Adam Boyle: CEO of EngageRM

Join us as we speak with Adam Boyle, CEO of EngageRM and founder of Pegasus, an Australian tech company that started in mining safety and grew into a global player before a successful exit. We'll hear how Pegasus got its start doing labour hire and training in the mining industry before expanding into software like digital safety inductions. When the mining downturn hit, Pegasus pivoted to new industries like retail, developing contractor management portals for major companies like Woolworths. Just as the company was preparing to expand internationally, COVID-19 struck, but Pegasus was able to quickly adapt its software to help businesses manage new pandemic protocols. This agility led to continued growth and acquisition offers, culminating in a +$150 million sale to Avetta in late 2020. Tune in for the fascinating story of Pegasus' journey from local startup to global exit, how the company and its employees benefited financially, and what founder Adam Boyle is up to now as an investor and advisor in the tech sector.

Creators & Guests

Host

James MacDonald

Host of the NTP Podcast | Director of NewyTechPeople

What is NTP Podcast?

Welcome to the NTP Podcast. Each episode highlights the incredible work of talented tech professionals in Australia. We chat with people who are at the top of their game to learn all about their craft—why they’re passionate about their work and what resources help power their success. By delving into their experiences, we gain insights into the constantly evolving tech scene, explore how it has changed, and see where it may be headed.

Welcome to another episode of the NewyTechPeople podcast. On today's episode, we have Adam Boyle, former CEO of Pegasus. Welcome, Adam.

Thanks, mate. Thank you, mate. One of Newcastle's biggest tech success stories, both Pegasus as a whole and your career today.

But for those of our audience that don't know who Adam Boyle is and the story of Pegasus, mate, I love to give a bit of an overview of who you are and we'll dig into that. Yeah, sure. Well, thanks for having me to start with, this has been a little while coming.

I think we've been talking about it for a little while, but I'm still uncomfortable in this space. You know, we've kind of, for most people that, you know, knew of Pegasus and especially at the time that we started to become, you know, a little more known in town, you know, we slipped under the radar for a long time and I was comfortable there, I think. So me having to come out and tell the story afterwards was a challenge for me personally, but as it's also put me into a spot where I've had to experience a couple of new things now, which is good, but we were a 35 year old company here in the Hunter Valley.

That's probably the funny part of it all, is everyone thought we were a bit of an overnight success, but the company had been around for a long time. I hadn't been there the whole time, but at a point in time, we were a labor hire company who got into training. We had our own registered training organization.

The place was operating well in Singleton, out of an old school in Singleton for a number of years prior to any of the big labor hire companies coming to town. And these guys probably had no inkling that they were going to ever turn into a tech company and were just continuing to employ mostly truck drivers on mine sites in the end. And at that time, lots of people wanted to go and try driving trucks in the mines.

I remember one of the funny stories was when I first got started in the CEO role, had all these people who were hitting me on Facebook, I had hit, you know, I was like my most popular on socials because everyone wanted to get a job driving in the mines. And so, you know, I didn't anticipate that that was going to be the start of it all. My background had been in technology and I came to Pegasus from one of our competitors, Peter Eason, who was the original owner of Pegasus.

And Steve Newman had brought me in and both of them said to me at one point in time, you know, we've pretty much copied what you guys did over at SGS, which was my company that I was working at the time, and SGS was a larger certification company, probably least known for this sort of thing. Most known for a lot of the certification inspection type work that they did. And so it wasn't core business.

And my move to Pegasus was more about exploring this, a little more than what sgs were going to, let me, but also these guys seemed really interested in growing it and seeing where it went to. I jumped there in about, I'd spent ten years, I think, at SGS at that time moved to Pegasus, who were located in Singleton in about, I think that was 2007 and then that's how it started. Yeah.

Beautiful. Yeah. It's quite an interesting story as well, because I think a lot of people in the tech space is like, you have to be an app, you have to be code first from the beginning, right.

Whereas especially in the Hunter Valley, a lot of the tech success stories locally actually have come from more traditional businesses that have maybe scratched their own itch or built something for themselves, which has then evolved from there. Most definitely. How did the tech story evolve for you? Great explanation of it, and it's something that's hard to explain to people now because it's sort of, you know, everybody thinks they have to come in and find a new idea now, and it's such a struggle to try and find something that's new because of probably the depth of this market now.

The tech market now would be a lot harder. I would find it hard to find a new business these days. For us, it was basically on the back of a great services business and a good reputation around town, being able to then focus on doing something a little more electronic than what it was before.

And that was our first approach, was that at the time, everybody was doing safety inductions in mines, and it had become a thing. Legislation had moved in a path that meant that everybody had to start paying respect to the fact that everybody coming on their mind site at the time needed to be inducted safely. So they understood the risks involved in the work they were about to do.

And our company was, through our RTO was mostly doing that sort of training for mind sites and bringing people on. And so our movement into the digital space was to say, we think we can do this a little better, and what if we start capturing some information on the people? What if we give them a card at the end of it so that, you know, every time they turn up here that they've done it, you know, and how often are you going to redo this induction. So it was all answering those simple questions to start with and building some technology that allowed us to do that which then expanded into, you know, worlds that we didn't.

