Four Kids, Several Chickens, One Horse and a Startup

When I sat down with Megan Avard, Founder and CEO of SurePact, I immediately understood that she is not your typical tech entrepreneur – if indeed, there is such a thing. 

“I've picked up all the horse manure and fed the chickens. My husband is taking the dogs for a couple of kilometers walk in the bush. Ready to rock and roll. Nothing like cleaning out a horse paddock to get you sorted for the day.”

Megan is Australian. She is also one of the more inspiring company founders I have met with not least because her path to founding her own company is not the traditional one. Megan worked as a project manager for 25 years including eleven years for Brisbane City Council. She told me about some of the frustrations she came up against.

“I had a serious problem. There was no technology that could give me what I needed. And I found across the crews, some with 125 staff, at different times, had no system support to help them identify risks and then deliver infrastructure solutions.”

Every new beginning carries its own set of risks and concerns and Megan was acutely aware of the challenges ahead of her.

“I had just turned 50 and it's a much harder decision when you've got responsibility. I have four boys and, at the time, two were in Uni and two of them were in high school. It was a hard decision, but a quick one. I'm not a person who actually sits and ponders for too long. I believe intuition is a real thing. I can't say I always get it right, but I had the support of my husband. He told me to take a year and give it a crack. And we're still here three years later.”

Megan founded SurePact in 2017 to solve the problems she had encountered in identifying and mitigating risk as part of her project management role. Her customers are now the project and contract managers she worked with at governments and corporates, helping them increase transparency across a contract’s lifecycle in line with the important compliance regulations.

Despite her years of executive experience and her undeniable business savvy, Megan described getting over her imposter syndrome as one of her early challenges.

“I was happy to call myself a founder, but I did not like calling myself a CEO. For most of the first year, I felt like I had to justify my position before I could tell people about our product. But then I met up with Leanne Kemp who is the Founder and CEO of Everledger. She’s also a Queenslander, like me. And she told me, “There are different kinds of CEO. There are those that come in at nine and leave at five and there are those that start off with a butter knife hacking through the bush to clear a pathway. You’ve found a real problem and you are making a difference.” After that I started using the title of CEO with pride.”

One of the unique values that Megan brings to SurePact is that she understands her clients, because she’s walked in their shoes. It’s the certainty that she is answering a need that she herself experienced that keeps her focused on her goals and the goals for the company.

“I’m still involved in writing the user stories and product development, although not the code. This morning I got an email from a client and they said, “I love that feature.” And they explained which feature they loved and asked me, “Did you know that your system did that?” And I had a bit of a giggle and said, “Yeah, I did, but I'm so thrilled that you love it.” I just love my clients.”

I started to wonder about the plans Megan may have for SurePact. From my own experience I had to pivot my startup more than once, which is not unusual. Startups rarely follow a straight path and tend to take a meandering journey. I quizzed Megan whether that had been her experience also and she had an interesting take on the concept of pivoting.

“On the one hand I think I’ve been true to my original vision. On the other hand, I’m always trying to add more and give more to our customers. Take Health and Safety for example. It can be terribly boring and I’m looking for ways to include a VR element, gamified VR, while remaining qualified and compliant. Are those pivots?

I haven't swayed from my original vision. We just got bigger, and our clients have given us more ideas. I wouldn't call that pivoting. I call that expanding.”

I had to ask Megan about the last year and what her experience had been managing a startup during a global pandemic. I thought that things had been a little different in the southern hemisphere, but she painted a familiar picture.

“March 30, 2020 is burned in my brain. That was the day we were due to launch a brand-new module that we had been working on for the previous 18 months. We were supposed to present to over 100 people in Cairns, about 1800 kilometers away from where I am in Brisbane. Five days before the launch, everything shut down: no flights at all.

We ended up completely reworking the launch and doing it virtually. We got three times the number of people participating across four Australian states with people watching also from the US.

In March all my clients went to ground just as we had four big enterprise deals on the table. But it was a scary time. I was asking myself, ‘Can the company survive this?’

Then in April, we were already coming out the other side. Communities still need to operate. Infrastructure still needs to be built. It was just about allowing everyone breathing space to panic.”

And like other entrepreneurs I have spoken to, working through the global pandemic, Megan was quick to look at the positives.

“Previously I had been on a plane every other week heading to other parts of Queensland or Western Australia. Now I can be in five different remote communities in one day across multiple states. When I get to meetings, I don't look exhausted, I'm not trying to set up my laptop and I haven't run out of battery. So, there's been a silver lining.”

It’s been an amazing journey for Megan Avard and I just had to find out what advice she had for her fellow entrepreneurs.

“Talk to people. Take advice. When you find someone who is willing to give you some of their time, don’t overburden them. Don't go in with 1000 questions, just pick three, and make them count. Really think about what you need to know. You've got to have a pathway.

I think my advisory board would say I've tried to do everything properly, right from the start. We asked ourselves, “what's the due diligence required for this?” We knew we weren’t going to do a hack job. We decided to do everything properly.”

Megan Avard has an undeniable energy and she also has a clear vision of where she wants to take SurePact. In my experience that combination makes her an entrepreneur to be reckoned with.