 small businesses in Australia. The discovery came only after grinding through jobs that were an imperfect fit. How lucky was I?

During university, I stumbled across the book The Pilgrimage by Paulo Coelho. It recounted the author’s experiences as he walked across northern Spain on an 850 kilometer trek called the Camino de Santiago.

Also known as the The Way of St. James, the route was one of the most important Christian pilgrimages during the Middle Ages. The book was part adventure, part guide to self-discovery, and it lit a fire in me.

Pilgrim plates

I embarked on the same trip, walking 25 to 30 kilometers a day. You never knew what was going to come over the next hill. In many of the towns we passed through, there were monasteries where we would sleep and eat “pilgrim plates” – meals set out for travelers. The route took us through one of Spain’s main wine districts, La Rioja, where there was even a wine fountain. There was sunburn, blisters and terrible hangovers.

The walk fueled my wanderlust, and I continued to travel extensively during my undergraduate studies. I had my head in the clouds. I loved reading and I was pretty feckless.

I finished school in Sydney and hoped to become a management consultant in the style of McKinsey, but found no such roles. A friend referred me to an entry-level position at Ernst & Young.

Winter work

They placed me in audit, one of the less glamorous jobs compared to what a friend was doing on the corporate finance team during the bull market of the early 2000’s. One of my worst assignments was a winter stocktake on a farm in the New England tablelands of New South Wales. It was significantly warmer in the freezer than outside.

So I switched careers and joined private wealth manager Ord Minnett, where I worked in corporate finance. I helped arrange initial public offerings on the Australian Stock Exchange and raise capital for companies. You had to be very interested in emerging companies to work the industry norm, which was more than 100 hours a week. Working through the global financial crisis impressed upon me how a downturn hurts jobs and access to capital for small companies.

In 2011, my father had a health scare that prompted me to reassess my own life. I wanted to try a few things that, if I got knocked over by a bus, I would have been happy to have done.

Blagging

I had dreamed in high school of becoming a great chef. I knew that was unlikely to happen in my 30’s, but I thought “let’s give it a shot.” I secured admission to Paris’s Le Cordon Bleu, one of the world’s top cooking schools. A three-month course blew me over the channel to England. There I “blagged” my way, with a help of a friend’s connection, into an unpaid internship at a Michelin-starred restaurant outside London called Petersham Nurseries Cafe.

The kitchen had a small brigade of world-class chefs, with a flat hierarchy. I finally learned what passion truly is, and the level of pride these professionals took in their craft. Talk about the 1% of excellence that went out with every plate. There was a familiar pressure to working in corporate finance, and the time flew each day. With my lack of experience, I had no business being there, but they put me on prep, appetizers and salads. I learnt so much from these masters. One notable occasion was when celebrity chef Heston Blumenthal complimented me on the zucchini fritters.

Stumbling upon Xero

I learned that a chef’s life requires an all-in mentality and lots of after-work partying – perhaps too much for me. One evening after work, I was searching online for a way to save the head chef time. Our daily stock-take of fresh-food inventory was highly inefficient. That’s when I discovered Xero.

My first thought was, “Oh my God, I hope Xero’s not publicly listed. I would love to go work in their finance department, take them through an IPO.”

I was a little too late. Xero had been listed on the New Zealand stock exchange since 2007 and subsequently dual listed on the Australian stock exchange. But the company remained on my mind. When I saw a job opening in Sydney for a salesperson, I decided to apply.

Finding purpose

I got the job, and I fell in love with Xero. I loved the purpose and being around people who were passionate about helping an industry. I loved building the relationships with our clients and helping them succeed.

As I climbed the ranks to National Partner Manager over three years, I realized I was achieving one of my earliest goals. I had set out to become a management consultant after grad school, and failed. But at Xero, I found I was being a consultant to the small business owners who were accountants and bookkeepers. I was helping them grow their practices, streamline their processes, and refine their marketing. Fundamentally, we were giving back time to our accountants and bookkeepers to realise their goals. Waking up in the morning and wanting to help improve the industry is a similar emotion to wanting to get into the kitchen. It’s a passion.

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