We didn't ever anticipate at the start, but we, you know, we listened. We stayed kind of nimble at the time to go after a few different opportunities and some things just kind of led to the next opportunity. And the great story about Pegasus and one that I like to tell is that, you know, Newcastle is so fantastic a place because you've got such great access to the coal front, you know, and it's not only the mine sites.

We've got, you know, a rail network that runs through here to the biggest, you know, black coal port in the world, you know, and then you've got all the other things, all the surrounding ecosystem here that allows us to be able to set up a great business and have a, you know, have a really good testing ground for that to get going. And that's what we had here. You know, we just listened to those guys and then over time we were able to diversify a little bit out of mining and into.

Into something different. Yeah. And that's when it all started.

I really like that. I really like the story of that and leaning into, I guess, the hunters strengths leading into the advantages we do have here. Like, I love software.

Like, I love, you know, technology is, you know, the game I play in and I. But Newcastle is never going to be the software hub of Australia. It's never going to be the place where the biggest apps and the greatest apps are all built from the scrap.

And we've got thousands of people investing in it here and building that team. The hunter's advantage is leaning into the advantages that we've got here that other places don't. And then building upon that, as you said, you've built a software business on the back of scratching your own itch with your own self being customer number one.

Definitely. Yeah, most definitely. And, you know, it's kind of the secret sauce of being here and people who have done it well, you know, have, have worked that out early and then I guess after that you then have to try and find a way to diversify, you know, and get out of here a little bit.

Yeah. So our second big or our next biggest customer outside of mining became Woolworths. Woolies we tended for a piece of work that we didn't originally win, they awarded it to someone else, someone much smaller than us who weren't able to service the contract and what they worked out about this model was that not only did you have to be able to have decent software that solved a problem and great ideas and innovation, all that sort of stuff, but you needed to be able to back it with some service.

You needed to be. Ours was bringing on contractors, onboarding contractors, and eventually pre qualifying. And once you started to get into the scale of it, you needed to be able to keep up with the scale of the customer support and success stuff as well, which pegasus was at the time big enough to do.

And they eventually got us to come back in and have another look at it once that existing contract had sort of fallen over a bit. And so we spent a bit of time in there saying how we would do it. They awarded it to us eventually, and then it took a much different path.

Then you're talking about coal mines who typically had safety and training teams and lots of resources and a decent sized budget for something like this to retail. Who doesn't have a budget? You know, they have one or two safety people across at the time, across the whole of woolworths. That's amazing.

And it was crazy. Yeah. So we had to go in a much more lean approach to how.

We had to try and look at how we would structure pricing and be much lighter on the way that we onboarded contractors and the time that we spent with the customer and all of that sort of thing. We started to build out these portals, which eventually became the thing that we were known for. So we built something that the contractor could do themselves and largely get all the way to the end before we had to verify it.

There was this kind of trust thing at the end that needed somebody to verify what they'd uploaded or the training that they'd done or whatever we were asking them to do. And that became, you know, Pegasus role in the Woolworths contract. And so we've gone from this really heavy hands on, heavy touch with the mining guys, trying to justify the high price that we were already charging them to this really light approach with Woolworths.

And then why that turned out to be significant was at a point in time when there was downturns in the mining areas and mining regions and stuff like that, we were then asked to do more of what Woolley's was doing. Yeah. So we were kind of ahead of the game at that time.

Yeah, I love it. Again, if you look at a lot of startups, right, they come in there with, I've got this five year plan, I've got a business plan, how I'm going to go about it. And, you know, a lot of early stage people coming in there giving some advice is like, you've got to have a plan, who's your target market? Whereas it seems like, it seems like some of your success actually come from being able to pivot quickly and being a little bit opportunistic and seeing where an opportunity is and then moving and running quickly with that.

Yeah, for sure. Yeah. Keen to understand you're sort of like that.

And I think also tapping into a, a network of networks that already existed and that you didn't have to recreate, you just had to help them penetrate and find. And so if you get there first, you're at an advantage because what we used to our sales approach at the time, after we were successful with Woolworths and then trying to sort of capitalize on the mining clients that we had, but also then move into other areas and we want to a major contract with rail in a program that we called rail industry worker that still to this day is in existence. And probably like no other sector in the country has a single way of managing contractors through a single card that is accepted across all the whole rail network.

And for us it was about being able to get after that network of networks quickly. So we would go and get the beachhead clients to start with. We had targets of going after number one to five quickly, and if we could get three of them, then it was easy to get some of the rest because once you start building the network, the new clients would come in and say, how many contractors are already in your system that work in construction, for example? So we've already got lend lease and we've got John Holland and we've got these others and they'd say, so we'll give you a list and you can tell us how many there.

And if we could say any more than 50%, you know, it's kind of, you didn't have to do much more to sell, but that was the dream. You know, if you could get there then, and the quicker that you could get there then, you know, the easier it was to keep the ball or to keep momentum rolling. So going after those big ones to start with and that gives you, I guess, the proof.

Yeah, for sure, but you had to start somewhere. And I think from a, from a startup, wild goals, you know, that is the dream for most of me. So try and land the big client, you know, that that gives you the story.

To then keep going, especially in our space, is absolutely the hardest thing to do. Building the tech, it's difficult as well, especially if you're not at the cutting edge just yet. You've got to try and find your way there through having these relationships with clients.

You kind of want to hear how they talk about it so that you know, that you're solving the problem for them. But getting that first sale over the line is the hardest. And then trying to move into other areas and other regions, I mean, that's just as hard over time.

