Catalyst featured on the Xero blog.

At the 2018 Women in Finance awards in September, I was honoured – and, given the high calibre of the other nominees, taken aback – to be named the Regional Professional of the Year. The award was a coup for the Catalyst Accounting & Tax team in Warwick and got me reflecting on our humble beginnings.

A place in the country

Catalyst was founded in Moura, a small coal-mining town in Central Queensland, Australia, in 2010. Our closest centres, Rockhampton and Gladstone, were both more than 170 km away. We initially operated out of an abandoned church hall and had just one large client, but our customer base expanded rapidly, partly because there was only one other accounting firm – who were very much ‘old school’ – located within 60 km. After four years building our business, Catalyst moved south to a new home in Warwick in South East Queensland, a rural town 130km from Brisbane. The shift was typically challenging but, having adopted Xero software early on, we retained all our clients.

Read more on the Xero Blog.