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Tech entrepreneurs Wayne Gerard and Roman Galikov are digging deep into their own startup experience to grow their latest venture, Create Financial, an accounting and commercial advisory firm that understands how to build a new business at “founder speed”.
Established in July this year, Brisbane-based Create Financial has already hit the ground running by securing 15 clients in its first 10 weeks of business.
The strength of underlying demand for the firm’s services has prompted the business partners to look at recruiting more staff with an eye on expanding into emerging markets interstate, particularly Sydney and Melbourne.
Create Financial provides specialist services and advice to startups, partnering with founders across the full journey from idea, startup and scale-up, to exit and recycling capital as investors - and ultimately leaving a legacy.
To do this well, Gerard tells Business News Australia that “you have to understand how founders are wired and how they operate”.
“They operate at a founder’s speed, and they need a partner that can operate at that speed to help them make better quality decisions.”
Gerard, a former Chief Entrepreneur of Queensland, says every stage of the startup journey is critical, especially in an era when angel investors are more prudent about pouring their capital into startups.
“The level of due diligence being undertaken today is higher and that means the bar for capital raising is higher which means you need to have really good financials to have the best chance of standing out in the crowd,” he says.
Create Financial, which is described as a consultancy “for founders by founders”, draws on the startup experience of Gerard and Galikov, the founders of enterprise software company RedEye.
Gerard originally established RedEye in 2012 and was later joined by Galikov as accountant to grow the business which provides services that make critical global infrastructure safer, easier and more efficient to operate and maintain.
After securing BHP Group (ASX: BHP) as its first customer, RedEye scaled globally to be used by major power utilities in New Zealand and the US before the partners exited the business in December 2023.
“We started right at the beginning of cloud and of enterprise adoption of mobile technology and we had to build a commercial model that broke the barriers of adoption,” says Gerard.
“When we reflect on our journey as founders, one thing stands out.
“We wish we’d had access to an accounting and advisory team that had actually lived the founder journey, from startup to scale-up, capital raise and exit. So, we built one.”
Lessons learned
Gerard says all the lessons learned on their startup journey are still valuable today.
“There are lots of accountants and lawyers out there who have learned through trial and error over the years, but they haven’t learned through experience,” he says.
After making inroads in their home market of South-East Queensland, the Create Financial founders are already looking to spread their wings and grow the business further.
“We’ve cast the net Australia wide now and brought in clients from Sydney and Melbourne where our networks aren’t as strong,” says Galikov.
“Part of our strategy is to grow organically but also to pursue an M&A strategy by acquiring practices in other capital cities and using it as a chance to create not only a presence in those regions but also career opportunities for people working with us.”
Galikov, the managing partner of Create Financial, points out that founders need more than accountants to manage their growth journey.
“They need partners who understand the pressure of payroll, the complexity of cap tables, the realities of investor due diligence, and the nuances of startup and innovation-specific tax treatments,” he says.
“We’ve lived that reality, and we’re building Create Financial to make sure other founders don’t have to learn those lessons the hard way.”
Among the many areas that startups overlook from inception is getting the share structure right.
“We can walk into a tech company and find they don’t have the right share structure but they’re about to undertake a capital raising with a big investor in Australia,” says Gerard.
“No one has stopped to give them advice, yet the difference can be millions of dollars in enterprise value going to the wrong place if you don’t get the structure right.”
Employee share option plans are another minefield.
“Founders can listen to the hype on podcasts and give their first employee or second employee 5 per cent of the company, but that’s crazy if you don’t understand the unintended consequences of it,” says Gerard.
Raising capital is 'really hard'
Tax offsets are another area where angel investors can be drawn to startups by attractive incentives.
“It just requires a little bit of planning to make sure the company is well structured and qualifies for the tax incentives,” says Gerard.
“Helping companies do the compliance work necessary to get the R&D tax incentive and to maximise it legally is also really important. This is something that we have lived.
“When you think about the levers that an early-stage company has, this is a really important lever because it gives the early investors a substantial tax incentive to invest.
“Raising capital is really hard and often founders don’t set their businesses up well in the beginning because no one has ever explained to them how investors value companies.”
Create Financial goes beyond compliance to deliver fractional CFO support, investor readiness, commercial advisory and fundraising guidance that is “grounded in real-world founder experience”.
Create Financial officially launched earlier this month at InvestFest 2025 on the Gold Coast, building on the founders’ existing relationships within the South-East Queensland startup sector that has given an early boost to the firm’s client base.
Gerard says the region’s startup ecosystem has benefited from years of investment from the Queensland Government, along with the innovation incentives and programs of most of the city councils in the state’s south-east corner.
“South-East Queensland is a great place for us to found a company,” says Gerard, whose role as Queensland Chief Entrepreneur was to boost the state's startup ecosystem through connections with government and industry to create new economic opportunities.
“We also have good networks across Australia, and I see a lot of deal flow through a lot of the investments that I make.
“I am really excited about the potential for early-stage innovators to get the right advice and go on to have a really substantial impact on our economy.”
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