But it's very strategic and it is absolutely the most fun part as well. You know, when you're not there anymore, it's the single thing that you miss the most. Oh, yeah, mate.

So it sounds like for the vast majority of it, like, your customers actually drove your software, so you were building on the back of customer feedback and what do they want? Then you can flip out a new feature and continue to evolve like that. Yeah. And we didn't always get it right.

Like we. I talked about that rail industry worker program. Yeah.

You know, as the story goes. And we eventually decided, because at the time, we were bootstrapped up until 2019. And by Bootstrap, I mean, we actually had a, you know, I told this story to our XLKR committee when we.

When we were first pitching for the money. We'd flown around for twelve months, you know, been to London probably three or four times, we'd been back to the US probably six times every couple of months. And we were, myself and our chairman at the time, Craig Jones, who was sort of instrumental in our exit in the end, had flown around and told the story to a lot of people.

And, you know, Craig kept trying to refine what I was doing. Like, he was pretty critical at the start. He was like, you know, don't say that like, you just, they won't be coming back to us because you just said that, like, this sort of thing, which was okay because we'd worked out, you know, we needed to tell the story as much as we can to get to the end and find the two or three that we knew that were strategic, that we're going to invest in us.

And so we did that. We got all the way to the end. You know, we had two.

We'd flown into San Fran after being there a few times before and we knew what we had to do. And we'd gone to meet the investment committee and I had this deck. I'd worked on it for ages and I'd not slept, I reckon, for two days.

And even on the flight, on the way over, I'm just going through it, make sure I didn't stuff it up and I didn't open it. So we got into this investment committee, and they'd already seen everything they needed to see. And I didn't open my laptop.

And I'm like the CEO at the time. He said to me, oh, he's still there. He said to me, tell us your story.

You know, we haven't met many Australians. Tell us where you come from. And so we started to talk about that, and he said, so, you know, we were talking about the bootstrap story.

How did you, like, how have you done this? And we sort of said, well, at the time, I convinced, you know, we convinced Peter Eason and Steve Newman, who were the original owners, to not take any dividends for a period of time. And eventually Phil Stalker, who was my CFO and my business partner, who was as big a part of the success as I was, I got to sit out the front and tell the story. Phil was at the back office doing all the hard stuff and making it happen.

But we'd convinced them not to take any dividends for a long period of time and use the good cash that we were getting out of the employment business and the training business just to fund the development of this software that was eventually going to take over our business and be the livelihood of the thing. And they trusted us enough to do that. And there's a lot of trust that goes into that because these guys got nothing out of it for a long period of time until we got to a spot where we were able to transact.

And it became valuable to everybody at the time. But that was a long way. There's a lot of trust.

You got to continue to tell the story and you got to continue to ride through the ups and downs, especially the last couple of years in the VC market. I think the last couple of years in the VC market, it's really shown some instabilities, and it's gone from a time where money was easily, very easily accessible for a long time. And it wasn't even about turning a profit or even sometimes not even making any revenues.

It was just about customer acquisition. Money was easy to come by. And then the market changed.

No, I've definitely seen that in the last few years. I would hate to be having to ask for money now the way that we did. And ours was kind of a series of opportunities.

We put ourselves in the right spot. I always say that we were lucky. We were lucky because we were in the right spot at the right time.

People knew of us, but Craig Jones, who had come in as our chair had got in touch with us because he'd seen our logo on a few other transactions. We were showing up on the m and a pages of people's pitch decks and he said, I think you've got something. You've obviously made enough noise and you've got a big enough market share that you're important here in Australia.

And so these people are saying, after you give us the money, we're going to go and have a crack at Pegasus. So he said, let's try and build it so you're ready. We did that with him.

We got through the first raise. We had Tom Abrava, who wanted to buy the whole thing. We had Excel KKR, who were happy to go on a minority raise and see where it went to.

After that, we ended up going with Excel because we thought we had a bit of growth still left in us and we'd like to see where we could get to in the next sort of three to five years. So on Christmas Eve on 2019, we signed the deal with Accel Caca for a series A at, I think, 28 million. I think we raised at a maybe 58 million valuation.

Yeah. At the time, thought, you know, the world's oyster, you know, we do what we want to do now. We've.

We've had no cash leading up to here. We're just sort of scraped by all the time. We had three or four different versions of we're not going to make payroll next week, you know, and it got worse and worse as it went on because by the end we had 120 staff.

And you're thinking, you know, this. This is the worst thing that can happen in business because all these people are relying on you. Yeah.

And I've made a bad decision and now we can't make payroll, but we. We found our way through it. You know, my wife Jo was our chief of sales and there was two occasions where she landed and got clients to prepay, you know, that actually kept us alive, you know, and you.

And not many people would hear those stories. No, Matt, people only to see the glamour story. I sure do.

The big sale and the successful acquisition. Yep. So, you know, those things there, when you think back and think how it all came around, the kind of the resilience and the.

And the durability of the place and people wanting to just get after it to do whatever it needed, it was kind of built on the back of that. And so by the time we got to the end, we had a bit of cash. We thought, now we can go and do some cool stuff.

And then a month later Covid came. Oh mate. And we couldn't go anywhere, mate.

We'll come back to the COVID bit in a minute. I've just made it known a couple of parts. I want to come back to the raising part just before we get too far away from that.

