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Renata Sguario - Unlocking Human Potential in Business - MaxMe

• Tom McGhie • Season 3 • Episode 1

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In this episode, Tom McGhie speaks with Renata Sguario, who left a 30–year corporate career to found MaxMe, a startup helping people build the human skills often missing from traditional education and workplaces. Renata shares her leap from executive life into entrepreneurship, the realities of being a first–time CEO, and why she is passionate about democratising soft skills training so everyone can thrive.

Episode Overview:

Renata reflects on her background in major corporates such as Accenture, British Airways, Telstra and NAB, and what ultimately pushed her to leave. Frustrated by cultures that sidelined people development, she decided to create a company that would put human potential at the centre.

 Now six years into running MaxMe, she explains the challenges of bootstrapping, the steep learning curve of sales and marketing, and how optimism and resilience kept her going. The conversation explores how MaxMe equips people with skills like communication, adaptability and emotional intelligence, and why these are fundamental to both personal success and organisational transformation.

Key Themes

Corporate to Startup: Renata grew tired of corporate environments where people’s leadership was undervalued. Moving from large firms to a tier–two company didn’t fix the problem, so she left to build MaxMe.

First–time CEO Realities: Bootstrapping meant investing her own funds and living with uncertainty. She had to learn fast, wear every hat, and stay optimistic despite constant setbacks.

Why MaxMe Exists: Many graduates use only a fraction of their technical training in the workplace, while employers struggle with staff lacking soft skills. MaxMe’s mission is to close that gap by building competence and confidence in everyone, not just those in elite programs.

How MaxMe Works: Learning is delivered in small, sustainable chunks embedded in daily work. Cohorts of around 30 participants build skills over time, with group learning emphasised because “humans are wired to be in packs”. Programs serve both large corporations like Deloitte and small businesses that pool staff together.

People and Culture Drive Success: Renata notes that most business transformations fail because leaders overlook the human element. Skills like trust, communication and collaboration determine whether change sticks. She shares examples from her career where focusing first on people delivered results faster than chasing KPIs.

Advice for New CEOs: She encourages leaders to stay curious, let go of what they “know”, and invest early in their people. When staff feel supported to grow and contribute, discretionary effort follows — and that drives the business forward.

This episode offers candid insights into leaving corporate life, starting a company from scratch, and why people and culture matter more than processes or balance sheets. Listeners will gain practical advice on leadership, transformation and the essential role of human skills in business success.

Speaker 1:

The human element is often at the center of challenges and solutions for CEOs. Today, I'm excited to be reconnecting with an old colleague who has left her corporate career to start a company, MaxMe that is tackling the development of human potential in businesses today. Renata Squario, it's so good to see you. I'm really looking forward to getting into this one. How about we start with why you would want to leave your amazing career to start MaxMe?

Speaker 2:

Thanks, tom, and thanks so much for having me on. I find that it's amazing to reconnect with old colleagues and have these conversations right, because we're all on our own journeys now, having left very similar situations. So corporate I had 30 years of corporate experience, amazing experiences, before I really decided to go out and start MaxMe. I will say I dabbled in a small business while I was in corporate. I actually took six months off in early 2000s to start a cafe with my mum. I know that's really random, but I'm actually a child of immigrants, tom, so I'm a Ukrainian born. My parents immigrated to Australia with me and they built a life and a storyline in Australia based on small business, and most of my family are small business owners. There's very, very few people in my family that have gone on to work in corporate roles and so me doing that was quite different and, I think, probably what my parents aspired for for me anyway. So I guess I was the good kid and I chose that pathway. But I did dabble once in small business before I ultimately decided to do that. You know the big jump off the side of the cliff and start Max Me, but my experience in corporate was was really amazing. I started at Accenture. I was an intern there. I was then offered a grad role, spent seven years there but decided management consulting was interesting but I wanted to work on the client side. And then I moved to London and I worked for British Airways, came back, worked for Telstra, worked for NAB for nearly 10 years and ultimately ended up at a company called Latitude Financial Services, which was a change for me.

