Steve and I started Rise in our mouldy downstairs room, cockroaches clicking in the skirting boards and wet season rains seeping up through the floor.

Our version of success was simple - keep the wolves from the door, the kids from each other’s throats and our marriage off the rocks. Our work was inspired by a simple desire to find better solutions to the challenges of working across remote Northern Australia and fueled by the Goat family competitiveness that can’t bear to see anyone get there first!

We brainstormed the business name, via text, while I was in Royal Darwin Hospital Emergency Department with a ruptured appendix, double-bunked, high-as-a-kite on morphine. This was also the day after Steve had been diagnosed with a DVT and a couple of weeks after our daughter had fractured her elbow while Cyclone Marcus hit town. This meant when we started our business the only fully functional beings in our house were a 7 year old boy….and a dog.

So if you’re wanting to know a good time to start a business – there isn’t one… just start!

We had no plan, no strategy, no vision board – just a belief our idea mattered. In the beginning we didn’t measure our success we were simply trying to survive – as a business, as a family and as a married couple.

We had no time to stop and get perspective, we were simply

-        too busy testing and adapting equipment to work in the heat and humidity.

-        too busy building better transport cases to protect our kit as it rattled 1,000ks across the red dust corrugations.

-        too busy navigating every corner of this vast and epic landscape.

-        too busy researching equipment we could take on small planes so we could access communities when the roads were flooded.

-        too busy trying to manage software and huge data sets with no internet connection.

-        too busy changing tyres and fixing broken vehicles. 

I could say it was a ‘juggle’ but that gives the impression it was somehow co-ordinated and skilled it wasn’t – some days it was a complete and utter shouty, shit show.

A defining moment was when Steve came back from yet another few weeks working remote, driving endless k’s in the heat on the dusty corrugations. I was at home working a part-time job, while also trying to build my own consultancy, while also having to manage the lives of two very sporty, active kid’s; and like so many of us – trying to do all this with no family on hand to help out.

He was welcomed home by surly kids, a sulky wife, and a sloppy cold supper. Steve surveyed this sad, miserable scene and said.

“why are we doing this if we can’t even enjoy it?”

We realised we needed to have some honest conversations about what we wanted from Rise – as a family, as people and as a couple. We didn’t want Rise to destroy the very thing it was created for – our family. We recognised we’d fallen into the trap of not questioning the idea we’d been sold about what a business ‘should’ be. We never questioned if we agreed with the typical business model that needed us to aggressively chase profit and growth at all costs. We didn’t …..and still don’t.

So we decided to define our own version of success based around balance, not growth, and sought purpose not only profit. We started to structure Rise to foster not only financial wealth. but time wealth, physical wealth, mental wealth, social wealth and family wealth.

It was this year Steve took his first kite trip – which is now a sacred event in the Rise and family calendar. The only thing that’s changed over the years is our son now joins him….and completely smashes him! On weekend’s you’re more likely to see us in the ocean, not the office, We prioritise family trips over business trips….and we don’t apologise for this.

We want to foster creativity and curiosity; to create a place where people can flourish; and I believe our success can be demonstrated by our loyal staff, engaged clients and our three innovation awards…and the fact our teenage kids still want to hang out with us!

A few years in we were winning bigger contracts and starting to feel pride in Rise’s work. We became more confident as business leaders – more strategic and intentional. We were beginning to see Rise’s value, but something still felt off with how we were telling the Rise story. We were using the same technology, delivering large-scale projects, and delivering the same services as many bigger technology businesses, but Rise’s story had an air of apology about the complexities and challenges of operating here in Northern Australia – they felt like failures and faults. Our story felt tepid and timid, Rise was “less than”; we weren’t as big and shiny as the everyone else.

Then I had to write our first NT Government tender. An epic effort requiring more self-reflection than a therapy session and feeling like a business colonoscopy – getting right into the guts and showing me things, I really didn’t think I needed to see. Line by line I started to see every challenge overcome, every piece of technology adapted, every km spent on the red dust, every storm weathered, every vehicle fixed was our value, and our story.

I’d been trying to fit Rise into the narrative of a temperate, corporate, metro-centric business, when in fact we were a rugged, tropical, remote Northern Australian business. We weren’t as big because we had to be agile and adaptable. We weren’t as shiny and corporate because you can’t be on the red dust corrugations. We were more Hilux than Mercedes, we didn’t fit into the temperate, southern business narrative for the simple fact we belonged here – in the epic north.

We reimagined and rewrote the Rise story in the context of the place where it was formed – along the coastline of Tiwi’s, in the central desert heat,

drenched in raging rains and clouded in red dust plumes. Our story, our value isn’t what we do, but the fact we do it in one of the most extreme and isolated places - not only in Australia - but on Earth.

What Rise overcomes on a daily basis isn’t something to apologise for, it is something to celebrate and leverage, particularly against interstate businesses, because Rise’s ability to work in the most remote and isolated parts of Australia can’t be learnt on the streets of Melbourne. Our experience of delivering large-scale projects across this epic landscape, in the wilds of the wet season, weren’t crafted in Canberra.

We are not a second-rate southern business – we are a first rate, tropical, remote Northern Australian business. And this isn’t just Rise’s story – it’s the story of Territory businesses. A story so fundamentally shaped by the epic landscapes, extreme climates and brutal isolation of Northern Australia.

It’s the story of our unsealed roads –75% of the roads across half of Australia’s landmass are unsealed, red dust corrugations.

It’s the story of Australia thinking the Territory has no population outside of Darwin, Alice or Katherine – when there are in fact over 70 remote communities right across the Territory.

It’s the story of delivering vital services to these remote communities cut off for months during the wet season because the single, unsealed corrugated access road is flooded.

It’s the story of vast swathes of Northern Australia – again, that is NOT empty - having no mobile coverage in a ‘digital’ world.

It’s the story of using equipment and technology manufactured for temperate climates lasts half as long as it should, is double the price, and has to be sent 1,000ks for a repair.

And yet, we not only survive, but thrive and innovate in a place so hard to imagine in the aircon of Darwin, and virtually unimagined in the boardrooms of Sydney, Melbourne or Canberra.

So this story needs to be told…..And more importantly it needs to be heard because this story matters not only to us, but to the Territory and Australia – this story is one of the North’s most vital and valuable assets.

This story matters because our ordinary…. is their extraordinary.