Why I’m Building This
I got my first paid job at fifteen doing tech support at my high school. By twenty I had three schools across Sydney as clients. I loved the work. Dropping in, solving a problem, moving on.
When I was twenty years old and had just been elected to the board of directors at the time, the government pulled the rug out from under us. Compulsory student fees were removed overnight. The union lost a significant chunk of its funding and we had mere months to restructure a going concern under real financial pressure, with a board that had to govern rather than manage and a constituency that had opinions. No playbook. Just the problem in front of us. I didn't know it then, but that experience was leaving an indelible imprint on how I would define “work that I like to do.”
I came then to law first through a summer clerkship at a top-tier firm in Sydney, followed by practice as an associate. But I moved quickly into tech, where I spent years across customer experience, sales, product, and eventually legal at a venture-backed AI startup in New York. I shipped product, negotiated contracts, managed teams, and sat in rooms where strategy met operations. I learned what works when the plan meets reality, and what doesn't.
What I kept noticing was the gap between what a business actually needed and what it could get. Not for lack of expertise. The problem was delivery. Advice that didn't survive contact with operations. Consultants who engaged, recommended, and left. Work handed off before the consequences landed.
When I decided to build something of my own, I kept coming back to those early experiences. Small enough to be accountable. Experienced enough to be useful. There when the first plan meets reality.
Regulus Consulting works with companies that need someone who can hold strategy and operations at the same time. AI advisory and product work. US market entry for foreign businesses. Fractional COO for companies that need senior operational leadership without the full-time overhead.
And because I also run Regulus Law, a legal practice covering privacy, AI governance, tech transactions, and business formation, my clients get something genuinely uncommon: an operator who speaks law fluently, and a lawyer who has actually run things.
No layers. No handoffs. The person you hire is the person who does the work.
I've been building toward this since I was fifteen. I just took the scenic route.
— James
