ABOUT.
Being a farmer’s son from western New South Wales, Australia, I have a strong “DIY” orientation. What that means is that I’m practical, I like to do things myself, and I like to know how things work.
I don’t like to throw stuff away; I prefer to keep it and re-purpose it at some future point. I enjoy physical labor and believe strongly that physical labor is ennobling and good for one’s soul. I enjoy being connected to the soil.
I often embark upon projects about which I know nothing at the outset; I learn along the way. I’m not particularly afraid of failure. I think I’ve learned far more from my failures than from my successes.
WORK.
In my over thirty years of corporate finance and management experience, I served a diverse set of roles including Turnaround Specialist, General Manager, CEO, CFO, Vice President of Finance, Controller and Treasurer.
I have served on the boards of several local nonprofit organizations and realized that there is huge need for financial expertise in the nonprofits sector.
Currently I partner with Noble Accounting LLC and represent the company as an outsourced CFO and business consultant for a diverse set of non-profits, including LA Best, The Center for the Partially Sighted and CESMII – Clean Energy Smart Manufacturing Innovation Institute.
To best serve my rather national clientele, I rely on cloud based accounting software such as Xero and Intacct, and cloud based document sharing and communications – a very efficient and fast way to serve my clients with the most innovative software packages and technologies.
I spent a couple of years in the mid 80’s working in Hollywood for Lorimar Telepictures (inventor of the night time soap – Dallas, Falconcrest, Knots Landing) as the Director and then VP of Corporate Finance.
Among other things, I was involved in the negotiation of a $300M revolving senior bank credit facility with a 10 bank syndicate, and the issuance of a large amount of high yield bonds (commonly known as ‘junk debt’) through Michael Milliken, restructuring the company’s Balance Sheet.
I went on to work for a couple of other entertainment companies, among them the Virgin Group, before transitioning back to corporate turnaround.
Financial Controller for several divisions/subsidiaries of an international, publicly-traded, Australian-based construction services company.
Fresh out of Law School and Business School I went to work for the Aquila construction industry division of what is today the largest natural resource company in the world, BHP/Billiton. We had construction and construction services subsidiaries in Asia, Australia and North America, many of which were under performing. I became, more through accident than intent, the group’s turnaround controller.
For several years I traveled from subsidiary to subsidiary developing and implementing financial reporting systems working closely with the division CFO so that everyone filed comprehensive monthly financial reporting packages with the Australian head office.
I learned the discipline of compiling financial reporting packages to strict monthly deadlines regardless of the country, the culture or the type of business. I learned how to tailor financial management reporting packages to the exigencies of each individual business so that they provided useful operational performance information while complying with the statutory requirements of both the local jurisdiction and the Australian accounting standards.
I was fortunate to have bosses who were highly skilled and patient and nurturing.
Debtor side turnaround – My preferred role is to be hired to turn the company around at the nadir of the crisis and then to shepherd the company through an out-of-court creditors moratorium and ultimately return the company to profitability.
This isn’t a job for the faint of heart because it involves immediately stemming the hemorrhaging cash, instituting a good daily cash management system and quickly negotiating additional financing to create enough time to address the underlying issues that have eroded profitability.
Once the additional financing is in place (often it is a hard asset or Receivable facility or a facility supported by some outside collateral) you have to transition to tackling the operational issues to return the company to profitability. This can be intellectually challenging and invariably involves developing and implementing financial management reporting systems to, among other things, monitor the efficacy of the turnaround initiatives.
The skillset to successfully negotiate this stage of the turnaround is entirely different from that required at the early/crisis stage. Here you have to foster collaborative relationships with the sales, operational and production folks in order to develop sound strategies to move the company forward and back into profitability, all the while retaining the confidence of the moratorium creditors if you are in an out-of-court situation.
Creditor side consulting – I’ve been chair of various creditor committees both in Chapter 11 situations and in out-of-court situations. I’ve been the court appointed consultant in Chapter situations.
I’ve provided expert witness testimony, and been retained by the senior bank lender (usually a commercial bank) to advise the bank on next steps/viability analysis e.g. do they stay the course and provide additional financing, or do they foreclose?