Obviously you bootstrapped for a long period of time. I know now you've got a successful exit, you've spoken to quite a few stars, done some mentoring around that space. What's your current position? Obviously the market's challenging at the moment, but what's your current advice piece for any of the startups you're working with or advised around? How early did you take on money? Obviously if you can self fund for a period of time or use some of the revenues to actually drive further enhancements, it can be beneficial.

But at a point in time it is super valuable to take on that cash and continue really that upward curve. What's your current position or advice around that changed a little bit? Like selfishly, I used to say, hang on, do it as long as you can. Like, you know, you, if you get to the end and you've got a small cap table and you know you've bootstrapped most of the way, you're very attractive to VC's and PE, they really love that story because they don't, you don't have to convince many people that, you know, the next, the next phase is the right phase, but also, you know, you, you've got reasonable expectations.

Yeah. You know, you're nothing. Investors who have got, maybe they thought it was going to be bigger than what it is and so you have to go back and reset expectations or in some cases you have to go and do a down round to raise more money, all those things are difficult conversations that if you've only got three founders or three shareholders, in the end they seem much easier than what they are and you've got a bit of propensity for a lot more risk, probably because you know your own boundaries and you know where you can push.

So I used to say that, but now I'm involved in the other side of it and it's so hard to, as a startup to get started, you know, and I said to somebody last week, I could go and ask five of my mates, you know, to give me a million dollars and they would because they know I've got a background and they know I've got a bit of experience here and a track record. But for somebody who hasn't done it before they got no chance sometimes, you know, and so it's really, really difficult. And I now see the need for people to be able to raise money and do that and to keep it going.

But still, you got to have that in the back of the mind when you get to the end. You've got to be doing it because it means something to you and it definitely means more if you own more of it. I've said that to most of the companies that I've been working with, and at the moment, it's not only good enough to have recurring revenue and a good growth percentage anymore.

You need to have EBITDA, you need to have size, and you need to have got started a lot further than where we were giving money to back in 2021. So it is difficult, I feel, for people who are trying to get started at the moment, especially you look back at companies like Pegasus and you think, I want to do what they did, but we were in the right place at the right time. We were definitely in the right place at the right time.

You mentioned that twice, and we'll dig into that in one sec. The other part you mentioned just there, obviously it means a lot more if you own a bigger piece. Energy, as I mentioned just before, about not being able to make payroll, being close to not being able to make payroll, obviously, they're super challenging times, right? Everything looks great now after a successful acquisition, but that those challenging times personally and, well, personally for you, like, how did you get through that? Cause I think a lot of people look at stuff, it's shiny and bright, and the upside is fantastic, right? Like, it's like no other in business if you have that success.

But there's a lot of challenging times along the way. Like, how did you personally deal with that? You know, you have to have that in you to start with. Like, you know, I've probably never shied away too much from any of these types of challenges before.

So you got to be, you know, you got to personally be a bit resilient. And I had a, you know, my personal life hadn't, you know, it had some bumpy roads up until that point in time. You know, my ex wife and I had split up when the kids were young, you know, and so I was having to juggle spending time with the kids as well.

And, and then, you know, trying to run this business that was growing quickly and required me to be in it a lot. I tell a story now that it kind of worked to my advantage a little bit because, you know, in the times that I wasn't with them. I was keen to go and travel and get away and not be thinking about something else, mostly, you know, but when I was here, I tried to be present with the kids, and that part was hard.

But the best part about it was that the people that helped me the most through that were my. My Pegasus, obviously, my family, but my Pegasus friends as well. Yeah.

You know, and they. They accepted the fact that I wanted to spend time with my kids and they wouldn't bother me then. Yeah.

But also they were in it with me. You know, I had people like Jake Mullins, who was my CTO, Pru Killick, who was our head of people and culture, you know, my end up, my brother, who was the chief customer officer, Joe, my wife now, and, you know, series of other people like Ben Satchell and Brooke Cronin, Brooke Fernand now. And I could probably name another 1015 people who are now lifelong friends, you know, and we went through some tough times together, you know, but every time it happened, I knew they had my back.

And same as them, if they ever had a challenge, you know, we do it together. And so the thing that I've tried to say to mostly these startup companies now is that you need to find other people that you can rely on. I didn't mention Phil Stalker there.

One of my best mates, who was my CFO at the time and business partner. We had a discussion at one point. Phil used to come in to me and say, on Friday afternoons, I'm worried about next week.

And I'd say to him, mate, what do you think I'm going to do now? I said, don't come in here and tell me we're not going to make payroll next week on a Friday afternoon. That's a new rule. Tell me on Monday.

We'll solve it then. Otherwise your weekend's done. Weekend's done.

We laugh about that now, but we had so many of those conversations, and you just found ways to get through it, and you brought people in, and altogether, you found ways to get through it. We were all in by the end. Every cent that we had in the business, I was still renting.

Phil had worked hard to have some investment properties that were basically all listed in our business at some point in time, you know, as backing for what we, you know, for what we had to borrow from the bank, you know, and you have to bring people along. Yeah. You know, and you have to believe, you know, you have to believe.

Yeah. Yeah. I think that thing is just, as you said, the belief, like, knowing that you know, you got that big picture of mine going, it sounds like the network's probably the biggest thing.

