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valuePROPOSITION
Herding sheep
and tranSforming legal services
Fired with an ambition to run his own company by his 40th birthday, but just as determined to avoid putting the financial security of his family at risk, Stewart Rendall made a number of career moves in his early career which his colleagues could only describe as “weird.” A natural organiser who says running things is emblazoned on his DNA the way herding is imprinted in sheepdogs, Rendall – now an Expert Network Member - says he had no desire to become the next Bill Gates or Rupert Murdoch; he simply found the urge to run a business irresistible. “It is just something in my nature and it is pointless to fight,” he says. “It is why the first job I ever did after University, which was running airports in various parts of the world, was such a great job, because it allowed me to herd “sheep” onto planes and off of planes; it was a very obvious thing to do.” Rendall says he knew that going into business would be a risk whatever he did, but he wasn’t prepared to gamble, because he had commitments to meet. He also felt that building something from scratch during a period when venture capital funds were virtually non-existent in the Australian marketplace was too challenging to contemplate without first acquiring the necessary knowledge and experience. “The only way around that was to go out and actually take on roles for which I had to take a huge pay cut because I had no experience, with the objective of building skillsets,” he says.
“I took roles in sales and marketing, because I figured if you can’t sell the blessed thing it doesn’t matter how good you are or how good the product or service is, everything else can be irrelevant - from manufacturing to fulfilment; from support side to HR and Finance,” Rendall says. “To some people these looked like weird career moves, but from inside my head it was relatively straightforward. After working those roles I still needed to build confidence in my business skills, but at least I had the basics. In my own mind, had I not done that, starting my own business would have gone from risking to gambling.” While he wouldn’t necessarily recommend his approach to others, for Rendall the investment in building business competence has reaped rewards. Not only did he succeed in starting his first business by his 40th birthday, he has since created two others and achieved three turnarounds of companies previously agreed by all to be “basket cases.” (Turning around businesses is much harder than running your own, he says, because you have to negotiate decisions with a greater number of stakeholders). These days the founder and Managing Director of Sterian, an Australian-based
www.commercialisationaustralia.gov.au
IT services and solutions company with clients in Europe, Asia, Australia and North America, Rendall has accumulated more than 30 years’ experience in leading companies; has extensive experience of selling to both the government and commercial markets; and has lived and worked in Europe, North America, and Asia. He speaks several languages and has recently presented a Masterclass in Global Marketing at ANU. He was appointed as an honorary Trade and Investment Ambassador for the Australian Capital Territory in 2011; and as well as being a Commercialisation Australia Expert Network member, is also an Advisor to several Australian Government Departments. Rendall assisted in the development of the ACT Government’s Selling to the US Public Sector Program and, since then, has developed a modular training program aimed at building the capabilities of ACT companies selling solutions and services to the US Public Sector market. From 2004 until 2010, he was MD of a Canberra-based developer of world-class InfoSec application software, hardware and related services to governments around the world. From 2010 he has