Out-of-court Workouts under auspices of CMA Moratorium – By the time under-performing companies recognize the depth of their problem it is often too late and too expensive to file and conduct a Chapter proceeding. A way to avoid the expense of a Chapter filing and the cumbersome slow-moving nature of Chapter, is to do an out-of-court workout under the auspices of the CMA.
The way this works is that a creditor moratorium is declared by the Trustee/CMA. The CMA receives a UCC security interest over all the moratorium debt, and the company with the moratorium in place now has a certain amount of breathing room to identify, address and rectify the issues that caused it to fall into default in the first place.
Because it is ‘out-of-court’ the creditors’ forbearance under the moratorium is consensual (rather than imposed as it is in Chapter); thus the credibility of the turnaround specialist is critical to this process being successful. I developed an expertise at organizing and executing these kinds of out-of-court workouts, and enjoyed considerable success in relation to many of them.
Anatomy of a turnaround – a solvency crisis of one type or another causes the bank/senior debt to declare a default, which gets resolved by the company agreeing to hire a turnaround specialist (me) who comes in and immediately negotiates additional financing to create runway so that the underlying operational issues can be identified, addressed and rectified.
In the crisis/early stage of the turnaround (the darkest period) an austerity program of some kind is quickly instituted and daily cash management is king. Once the refinancing package is in place, the underlying causes of the solvency crisis are identified and addressed.
The causes run the gamut from situations where the company hasn’t kept up with evolving industry technology or technological advances have obsoleted the industry, to (more commonly) situations where the company principals have failed or ignored their stewardship responsibilities in one form or another.
E.g. in one company in which I was installed as the turnaround specialist by the senior bank lender, the company principals (the sons of the original founder had developed profligate lifestyles) had burned their manufacturing facility to the ground, absconded with the insurance proceeds, stolen their employees’ pension funds, and quickly fell into default with all their lenders.
This type of situation, although dramatic, is more common than one might imagine.
I’ve done quite a lot of capital formation and capital structuring work, primarily for startups but also increasingly for established companies that have gained a commercial foothold but raised most of their capital without regard to the securities laws.
They often have a need for additional expansion capital and have exhausted their friends & family capital sources, necessitating them to approach more sophisticated investors. Before they can access more sophisticated capital – they usually want to raise capital using the Reg. D safe harbor exemption to registration – their existing capital structure has to be revised and they have to be brought into compliance with the securities laws.
I assist them in working through this process, thus readying them for more professional capital. As part of this I’ve become a ‘one-stop PPM shop’, penning business plans, assembling multi-year financial projection models, negotiating the terms of the Series A Share Purchase Agreement and then writing the Agreement itself, generating the pitch decks, cap tables, and due diligence documents.

A few years ago I founded a natural organic beverage company. Bucha, a good tasting kombucha began in my kitchen as a result of my dissatisfaction with the commercial kombucha that I’d been purchasing up until that point. Today Bucha is a national brand sold in many places in the US through Whole Foods, Kroger and Vons/Safeway and even Costco in some areas, and throughout Canada.

EDUCATION.
High School: St. Ignatius College, Riverview , NSW, Australia. Matriculated in top 10% of class, and obtained a full Commonwealth Academic Scholarship to University
University Degrees: both from the University of New South Wales , Sydney, Australia
- B. Com [Bachelor of Commerce] specialty in Accounting and Finance
- LL.B [Bachelor of Law] specialty in Business and Tax Planning
INTEREST.
Back in the late 90’s I developed what has become a life long interest in Open Source software. I met, over the internet, the Open Source evangelist, Bruce Perens. Bruce is considered one of the founders of the Open Source software movement, and was the person who announced and explained to the world the concept “Open Source”.
We formed an Open Source incubator in 1999 called The Linux Capital Group. The concept was to develop a series of startups to develop and commercialize various strands of Open Source software. Our inaugural startup was Progeny Linux Systems. I was one of the founders of this company along with Ian Murdock, the original founder of the Linux distribution Debian (a concatenation of Debbie, Ian’s wife at the time, and Ian’s first names).
Based in Indianapolis Progeny developed and upgraded many aspects of Debian and went on to provide Open Source consulting to companies across the US. Our biggest customer was Hewlett Packard (“HP”). Progeny built out HP’s Open Source capability over a period of years, employing about 15 Open Source software programmers.