Speaker 2:

Up until the point that I took the role at Latitude, I'd always worked for tier one companies and I became a bit jaded about the. I guess I've always been very servant, leader-like, like I've always wanted to do work that is, in service of other people, their potential, et cetera, and I always brought that mindset to every role I ever had. But as I got more senior it became harder and harder to do that, unfortunately, because I started to really work with a lot of people who didn't really see the world through the same lens as me and I started to really I thought, pollyanna-like that the more senior I got, the more people, like-minded people, I'd be working with. But actually it was less and less and less and so it ended up feeling like I was, you know, kind of wading through molasses and when I left NAB tier one, I thought, oh, I'm going to try tier two. Everyone says it's much easier to do really impactful work in that area and so I took on this role in a much smaller company.

Speaker 2:

I took on a very broad role, which is what I like doing. I'm a broad kind of person, got a lot of different roles and experiences under my belt, and so I took on this role and I thought, oh, this is going to be fantastic and I can drive impact. And unfortunately, that's not what happened, because I found the same challenges in terms of like-minded people and people that kind of saw it through a lens that was a little bit unique in terms of the way I was looking at the world, which is that we've really got to invest in our people and we've got to get them performing on kind of all cylinders at their highest potential, and then the rest of the business results kind of take care of themselves. But unfortunately, tom, that's kind of not the frame that most people think through, or at least certainly at the time that I left corporate. So I left to change that situation.

Speaker 2:

I actually left to create a company that could democratize the upskilling, the critical skills that people need to be successful, to be at their highest potential, but don't really get that upskilling. They don't get it through their education pathways, but they also don't get it at work, even though they need these skills to be productive and to get those great operational outcomes. Companies only invest in about 10% of people, leaders and people on talent programs. So I just intuitively knew that I couldn't keep on the hamster wheel. I needed to leave and do something that was impactful on a larger scale and global, because otherwise I was just going to really probably go postal. Actually, I got to that point where I was so frustrated and again, as I said to you, I thought tier two would be the answer and it wasn't the answer and so I thought I've really got to go and do something that really scratches my itch before I go postal.

Speaker 1:

Yeah, right, and so I guess you know making that jump to go and start up a business is not a you know it's not something to be taken lightly. It can feel very scary. You've got to be pretty, you know, conviction, focused to make that step, like a lot of people that I talk to that do it, you know, say that, feel that and by and large, I guess for the ETA community you know that we work with it's a similar concept right of becoming a CEO for the first time and everything else. How is that experience for you?

Speaker 2:

Yeah, yeah, it's been a really full-on. We're in our sixth year now. So I say to people I'm a workaholic by nature. I've always worked really, really hard and kind of really gone the extra mile over and over and over again and I'm, I feel really comfortable to say that. But I've never worked harder in my life than I have in the last five years. I've had very, very senior roles.

Speaker 2:

Stepping into the CEO role was not difficult from a leadership point of view because I feel like I've got the right leadership style suitable. But to have all of that responsibility and to understand that a CEO of a start-up doesn't mean you get to boss people around. It actually means you're everything to everyone. And for the first part of the journey it was me and one other person that was sort of helping me put a bit of the CX story together. So you're sort of doing everything, you're pitching, you're marketing. I had no idea about sales and marketing. Like I never worked in sales and marketing in my career. I always worked in operations, in risk, in tech, in delivery. I never had to sell anything, certainly never had to market anything. So that's kind of the voodoo that I never expected to have to learn and I had to learn it really fast. So, stepping into that kind of all things to all people, while being the CEO title, like what does that mean? Where are my people? Oh gosh, I don't have any people, it's just me myself and I and, like I said, one other person that was helping me, kind of tell the story of where Max Me needed to go, and so it was a real adjustment from the having lots of people to help me in whenever I needed it to kind of having to find that inner strength and that optimism day after day after day, when I decided to bootstrap my business which means I didn't go out and raise based on an idea I put my own money in and have pretty much bootstrapped the whole way, which has been a really big adjustment journey for me.

Speaker 2:

I was a high income earner and I've had to adjust to being a very low income earner because everything that I had was going into the business, so I wasn't taking anything out, it was all going in and having to show up and all of the disappointments and all of the no's, because you might have the best idea in the world, but not everybody thinks it's the best idea in the world, and so how do you convince people that what you're selling is indeed something that they want to buy, because that's ultimately what it is all about? And so a lot of adjustment, a lot of adjustment, a lot of learning, a lot of heartache, a lot of having to pick myself up and find those optimistic pathways. I'm lucky. I'm a natural optimist, actually, and wired to be optimistic, so that really helped.

