About the Founder

Jackson's career started at PricewaterhouseCoopers, where he trained as a Chartered Accountant across both audit and tax - the kind of grounding that teaches you to read a set of accounts properly. During that time, while still at PwC, he took on the Treasurer role for a local club in serious financial trouble, turning it from losing over $13,000 a month to breaking even within six months, just by getting the numbers right and making better pricing and spending decisions.

From there, he moved into industry, managing the finance side of a $600 million power station construction project for TransAlta Energy - tracking budgets, cashflow and reporting during a critical and expensive phase, before becoming the key financial contact across two operating power stations.

At 25, he decided to test everything he'd learned by building something of his own - converting an old bank building into Kalamunda's largest restaurant, a 350-seat venue with a team of 60+, open seven days a week for breakfast, lunch and dinner. Running the floor himself, not just the numbers, is what gives him a different perspective to most finance professionals - he's felt firsthand what it's like to make decisions under pressure, with real cashflow and real staff on the line.

The hardest lesson from that venture had nothing to do with the numbers. The wrong business partner, and no shareholders agreement in place for when things went wrong, ultimately led to his decision to walk away. It's a mistake he's seen far too often since, in all kinds of partnerships. When you're excited about the dream and working 15-hour days to make it happen, it's the urgent stuff that gets the attention - not the bigger, non-time-sensitive decisions that actually matter most. And the harder conversations often get put off, in the hope things sort themselves out. It's a pattern he's seen in business after business since.

That experience led to Crown Perth, where he worked across more than 40 different bars and restaurants, reviewing P&Ls and helping outlet managers understand their numbers well enough to act on them. Seeing that many different businesses up close - some thriving, some struggling with the exact same issues - is where it became clear: the fundamentals of a healthy business are remarkably consistent, no matter what's on the menu.

Jackson then joined Varsity Group as their first dedicated finance hire, building their reporting and budgeting from scratch. He guided the business through Covid, including the decision to open a new venue during shutdowns - a big call that paid off. Over the following years, he helped grow the company from under $5 million to a valuation north of $50 million, before leading the financial modelling, risk mitigation and legal groundwork for its successful sale. What followed was just as demanding - integrating two head offices across different states, aligning systems and processes that had grown up independently, all while protecting the culture that had made the business so successful in the first place.

Today, that same approach carries across a genuinely varied client base. Pound Group - a group of property and media businesses - were among his first clients when he started offering this kind of support directly, and they still are today. Since then, that's grown to include hospitality venues and sole traders running trades businesses too. The industries couldn't look more different, but the issues almost always do: pricing that doesn't reflect true costs, expenses that quietly grow while nobody's watching them, and owners who are excellent operators but don't have anyone to turn to for impartial financial judgement.

It's that mix - someone who's sat on both sides of the table, running a business and reading the numbers behind it - that shapes how Jackson works with every client today. Not another report to file away unread, but a genuine second opinion from someone who's actually lived through the decisions he's now helping you make.