Little Boat Way

About

Hi there, I’m James Kahn. Welcome to Little Boat Way.

What is Little Boat Way?

I help businesses scale. If you need help with:

  • Leadership mentoring
  • Growing profitably
  • Scaling to an exit
  • Building effective management and operations
  • Setting culture
  • Building and scaling a sales and marketing function that works
  • Doing technology right in your business – including AI and cybersecurity

Or other advice – I can help.

I specialise in software, technology and services businesses.

My skillset includes a wide span of CEO & director skills – including culture, operations, sales, marketing, crisis management, negotiation, finance and technology.

I occasionally write articles about leadership, entrepreneurship, technology, and building good businesses. I share both my experiences and opinions. If you enjoy reading the articles, please subscribe to my email newsletter and follow me on LinkedIn.

Career

The majority of my career so far has been founding, growing and running a fast-growth, profitable IT services company in Brisbane, Australia – Idea 11. I started it in my late 20s, figured out how to differentiate it, scale it, and eventually shifted to a board director role and exited the business.

The company was highly awarded for growth, hitting the Australian Financial Review Fast 100 3x, CRN Fast 50 5x, and Deloitte Tech Fast 50 3x, as well as being awarded for our work, with CRN Impact Awards nominations.

Over the years there were also plenty of challenges we had to overcome, and while some of them were stressful at the time, in hindsight, solving the problems was how I learnt the most.

Earlier in my career, I had a series of technical & sales roles in the IT industry, from B2B software sales, to IT engineering and software development.

I’ve been lucky enough to have worked with customers across many industries – aviation, defence, finance, government, mining, manufacturing, services, software, and retail to name a few.

Qualifications

I have a BSc in Computer Science and a BCom in Information Systems from the University of Auckland.

I’m also a Graduate of the Australian Institute of Company Directors (GAICD).

What does Little Boat Way mean?

Little Boat Way is a play on words – Kahn means “little boat” in German.

The rest

I live in the Sunshine Coast of Queensland, Australia.

I have some limited availability for business advisory consulting, advisory boards, and non-executive directorships.

If you’d like to get in touch – whether about an article, or for an advisory/board opportunity – feel free to get in touch from the contact page or send me a message on LinkedIn.