After 60,000 years, we’re an overnight success.

1825 nights is a lot of time to think about your business.

You wonder where the next jobs are coming from, wonder how to attract amazing staff to your own organisation and wonder how your tax bill still looks so daunting at the end of each quarter.

Five years ago, Pipeline Talent was born on a kitchen table in Jerrabomberra, just outside of Canberra.

I had quit my job as CEO of the Australian Indigenous Leadership Centre after training more than 5000 leaders across the country.

Corporate Australia was leading the way, hungry for more Aboriginal and/or Torres Strait Islander staff, but unable to find them. Indigenous leaders were blowing out my contact book – with the skills and experience that would equip them for senior roles, but without the traditional career patterns and networks that linked them to corporates.

There was a critical piece of the jigsaw missing – a company which could link Indigenous managers and executives ready to be appointed on merit to the organisations keen to employ them.

There were a number of great Aboriginal companies working in labour hire, but there was not one Aboriginal person in executive roles at Australia’s top 200 ASX companies and few in leadership roles in government departments.

And boards – don’t get me started on Boards! Corporate Australia had widely and enthusiastically embraced the need to contribute to closing the gap and provide opportunities for Aboriginal talent, but that didn’t – and still doesn’t – extend to ensuring that First Australians can get a seat around the board table.

So I resigned from my comfort zone, a role where I had developed a national profile and had a wage and the satisfaction of delivering life-changing training to thousands, and I sat down at my kitchen table.

The phone no longer rang. The appointments and invitations to events abruptly stopped. The income stopped.

In the quiet house, a few weeks in, the reality set in. I needed an accountant. A business name. A clear plan.

The offer of a really exciting executive role in government lobbed into my inbox. Great money, chance to do some really valuable work. Security. I took a deep breath, raised my blinkers, declined and pressed on.

Yes there were many restless nights. In hindsight, I can see that creating a new concept and explaining it to people takes a good year or more. Hundreds of meetings, lots of pats on the back, few jobs.

As work slowly picked up, I got a funky new sports car, thought about an office, and worked thousands of hours, mentoring, doing strategies, and trying to keep a focus on my core goal of finding senior jobs for Aboriginal and/or Torres Strait Islander leaders.

Things were small, but slowly growing. Then a different night arrived. A knock at the door. Two children came into my life that night through kinship care. They were babies in my extended family who I had not previously known about, with nowhere else to go and now they were mine. Alongside a fragile corporate baby that had not developed a clear identity yet.

Nights changed, filled with far more than just a worry about the next appointment. Nappies again. New car changed for station wagon. New bundles of energy, joy, tears and personality to hold dear in a wholly unprepared household.

Still, the business grew. Extraordinary staff appeared. Corporate and Government managers who had long told me about their wishes to find great Aboriginal leaders tentatively started to reach out, still wary to trust a recruitment newbie or constrained by procurement processes which hadn’t factored social inclusion or merit-based excellence into their bandwidth.

Fast forward another 700 nights and the company was gaining some really strong momentum and the boys were growing into the beautiful, complex beings that they are. Pipeline Talent had a flash office in Kingston, ironically over the road from the once-ragtag government housing where I had grown up.

Then COVID hit. Each headline of job fears, travel bans, retrenchments and hiring freezes caused some fresh anxiety, but as time progressed, it became clear that the market for Indigenous executive recruitment and training was completely separate from the rest of the labour market.

Organisations had spent so long without Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander managers and leaders that there was tremendous pent-up demand for talent – and there continues to be so.

Pipeline now has placed hundreds of Indigenous staff into executive and management roles, we have coached thousands of emerging and current Indigenous leaders in their existing roles and developed Indigenous workplace and recruitment strategies for dozens of organisations.

As our new offices open on the outskirts of Canberra, Pipeline Talent is suddenly being noticed by firms across the country who are looking at how to grow their pool of Aboriginal talent. We have become an overnight success – simultaneously appearing on the radar of government and firms across the country.

Does it lead to easier sleep? The answer is no. There are always more challenges to fulfill, more candidates needed or more staff needed in the business.

But the sleep comes nonetheless, because finally, after five years, I have realised Pipeline is not the centre of my story.

The overnight success would never have occurred unless the candidates we placed were excellent and matched or exceeded expectations. Word of mouth is everything in recruitment. Pipeline Talent is simply a conduit. We are lucky enough to come into contact with amazing people who carry the insights and character from the world’s oldest living culture in addition to the skills they need for their jobs. And we match them with organisations that recognise that Aboriginal representation in their leadership group is required not because it’s token, but because it’s really important to deliver diverse perspectives and networks to their organisations.

Pipeline Talent is proudly an Indigenous business and delighted to be an overnight success. But the credit belongs to the extraordinary Indigenous leaders across Australia who stand on the shoulders of 60,000 years of history. With thousands of experienced, talented leaders still to be discovered by corporate Australia, we are privileged to play our role.