My childhood MBA

Someone asked me recently why I was so polarised about my passion for helping small businesses on one hand, and why I had such apparent disdain for large organisations. It’s something I hadn’t actually thought about at all. I just accepted it as the way I and many people see the world; rooting for the little guy is not all that uncommon.

My own career in has seen tours of duty right across the software industry scale spectrum. Starting out inside a scrappy 30 employee business, to being a subsidiary MD in a 1,500 employee group to being one of 100,000 people at Microsoft. And most recently leading a team of three people working from home and out of coffee shops as we got Xero going in the UK – where incidentally we’ll be coming up on 160 people soon.

I think I’ve generally enjoyed the experience of being inside the smaller companies more than the larger ones.

But it was only recently, after more than 25 years in business that I had one of those Aha! moments about why I’m so fundamentally passionate about helping small businesses.

When I was around nine years old my father left a comfortable management position and started his own company. My mother enrolled at night classes and learned accounting and bookkeeping and managed all the accounting for the business as it grew.

My sister had the mid-sized bedroom inside our little three bedroom semi-detached house on the outskirts of Glasgow, so one day she found a flat pack desk had appeared in the corner of her bedroom, which duly played host to a typewriter for invoicing, a couple of stacks of paperwork, some lever arch files and a hole punch (free confetti!).

Occasionally during school holidays – today being Good Friday is a great example of one of those typical days – he would invite me to join him in the workshop for a few hours to just hang out, sweep up, annoy his staff with naive kid-like questions, re-organise the shelves of inventory or sheepishly answer the telephone.

Just experience what it was like to work for a living.

Throughout most of my childhood, whether in the back seat of the family car or over dinner, I’d listen to my father’s daily reports of how that day’s business had gone.

The challenges, the people issues, the successes, the problems. The twisting and turning he’d have to employ to keep the seemingly all-powerful bank manager simultaneously onside and out-of-the-way as if he was some kind of legitimised protection racketeer.

One of the aspects of small business life I learned from my father was that of the large customer who deliberately took too long to pay his bills and his evil twin, the large supplier who’d threaten to cut lines of credit.

With the little guy squeezed, sometimes just barely surviving day-to-day in the middle.

So, without realising it by the age of around twelve or so, I’d become schooled in the basic principles of cash flow, and about the huge problems larger businesses could inflict on the little guys with just a careless wave of a hand.

And the way these problems always found their way onto the kitchen table. The arguments, the stress you take home with you and worries about money. Or just working over-long hours.

So, it’s actually surprising to me that it’s only recently that I came to realise how profound an impact my growing up inside an small business family has had on my own outlook and mindset. And how much it fundamentally defines me, and fuels my passion and energy for what I do at Xero.

Chatting with one of the team the other day, I joked that this felt like my life’s work. I’m now not sure it was a joke.