I started 7 companies. 3 of them failed.

I started 7 companies, 3 of them failed. It all led me to this.

Last week SKOR turned 3. The honest story of why it exists starts long before that.

I spent 25 years building companies before this one. Eddie's Internet Solutions (at 21 years old, helping people get on the information superhighway 🙂 — that was 1996), Unique World (at 24), Unique World Software, Tinybeans (co-founder), LayPay (co-founder), TurboViz (co-founder), and now SKOR. Different industries, different markets, different decades…the same thing quietly drained profit from all of them. And it wasn’t something you could see on the P&L.

In my personal life, I played a lot of team sports growing up — cricket (I’m Australian in case you didn’t know), basketball — so I learned a ton about teams. On top of that I was always one to measure things, monitor, set goals, review goals. I was one of those dads who sat with their 12 year old and encouraged them to set their goals and look at them daily. It’s no different in business.

My time at Unique World and Tinybeans is where I learned the most about teams in business and their connection to performance and profit. At Tinybeans we used to do a ton of engagement surveys and 360s to measure the team and our business. What I learned through both those tools was that they were ineffective when it came to driving performance.

The engagement surveys were interesting, and we got a lot of qualitative data, but we struggled to really understand the root cause of what was holding teams back. We had lots of comments and frankly spent half the time in results review meetings, focused on who said what and how they said it, etc. Whereas what we should have been focused on is what was the cause of the team challenges, what was holding them back from accelerating their performance. 

The recommendations were generic too. Improving communications. Well, that's easy to say but difficult to do, because I could give you 10 different approaches for improving communications. Sometimes communications turned up as a recommendation, but the root cause was people not understanding their accountabilities and their goals. Very different lenses for action.

We would often complete the recommendations and then the engagement score was the same. There was often very little correlation between engagement and performance. Why are we measuring engagement again?

Another pet peeve of mine was that the engagement score was a lagging indicator. ENPS, also lagging. Trust surveys, happiness surveys, vibe surveys — all lagging. The problem with lagging is that you're looking at the past, and when you're looking at the past it leads you to symptoms.

The 360s were worse. Exhausting, time-consuming, difficult to really execute against. Rotate the leaders, get many people involved in the feedback. And when we got to the feedback part and people were listening, it often came with a sense of defensiveness and very little actioning.

As I was beginning to think about this area, I must have spoken to 50+ CEOs about teams and driving high performance and how you get the most out of your people. The biggest struggle I heard was that although they said their people were important, they really didn't back it up by the investment. Few had leadership programs, manager training, employee development. When I asked where people and culture turned up in their investment pool, few had it high on the list, some, not at all. Ironically many said they had a great culture and low churn. That's like saying we have an incredible all-star team but don't need the coaches and people are so comfortable that they never want to leave.

This led me to the core problem I was looking to solve with SKOR: connecting team behaviors to dollars.

The first year or two I had a very different value prop to what we have today. Different positioning, different product delivery. I won't bore you with the early stages. Where we landed after much iteration and feedback from clients and partners was that the biggest driver of action was identification of profit leakage.

The name SKOR comes from wanting a leading indicator. It's a SKOR of behaviors added up — a score out of 100, benchmarked internally and externally, and the vision is that every team and company has a SKOR. The reason why we call it SKOR is literally in the conversation: you say, "What's your SKOR?" Depending on what they answer, you know straight away how they're treating their people and how those people relate to the performance and profits of the organization.

Then we connected that score to the dollars leaking out of the dysfunction. Not knowing your accountabilities. Not knowing your goals. Rarely getting feedback. Lack of team and org alignment. Or one of the worst and most common, not enough recognition. After all an organization is a team of teams. Made up of lots of small teams.

I'm very proud to get to three years, and it's with great gratitude that I have an amazing team that's been on the journey with me. Some for most of it, some for some of it.

So far in 2026:

$12.3MM in Profit Leak uncovered through the SKOR diagnostic (org + team only)

Over 2,700 employees have taken the SKOR diagnostic

Over 300 companies have tried the Profit Leak Calculator

And we're just beginning. The partners we've signed to resell SKOR are consultants and leadership coaches — they were already the antidote, they just didn't have the number.

We find the leak, they help recover it.

Thanks so much to everyone who's been part of this journey so far, it's still very early days.