WFH almost destroyed me: entrepreneur

Nicholas Beames sold his business for $100m. Despite that, he says working from home left his life a mess — and managers need to take a new view of employees.

Nicholas Beames, founder Rounded.

Nicholas Beames says that, despite having sold a business for $100m and embarking on another, working from home last year almost destroyed him.

He was running a new business – an accounting software firm called Rounded – and had the task of motivating his staff who were based in six countries.

“My wife was working full time, and my (three) kids, all in primary school, required deep focus,” says Beames. “Not only was I working from home, but my entire company overnight was working from home.

“The entire year of 2022 was a write-off for me. There’s probably quite a few people out there who are a bit like this. We might have survived Covid, but last year was just a mess because we had so many things impacting on our life and things (like the Ukraine war and interest rates) we can’t control.”

Nicholas Beames, founder of Rounded. Picture: Supplied

But companies, he says, need to recognise that Covid “is not over”, that WFH is the future and they must begin to trust people to deliver what they promise. Beames, who sold his first accounting software company Astute Payroll in 2016 for $111m, set up Rounded shortly afterwards. He calls it “Australia’s only accounting software for freelancers and sole traders” who unlike bigger firms do not need programs and systems that offer accrual accounting.

“Not only do they not want accrual accounting, but they don’t understand and it just messes with their lives,” he says “We’ve built around it.

“It’s a tool that should help people decide to change the way they work and move away from a post-Second World War” approach that stipulates attendance in workplaces. He notes, however, that the biggest barrier to working from home is the lack of trust from middle managers.

“We need managers to trust their staff to produce the outcomes that they have agreed to produce,” Beames says. “Trust that they can do it without having to be supervised”.

HELEN TRINCA