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July 14, 2026
“Nobody cares about your big idea.”
Patrick Devlin doesn’t hesitate before delivering what he describes as the biggest lesson from his first two years in business.
“That’s a tough lesson, because it made me realise how many years I spent standing in front of an audience as a vendor, talking about our latest big thing. I thought I listened. I thought I made it about them. Really it was all about me and my company’s product.”
It is a confronting admission from someone who spent decades representing some of the biggest brands in enterprise technology.
For years, Pat helped organisations navigate IT decisions from inside global vendors, where the strength of the brand, the scale of the business and the weight of marketing inevitably shape customer conversations. Like many experienced technology leaders, he believed he was focused on customer outcomes.
Looking back, he sees those conversations through a different lens. Because building a company from scratch has a way of stripping everything back to its essentials.
The logo disappears. The executive title disappears. The marketing machine disappears.
What remains is a much simpler question. Can you create genuine value?
“When the brand, the money and the size of the vendor fall away, you find out what real value is,” Pat acknowledged. “And when you have none to offer, you’re irrelevant.”
Two years after launching IT Architecture as a Service (ITAaaS), that realisation has become the foundation of both the business and Pat’s leadership philosophy.
What began as an entrepreneurial leap has evolved into something much broader: a reassessment of how technology consulting creates value, why architecture matters more than products and why trust ultimately outlasts every logo.
Leaving the corporate world also challenged another assumption. This was a former leader at Hewlett Packard Enterprise, Aruba Networks, SimpliVity, Ruckus Wireless, WatchGuard Technologies and Brocade.
Pat expected some professional relationships to fade once the corporate title disappeared, it seemed inevitable. Large organisations naturally attract people because of the influence, budget and opportunities they represent.
What surprised him was discovering which relationships had always been genuine.
“I knew that some of my work friends at the big vendor were only friends because I had a fancy title and access to big-company resources,” Pat shared. “I expected that to change when I went out on my own. Now I was a nobody.”
Instead, the fledgling entrepreneur discovered a technology community that was remarkably willing to support someone starting again.
“What surprised me was the people who still wanted to connect, to support and to help build,” Pat recalled. “What an awesome community we have across the tech sector in Australia and New Zealand. Wonderful humans who extended their help, their support and their connections.”
For Pat, those relationships became far more than professional networking, they became the foundations of a new business.
“We’d be nowhere without the people who took a chance on us,” Pat noted.
The experience fundamentally changed how he thinks about influence. Brand recognition may create awareness, but reputation is earned over years of helping people, solving problems and showing up when it matters.
That reputation has also shaped the way ITAaaS has grown. Rather than relying on aggressive sales campaigns, the business has expanded through recommendations from customers and peers who have experienced its work firsthand.
“All my best customers have been referrals,” Pat said. “Apparently I’m a much worse salesperson than I thought I was, so thank god I have some generous friends.”
It is classic Pat – self-deprecating, humorous and refreshingly honest. But it also reinforces a broader point that in professional services, trust remains the most valuable currency.
While entrepreneurship has reshaped Pat’s thinking about leadership, customers have reshaped his thinking about technology.
Every week, organisations approach ITAaaS with different technical challenges.
Some want advice on cloud cost optimisation. Others need guidance around governance, risk, VMware licensing, network architecture or AI readiness.
On the surface, those engagements appear unrelated but Pat argues they all begin with exactly the same mistake.
“People come to us for all sorts of guidance: cloud cost review, governance and risk, VMware, network architecture, and increasingly AI readiness,” he continued. “The insight is that the product, the technology itself, is never the solution.”
It is a perspective formed after decades watching technology projects succeed – and fail.
Too often, organisations start with products. They compare platforms. They evaluate vendors. They debate features.
Only later do they stop to ask how the business actually works.
“The business process and workflow matter more than the tech,” Pat explained. “If we understand the process, we can shape an architecture to support it. If we don’t, the tech fixes one problem and then instantly creates another one.”
For Pat, architecture is not simply about infrastructure or systems design. It is about understanding how people work, how information moves through an organisation and where technology genuinely creates value.
That philosophy has become even more relevant as organisations race to adopt AI. Many conversations today begin with questions about models, platforms or copilots.
Pat believes they should begin somewhere else entirely, however.
If the underlying business process is broken, automating it simply accelerates the problem. The technology changes but the principle does not.
That same thinking extends inside ITAaaS itself.
“We’re a small firm that punches well above its weight,” Pat declared. “I think that’s because everyone stows their ego at the door. There are no fancy titles, no CEO. Nobody thinks they own their patch.”
For many growing businesses, there is a temptation to recreate the structures of larger organisations. Pat has deliberately resisted that.
Instead, everyone contributes wherever they are needed.
“We all do everything: strategy, delivery, positioning and leadership, adapting on the fly every day,” he added.
The model demands versatility.
One day someone may be leading a customer workshop. The next they are reviewing proposals, refining messaging or helping shape the direction of the business.
It is less about job descriptions and more about shared ownership. For a consultancy built on advice, that collective accountability has become one of its greatest strengths.
Entrepreneurship is often portrayed as freedom but Pat describes something rather different.
“The hardest part is easy to describe: cashflow,” he shared. “When you start, your income is zero. The mortgage and the school fees turn up every month whether a new client does or not. It sharpens the mind, and it’s a discipline that never really switches off.”
There is no glamour in that reality.
The pressure does not necessarily become easier with time. Founders simply become better at managing it.
According to Pat, it has also reinforced the importance of building a business around sustainable customer value rather than chasing short-term opportunities.
Looking back, Pat sees a clear distinction between the company’s first year and its second. The early months were spent proving the business deserved to exist.
“When we began, I chased every single customer,” he recalled.
“It was hard. We were unknown. Today, the conversation has changed. We’re getting word-of-mouth referrals, we have reference customers, and we’re doing repeatable work.”
Those milestones represent far more than commercial progress. Reference customers provide credibility, repeatable engagements demonstrate consistency and referrals signal trust.
Together, they create the platform from which the business can scale with the next phase of growth already taking shape.
The focus is centred on expanding the team, growing the company’s fractional consulting capability and launching a new sub-branded business that builds on the foundations established over the past 24 months.
For Pat, however, growth has never been measured purely in financial terms.
“I’ve always thought of myself as someone who works hard,” he added. “This is the hardest I’ve ever worked. And it’s the most rewarding work I’ve ever done.”
Looking back, perhaps the biggest surprise isn’t that entrepreneurship proved difficult. It is that stripping away the brand ultimately clarified what mattered all along.
Customers don’t remember the logo on the presentation. They don’t remember who had the biggest marketing budget. They remember who listened. They remember who understood their business.
And they remember who helped solve the problem.
That, more than anything, has become the defining philosophy behind ITAaaS.
“When the brand, the money and the size of the vendor fall away, you find out what real value is,” Pat summarised. “And when you have none to offer, you’re irrelevant.”
Two years in, Pat no longer sees that observation as a lesson in entrepreneurship. He sees it as a lesson in leadership.
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