Speaker 2:

I think those that are not naturally wired for optimism and might have more of that negativity slant, they really, really have to develop those optimism skills. They can be developed. It's something that Max Me focuses on helping people develop. But if you're not naturally optimistic, it's even 10 times harder, I think.

Speaker 1:

Yeah, we may as well go there now in terms of max me we've we've talked around it a little bit in terms of your new world, your startup, your baby a wonderful project.

Speaker 1:

What, what is it? How does it deliver and work and then ultimately like the. The one of the reasons I really wanted to talk, obviously, and reconnect and understand all of this is because I personally think there's a big connection between MaxMe and the ETA community more broadly, and so that's also unashamedly want to make that point clear as well. So tell us all about it.

Speaker 2:

Thanks, tom. And look, we live to serve people and their competence and confidence. That's really. You know, there's a lot of people going around without the requisite skills that they need to be successful. We over-index the importance of marks, rote learning and technical skills and really and you can do this test, anyone can do this test. Ask anyone what percentage of their university degree did they use day, one week, one month, one year, one of their working career?

Speaker 2:

Now, in specialised jobs, it's a little bit different. Okay, I get it, but in the more generic, which is probably 70 to 80% of university degrees, I get it, but in the more generic, which is probably 70 to 80% of university degrees, most people sort of uncomfortably shuffle and say, oh, maybe 10, 20% maximum. So what are the skills that we need? Well, they're these human skills that we don't ever get told we need. We certainly don't get taught them, and so we're not really work ready and employers are pulling their hair out going. Well, I've got the best of the best from universities and the best whams and the best this and the best that, but actually they can't, they don't land, they're not productive and I have to spend a lot of time skilling them and you know, et cetera, et cetera, which, if you're not on a grad program so a lot of grad programs really do put the kid gloves on and you sort of get the rotations and the upskilling, but that's only 4% of new starters.

Speaker 2:

So we've got 90% of people in organizations walking around with technical skills, yes, but without the skills that they need to work well together to be productive, to be able to be emotionally intelligent. And we know EQ is a big determinant of success. It sort of represents about 58% of the skills that we need at work. About 58% of them are EQ skills, but we never taught them. So MaxMe is there to really help up skill quickly but sustainably. So we're not the sort of organisation you'd bring in to run an all-day workshop and consider your people done and back to work. That doesn't work. So we've brought a lot of research to our flows and to our products and we have definitely found through that research that adult learning needs to be in the flow of work and it needs to be micro and reinforcing, so it needs to be accretive over time.

Speaker 2:

So we've we've designed programs and we're running them very successfully with clients, where we're getting people upskilled over time and we build over time so that when they start it's great, In the middle they're starting to get it, but by the end they're like, ah, this is amazing. I now understand what you've tried to teach me. I've got these new skills and I'm feeling great about myself and my readiness to then not only go and do my job better but also keep learning, Because that's the other thing that's really missing In the rote learning pathway to the world. We feel like we're done, Like we leave university and, oh my God, we've got all the skills. Now we're ready to go.

Speaker 2:

Actually, it's just when the learning starts and we haven't created that muscle to unlearn and relearn In young people in particular, like they're so knowledgeable and they've got so much information flying at them, but they're so at the basics and really don't have that ability to fail fast, learn, unlearn, you know all of that kind of stuff that we really need in the modern workplace. So MaxMe inculcates quite quickly for a very affordable price and we give people back to you with some tools and techniques that we leave you with as well, so we really get people upskilled. We work one-on-one with people, of course we do that, but we also work in groups as well, so we know people like to learn in groups. Single stream learning is great, but it's boring, so most people give up on it pretty quickly. Most humans are wired to be in packs. They like to learn in groups. We like it to feel like training. So we've really harnessed all of that knowledge and research and we've brought some great programs to the market.

Speaker 1:

So in that context you're working with people broadly. Is that applicable more to a smaller, a mid-size, a large business, where it really just doesn't matter? How do you see that market fit in terms of if I was again putting myself into the first-time CEO role? I'm scrambling to do all of those different things and I'm actually thinking about my people as part of that like what size does it help? At what stage does it help in the context of the delivery of those programs?

