Before starting Allison Ross in February 2007, I had a combination of retail, IT, and management experience in large and small organisations gained over 13 years.

In 1994, I started my career within the planning department of American Swiss and then within Woolworths.

As an end-user of retail planning and reporting systems, I learnt to appreciate the importance of understanding customer behaviour across product, time, and location. This insight led me to pursue the marketing side of retailing and I embarked on an Account Management Diploma with AAA School of Advertising in 1999.

On my resignation from Woolworths to pursue a career in marketing, I was offered a position as a trainee analyst/programmer within the Woolworths Group. The rationale behind this appointment was that my knowledge of retail processes and systems from a user perspective would allow me to easily elicit end-user requirements and translate these requirements into IT specifications.

After leaving Woolworths and while completing my BCom IS Honours degree, I experimented with various positions in which I was able to integrate my business and IT skills. This included business analysis, systems analysis and technical writing. Techincal writing projects focused on IT and business skills courses for corporate end-users.

In 2005, nearing completion of BCom Honours, I started seeking positions in which I could gain more management experience and in 2007, I pursued my vision of transforming my BCom Honours research - "A Unified Framework for Internet Adoption, Estrategy Development, Web Goals, Web Design, and Web Metrics" - into a strategy tool.

My methodology, developed and tested over 5 years within Simply Colossal, combines my practical experience in retail, IT, and marketing with proven theories in retail, IT, and marketing to produce a unique framework for strategy development. This strategy-development framework can be applied easily and effectively to the marketing of any business or product.

I now aim to make this information available to entrepreneurs and business owners who find it hard to make sense of business.