My biggest mistake: Diony McPherson, co-founder of Paperform

They’re now happily managing a $4.2 million business and four boys aged four and under, including eight-month-old twins. 

But when Diony McPherson and her husband Dean started Paperform as a side hustle in December 2016, their mission was to build a business that would give them time to raise a family — and the funds to afford a house in pricey Sydney.

Things got off to a promising start, with the pair able to quit their full-time jobs after six months to focus solely on Paperform, a platform which helps other businesses easily build interactive online forms.

But there was one rather large obstacle getting in their way: their mindsets.

The mistake

McPherson says the biggest error was assuming theirs could only ever be a lifestyle — rather than a growth — business.

“Even though our first kid wasn’t born until mid-2018, we were still in this mindset that ‘if we’re going to grow a family, then we can’t possibly grow a business’,” McPherson said. 

“Hustle culture” was everywhere, and because she and Dean valued their family, their community and a certain way of working, they believed they didn’t fit the mould as ‘business owners’. 

So for the first two years they toned down their ambitions, thinking they’d come at a cost to their future family. 

However by late 2018, the level of organic growth had forced things to a head.

“The business was requiring more work than we could do as two people,” McPherson said.

“So we had to think, OK are we going to put the brakes on and slow growth down and just enjoy it where it’s at, or are we going to lean into this even more?”

The pair came to an acceptance that they could still be ambitious and value their family — partly by working smarter, not harder.

They realised they’d always been a growth business; they’d just been resisting the idea.

“We unnecessarily held ourselves back.” 

The context

At the beginning, Dean, who McPherson describes as “a wonderful nerd”, was working as a full stack developer (he also has a degree in philosophy).

Meanwhile McPherson, who studied ancient history and a master of museum studies, was working as a manager for Google Arts & Culture — her first real foray into the tech field.

Both had loved their jobs, but saw an opportunity to eliminate much of the tedious, boring tasks involved, by setting up forms for businesses to automate such processes. 

Initially in the early days of Paperform, McPherson says she didn’t always feel comfortable in the tech startup they’d created.

“I psyched myself out of accepting that I could grasp concepts,” she said.

“It was specifically marketing in tech that really freaked me out, like what’s SEO … and keywords and how do I optimise for that and what’s the URLs that I need to put in there and the UTMs…

“The mistake I made was letting me make me feel like I was dumb, and I wasn’t.”

Meanwhile, venture capitalists had clocked Paperform’s success, and were asking questions such as: what do you want to do with the business, would you sell it, what are your future plans that might impact its valuation? 

Paperform resisted investment but McPherson says it made her think, “why wouldn’t I make this even bigger?”

The impact

McPherson says it’s difficult to gauge the impact of their mistake.

“We’re really happy with where we’re at now, but I suspect that we would be even bigger than we are if we had accepted that ambition,” she said.

“I don’t think we’d be doing anything different than what we have been doing if we’d had that realisation earlier, but we probably have started doing this stuff a year ago, 18 months ago.

“I think we could have grown faster; I think we probably would have even had more products available at this point.”

McPherson says as a ‘lifestyle’ business, they grew their annual revenue from zero to $420,000 in the two years to December 2018.

Since they’ve switched to operating as a growth business, they’ve multiplied that figure by 10, and now have 20 employees, and more than 7000 customers.

The fix

After their ‘a ha’ moment, the couple started putting measures in place to operate a high-growth business, but decided to retain their ‘family first’ values — for both themselves and their employees.

They created boundaries around their family time, and decided to delegate some important tasks.

“We have a nanny, we have a cleaner that comes once a week. We don’t have a yard at the moment. But when we did have a yard, we had a gardener,” McPherson said.  

“So we’re not superheroes. It was intentional … we sat down and planned what we needed.” 

As for the mindset change, McPherson says this has come with time, and the use of critical thinking.

To manage growth, Paperform has embraced new tools and services on the market, such as a product that helps the business manage the compliance issues of hiring international employees. 

The lesson

One of McPherson’s biggest lessons is that she should embrace, rather than shy away from, difficult challenges.

“The other thing I’ve realised is it’s actually detrimental to the business. 

“It’s detrimental not just to my own development and learning, but more importantly it hurts the business if, as a business owner and decision maker, I don’t step outside my comfort zone.”