Ok, we’re a bunch of people working together. So far so good. Is that a company? Well, no, it takes more than that.

We started off with some planning sessions. We had to find a location for these sessions and ended up in the Lifeguard building in Evans Bay. This was handy, had an upstairs meeting room but with no insulation and little or no heating, it would take more than a few sandwiches for lunch to thaw out.

It soon became apparent that you do indeed need to spend time working on the company not just in it. Somehow this job fell to me with the tenuous question of whether one gets paid for this activity (which is of course done at the expense of doing paid client work). Yes, it does take money to run a successful company, and it takes time to sort through just how this is going to be managed fairly and equitably.

More than just the sum of our parts – I’ve always believed that a good company should be more than the sum of its parts, that more minds are better than one.

Part of the motivation for Knoware was the belief that by working together we can do more and do better. We all have different strengths, and the key is to play to those.

I worked with Colin Harris for many years. He had a degree of technical excellence that was beyond my best efforts. I was good at chatting up people, defining the need and providing strategic advice on the best use of data to get the job done. We still had gaps and as time went on, and with the overhead of doing business particularly with government, we added in an Operations Manager to keep the cogs turning.

We were very lucky to have Nicky Chalker and then later Suzanne Turner in this key role. They were both excellent and I consider both friends to this day.