Speaker 2:

It's a really good question, tom, and it's an unhelpful answer when I say we can be everything to everyone and that's normally not helpful to most people. But we really, we truly live democratisation, which means it doesn't matter who you are. We should be able to bring the high quality upskilling to you. Now. We've run programs for Deloitte. We've also run programs for 50 people organizations, and the reason is exactly in the question that you asked is the skilling that's required is required by humans, regardless of the sort of company that you work for. And if we're going to be truly living the democratization ethos, then we need to find ways to bring the sort of skilling that's normally not available to smaller companies. We need to find a way to bring it to them and we have so normally we work with. So we run programs of about 30 people per stream. Yeah, that's normally our sweet spot Between 30 and 50, we can run it face-to-face, we can run it virtual.

Speaker 2:

Now, if you're a company that doesn't even have 30 people, then we run our Human Skill Academy program and we run this very, very successfully overseas at the moment, but also in a couple of pockets in Australia, where I might be a small business with five people that I want to upskill, and so if we can get you know a whole lot of small businesses to put five people into a program, we kick the program off Now. The exciting thing, of course, is that as a business owner, I'm getting my people through a high quality learning experience, but I'm also helping them create connections and network outside of the organization. So our programs help to create community and connection with humans across organizations, and so it feels like very uplifting and connected and people you know feel that there's real purpose behind the programs as well. So we get a lot of really fantastic feedback around our ability to galvanise smaller groups of people into a collective that then learn together for a number of weeks.

Speaker 1:

I mean, I'm just going to put this out there, but we work together in the capacity of transformation work Coming from different perspectives. Your technical background was always well is, frankly, so much better or more attuned to that than mine, but I guess what I learned through our time together and where I can see a really strong connection point here, is that in any change environment you quickly end up in cultural change centered around people that has been run by its founder, potentially, or you know somebody else that you're walking into to be essentially the managing director, ceo, for the first time. You know, more often than not, there is always going to be an incredible amount of cultural change and just people change in that experience of transition. Tell me about that from your perspective of just you know. This isn't about necessarily people that have just left university. This is the change environment and your experience of it. How does that land with the way in which you're delivering these programs?

Speaker 2:

Thanks, tom. It's a really good question. And people say to me oh, you're a university upskilling company. Well, yes, but we're so much more and, as I said to you, we ran a very successful whole of cohort program at Deloitte. We touched 1600 people a year. It was in their senior consultant level. So these were people that were kind of five to seven years into their career sometimes earlier, depending if you're an early promote but also they're experienced hires. So they would bring people with 14, 15, 20 years experience out in industry and they would bring them in at this level. That's just how they operated. So we had a really eclectic group of people that we would upskill and the testimonials that came back from that program really buoyed our thinking around that. We've really nailed it here because we took a group of very, very diverse people across, not only gender and all sorts of diversity, but also age diversity, and we were able to bring them together into this learning cohort. So that definitely I should say that right up front. But back to your question around culture so I am a business transformation geek. So that definitely I should say that right up front. But back to your question around culture so I am a business transformation geek?

Speaker 2:

Yes, and I've done some pretty big business transformation and you know the statistics are out there, so this won't be new, but perhaps the listeners haven't heard this that upward of 70% of transformation fails. Right, a very, very significant portion of very expensive transformation fails and fails to realise business benefit. It's not because we don't develop great processes, it's not because we don't do great tech change. It's because we fail to change the people and their way of working, their mindsets and behaviours towards the change. And it's because change management is always seen as the fluffy stuff, the thing that you know. Oh my God, you want to spend what on change management. And we have to constantly remind people that actually the change is affected and the business benefits are realised when people are changed towards a new way of working. Now, that often is very little about the technical skills that they need and very much around the new mindsets and behaviours, and so for us, that definitely sits in the world.

Speaker 2:

And you use the word culture? It definitely. The word culture just literally means how do we do things around here, and so ways of working is very much a metaphor for culture. And you know I'm actually at the moment helping an organisation with their business transformation challenges. The biggest problems that we're facing into are human to human dynamics People who don't understand each other, who don't know how to work well together. They don't know what their strengths and derailers are collectively. They definitely don't know how to communicate well with one another. There isn't trust and rapport, there isn't any kind of innovative thinking. It's all blocked and it's all blocking type of behaviour. This business transformation will never succeed unless we change the people and the way they work together.

