We always thought we were going to make it. That probably sounds a bit ridiculous considering the number of times we nearly didn't, but lack of ambition was never really our problem. We always had ideas that were bigger than the company. One of my business partners once described Tall Emu as running on “the smell of an oily rag that everyone else had already sniffed”.
Tall Emu started in a spare room after the dot-com crash. We tried a few things before settling into CRM, workflow and business process automation. A surprising amount of that business is really just selling common sense, which can command a reasonable price because, as it turns out, common sense is bloody rare. I don't mean our customers lacked common sense — far from it. I mean a lot of software gets built without the little things that just make sense when you're actually running a business, and that was always the bit we ended up building.
The business changed a lot over the years. What we sold changed, what customers wanted changed, technology changed, and we changed with it. The one thing that didn't really change was the tendency to think big. There was always another thing we wanted to build, another problem we thought we could solve, another part of the business we thought Tall Emu should be able to handle.
Over the years, people came sniffing around Tall Emu. Then one of those conversations mentioned MYOB, and suddenly it was different. MYOB made enormous sense to us. We worked in and around their customer base, our software solved problems their customers had, and after 20 years of hard work we thought: this is it. We’ve finally made it. Big company, big customer base, lots of resources. We're going to make Tall Emu enormous.
I was probably a little overexcited, but one exec put it quite succinctly: “There’s 1,800 people working at MYOB. They don't all work for you, Mike.”
The bit I hadn't really thought through was that Tall Emu had been my number-one priority for 20 years, and it honestly never occurred to me that once it was part of MYOB, it wouldn't be everyone else's number-one priority too.
The CEO who bought us had one strategy. A new CEO came in with another. When something has been your obsession for two decades and suddenly it's sucking hind tit in somebody else's list of priorities, it's pretty hard to just shrug and get on with it.
Don't get me wrong, MYOB acted with honour. Selling the business was a hard call, and we kept waiting for the “gotcha”, but it never came. They did what they said they would do, and I don't regret selling to them. But they did teach me one thing: I am not cut out to work in a corporate.
So eventually I left, which was even harder than I expected. Tall Emu stayed behind and, for the first time in more than 20 years, I had nothing to do with the business I'd built.
In fact, I had nothing to do.
Then MYOB asked if I wanted to buy it back.
So I did.
Unfortunately, buying the business back and having everything magically become wonderful again wasn’t how it worked out. Tall Emu was on fire. Customers were pissed off and there were product problems. The next 18 months were basically a sustained exercise in saying sorry, fixing things, saying sorry for some other things, and trying to get customers believing in us again.
Eventually, we earned that trust back. The software wasn’t perfect, because software never is, but it was stable enough that we could stop spending all our time looking backwards and start building again.
And that mattered, because the ideas had never gone away.
Then AI happened.
For most of Tall Emu’s history there has never been a shortage of things we wanted to build. We were still the company running on the smell of the oily rag that everyone else had already sniffed. Every ambitious idea had to compete for developers, money and time with fixing bugs, supporting customers and all the other things required to keep a software company alive.
AI changes that equation in a way I don't think we've fully understood yet. Not because you can press a magic button and have it build a perfect software product — you very much can't — but because a small team can suddenly execute at a speed that would have sounded completely stupid a few years ago. We can explore ideas faster, build faster, test faster, chew through the tedious work faster and take on things that previously would have sat on the “yeah, one day” list for years.
And it has arrived at exactly the point where the business is ready for it.
Tall Emu has always been more than CRM. Stock, purchasing, operations and all the messy stuff that happens after you win the customer have been part of the product for years. The difference now is how much deeper and more polished those areas have become. What were once supporting capabilities are now much more complete parts of the platform in their own right.
We're also finally starting to market Tall Emu for what it actually is, rather than squeezing the whole thing into the CRM box because that happened to be the label we settled on years ago. That's why we're dropping “CRM” from the name.
We're just Tall Emu.
The funny thing is that this feels a lot like the early days again. The ideas are getting stupidly big.
After nearly 25 years of Tall Emu, I've built it, nearly killed it, sold the whole thing, left it, bought it back and spent a couple of years putting the wheels back on. Through all of that, the ideas were always bigger than the business.
The difference now is that the company is bigger, the product is stronger, and for the first time our ability to execute is starting to catch up with the ambition.
I was asked recently what I thought 2027 was going to look like. I don't have a sensible corporate answer for that.
2027 will be nuts.
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