Unfulfilling executive career? Transform it before it traps you.

When a family crisis took me out of school at 14 to get a full-time job, it sparked a journey across many industries, roles, and nations.
 
Office work, construction, and self-employment in Australia. Study in the UK. Ministry in Africa. Sales and executive roles in the US. And yet others.

I led the transformation of Arby’s to become one of the world’s fastest-growing restaurant chains. Rated in the Top 10 of over 3,000 franchise systems in the US, with a new location opening every 39 hours. 

When a takeover harmed the culture, I resigned to find a meaningful new path. But then my income was nearly tripled and I stayed on. 

Two years later, I resigned again, to buy or create a business aligned with my values.
I sought strategic, executive-level career support. And couldn’t find it. 

In that gap, I finally recognized my calling. So in 1992, I became a pioneer in this field. 

In 2014, a failed project left us with inadequate capital, and I turned the business over to a consortium of colleagues and clients. They closed it in 2016. In the meantime, I had created and launched a more resilient model. 

Today, our stressed societies desperately need more leaders motivated and able to reform management structures that undervalue higher needs and promote lower ones. 

If you’re ready to reimagine what your career can be, and to align it with your best contributions, there has never been a better time to do so. 

Let’s explore what’s possible. 

📅 Schedule a conversation: https://rjacareers.com/schedule-a-call-rj/

Russell Johnson

Independent Consultant

Life Skills Group Australia

Technical, product and operational leadership at this EdTech start-up using technology to help classroom teachers bring emotional intelligence and other soft skills to their students.

- Improved CI/DevOps practices to increase release cadence from quarterly to fortnightly
- AWS / Node.js / React stack for web, mobile & desktop platforms

Co-Founder & Chief Technology Officer

datajuice.io

Datajuice looked to fill a gap in the market between Excel analysis and heavyweight analytics solutions. Responsible for product prototyping, pricing discovery, and financial modelling.

Co-Founder

Vocus Communications

Stepping back. Responsible for the digital experience of 2000 Vocus employees across ~20 offices and numerous acquired companies & collaboration platforms.

- Defined a new digital workplace strategy and gained complete buy-in for migration
- Replaced three Intranets with one and six knowledge management solutions with one
- Rolled out a Service Oriented Enterprise approach based on the Atlassian model, so that each team could set up a self-service portal for other staff, and search/browse for the expertise or information they needed

Digital Workplace Lead

Employee #11 of 2000. Responsible for technology infrastructure, application and product development, corporate IT, customer service delivery, billing and other business operations. 

- During my tenure, Vocus grew from < $10mn revenue to the fourth-largest telecommunications company in the Australia/NZ region with a market cap of $6bn. 
- Integrated eight acquisitions' worth of people, processes, products and systems into the IT department
- Developed strategy and architecture to support growth from 80 wholesale customers across six products to thousands of B2B customers buying complex modular products.
- Platform ownership of IAAS and security products; combined three cloud MSP technology stacks into one supported by a single team.

Chief Information Officer

Soul

Stepping up again to take extra responsibility for our Windows infrastructure. Plenty of project work integrating multiple infrastructure platforms into one with minimal downtime.

IT Operations Team Leader

Tech and Team Lead. Stepping up to take on extra responsibility for servers, storage, Solaris, Linux, Backup, monitoring, SRE.

Unix & Applications Team Leader

Team and Tech Lead for the BSS suite of applications. Java/J2EE, Weblogic, JBoss, Oracle.

- Architected and built a virtual ISP platform in my spare time, migrating hundreds of thousands of users from acquired ISPs.

Applications Team Leader

Stabilised the BSS suite of applications and optimised a lot of gnarly SQL. Oracle, Weblogic, Solaris.

Senior Application Engineer

Tech veteran with over twenty years experience. I started in Linux and Solaris systems administration with a side of network engineering and front-end and back-end software development. After a few years working in MSP & other consulting, I moved into managing complex tech stacks from platform engineering up to enterprise-class middleware. Think storage; Cisco and Dell hardware; optimising Oracle, Postgres and MySQL databases; Weblogic and JBoss; all running the entire back office suite for a major national telecommunications company. In my spare time, I architected and built a white-label ISP solution used by almost a hundred thousand customers. 

The I joined Vocus Group as Chief Information Officer, employee number 11. Fast forward eight years and Vocus had 2000 staff and a $6 billion market cap; and I'd had the ride of a lifetime. It's impossible to summarise how much I learned supporting the business through every stage of that growth. I've pitched, hired, coached, architected, program-managed, integrated M&A, built ITIL... you name it, I probably did it at some point.

Since then, I've provided technical and operational leadership in two early-stage startups in the data analytics and edu-tech spaces. 

I enjoy tech and I stay up to date, but I also enjoy the human element. As a leader, I work hard to provide a workplace where technical people can flourish. I believe everyone deserves fulfilling work, and I make sure that happens within my teams.

taplio

The Battle

Russell Johnson

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