The Start of The Atomic Sky Story

Guest post from Simon MacFarlane, Founder of Atomic Sky - a recent addition to the BizSpark Network Partner family.  

I have never had any first-hand experience of the old adage – “those who can do and those who can’t teach” – and I have always been fortunate to have been taught by clearly very dedicated and accomplished teachers. But there was still a nagging doubt in my mind when Atomic Sky came into being that we would simply be perceived as teachers – or worse still “management consultants” – well versed in telling people what they should do without any first-hand experience of doing it themselves.

The reality of course is that Andy Lamb (Andy is my co-founder and the person who I managed to persuade that Atomic sky was a really good idea!) and I have many years’ experience of creating, running, selling, being successful in and / or failing in business. So we knew we had the pedigree and the experience – it was simply a nagging doubt that on the surface anyone seen as providing advice and guidance would be grouped in with the numerous other “consultants” who feed off the business community here in Perth without actually adding any real value.

However once Atomic Sky was up and running it very quickly however became clear that there is, especially in this remote part of the world, the need to provide practical hands on guidance and support to the embryonic start up community in Perth – but in an honest, objective and cost effective manner. And Atomic Sky has quickly established a reputation as being able to provide credible advice, support and services born out of first-hand experience.

We established Atomic Sky in December 2013 – with the very broad mandate – to help people or organisations with good ideas turn them into great businesses. The breadth of our mandate is such that we are able to help a broad range of people – from those with simply an idea and a presentation through to established organisations trying to commercialise or embrace new technology.

We have generally speaking two ways of working with people – either we take an equity stake in the business and provide combinations of investment and services in return for equity – or we simply charge for our expertise – but we only engage on a paid basis where we see a long term ability to add real value to the organisation. In practice what this means is not just providing for example coding or tech skills but combining these with commercialisation skills to ensure the development is undertaken in a commercial manner.

In true start up style – we quickly added some co-working space to our model – and this was born out of our inability to find a suitable home for Atomic Sky. We found something bigger and thought “why not? we can share this with other likeminded people”.

Atomic Sky has been up and running for nearly two years now – but it has only really been in the last 12 months that  we have gained real momentum. We have 10 projects underway, we have secured a corner stone investor in the business, we are developing a range of business under the Atomic Sky umbrella to provide services to our start-ups, and we have established the Tech Hub as both a virtual and physical place for people to come to to collaborate and learn about making their ideas and businesses successful.

If you have any questions or would like to learn more, please call or email and I would happy to discuss our journey to date. Or better come and pitch us your idea and let Atomic Sky help you make it great.

Simon
MacFarlane

Simon.macfarlane@atomicsky.com.au

0427 119 188

Comments

• Anonymous
  February 08, 2015
  good