John Bruce-Smith
Director and Principal, Finance
- Establishes & Manages Employee Share Option Plans
- Provides full Corporate Tax Advice & support including transfer pricing, corporate tax returns, audits and tax planning
- Manages the entire Treasury function including devised FX & investment policies and FX hedging
- Establishes and Manages Securities Legislation
- Manages all Financial aspects of potential Acquisitions
- Assesses and manages company Equity Investments
- Advises and accesses Government Incentive Programs
- Facilitates and Advises on IPO Planning
- Ensures Intellectual Property Protection
- Advises and maximizes ROI for Office Facilities
- Complies with full suite of Financial Reporting requirements
- Management Reporting
John is a Chartered Accountant with over 30 years global financial management experience. His career has been in the information technology & communication industry and he currently advises a number of Australian tech start-ups and US tech subsidiaries. John holds an MBA, a degree & diploma in financial management and is a member of the Institute of Company Directors.
After 20 years working with listed industrial companies in Australia, the UK and Hong Kong, John moved to Silicon Valley during the tech boom. From 1998 to 2001, John was Vice President – Finance of Identix Inc, the global leader in biometric identification.
He returned to Australia in 2002 and was most recently the Chief Financial Officer for Atlassian (2006 – 2011), the highly successful private Australian software development tools business. During this period, Atlassian grew from $10M turnover with 50 people in 2 offices to $110M with 500 people in 6 locations. John’s role, apart from financially managing the organic and acquisitive growth, was to make the organisation "investment ready". In 2010 Accel Partners of the US acquired a 15% stake in Atlassian, their largest single software investment.
Focusing on tech companies, John advises on capital raising & restructure, international tax strategy, international acquisitions, ESOPs, treasury & FX management, IP protection and government incentives. He is also well experienced in accounting and tax issues for software organisations.
Jodette Cleary
Director and Principal, Human Resources
- Conducts HR Audits and HR Due Diligence
- Develops Business aligned People Strategy
- Establishes / Improves HR Function
- Obtains superior levels of Employee Engagement
- Provides IR & Employment Law Assessment & Advice
- Creates High Performing Leadership teams
- Recruits Top Talent via the development of an attractive Employer Brand and Employee Value Proposition
- Provides Effective Termination Management
As Director and Principal People Consultant of The Growth Execs™, Jodette works with businesses to develop a business aligned People Strategy, Infrastructure and Programs that ensures these business attract top talent, have engaged and productive employees and effectively manage employment legislative risk and compliance.
For the past 7 years Jodette has been the Managing Director and Principal Consultant of We Know HR®, a boutique HR Consulting company providing affordable, expert HR solutions to small/medium sized companies as well as HR Coaching & Development programmes for HR professionals and HR projects/services for HR teams in any sized organisation. Jodette’s style, leadership skills and unique approach to HR saw her appointed to leadership roles early in her career, including Board Director appointments at Honeywell at only 31 years old. Jodette uses this experience to help fast-track other HR professionals into key leadership roles and to select and support high-performance SME leadership teams.
Prior to entering the world of HR consulting, Jodette was the Asia Pacific HR Director for Honeywell Building Solutions. At the time this was a 2,000 employee, US$300M business covering 11 countries in Asia Pacific providing building automation and building security technology and solutions. Prior to her 6 year post at Honeywell, Jodette worked in IT&T, Recruitment and Mining.
Some highlights from Jodette's many successful consulting assignments include 12 months with on-line experience gift supplier Red Balloon, improving their employee engagement, establishing their leadership team and creating their HR function. Jodette also headed the global HR function of Australian global software house Atlassian, enhancing their employer brand, recruitment capability, creating a high performing first class leadership team and providing them with HR coaching and advisory services. Notably, both Red Balloon and Atlassian were 2009 Hewitt Best Employers, with employee engagement levels of 97% and 87% respectfully, and the results last - Atlassian ranked 2nd and RedBalloon 8th in the 2013 BRW Top 50 Best Places To Work in Australia! More recently Jodette established and managed the Sydney HR function for fast growth e-commerce provider Bigcommerce.
Scott Farquhar, Founder and Owner, Atlassian
We hired Jodette at Atlassian to take our HR practices from that of a small start-up, and professionalise them in preparation for our rapid growth. Jodette brought her wealth of experience to bear at Atlassian and quickly put in place policies and procedures that helped us grow, but maintain our corporate culture. I would recommend Jodette to any small/medium business that has identified HR as an area that they want to professionalise.
