How being an athlete taught me to embrace change
Sport has been the leading driver in all my successes — providing lifelong friends, professional contacts, opportunities in higher education, and building a mindset that doesn’t shy away from hard work or cause me to crumble under failure. Everyone in the Xero go-to-market team in Canada knows how much I loved being an athlete, and I can see their eyes rolling from here. But working at Xero has let me become part of a true team again, and I wanted to share how this came to be.
My mother often opined that my sisters and I inherited our dad’s athletic ability. She first met him at the North Shore Rowing Club, which sits on one of Auckland’s small volcanic crater lakes, Lake Pupuke (pronounced pooh-pook-ee). My grandparents were rowers, my aunties and uncles were rowers, and my parents were too. My dad rowed for New Zealand in the early 80s, winning two World Championships in 1982 and 1983. After an unfortunate season the following year, he then placed fourth at the LA 1984 Olympics.
As a sport, rowing requires being absolutely in-sync with one another. Boat speed and balance is severely affected if my oar handle is an inch lower than my teammate in front, or a second faster or slower at any point in the stroke. If my weight is distributed differently on my seat than my teammates, or my blade placement is deeper or shallower or pops out earlier. If my body position hits certain points in the stroke at a different time… the list goes on.
This all happens at varying speeds — from practice pieces, steady-state and race pace, where you row upwards of 40 strokes a minute. And it all needs to be exact. When you’re in a crew that masters this, it’s the best feeling in the world. You can close your eyes and know exactly what your teammate in front or behind is doing. You can feel if someone three seats up is out of time. You feel utterly connected.
Rowing looks beautiful when you watch it on TV during the Olympics, or see a crew rowing along a nice flat river early in the morning. It looks easy, but when you’re in that boat 750m into a 2km race, it’s absolute agony. Your body goes into survival mode and begins to shut down non-essential senses, and you have to be willing to hurt and hold that composure more than the crews beside you.
There’s a huge amount of trust involved, built up over thousands of hours of working hard together when it’s not always easy and when you don’t always want to. However, when you win or have a great race (or even a great practice), it feels exponentially better than if you had gotten to that point alone. You are willing to work harder because your teammates around you are family. And when you have a great crew and team, it’s a feeling that stays with you forever.
I got to experience this with my Varsity 8 crew during my senior year at University of Miami in Florida. It was the spring of 2016 and I was rowing at the ACC Championships in Clemson, South Carolina. My pair partner (the girl who sat behind me) was in pain from a nasty infection in her hand — she decided to row anyway to have this last moment with her crew.
I turned around, gripped her hand and felt a strange sense of loss. Because I knew this was my last time on the water as a rower. It was a sport that had given me so much and introduced me to people from all over the world, who will remain friends for life. But as my dad says, when one door closes, another opens.
That moment led me to where I am today. I’m sitting at the first official Canadian Xero office in downtown Toronto, next to team mates who I’ve grown to care about as much as I cared about my crew mates at Miami. I was lucky enough to be the fourth member of the Toronto office and have witnessed the amazing growth we’ve had and continued to have.
In 2018, we were a six-person team working out of a WeWork. Since then, we’ve announced the HubDoc acquisition and spread the Xero love to our accounting and bookkeeping community throughout Canada. At times it’s felt like we were a band on the road, doing everything with such heart and love because we all believe in each other and the product so much. We’ve often said the environment we’ve fostered here is a once in a lifetime experience.
In the summer of 2018, I invited the Toronto team (which was then 10 people) to meet my American family in Rochester, New York. Off we went in three Xero Mini’s, driving through the countryside for a weekend of barbecues and fun. It was our first road trip, but it certainly wasn’t our last. A lot of us are expats and came to the city with no friends, but two years on we’re working from a 200-space office on University Avenue and spend a lot of our free time together.
We’re all intimately involved in the success of Xero in the Canadian market because of the bond we share. I love Xero because of the culture we’ve helped build here. It’s not just a job to me, and it’s not something I look forward to leaving. I know that one day if I leave the Xero team in Canada, it will feel like that quiet moment out in Clemson. It will be a moment that’s sad and epic, because I know that I’ve experienced something special — but I also know that another door will open for me. And that’s exciting.
“Would I rather Team Xero be feared or loved? Easy. Both. I want people to be afraid of how much they love us.” Michael Scott, The Office (and me)