So for anyone else that's going through it, it's making sure you surround yourself with the right people and you have to give. You have to be able to give them a something, whether it's responsibility or, you know, reward them. When we eventually were acquired by a Vetta, every one of our staff had got something out of it, you know, and some of it came from my personal money and Craig's personal money, you know, and because we wanted to, we wanted to reward everybody.

But we had, you know, ten people who nearly, who probably nearly got a million bucks, you know, who'd stayed there for a long time, were loyal servants of the company. And when you think about the opportunity for a Newcastle tech company to do something like that, where people get to pay off mortgages and buy investment properties and stuff like that, that's the dream, isn't it? I really like that part. In the end, I felt like all those people who had stuck with us over time got rewarded when they had to.

It's beautiful. It's a beautiful story, man. The other part you mentioned, you've mentioned a couple of times, the right place, right time.

You mentioned the word luck before, which I think you can lock into things, luck out of things. But net, net longer term, I think the success is on the back of a lot of good things along the way. Right, that right place, right time thing.

You're telling the story up until Covid. What's that story? From COVID onwards? Yeah. So from COVID onwards, the plan for the 2018 was to go and expand outside of Australia.

We had still 99% of our revenue was coming from Australia. And to sort of get the next, you know, if you build up the multiples, you know, in our space, we knew if you were growing, you'd get attention, you know, if you was mostly recurring, you know, it'd step the multiple up a little bit, you know, then if you were global, you know, if you were outside of Australia, the percentage went up again. If you had some, if you're making money, you know, and you had decent EBITDA, then you're looking at strong models.

We ended up trading at nearly eight and a half times revenue. Yeah, beautiful. Because we had some of those things in place.

The thing we didn't have was anything outside of Australia. So we thought, we'll try and get there, you know, and then after we've gone at, you know, the. Probably four, four times, which was where we took the series a.

Yep, we'll try and get to eight by growth outside of here. And so we were ready to just jump on a plane, start getting over and get some boots on the ground over in the US and the UK. And then all of a sudden Covid came and no chance, you know, and you're just taking money from a PE guy who.

PE guys who are expecting growth. And we knew we had sort of three to five years to get to where we needed to, so it wasn't panic stations, but we were still trying to find ways to grow outside of Australia. Funnily enough, we were probably spending more time talking about strategy than we ever had because you just, you know, you had time to yourself, you know, and I think that's what Covid did was it sort of gave you a little bit of time back that when you're potentially in an office and, you know, in those times, you'd go and grab lunch with people or you'd go and sit around and have a.

That and travel. Right, like you're not traveling anymore. So.

Yeah, a lot more time at home, as you said. Yeah. So we decided, let's try and find some partnerships, like, let's try and find some partners over that.

They kind of were closely aligned to what we did and we could maybe explore some opportunities there. And we'd already gone and met through the, you know, the twelve months before when we were trying to raise some money. We actually went and met all of our competitors in the US and the UK, which was interesting, you know, because they, most of them knew of us.

We were trying to give them some insights as to where we were heading. We were confident that we were a little way ahead being in this market and especially around the worker side of our competency management component. And so, you know, we went in there with a, you know, strategically thinking, this is our next one.

You know, we're about to. We're still trying to land this first one, but actually we're setting up the second one as well. So that's something that I say to everybody.

Now, whenever you're raising money, it's important to get the raise done, but you need to be thinking about what the next one looks like, you know, otherwise this one doesn't make sense. You might not be taking enough money, you know, you might not be positioning it well for the. For the next one.

So definitely, you know, being able to have the next raise in mind helped for us. So we went off on this path of then going back and reintroducing ourselves to these guys that we'd already met, who already knew enough about us to be interested. But we went straight to a vetta and we said, are you still interested? We want to try and get a bit more traction in the us market.

We know you don't really have a worker product. They'd started, but they hadn't got a lot of. They hadn't made very good headway in that space.

Would you be interested in a partnership? They said, yeah, well, let's explore it. So about a month into it, I get a call back from Ashad, who's the CEO, who wasn't involved in the conversations to this point. We were just sort of talking to Scott Spencer, who was the sort of head of growth, and he really liked the business to start with.

He was the one that sort of introduced us all the way through. And I do owe a lot to Scott. He was a lot of the reason that we ended up in the room with Avetta.

Ashad said to me, look, we aren't really interested in a partnership. I thought, oh, no, there he goes. We spent a bit of time on this.

He goes, we want to buy it. And I said, well, I don't know how that can happen. Like, we're a year into this strategy with Accel KKR.

They're expecting a three to five return. We wouldn't even be up around one yet. We're growing still.

And that was the great thing about COVID was that in Covid, people needed software like ours, trying to get people back to work. So having compliant software, we were already using card readers and stuff like that to get people on site. So all of a sudden that was more.

We put the thermal scanners on the top of the reader so you could check to see whether anyone had a temperature. It was things like that that you kind of pivoted to do quickly. But largely the 80% of the core was stuff that people needed right now.

If people got the right training, the COVID training that we were doing, have they been immunised? All that stuff we already held in our databases for other reasons, like cold ward medicals, for example, were the equivalent of the immunization. And we were capturing that many inductions, that another Covid induction wasn't much. So we sold well, even in Covid, it sounds like.

