Catalyst Consulting

Headed up by Keith Matson and Jeremy Hayllar, CATALYST draws on over 40 years of professional business experience - much of that experience in developing, owning, and growing highly successful businesses ourselves.

Jeremy Hayllar: MBA, Business Educator, Entrepreneur, Facilitator
Keith Matson: MBA, Business Educator, Entrepreneur, NLP Trainer & Master Practitioner

Jeremy Hayllar

Jeremy has worked with small-to-medium enterprises over the past 10 years.

In 1996, he was part of his first start-up company – a Multimedia Marketing business - and has since taken on demanding business development roles in start-ups and growing companies. Jeremy knows what it is to grow a business and has first hand experience of the unique challenges facing entrepreneurs, business owners, and managers.

Jeremy has an entrepreneurial approach to business, understanding the challenges facing young organisations. As a business advisor, Jeremy’s strengths are his communication skills, flexibility in adapting to changing business environments, and his ability to translate complex concepts into useful applications.

He has practical experience in:

Sales and Marketing strategies
Development of integrated solutions
Business plan development
Project management
Customer relationship management
Contract negotiation
Analysis of business processes
Facilitation, training, and presentation

Jeremy’s consulting and facilitation experience includes:

Designing and developing unique performance analysis tools to enable entrepreneurs, business owners, and managers to assess the performance of their business, identify strategic gaps, and to initiate development of the business.
Delivering Management Information systems to medium sized companies throughout the UK. In this role he focused on understanding client requirements, to define business problems, develop strategic solutions, and design implementation plans.
Working with Australian start-up companies to plan for growth and expansion.
Facilitating Entrepreneurship workshops designed to enable entrepreneurs to screen their business ideas for commercial viability.
Intensive ‘one-on-one’ client engagements focussing on specific client requirements.

Jeremy holds a Masters Degree in Business Administration with a Major in Entrepreneurship and specialisations in New Venture Management, Leadership, Strategy, and Marketing. His academic qualifications, combined with his business experience and facilitation skills, set him apart from many other coaches and consultants.

Jeremy is passionate about business and is committed to unlocking the ‘secrets’ of business success and sharing them with others.

Keith Matson

MBA, B.Bus (Accounting and Finance), Grad Dip (Tax Law), Dip Quality Management, Diploma of Training and Development, Certificate IV, Training & Assessment.

Keith is passionate about business, particularly what can be done to improve Australia’s poor success rate with small businesses. His extensive practical experience and academic knowledge means Keith is a Business Expert in the true sense of the word.

Keith’s philosophy is one of encouraging and empowering people, organisations and communities to succeed through the pursuit of continuous improvement. Improving the leadership and management skill set is the key to more effective use of available resources.

During a professional career spanning 30 years, Keith has refined his knowledge and skills in the areas of:

Strategic analysis
Project management
Business planning and implementation
Negotiations
Organisational change
Team building
Leadership development
Executive coaching
Entrepreneurship
Training, facilitation and presentation

Keith’s business experience totals over thirty years with an early professional career focus in accounting. His first business – an accounting practice – introduced him to the challenges faced by Small Business owners and his role became more a business advisor than accountant.

Since he sold his practices in 1990 he has owned a number of varied businesses – corporate training and development, personal development and motivation, business consultancy – and in his ongoing role as business advisor, he has worked with a variety of different businesses – from single-owner-operator start-ups to large-scale manufacturing companies.

Keith values considered, commercially realistic, cost effective, and practical solutions to business issues. He has assisted small businesses, boards, CEO’s and senior management teams across all functional areas to develop and effectively implement robust business improvement techniques in support of organisational change.

Keith has specialised in functional strategic analysis for business expansion, organisational turnaround, business reconstruction and re-engineering, identification, recruitment and development of staff, creation and management of cultural change and the implementation of effective management processes to improve strategy evaluation techniques.

Having lectured in Strategic Management, Entrepreneurship, Accounting and Tax Law at university level, Keith has also presented seminars locally, regionally and nationally on topics including Strategic Analysis and Planning, Business Planning and Effective Implementation, Change Management, Executive Leadership, Marketing, Franchising, Corporate Finance, Information Management and Turnaround Management.

He has provided in-house training for senior executives and has given seminars to entrepreneurs in Australia, New Zealand, Hong Kong, Singapore, America and Canada.

Such extensive experience means one thing for his clients – he knows what it takes to make a business work!! One of the true ‘transformational leaders’ Keith consistently turns struggling businesses around, not only operationally, but the people as well – so that the employees are just as passionate about building a profitable business as the owner.

Keith is accredited in the following areas:

Situational Leadership
Acumen Strategic Logical Thinking
LSI/GSI Cultural Inventory
DiSC Behavioural Profile
NLP: Master Practitioner and Master Trainer
Transactional Analysis

Keith’s recent projects include:

Working with the Management team of one of Queensland’s largest construction companies.
Working with a start-up consulting company to discover and then implement the required processes for a national expansion campaign.
Providing Management and Organisational development advice to Queensland’s largest mining consortium.
Providing a National Management Development program to One of Australia’s largest hospitality companies.
A series of Business Development Workshops throughout QLD for a leading financial planning company.
Change, Financial and Administrative Management of a large manufacturing company (Melbourne-based) that had undergone a series of turbulent ownership changes.
‘Virtual’ Strategic Manager of a leading Training and Education company.
Organisational and Management development and Change Management for an international recruitment company.
Strategic planning and franchising management for a training company about to expand interstate.

Keith holds the following professional memberships:

A Fellow of the Australian Institute of Management
The Australian Institute of Company Directors
The National Institute of Accountants

He holds the following honorary positions:

Chairman, The Australian Future of Youth Foundation
President, The Brisbane Executive Club

Keith is currently pursuing his Ph.D. - his areas of research are Entrepreneurship, Organisational Innovation and Strategic Management.