TIM REED, CEO, MYOB – the strategic people manager
When MYOB made its move into cloud software, it was a return to the internet for its CEO, Tim Reed. Earlier in his career, the father of three had worked in Silicon Valley after completing a Harvard MBA. The internet businesses for which he worked from 1995 to 2003 – including Internet Profiles Corporation, DoveBid and Elance – would help to shape the web as we know it. But it is individuals from Reed’s past, rather than experience, that he credits for turning him into the manager he is today.
The first was his father. Reed’s parents were both schoolteachers, but the year Reed was born, his father gave up his career to start a small business. Living with his wife and children in Drouin in rural Victoria, and later in Marysville, the entrepreneur went on to launch four more businesses over the next 40 years, including a bus line, guesthouse and tour business.
“I saw firsthand the ups and downs of running a small business: the long hours and the sacrifices, the hard times and, when things are going well, the rewards,” says Reed, now 43. “He had a good work ethic and a healthy attitude to risk. Some of that pounded itself into my DNA.”
When his parents divorced, Reed moved with his mother, brother and sister to Melbourne, where he earned a first-class honours degree in commerce. This led to a job at LEK Consulting.
At LEK, Reed spent one year each in Australia, Asia and the UK under the tutelage of Richard Fuller, now a British MP. Fuller “stretched me, supported me and exposed me to some fantastic opportunities”, recalls Reed. “He gave me opportunities to mix with executives who had decades more experience than I did. He gave me a lot of rope, but on no occasion did he let me hang myself. I see myself doing these things now with staff members.”
Reed’s American-Hungarian wife Karola, who he met in Silicon Valley, helped convince him to move back to Australia in 2003 once they had begun raising a family. He planned to open a microbrewery, but a meeting with Neil Gamble, CEO of software company Solution 6, turned all that around.
Reed was employed as general manager of Solution 6’s Australian operations, and nine months into his reign, the business was purchased by MYOB.
“Over the last decade, the pace of change in the channels through which MYOB develops relationships with customers has been astounding,” he says. “The core promise, that it makes your business life easier, hasn’t changed. But everything we have to do to deliver on that promise is different.”
The cloud opens up powerful possibilities for accounting software, says Reed – from the capacity to submit information to clients, accountants or regulatory bodies, to the ability to see your business in aggregated form compared to others in your industry, to mobile access and mobile payments.
“The pace of innovation is certainly not going to slow down any time soon,” says Reed.
“That’s what gets me out of bed every morning.”