Again, no, that's another version of you pivoting really quickly and on the fly. And that seems to have been like a little bit of a commonality, definitely, but we didn't move too far away from the core. I think that was the other thing, what we were good at and building that network out still.

But we were upfront with him. He said, look, let us have a look. Share with us the data room that you've just put together, and at the very least we might come back and say no.

So we were happy to do that. It was getting towards Christmas. This is sort of October, November, and on the day before Christmas, which was like the year prior, we signed all the agreements on the day before Christmas.

He rings me back the day before Christmas the next year and says, we've got to a number. I think you'll like it. What do we need to do? And I said, well, tell me what the number is first and I'll tell you what we need to do.

And he said, well, our peer guys think that it's worth about 100, but we're willing to offer 110. And I said to him, this is the exact conversation, because I remember it exactly. I've always thought if someone came and offered me $100 million for a business that I built, I'd fall off the chair and you'd have to get me back up again for me to, to say yes, thank you, and, you know, really appreciate it, but it's not going to be enough, you know.

And he goes, don't you need to go back and ask the others? And I said, I just know the expectation already. I'll do it, but if I do it, it's probably final, you know? So I'm just telling you now, just so that we can talk through what the strategy might be. And he said, well, let us have another look at it.

And I said, but what have you got to look at? Like this? We can't look. Yeah, yeah. And he said, well, we're probably going to have to do it on future numbers, so we're going to have to lock into what you think is the future here and do it based on what the forwards look like.

And I could tell you had something in mind. I could tell that there was a reason that wasn't spelled out to everybody at the time, which, as it turned out, was that they'd kind of not made some promises, but they'd indicated to some of their biggest clients that they'd have a product like ours soon. One of them was Amazon, one of them is Rio Tinto, one of them is Cargill.

It made sense to be investing in that space for them to move that forward a little quicker than probably what they expected. I could sense that that was going on in the background, but we just played it out. They eventually got to the number.

So he came back to me on the 14 January. I'd spent most of January with feeling sick. I've just let the worst, the biggest opportunity of our lives go.

But, yeah, he came back and hit the number and went back to excel and said, I know it's not ideal. You guys probably wanted to be here longer, and I wanted them to be there longer. I'd had such a good time with them because they had a consultancy side of the business that as a tech company out of Newcastle, you don't get that.

Like, you know, I went to a summit before, a CEO summit before COVID came, and they had 40, 50 other CEO's there from companies similar size to ours who were all growing, you know, and you sat down and said, oh, how did you do this? And they're all just so willing to share. And I got more out of that two days being there than I'd ever got out of because it wasn't a scaling software ecosystem here in Newcastle at the time, you know, and so I wanted to stay in longer, but the opportunity was there, you know, we'd already had the discussion about what an exit looked like, you know, as I said, craig and I had been planning for the next one, and we got to the next one three years before we thought we did. And so it kind of.

That was it. That was the story. Matt, super impressive, and it's great for a Newcastle success story to have that as well.

That part you just mentioned about the summit, I think it's a good thing. It's a point for Newcastle. It's a point for everyone, but in particular Newcastle because we can be, you know, a little bit siloed away from any of the major cities, in particular Sydney.

If you don't have access to that mentorship before that, did you have other people that you would lean on through that journey that, hey, maybe you'd gone through a similar path before, had some successes that you could lean on during that. Yeah, for sure. And the way I like to learn is through my relationships, you know, and I definitely had a lot of those relationships, you know, I gravitated towards people.

You know, I probably start off with my dad. Yeah, dad's a financial advisor, but, you know, he was the guy that I looked to as far as, like, I. We used to have this saying at Pegasus that I don't want you to play work.

Like, let's stop playing work, like, let's not pretend. And they said. And people said, what do you call.

Why do you call it play work? And I said, because when I was younger, I used to get dad's old computer and sit there in my room and pretend I was being dad, you know, and so that was me playing work, but I don't want you to do that sort of thing. So it started off with dad, prior to working at SGS, had worked at Newcastle basketball and Maitland basketball, and dad was. The, dad was at Maitland basketball at the time.

He'd gone to Maitland basketball to try and get the stadium built up there. And so he'd taken a bit of a hiatus from his financial planning career and gone and done that. And, you know, the state, we've got a nice forecourt stadium now.

How good is that? Yeah. All on the back of mostly what he did at the time. I went and worked for Phil Matthews here at Newcastle, who I still to this day, we meet and have coffees, talk about life completely different.

But he gave me, I think Phil said to me at one point in time when I first started, when you start in a new role or if you're doing any new job, make an impact to start with. And I really. I kept that in the back of my mind every time I did something like, you know, go hard early, you know, let everybody know that you're, you know, that you're serious and get the numbers on your side to start with.

So you've got a bit of a track record. So I've always remembered that Dave Fleming, who was at the. The university for a long time, became my first boss at SGS.

And then the people that I met at Pegasus, Peter Eason and Steve Newman, were great fellows and I didn't get to work with them as long as I could have, but they introduced that kind of family culture that we continued on with. Phil Stalker, one of the smartest guys I've ever met and understood me and put up with me, I think, and I'll always be grateful for him, you know, to him for that. And then, you know, all the other people that I got to meet along the way and finishing up with Craig Jones, who, you know, Craig and I, we clicked straight away, you know, and he was the reason that we, we finished where we finished, you know, and got to the exit.

