For Years I Thought These Were Two Separate Worlds

For most of my career, I worked at the intersection of strategy, operations and transformation, helping organisations navigate growth, complexity and change.

It started in Munich, where I studied Business Administration, and it took me through marketing and operations roles at companies like Infineon Technologies and Serviceplan Group, before an MBI at Macquarie University pulled me to Sydney and opened up an entirely different chapter. One of the defining moments of that career was leading strategy through one of the largest mergers in the legal industry, and then staying on to help integrate and scale the business afterwards. That work taught me more about organisational complexity than almost anything else I've done.

But there was always another thread running through my life, just as important to me, even if it wasn't my job title. Human transformation.

Two worlds I didn't try to connect

Long before Viveka existed, coaching, leadership development and personal growth were a genuine passion of mine, not something I discovered later for professional reasons. I've spent years investing in my own development, and I've experienced firsthand how the right coach, at the right moment, can fundamentally change the way someone leads, works and lives. I know that from the inside, not just as an observer.

For a long time, I saw these as two separate worlds, and I didn't try particularly hard to connect them. One was about helping organisations perform at their best. The other was about helping people become their best.

The problem that kept surfacing

Then, the more time I spent around coaches, trainers and experts, professionally and personally, the more I kept noticing the same thing in conversation after conversation.

Extraordinary professionals were changing lives, doing genuinely important work with real impact. But behind the scenes, so many of them were overwhelmed. By administration. By disconnected systems. By marketing they'd never trained for. By scheduling and invoicing, and by the constant, exhausting work of proving their own credibility to strangers online.

Too much of their time and energy was going into simply running the business, and not nearly enough was left for the actual transformation work they were built for.

I had spent my career solving operational complexity at scale. My real passion had always been human potential. Those were not two things.

Why 2017

That's when the two worlds finally connected, and I remember it less as a single lightning-bolt moment and more as something that became obvious gradually, then all at once.

So I built Viveka. Enterprise-grade infrastructure built around the actual needs of coaches, trainers and experts, so they can build credible, thriving businesses and spend far more of their time doing the work they were called to do.

We're now home to more than 3,500 vetted coaches worldwide, which still genuinely surprises me some days when I think back to where this started. But the reason for building it hasn't changed at all.

Sources and further reading

1. About VivekaViveka
2. Viveka on WefunderWefunder