From the founder

Closing one door

After two decades in uniform, I'm stepping back from military service — and what that means for the people I work for.

For twenty years I've carried two lives, and kept them largely separate.

In one, I'm a designer — the person comms and HR teams call when a high-stakes presentation is due and the room will be senior. In the other, I've been an officer in the Australian Army: a Combat Engineer Officer since 2004, full-time and part-time, most recently teaching joint warfare planning at the ADF Warfare Training Centre.

I've never actively promoted my service, and I've never wanted to use it as a promotional angle — that isn't why it mattered. The two worlds have been distinctly different, and though they look like opposites, more often than I expected each quietly sharpened the other. I'm writing about it now simply because it's time to give my creative work, and the clients who rely on me, my whole focus.

I've been fortunate to serve across about as wide a span of human circumstance as one career can hold — more operations and deployments than I'll list here, among them Afghanistan and Timor, the bushfires, the COVID years supporting communities across NSW, and other disasters closer to home. War, peace, pestilence, disaster. The thread running through all of it was never really the mission, the operation or the exercise. It was people — often on the worst day of their lives — needing someone in the room who didn't rattle. The real job was to stay steady, think clearly, support the people around me, and deliver when it was hard.

And there's a second thing the Army gave me — the one people least expect from a soldier. It made me a sharper creative. Combat engineering, and later joint warfare planning, are not the opposite of creative work; they're applied creative thinking under real pressure. The task barely changes from one world to the other: take a complex, fast-moving, high-stakes problem and cut it down to a simple, clear direction that people can actually act on. That is exactly what I do for a client staring at a tangle of half-finished thoughts three days before the board meets.

So when that client calls at 6pm on a Friday, the stakes are — thankfully — nothing like a deployment, but the demand is the same shape: stay calm while someone else is under pressure, find the simple line through the mess, and carry the load so they don't have to. Two decades of service built that before I ever brought it to a client — the resilience to work through the night, the tenacity to push a creative problem past the point where most people stop, the habit of working across difficult people and competing agencies to reach one clear outcome.

If you're choosing who to trust with something that really matters, that's what you're actually buying. Not the software. The judgement to find the simple line through a complex problem — and the temperament to hold steady while you do it.

So why step back now? Because you can't give two masters the attention they each deserve, and for some years I've tried — often running both jobs in tandem, on far too little sleep. The Army has a generation coming through who will lead it well into the future; it doesn't need me holding a seat. My clients, increasingly, do. The work I do now moves at the speed of thought, and the people who rely on me need me present and accessible — not half here.

I'm stepping back now, and when I hang up the uniform for good it will be as a Major — with more gratitude for the service than I know how to put into words. And then I'll do one job, properly.

If you're carrying one of those high-stakes moments right now — calm under pressure is the whole point. Get in touch.