Friday, 27 June 2025

Community Building

I started a Canberra security meeting in 2011 (now called CSides) and started BSides Canberra, the first Australian Security BSides conference, in 2016. Over the last 14 years of running community events in Canberra, I often get asked how to best build a community. So I thought I'd jot some thoughts down.

1. Build the community you want to be a part of. Don't see yourself as a facilitator or a leader. To truly last and love building a community, you have to enjoy going. You have to love the content and the people that you're with. 

2. Participate first. Before kicking off BSides Canberra I had volunteered at community conferences. I still low key volunteer at other grass-root conferences and attend as much as I can. Understand the industry until you know what's missing for you or what you would like to see.

3. Don't be afraid to be yourself. As you build your community you will get so much advice. You will be told more times that you can count that you're doing it wrong. "Too technical", "too high-level", "too short", "too long". Don't be afraid to be who you are. Embrace your strengths and what you love. I think managerial and policy conferences are so important - but I don't doubt if I tried to run one it would be an absolute flop.

4. Deadlines. Plan out your timeframes. Have deadlines for important milestones (Ticket sales, CFP open, CFP closed). When life gets busy, and it will since grassroot community work is almost always volunteer time, having these deadlines means you will make time to meet them.

5. Accept help & seek help. This is probably surprisingly the most tricky because the heart of community events, volunteers, can be unreliable as their professional and personal lives get busy. Don't be afraid to pay someone to help with admin. Even though I personally have never been paid to run grassroots events, I will admit that in the past 3 years we have paid notional amounts to younger people to do set hours on admin.

6. Thank people. Thank your speakers, your volunteers, people that promote your events. There is an army of people making the event happen. Although you may start it, although your name might be on the event contracts and you carry a bunch of personal risk - at the end of the day the success is due to the community itself. Never forget how much the community matters.

7. Pick a good cofounder. Huge thank you to my partner in crime and all things conferences Silvio Cesare. Without his good humour and absolute passion for all things community, I'm certain all our communities would have had less longevity. Pick someone you can trust, who will be there for the bad and good times and who loves it as much as you.

8. Have fun. Do it for as long as you have fun. If you stop having fun, stop doing it.

I hope this helps a little, if I think of anything else I'll add it in. Overall, I strongly recommend if you have any interest at all in this - to jump in and do it. The world needs more community builders. :)

BSides Canberra 2024 - Royal Theatre Track


Tuesday, 3 January 2023

CEO Life

It's been two years since I quit my job in Jan 2021 to run my own business InfoSect. I thought I'd do a blog post looking at my second year, but also step back to see my entire journey in running my own business.

Re-reading my first year blog here, I think the focus of the first year was space and infrastructure. Although space and infrastructure continue to develop and grow into my 2nd year, I think if I was to reflect on the year, our biggest focus was people. So I'll kick off analysing how this is going.

Staffing

Below shows the staffing numbers for InfoSect since I started in 2021. The grey line is the actual numbers at the end of each month. The orange line is the trendline. We've had steady team growth over the past two years and what is probably more significant is the demographics of our team is changing as we lean toward hiring more senior staff members. As we enter 2023, we're now sitting on the borderline of small vs medium business size.

I've managed some significant team sizes in my past roles, but growing a team from scratch for a new business is a completely different task. This year I learnt the lesson of ensuring you focus on the culture of your team at this very formative stage. The culture is driven from within the team, the people you hire and how they interact with others. Once outnumberd, the capability of leadership to influence culture becomes reduced. 

This twitter thread about the downfall of Atrium after raising $75M in venture capital commented on exactly the same thing: 

At Atrium, we hired too many people too fast and we failed to set a cohesive culture early. This is incredibly hard to change later on.

After a few challenging decisions and some help from our friends at The Expert Leader, InfoSect is entering 2023 with a solid foundation and strong culture focused on trust, respect and accountability. 

Space & Infrastructure

In July 2022 we expanded into another warehouse in our complex, more than doubling our space. This allowed us to physically separate the spaces we used for research vs where we conduct our training and community activites. Our larger, light filled classroom is shown during setup below (we've upgraded the chairs since then too).

The extra space was sorely needed. You can only imagine having upto 10 random students wandering through your workspace to head to the bathroom while trying to hold a customer meeting in the meeting room that is en route to the bathroom. Of course this kicked off another set of desk builds, new boardroom tables and all the stuff we had experienced in 2021. Fortunately for us, we have hired someone to do this for us now. We now have a Business Manager that manages our facilities, ensuring they are maintained and safe for use.