Progeny, despite the large amount of software it developed, never managed to brand itself separate and apart from its largest customer, HP, and consequently it closed its doors after about 8 years. Many of its alumni went on to larger and far more exotic positions in the Tech sector e.g. Ian Murdock became the VP for Cloud Computing at Sun Microsystems. The Debian distribution itself is freely available on the internet, robust and very widely used. In fact it is the 3rd largest community distribution on the planet. You probably use it or a derivative of it daily.
We started a couple of other Open Source companies through Linux Capital; one was in the field of encryption; another was a certification authority. Neither caught fire, primarily because Linux Capital ran out of money. Despite the lack of commercial success of most of these Open Source startups, I learned valuable lessons, and were I to have the opportunity, I would do it all again.
What did I learn? I learned that a group of motivated individuals who have a common cause (such as creating a free Operating System) can collaborate and work together, donating their time and efforts, and the result can be enduring and can change the world.
Over the past few years my wife and I have become interested in Sustainability. Sustainability is a big word and it encompasses a whole variety of things from sustainable development, sustainable building, sustainable agriculture, sustainable consumption, energy generation, fresh water, food, as well as many social and economic aspects. I like Wikipedia’s simple definition …. “sustainability is improving the quality of human life while living within the carrying capacity of supporting ecosystems.”
So how do we practice sustainability in our everyday lives?
Apart from having a certain political outlook, we try to do practical things….like grow an organic garden….lots of fruit trees and many different types of vegetables. We find this healthy, relaxing and it retains our connection with the soil. We try to limit our consumption to minimize our ‘footprint’. I try to reuse things rather than always purchasing something brand new. And we have set the stage to build with hempcrete in California – the first permitted hemp construction on the West Coast.
We use energy efficient appliances. We believe that economic development does not have to mean pollution and environmental degradation. I guess it’s an overall ethic where we believe that we should act responsibly and that each of us has planet stewardship obligations (that’s a bit of a mouthful).
What are you doing to ensure you leave the world a better place for your children and those that come after you?
My wife and I have a large organic garden that we’ve built and added to over the years. It continues to develop and get more interesting each year.
We have approximately 75 fruit trees, including guava, peach, pomegranate, plum, avocado, fig, lime, blood orange, lemon, grapefruit, loquat, pear, tangerine, and macadamia.
We also grow a lot of herbs and vegetables, both in summer and winter; everything from lettuce, mustard, garlic, potatoes, Japanese eggplant, beetroot, strawberries, tomatoes, cucumbers, squash, zucchini, peppers, beans, chard, cilantro, acorn squash, etc. Some are grown in raised beds. Many are grown in our regular soil. Here are some photos –
My avocations include reading, travel, carpentry and physical exercise. My wife and I have traveled extensively over the years and try to get in one or two overseas trips each year. Her family lives in Germany and mine live in Australia so we visit those places pretty regularly, but increasingly we like to visit third world countries, particularly those with cultures different from ours.
Recently we spent a couple of weeks in Panama and included in that trip was quite a bit of time living at a howler monkey preserve in the mountains, completely off the grid, in a bamboo hut in the jungle. It was fantastic. The monkeys, one of which draped himself around my wife’s neck adopting her for the duration of our visit (it was hard to leave), are highly intelligent, mischievous, affectionate, and noisy.
We met some of the local indigenous tribe, the Bugle, and traded for some local hats woven out of a particular species of Palm native to the area.
Meeting the local indigenous folks was depressing. Their living conditions were minimal; the men spend most of their time laying around in the village drunk on locally brewed corn alcohol….what the locals call (roughly translated) “fruit of the witch”; the work is done by the women; most of the adults are both illiterate and speak only their indigenous language. Some of the younger folk at least speak Spanish.
Without fluency in Spanish there’s little hope for them to break out of their cycle of poverty. In all, a pervasive sense of hopelessness…..not that different from indigenous peoples in many other parts of the world. Trading with them, as we did, is at least a way of according them ordinary human dignity.
It was a similar experience, though the living conditions are less harsh in Panama, to parts of Zambia, Zimbabwe and Swaziland in Africa. The way to connect is by trading/bartering with them. Below are a couple of photos from Panama.