Matt, I think that's super important. I've heard from other people as well. From that networking perspective.

Surround yourself with the right people. Sounds like you surround yourself with the right people, the right places. You picked up little pieces from people along the way.

For others that are earlier on in their journey, then where you obviously go to. Any advice for picking out those mentors or seeking them out. Yeah, I think start, I always started with whether or not I'd like them as a person.

That's the most important thing. I think people leave that to the end. Sometimes they try and find smart people and people who have got a background or some experience in a certain area.

But I always thought if I can get on a plane with them and fly to London, you know, and have a good conversation, you know, one of my best friends is here in Patel who is one of the main guys that took a job with. I think he came to us through you guys and an Englishman who, you know, gentlemen who came into the place with eyes wide open and ended up being. He used to call himself the JVP because he was going to take over from me at a point in time.

But he's built a network now that I watch him go over and spread his wings over. He's in Texas working for a veteran, seeing the world and just great people that you like to see do well afterwards and also people that you didn't mind sharing it with along the way. All those things are important.

If you kind of think that in the back of your mind eventually this is going to get to a point in time where we're all going to have to agree on this and if we don't stand for the right things, if we've got different ideas on how the world should work and different morals and values, then it's probably not going to work out. So that was the first place, you know, after that, I always found people that did the things I didn't like doing as well, you know, I like that and I really admired them for that. Like, it wasn't, there was nobody in our room who thought they were the smartest, you know, and they all, everyone had appreciation for what other people did, you know, some, it took a while to, like, our finance people took a while to warm to the sales guys, you know, because they're all telling different stories all the time and, but we got, like when we were at our peak, you know, and, and really enjoying it and doing particularly well, you know, we all enjoyed each other's company as much, you know, so that's as important a part of it as, you know, I think, mate, that enjoyment of the journey, right.

Like you spent so many hours at work and as you said, you know, some of your best mates now have come through that, that, that experience. Yep. You spend so much time there.

If that end goal is just a dollar figure, yeah, it's going to be hard to fight through the bad times. It's going to be hard to fight through the, you know, the challenging days, challenging weeks or even just the time in, you know, who you're spending it with. No, you're exactly right.

And we didn't have a dollar figure. We never had a dollar. We knew that we wanted to get our, the number of workers in our system up to a point in time.

And it was all about the chase. Like we, we loved winning those big accounts. You know, everybody enjoyed it.

Like we, you know, we were all a part of getting it to start with just based on the way our sales process would work. But in the end, we'd all enjoy it as well. And then you get on with the next one.

Like, it was like, what's next? I remember a time when we won the lend lease contract and we'd worked on this for twelve months and we knew we had that. They'd said we'd been awarded it. We'd done so many presentations and we'd pitched a few times.

We had to go meet all the different various parts of the business and resell it again. And then we went through the contract process, which took forever. And then I didn't hear from them for a little while and I thought I was driving home from Sydney one day.

We were just trying to execute the contract. So it was already done. I rang him and said, oh, how's the contract going? Oh, yeah, it's signed.

Do you want to come pick it up? And it was like that. I was like, you know, obviously means more to us than it does to you. But I went in and just like I was about to go over the bridge and came back and went into Barangaroo and picked up the contract and then drove home and on the way back I rang Joe and I said, hey, guess what? I just got that lend lease contract.

And she goes, oh, cool, I'll tell everyone, you know. So by the time I got back, you know, we're in King street and we've got a little gate that comes into our, near the old waterboard building there. And so I pushed the thing and our whole staff were standing in the, in the driveway.

Yeah, and I'm coming through with this, you know, holding this contract out the window, waving it like this and everyone's like. And then we went over to the happy wombat and, you know, had beers all afternoon and. But that's, you know, when you're done, you don't remember the money? No.

Like, you don't remember they're the things that are the best stories, you know, and. And that's the reason you do it. I'll dig into that for 1 second before we get into what you work on.

Now, you mentioned the word family a little bit before and the work culture feeling a little like that. A couple of your colleagues have become your best mates, obviously, the whole team getting behind it. There any advice for other companies and trying to build culture? Yeah, I didn't realize it at the time, I think.

And one of my good mates is Josh Doolin from Mud Bath as well. And Josh did a lot of work for us in the early days when we were trying to build our team. We weren't able to get there quickly enough.

He was one of the ones that built those portals for us initially that helped us get some really good traction in that market. We had to build our own team after we got him in to do some supplementary stuff for a while. Then we sort of lost contact for a couple of years because he was off building his business and we were going pretty strong after that.

Then after we had transacted, I went back and said, you know, let's catch up, let's go through. And so I'd taken a couple of startup companies into Seymour and said, you need to use George. This is a good time for you to get in contact with him.

And I watched him pitch his business and he said to me, you're going to like this. But he said, I'll learn off Pegasus early on that it's okay to employ your friends, that if you can go and put out to the staff, you know, we're about to put a job up and you can bring one of your friends in and introduce them to the company. Then there was this kind of expectation from both sides, I've got to bring in someone good because we have a kind of a no dickheads policy here and they're not going to stand for me bringing in.

I'll lose some credibility if I bring in someone silly. But on the other side of it, you want people with similar value. Everyone knows what to expect here and who will get along with who.

