Why Valont exists, told the way it actually happened.
Andrew Northcott
Founder & Chairman, Valont
The early years were what most owners will recognise. Every client hard won, every system built from scratch, every mistake a lesson paid for in full. There was no glamour and not much money. Just the weight of responsibility, and the hope that if I kept showing up, things would start to move.
By 2009 I was running a labour-hire business, and the numbers had turned. I remember sitting in a Verne Harnish session at Randwick, looking at our daily figures, and seeing it in black and white: we had more people employed in the office than we had workers hired out producing revenue.
I genuinely did not know how the business would survive. For weeks afterwards I woke during the night thinking it might fail — and everything it employed people to do, everything we’d built, would go with it.
We persevered. We rebuilt the operation around what the numbers were telling us, and the business went on to become one of the largest privately owned labour-hire companies in its market. In time, it sold.
Here is the part that matters. The thing I was proudest of was never the scale, and it wasn’t the sale. It was that it became a beautiful business — strong systems, strong operations, and a customer experience we cared about more than the next sale. A business that worked properly.
I know the weight of payroll, the burden of compliance, continually managing cash flow and risk. I know the loneliness of carrying it all. And I also know the relief when things finally move, when discipline and systems give you back control and show you what the business is capable of.
What changed my trajectory as an owner was access. Access to outstanding education and business thinking — the kind of thing I found in that Harnish room, and later in the Owner/President Management program at Harvard Business School. Large organisations buy that thinking as a matter of course.
For most SME owners it has been far harder to justify — not for lack of ability, but because the capability has never been economical at their size. That is the gap Valont exists to close: to make extraordinary business capability accessible to the owners who could never have justified building it themselves.
We understand because we have lived it. That experience is why Valont exists.
Valont brings specialist capability across Finance, People, Operations and Growth, coordinated by one Trusted Advisor who knows your whole business. Your payroll, compliance, finance, and operations in one connected view — not scattered across five logins — so you know exactly where you stand and what to do next.
You don’t need to figure out superannuation, BAS deadlines, and award rates on your own. Lean on a team that has already done it, for businesses like yours around the country. You still make the calls. You just stop making them alone.
And how far you take it stays your decision — build it bigger, make it better at the size it is, or set it up to run without you. We don’t arrive with a definition of success. You already have one.
“Valont exists to make more of that capability accessible, and to leave the decisions about what comes next with the owner.”
Valont comes from the Spanish volante , a flywheel. Jim Collins used the flywheel to describe how momentum compounds: at first the wheel barely moves, then each push builds on the last until the same effort produces more and more progress. Twenty years of ownership taught me how true that is, and how much lighter the wheel gets when you're not pushing it alone.
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