Speaker 2:

And so you're coming into a new organisation. If you're coming into an existing organisation, not building it right from scratch, you're going to be facing into a group of people who are looking at you going do I trust you or don't I? That's the first and fundamental question they're going to ask. If you want to build your own culture and a way of doing things in an organisation, then you've got to build trust and rapport. You've got to build skills around communication, healthy conflict and then help people to feel really committed and accountable to what you want them to do. You can't just will that. You can't dictate that. You can't demand that you. You can't just will that. You can't dictate that. You can't demand that. You have to build that through upskilling and connection and we've done that so successfully with several really significant organizations because I come at it from a transformation lens with those organizations is you're trying to transform the company. It won't work unless you transform your people and upskill them.

Speaker 1:

Yeah, fantastic, coming back to some of your experiences of being a CEO for the first time, with everything else and I suppose that affinity for the change of coming out of a corporate life to become that, because it is quite often the path that we see a lot of people, particularly in traditional search but also other forms of the entrepreneurship through acquisition community, how does that resonate within the programs that you you know that Maxime are running, but I guess for your own experience of that transition, the scariness, the challenges, all of those bits and pieces like how does it all come together for a CEO and where should they specifically put their people agenda in kind of their long list of to-dos?

Speaker 2:

Yeah. So I think let's decouple the CEO themselves and the people that work for them. I think as a CEO going into any new way, so coming from corporate to startup, one of the things that you have to really let go of is what you know. It's really difficult to do that, particularly the more senior you get, the more wedded we become in our experience and what we know and we know this works and that doesn't work. One of the biggest adjustments I had to make was to suspend what I already knew and to become really curious, and curiosity is actually not one of my strengths, it's kind of it sits in the middle of my strength set. So I had to be really humble to say I need to move away from being the boss or the highly paid executive that's revered around my knowledge and stuff and I actually have to just be really curious and assume I don't know and be really open to learning. I think that's a really difficult transition that I've seen really make or break this sort of corporate to another way transition in my colleagues, and most of my colleagues have gone back to what they know because it was just too hard. It was too hard to transition from corporate to government or from corporate to startup. It was too hard to transition from corporate to government or from corporate to startup and so they just go back to corporate because it's what they know and the pay packet's good and blah, blah, blah, whatever. So I think that, as a leader going into any new situation, it's really around the skill set that we need to develop and the confidence and the humility around that transition.

Speaker 2:

In terms of the people agenda, I mean, I've always known this and I definitely know this from running Max Me is this company survives because of the sheer will and work of my people. Like if I was to put the people agenda down and go oh, but it's about my, you know my balance sheet, or it's about this, or it's about the sales, or it's about it's actually about the people that come to work every single day and for them to give the discretionary effort to run your business the way you would and I always, really I always used to look at that as a mark of great success for me. If I could get my team in corporate to run our business unit like it was their own money and like it was their own business, I felt that I had succeeded, that they were giving discretionary effort. They really cared about the consumer outcome, all of those things. Right, the money that we're spending, we're spending like it's our own business. What are we going to spend our money on, kind of thing.

Speaker 2:

And I've definitely been able to affect that in MaxMe as well, because my company and my startup could not run unless that every single person in MaxMe knew what they needed to do and came and were willing to learn and fail and give discretionary effort and bust their chops to bring our vision to life. That's why I started with people. I built my company based on people and their ethos and their psyche and the way they would work together. We've done a lot of team building work and culture. Work together because if they turn up at their best every single day, giving the most of themselves, then the company does well. If they don't, then the company doesn't do well. It doesn't matter how many amazing processes and balance sheets and you know sales frameworks I have, Without my people I can't do it.

Speaker 1:

Yeah, and I mean it's well put, well said, but you know, often just gets missed in that context of you know, I didn't start with a blank sheet of paper when you're coming in and buying a business. So therefore I've got to deal with what I've already got, but actually I'll deal with that tomorrow, because the first. Therefore, I've got to deal with what I've already got, but actually I'll deal with that tomorrow because the first thing I've got to do is actually just focus on sales. I've just got to focus on this other bit, you know, in the long list of things I've got to do. But actually until you get the whole piece running, based on culture or based on you know any other metaphor you want to use for it, you're not going anywhere, right?