May 21, 2010
Soren Harner
Director and Principal, Product and Technology
- Provides technology Audits and Due Diligence
- Builds high-performance technical teams
- Transitions technical teams past the start-up phase and implements sound product development practices
- Provides hands on expertise in data analytics and predictive modelling
- Advises on technical and product strategy
As Director & Principal Product and Technology Consultant for The Growth Execs™ , Soren loves putting technology behind the biggest levers in the business. He has been working at the intersection of technology, business and data science in every role since he was a graduate student and research assistant in artificial intelligence and machine learning at Stanford University. Soren Harner is a visionary technology executive with proven success building market leading technology solutions and high performing teams. Soren is able to critically evaluate new directions in technology, and harness these developments to achieve revolutionary business outcomes.
Soren is the Founder of Permaling, a business providing large scale data analytics services to all size companies across all industries. Soren is also an advisor to several startups and a mentor with the Founders Institute. Soren has held leadership positions in startups in Sydney and San Francisco. From 2011 through 2013 Soren was the Vice President of Engineering at Bigcommerce, the fastest growing SaaS ecommerce marketing platform in the world. Bigcommerce helps small businesses power anything and everything related to an online storefront from search to inventory to online payments to marketing and SEO.
From 2007 through 2009 Soren was the Vice President of Engineering for Atlassian, the leading maker of collaborative tools for technical teams. Soren grew the team from 25 to 100+ developers, and helped Atlassian gain a reputation as a leader in engineering culture and practice.
Prior to Atlassian Soren held leadership positions in knowledge mining, social network analysis and search at Intraspect Software, a San Francisco based collaboration and knowledge management software company later acquired by Vignette. After the acquisition, Soren served as a Director of Engineering for Vignette's collaboration products.
by Ted Tencza, Head of Technology and Design, finder.com.au
Soren is an excellent VP of Engineering, able to lead companies from being start-ups to world class leaders in their fields. He is highly technical, detail oriented leader, but doesn't forget that developers are also people. I worked with Soren as he guided Atlassian and Bigcommerce Engineering departments through rapid growth, and he was always there, ready to meet all the challenges - both technical and personnel, with a calm steady approach.
Glenn Butcher
Director and Principal, Engineering and Operations
- Creates high-perfoming DevOps and Agile cultures
- Creates Online and SaaS platforms
- Builds great technical and operations teams
- Provides Technical Due Diligence and Audits
- Advises on technical, security and product strategy
- Creates efficient customer service teams
- Aligns all parts of a company - engineering, sales, and customer service
As Director and Principal Operations and Engineering Consultant of the The Growth Execs™, Glenn Butcher has been putting together great technical teams since 1995. Glenn’s passion is creating cross-functional teams, removing silos and barriers and instilling a high-performing culture across multiple teams. If your sales, engineering teams, and customer service teams won’t talk to each other, you need Glenn, also known as "Mr Congeniality."
Glenn is an early evangelist of the DevOps movement and Agile development cycle, and earned his nickname “Mr SaaS” while building and creating the Atlassian OnDemand products. He can make the significant and sometimes difficult technology decisions that can change whole the course of a business. A fearless decision maker, he never hesitates or shies away from difficult choices once he has gathered enough information about your business.
From 2012 to 2014 Glenn was VP of Engineering at Brandscreen, Asia-Pacific's leading Demand Side Platform, trading with all the major Advertising agencies in the region. This entailed many billions of media buying decisions per day and delivered billions of impressions per month, with petabyte-scale data used to provide real-time analytics.
Prior to Brandscreen, Glenn was Director of SaaS Engineering at Atlassian, a world-class enterprise software company that helps innovators everywhere plan, build, and launch great software. He sponsored and fostered the Saas vision from a thought exercise to the entire company embracing the SaaS vision, with infasrtucture handling tens of thousands of virtual machines . Before the launch of SaaS, Glenn was IT Director at Atlassian for the infrastructure, security, internal software development, and business analysis teams and led due diligence on several corporate acquisitions, both legal and technical.
From 2006 to 2008, Glenn also served as the Systems, Operations and Content Manager for Internode, one of the largest telecommunications carriers in Australia and the most innovative, prior to its acquisition by iiNet. Glenn also led the Technology team at the Telethon Children's Institute, one of the largest and most successful scientific medical research institutes in Australia and early adopter of Big Data.
by Tony Surtees, Director Brandscreen
Glenn is an executive with a never-give-up work ethic who both projected confidence and purpose into his teams.
Glenn is instrumental in the creation of a high-performing culture across multiple teams against the conditions of intense competition, high service levels and the uncertainty that characterise startups. Glenn has not only recruited a top-notch technical teams, he keeps them organised and focused while instilling a customer centric set of values amongst technology personnel who had little direct client exposure. He also manages to promote a genuine sense of reciprocity and mutual respect across both the commercial and technology teams. This gave sales staff the confidence to make promises to clients knowing that their commitments would be delivered, all while maintaining a sense of pride, ownership and innovation in product and support. And clients love him!
I’d recommend Glenn for any startup looking to professionalise engineering culture and bring the full force of sales, engineering and customer service to the business.