The Question That Changed How I Run a Business (and Raise a Kid)

There's a moment in every business owner's life when the thing they built nearly disappears overnight — and in that moment, they discover what they were actually building.

Mine came in the form of a cyber attack.

I won't go into the specific details, partly because they still make me uncomfortable, and partly because the technical facts aren't the point. What I'll say is this: years of systems, processes, client data, and operational infrastructure became suddenly and brutally vulnerable. And in the hours and days that followed, I didn't think about revenue. I didn't think about market position. I didn't think about any of the metrics I'd spent years obsessing over.

I thought about the people.

I thought about the staff who trusted me with their livelihoods. I thought about the clients who relied on us for their deadlines and brands. I wondered if the relationships I’d built over a decade could survive such a major setback.

That experience cracked something open in me that I hadn't expected.

Twenty-Eight Years of Getting the Wrong Answer

If you had asked me in my late twenties what success looked like, I would have answered honestly, but I would have been almost completely wrong.

Success meant revenue milestones. It meant recognition. It meant building something large enough that people noticed it existed. I operated under the assumption that once I crossed a certain financial threshold, a feeling of arrival would follow.

It didn't.

Every time I reached a milestone, it was quietly replaced by a bigger one. The finish line kept moving forward. This isn’t a personal failing; it’s just how money-based definitions of success work. They can’t deliver the satisfaction they promise, because they aren’t really measuring satisfaction.

I ran a promotional products company — Cubic Promote, based in Sydney — and for the first several years, I measured almost everything in units sold, margins hit, and clients won. Those numbers mattered. They still do. But I was using them to measure the wrong thing.

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The Question Fatherhood Asked Me

The shift didn't come from a business book. It came from becoming a father. Before that, I looked at almost every decision from a professional point of view: growth, efficiency, and return. After I became a dad, a new question started coming to mind at unexpected times.

What am I contributing?

Not earning. Not accumulating. Contributing.

That question is deceptively uncomfortable because it forces you to evaluate your work by its effect on other people rather than its effect on your own balance sheet. And once it takes hold, it's very difficult to make certain decisions the same way you used to.

It changed how I approached clients. It changed how I thought about our team. And it significantly changed how I thought about the organisations — particularly charities and community groups — who came to us with limited budgets and genuine need.

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What Helping Charities Actually Taught Me About Value

Over the years, a pattern developed. Charities working on fundraising campaigns or community awareness initiatives would approach us. Sometimes they had almost nothing to spend. And whenever it was possible, we'd find a way — product donations, significant discounts, creative ways to stretch a small budget further than it should logically stretch.

From a purely commercial perspective, these calls are not always easy to justify. From a human perspective, they're among the easiest decisions I make.

What I didn’t expect was what those experiences would give back to me—not in business terms, but personally. When you see a small group working hard to improve someone else’s life, and you help them do it better, the reward is something I’ve never seen in any report.

The lesson I kept learning was that value doesn’t always come back to the person who creates it. Sometimes, the best investment you can make is in someone else’s success.

That is not a lesson any business course prepared me for.

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The Toyota Corolla Problem

I've come to think of the money-chasing years as the Toyota Corolla problem.

A Corolla and a Ferrari both get you to the same place. One draws a lot more attention, but both arrive at the same destination. I’ve seen many people, including my younger self, spend huge amounts of time and energy chasing the Ferrari version of things, even when the Corolla version works just fine.

Beyond a certain point, additional money changes the texture of life very little. What changes life in a lasting way is whether your work has made a tangible difference to the people around you.

I'm not making a case against financial success. Cash flow crises are real. The weight of payroll responsibility is real. Money removes a category of stress that is genuinely corrosive when it's present. All of that is true.

But it's a floor, not a ceiling. And many people treat it as the ceiling.

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What I'd Tell My Younger Self

If I could sit across from the version of me who started out chasing recognition and revenue, I'd keep the advice short.

Chase impact. Not money.

The money may come. It may not. But if you build enough genuine impact into the lives of the people around you — your team, your clients, the organisations you can afford to help — you'll construct something more durable than wealth.

You'll build a reputation that withstands a cyberattack.

You'll build relationships that outlast any individual transaction.

You'll build a working life that, when you look back, you'll remember for the right reasons.

After twenty-eight years, I no longer believe success is something you accumulate.

I believe it's something you leave behind in other people.