So you're getting more people to make more decisions about how the company evolves than just the one person at the top who's just the, you know, the finger point of saying, this is how we're gonna be. And I had some like, you know, Joe and Prue and Brooke and Ben and all those guys I've mentioned before, they were the ones who led the culture. It wasn't me.

Like, I kind of told them what my expectations were early, and they just ran with it from there, you know, and they would find people that they thought I would like, you know, and that fit in with the culture. And that's when, you know, you're doing well. Like, it does become a family because, you know, when your kids start to bring in partners, eventually, you know, they know the ones that are not going to get along with mum and dad.

So it's very similar to that, you know, and coming from a sporting background, and I used to like being the leader of the sporting teams as well. I always thought that was the best thing that I could do, was to try and build something that eventually grew, you know? I like having a big group of friends. Yeah, I like lots of my groups of friends interacting together and introducing them more.

Don't have sort of different. I just like having people together and it's, you know, how I've done business as well. Yeah, yeah, I'll make the business part as well.

Like, it's significantly easier to do business with people you actually enjoy spending time with or enjoy doing business with. Part of it's, you know, a financial aspect. But I feel like some of the best business relationships I've had have been with people that I get along with as well.

And we've been, you know, we've been dealing with you guys for a lot, for exactly the same reasons, you know, and there's other examples of that around Newcastle where you've kind of spread into other ecosystems as well. And, you know, I think I've known Linda for the whole time that we've been in business, and she's helped me. I remember sitting there telling that there was, you know, 1520 people of my key kind of people that she'd introduced to me because she knew what you liked, what we liked.

Yeah, yeah. I think it's a key aspect, mate. And then to today, mate, obviously, you've had your nice, successful exit.

A guy like you, he's probably not gonna sit on your hands for all too long. I know you've done a bit of consulting with other companies, but what's, what's the, what's the big next plans? No, it's good. I mean, the consulting thing didn't sit all that well with me.

I thought it was always just a means to be able to find what. What was next. Yep.

I always thought if I just go and talk to enough people. Yeah. I said to people, if you buy me a coffee, I'll come and have a chat.

So I've had way too many coffees and I'm carrying the weight to show it at the moment. But yeah, eventually got to. I got involved with Craig Lambert from XT Ventures who is in the sports and health space and we invested in a company called Engagerm and I started to spend a bit of time with him because I really liked the guys there and I liked the story and I thought the story sounded familiar.

Can you give us a quick overview of the story? Yeah, sure. Now, they're a CRM who'd started in the professional sporting space and a guy named Brett Jorge had been the original founder of this business and had grown it and found something, interestingly enough, interesting enough that a lot of the AFL, NBL, NRL teams in Australia were using this to run, you know, to manage their ticketing and their partnerships and their sponsorships and, you know, their suites, all that kind of thing and get great data out of it to be able to suggest things to the clients about how they might be able to sell. And when I first got involved I thought, isn't it funny that nobody's hit this market yet? I thought Salesforce or, you know, one of those guys would have done this, but because it's so niche and because it's about using a CRM for a very specific reason, he'd built something that was very specific to those guys and I liked, that's kind of what Pegasus was.

We started off with something that everyone thought, geez, it's not rocket science, but when it grows quickly and you get there first, you can do really good things with it. They're a Microsoft partner. Microsoft took them over to the US.

Brett had decided at the time that he wasn't the right guy to lead it through the next phase. And so he brought in Ned Coton, who was an ex Perth Wildcat and 610. I feel like I was big at Pegasus, but this guy towers over and so he's gone over to the US with Microsoft and signed the Clippers and the Lakers and the Bucks.

And I'm a massive NBA fan so it sort of ticks a few boxes for me along the way. Ned said, you know, like I don't have the tech background to take this further. We need to scale.

We're not scaling particularly well, you know, would you like to get more involved? And I said, no, I'm not really interested in a job, but, you know, flattered that you're asking me. And he said, well, what will get you interested? And I said, oh, honestly, you can't pay me. Like, I don't, I don't want to be paid, you know, and he said, well, there's got to be something.

I said, well, I think if I own part of it, that would be, and I think that's the luxury of being where I've ended up is that now I get to go and make a decision like this about who I can put money in and I have to know that I can provide value to them and I have to know that even though it's all risky, there's less risk involved in, because I understand my own, what I can bring to the table and I can see all the things that I liked there about Pegasus, all these great people there willing to go at it. They've probably not been paid enough to do what they've done. They've got these wild dreams of having most of the professional sporting landscape and others, you know, and I really, I've bought into the story.

So beautiful. Starting in May. Yeah, fantastic.

May I look forward to following that journey as well. As you said, mate, bringing a bunch of your skills and experiences and networks as well to that and you knowing the value you can bring to that. And I think that's a nice spot to be where, you know, you can come in and add value and take the next step.

Yeah, I've already got a couple of ex Pegasus guys involved and we'll probably have an office in Newcastle, I'd imagine, at some point in time. So, yeah, looking forward to it. Fantastic.

Mate. Mate, appreciate you coming out and spending the time with us today and sharing your story. I love the Pegasus success story.

I love the fact that something born and bred in Newcastle has, you know, gone on to international success and successful exit. So congratulations. Thanks very much, man.

And, you know, thanks for your support over the time as well. We've really appreciated. I don't do many of these, but I was more than happy to come and have a chat.

All good, mate. Appreciate it. Thank you.