Speaker 2:

No, 100%. I mean, I do want to use my experience at Latitude. So when I went into Latitude, I actually was brought in to set up shared services and it was six disparate business units that were brought together under one umbrella and declared as shared services. Yeah, so I guess it could be like a like-for-like metaphor for a start-up, like actually picking up a business that is existing. It was a small team probably, I don't know 40, 50 people, I can't remember exactly how many and I was told to go and run it and fix it because we never had a shared services, but they formed it as a shared services. They brought me in as the leader and it was, you know, kind of really not working well.

Speaker 2:

One of the first things that I did was work out what good needed to look like in each of the functions and to actually get up my people to either lean in, buy in actually didn't change the functions at all, I just worked out what were the functions and who were the people in them. We looked at the functions and we said, okay, what does good look like in these functions? What do we need? North star type of stuff, and then we painted a picture for the people on where we were headed and we'd said to them we're going to get behind your upskilling because you're not where you need to be yet, but we're going to get behind you and fully subscribe to the value that you're going to bring. Fully subscribe to the value that you're going to bring. But here's the bus. It's moving in that direction. You either get on the bus or you self-select out, and we did that.

Speaker 2:

The people work was the first thing that I did in my team before I changed anything, and we got 60% of the way there by just the sheer will of the people who bought into the fact that I believed in them. I subscribed to the potential that they had. They weren't quite at where they needed to be and we got them there in the end and we really, really got behind them and that really got us there. In terms of all of the plans, I needed to take a million dollars out of the cost plan. I need all these things right. I've got all these KPIs assigned to me, but I started not with those KPIs. I started with my people and they helped us get there.

Speaker 1:

Those KPIs, I started with my people and they helped us get there. Yeah right, yeah, fantastic. Look, I think from my perspective, that's a fantastic explanation of what you're doing, how you're doing it, but also the importance of it and, I suppose, really diving into something that often gets left, as you said, as a day agenda somewhere, or put on a.

Speaker 2:

We'll get to that. We'll get to that right.

Speaker 1:

Yeah, yeah, we'll cover that off next month, or you know, it's a footnote to the board report or something.

Speaker 2:

Tom, they're our biggest asset. If you look at the balance sheet, our people are the biggest asset on the balance sheet, unless you're a high manufacturing company where you've got a whole lot of equipment as well. But the cost of our balance sheet the biggest proportion sits with our people. They're our biggest asset. So why is it that we think that we can get our companies firing on all cylinders without addressing and upskilling and fully utilising our biggest asset? It's ridiculous.

Speaker 1:

Yeah, it is Absolutely, and I guess to that point, though, the leaders themselves have got to have that curiosity that you talked about to know where their skill sets sort of fall and lie, or the edges of their capability themselves to be able to sort of bring some of that external support or help in to kind of drive and improve. Yeah, it's a really fascinating piece. I'm very much looking forward to seeing more of what you do over the course.

Speaker 2:

Thank you again for the opportunity to connect and talk about what we do and I mean what you're doing in the community you're serving is very, very exciting. It's such an important. You know, small business is the lifeblood of our economy, of our country and the work that you do to really kind of help that high-performing pathway is fantastic, fantastic.

Speaker 1:

No, it's an exciting group of people and we all love to get behind it. We're looking forward to getting everybody together again this year in September, which is only now a few weeks away. So looking forward to that, and no doubt also to the years to come. So it's not going anywhere, indeed, fantastic Thanks, renata, and look forward to catching up. Well, actually, I should also say if people want to get in touch with you, how is the best way of getting in touch?

Speaker 2:

Well, you'll find us at wwwmaxmecomau, but you know, please, email, reach out. Happy for you to email me directly. It's renata at maxmecomau. We also have a, you know. If you don't want to email me directly, you can find us at hello at maxmecomau and we'd love to organise a conversation. We really love to get to know the organisations we work with and really give them what they need. So we do take time with all of our clients to really understand, regardless of your size, because we know that your challenges are the same regardless of your, your five people or 500 people. You've got people, stuff that you're thinking about, so we really love to to have a conversation and to see how we can help perfect.

Speaker 1:

Thanks again. Thanks again for your time today, Renata See you very soon.

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