If I reflect on this, a side effect of getting bigger and having more people, something that seemed to take a year and a lot of focus, suddenly feels a lot smoother and easier (at least from where I'm sitting!).

Training

The number of training courses we deliver has stablised now. The chart below shows the total number of students taught over the past 4 years, and we see a smaller increase from 2021 to 2022, with 2022 accountable for 35% of training over the past 4 years. This was our training demographics from 2021.

Again, this seems to be a reoccuring theme, but with Silvio no longer the single trainer at InfoSect, these numbers felt a lot easier to manage in 2022. Also, the slow down in training growth and additional trainers has left Silvio and myself more time to focus on the research side of the busines.

Research

Research is such a loaded term, it can be used synonmously with "hack days" or "free learning", and I think using the terminology may have led to some expectation issues in 2022.

So to clarify, the research we do at InfoSect is highly directed. It has fixed deliverables and in 2022 was responsible for 63% of our revenue. Without a doubt, it is immensely fun and rewarding work. As an aside, if you're going to embark on starting a business, make sure its something you love to do. For us, we love and believe in our work, and so does the team.

A highlight for me in 2022, I was feeling rather flat and stressed after catching COVID-19 at KawaiiCon (always a brilliant conference). Silvio and I were quite sick and fell behind in a lot of work. It led to us having to convert our in person ticket to a virtual ticket for the inaugural Australian Defence Science, Technology and Research Summit (ADSTAR) conference in Sydney. Out of the blue I received a message from an ex-coleague and friend which is shown to the left.

Having our business mentioned by the Assistant Minister for Defence was definitely a highlight for 2022 - it was nice to see our hard work pay off with such recognition.

We aren't great at marketing and we certainly aren't paying anyone to assist with marketing (can you tell? :P). Our tact is to just do really good work and let that speak for us. And I think in this case it did.

2022 marked the end of our 18 month research grant from DST which we received in 2021, and the end of the project culminated with this mention and this story released on the 26th July 2022. DST decided to extend our contract by 18 months, so watch this space for more in 2023!

Overall, our research side is going great, with similar (less public) stories coming from our other research partners. Although training is extremely rewarding, if I was to predict our business growth in the next 2-3 years - I definitely imagine it will be in this space.

Business Direction

This post is already incredibly longer than it should be and I certainly haven't touched on everything achieved in 2022. But I really want to take a step back and look at the business side of things.

InfoSect by no means is a standard startup business. InfoSect was founded in 2017. Silvio and I grew the business slowly with focus really kicking in from Silvio in 2019 when he went full-time. I think at this point InfoSect was closer to a sole trader business until I moved to full time in 2021. Neither of us are entrepreneurs, instead we are a couple of nerds that wanted the freedom to focus on their passions. So take my analysis below with a huge grain of salt.

Harvard Business Review does a good post on the five stages of small business growth. At this point I would put InfoSect somewhere at the end of Stage II (survival) and heading into Stage III (success).

Stage III is the success stage before significant growth and its at this point the owner can choose either substage D or G (shown by the two blue arrows I've drawn in above. This choice is to disengage from the business management or continue driving the business, investing more into it.

Understandably, a lot of owners want to step back after the hurdle of survival has passed. Either to continue the business with some free time or to consider selling the business. However, in all honesty I believe it's unlikely that either Silvio or I will select the Success-Disengagement pathway because we enjoy the work far too much. (Case in point - wait to see us invest into our new x-ray machine this year!)

Overall

In reflection of 2022, I would advise anyone thinking of kicking off their own business that once the shine of doing something incredible wears off, there is a really hardwork and decision-making phase that follows. The decisions made at that point will affect the success or failure of your business. This phase is incredibly fun but also needs consideration and commitment.

My learnings from 2022:

  • Keep learning in areas where you are weak. Some of my favourtie resources in 2022 were:
  • Have trusted outside support and advice
  • Make friends with other small businesses, it makes the journey easier
  • Don't forget to look up, breath and enjoy the ride

Overall, would I do it again? 
To be completely honest, some moments in 2022 running InfoSect were hard and I reminisced about my old team and job. However, amongst the highs and the lows - and where the business is positioned right now at the end of 2022, it is undoubtedly still one of the best decisions I have made.