Overcoming Misconceptions

April 1, 2026

An important lesson for any bootstrapper: take your ego, put it in a suitcase, and hide it in the attic for the next decade. It has no place in a start-up and will only cause problems. Egos and bootstrapped start-ups go together like oil and water.

There are also other, equally creative ways to overcome these misperceptions.

We first opened our London office in 2009 by accident. I had gone to the UK for Christmas to take my young family—Ania and the twins—to meet UK relatives.

I wanted to expense the flight, so I decided to write a report for the Australian banks on how UK mortgage lenders were coping with the Global Financial Crisis (GFC). To get the heads of mortgage at the UK banks to meet with me, given everything that was going on in the markets, I had to explain in great detail who I was and what we did. When I showed them examples of our product in Australia, much to my surprise, they all encouraged me to develop something similar in the UK, as there was a need and they would potentially buy it.

At this point, I flipped our Australian story on its head and announced that we were now an established Australian business opening a UK office—less of a stretch than what we had claimed in Sydney in 2006, but still a stretch.

I hadn’t thought it through, however. I lived full-time in Sydney with a small young family—sixteen thousand kilometres, a twenty-four-hour flight and eleven time zones away from the UK. How was I going to meet clients, sell to them, present to them and service them, all from the other side of the world?

This was March 2009. Zoom didn’t yet exist, nor were people accustomed to video calling. There were no smartphones yet. I didn’t consider any of this when I merrily announced, without a business plan or even a little sensible forethought, that we would be launching a UK mortgage product—a classic example of jumping off a cliff.

This was at the height of the Global Financial Crisis. Banks were going under, governments, politicians, private investors, and the public were all screaming in outrage, and the world economy was on the brink of collapse. President Obama was meeting with Wall Street to put together rescue packages, Lehman Brothers employees were being filmed carrying cardboard boxes out the door and NatWest was being nationalised. It was not a good time for banking.

I have often joked that there could not have been a worse time in the last one hundred years to launch a UK mortgage product for banks, but I did it anyway. Twelve months later, I was extremely frustrated and exhausted. While trying to run and grow a business in Sydney and not become a distant ghost to my family, I was often up all night calling UK banks, which were eleven hours behind me. Every few months, I was hopping on a twenty-four-hour flight back to the UK, jammed into the economy class of the cheapest available flight, crashing on friends’ sofas to save money, whizzing around UK banks for five days before hopping back on the plane to Sydney for another twenty-four hours of travel hell, jet lag and exhaustion.

Despite all this, I was absolutely loving it and actually getting some UK banks to part with their cash and sign up. The headache was that it was never as many as I needed. Until I reached a certain number, I didn’t have enough revenue to fund someone on the ground—hence the frustration of endless travel.

The problem was that on every trip it all seemed good, but just at the last moment, the banks I was trying to land would duck, just as the finish line seemed in reach. What was going wrong? Was I too jet-lagged? Was I not listening? Was it that I sounded tired when I spoke with them? I had set it up so it looked like I was calling from a UK telephone number during their daytime, as opposed to from Australia in the middle of the night.

I went through some back channels to a few people I knew well at the UK banks and discovered what the block was—my accent. Let’s be clear—I am English. I had lived in England for thirty-five years and had been in Australia for only three. I did not have an Australian accent. My problem was that I had, ever so slightly, adopted the Australian habit of going up at the end of sentences. This makes every statement sound more like a question to English ears.

Apparently, this had highlighted an issue. RFi was regarded as Australian and for whatever reason, this was not helping. When I pointed out that it didn’t affect the data, insights, or product, and that we had a team of analysts on the ground in Londonall I got back was a suggestion that it would be good to meet the head of RFi UK—and it would be good if they were English. The small but not insignificant problem was that there wasn’t actually a head of RFi UK. There was just a very jet-lagged me flying endlessly back and forth. I couldn’t employ anyone because we didn’t have the money.

So, I hired an actor.