Growth shouldn’t cost you what made you special.

I’ve spent more than 20 years building and leading commercial organisations in the technology industry, working with businesses ranging from early-stage start-ups to established global companies. My experience has taken me across Australia, New Zealand, India, Japan and Southeast Asia, helping businesses enter new markets, develop partnerships, build sales teams and turn commercial ambition into results.

I’ve been fortunate to be involved in some significant growth journeys, including scaling revenue sevenfold in 15 months, leading regional commercial organisations of more than 85 people and working with recurring revenue businesses exceeding US$130 million. I’ve managed substantial commercial operations, developed new routes to market and worked with customers ranging from small businesses to some of the world’s largest enterprises.

Of course, not everything has gone to plan. I’ve seen businesses hire salespeople before they’ve worked out how to support them, invest heavily in technology that nobody uses and expand into new markets without fully understanding the customers they’re trying to reach. I’ve made mistakes myself, and I’ve learned as much from the things that didn’t work as the things that did. Those experiences have given me a practical understanding of what it takes to build a commercial organisation, and perhaps more importantly, what can go wrong along the way.

If there’s one thing I’ve come to believe, it’s that businesses sometimes make growth more complicated than it needs to be. We spend enormous amounts of time discussing sales methodologies, processes, CRM systems, reporting and, increasingly, AI. These are all valuable tools, and I’ve spent much of my career implementing and improving them. But somewhere in those conversations, we can lose sight of the people who are supposed to make it all work.

For me, the strongest commercial organisations have always had something in common: the right people, doing the right things, because they genuinely want to. People who believe in the product they’re representing, understand the problems their customers are trying to solve and take pride in helping them succeed. Good leadership gives those people direction, good processes help them work consistently and good technology makes their jobs easier. When those elements come together, you create something much more powerful than a team simply chasing its next sales target.

I think this matters even more for founder-led businesses. Your early customers probably bought into you as much as they bought into your product. They trusted your knowledge, your enthusiasm and your commitment to making things work. As you grow, you can’t personally maintain every customer relationship or lead every sales conversation, but you can build a team that shares those values. Getting that right is one of the most important commercial investments you’ll make.

The best teams don’t win every match. The best athletes don’t make every shot. What separates them is their ability to learn, adapt and consistently execute.

I’ve spent my career applying similar principles to technology businesses — building teams, developing commercial systems and creating the conditions for sustained performance.

Perhaps you’ve built a successful technology business overseas and are thinking about entering Australia or the wider APAC region. Maybe you’ve won your first 50 or 100 customers and are wondering how to reach the next thousand. Or perhaps you’ve already hired a sales team and discovered that building a commercial organisation is quite different from selling the product yourself.

Whatever stage you’re at, I don’t believe the answer is automatically to hire an expensive sales executive, introduce another methodology or invest in more technology. Sometimes you need a clearer strategy, sometimes you need better foundations and sometimes you need an experienced pair of hands to help make things happen. The important thing is understanding what your business actually needs before committing time and money to solving the wrong problem.

That’s what I’d like Miavirra to offer. An opportunity to share what I’ve learned over the past two decades with founders who are building something they believe in. I’m not interested in replacing your vision with somebody else’s playbook. I’d rather understand what has made you successful, help you build on it and bring the commercial experience, structure and leadership needed to take it further.