IVAN SESELJ, PROMAPP SOLUTIONS
“We asked Zac to join our Promapp board as director back when we were a fledgling start-up software business. I knew him from working with him previously and knew his business acumen was what we needed to guide us and help us grow. We needed someone a bit pragmatic who was good with cashflows and governance and some compliance risk, but overall we needed someone with a solid business lens and the strategic thinking that would help us grow. Zac was the right fit for our board. The business grew revenue by 27 times during Zac’s involvement over 8 years and 90 plus board meetings.
At our meetings, Zac had a way of clearing out the thousands of small issues we’d have and instead cutting through the clutter, asking us questions and getting us to think about the things that would really grow our business. You can never know all the answers in business, but knowing the right questions to ask in the first place is what gets you closer to your goals. It was extremely valuable to us to have him questioning and weighing in on how much we should be investing in marketing, how hard to push cashflow, what opportunities to focus on and what to let go…
Part of Zac’s style is that his approach is the opposite of business theory. Many times he stopped us over-thinking our strategies and instead gave us the confidence to get stuck in and hustle, rolling up our sleeves and giving it a go. I’ll never forget when we were weighing up options for global expansion; we were getting advice to pause and do market research. Zac quickly ran some Google searches during our board meeting to compare regions and wrote the numbers up on a whiteboard — we thrashed it out, made a decision and got on with it.
People like Zac increase the value of your business by helping you perform better, by getting you to try different things, by holding you accountable and by asking you the right questions to help you make better decisions. In the five years before we sold our business, we were still growing by 40-50% each year and we’d successfully penetrated the US market. When we sold in 2018, revenue was at $25m+.
Beyond his business nous, Zac really loves what he does and puts that positive attitude and energy into his work. In the ups and downs of running a business, surrounding yourself with people like Zac really helps and I’ll forever be grateful for having Zac on our board and on our journey.”