I’m Still Becoming: How Jo Brooks Turned a Seven-Year Liquidation Into a Philosophy That Changes Everything
There is a particular kind of person who, after losing a business, a home, every material asset they had built, and watching the whole thing unfold over seven years in full public view, looks back and says: there was a lot of gold in that.
Jo Brooks is that kind of person. And the most interesting thing about her is not that she survived it. It is what she chose to do with it.
Jo is the founder of Navigate, a business educator with nearly thirty years of experience, the creator of the collaborate framework, and someone who has founded more than seventeen businesses since the one that went into liquidation. She completed her MBA last year at sixty-three. Her philosophy, forged through experience rather than theory, is built around three words she has lived rather than simply taught: circle over competition.
The girl who was sent to study
Jo’s relationship with education began not as a passion but as a routine. When television arrived in her neighbourhood, every other family watched it in the evenings. Jo and her siblings were sent to their bedrooms to do their homework, from grade three all the way through to the end of high school. There was nothing else to do, so she studied. And then she discovered she was good at it, and that being good at it opened doors.
When she finished school, she was accepted into university. Her father said no. He was old school and it was 1980, and that was the answer. She went and sat the banking exams instead, got a job, and then enrolled at TAFE for twice-weekly accounting classes that took her seven years and an hour each way to complete. She did it anyway, because if she could not go to university, she would find the next closest thing.
She always wanted to know what university was actually like. Last year she found out, completing her MBA online at sixty-three. When it arrived in the mail, she cried. And she is quick to note that she did not do it for the letters after her name. She did it because she had always wanted to know.
The question that started a career
Jo did not plan to go into education professionally. She was working as a finance broker when she asked her boss a question that changed the direction of her career. What if, instead of the industry standard entry certificate for their franchisees, they wrote a full diploma and set the bar an inch above everyone else?
He said: great idea, write the business case.
She spent the next twelve months doing exactly that, partnering with Deakin University to create the diploma of mortgage broking management. They registered fifty franchisees. They were the first finance broker organisation in the country to franchise at that level. And they set an industry standard simply by asking what if we did this better.
That pattern, of asking what if and then doing the work to answer the question properly, has defined her ever since.
The business that grew too fast
The company that eventually went into liquidation was an education business, a registered training organisation delivering online programs to business owners. It grew fast and it grew big. At its peak it was processing two hundred students a week. Jo had built an ecosystem around the learning itself: an accounting firm, a law firm, an HR company, a marketing company, an IT company, a finance broker, a financial planning company. When someone enrolled, they were not just getting a diploma. They were entering a fully supported system designed to help them build a genuinely solid business from the ground up.
It was innovative, ambitious, and built with extraordinary care for the people inside it.
And it grew faster than it could sustainably carry.
When the board met for an emergency meeting and made the decision to close, Jo went home and told her husband and daughter. Then she walked into her bedroom and sank to the floor. She does not know if it was five minutes or ten. But at the bottom of it, something clarified. This is as low as I am going to get. So I have to pick myself up.
She did.
What the staff did next
The liquidation played out over seven years. Jo sold every asset she and her husband had, including their home on acreage, to pay company debt. They moved to the Gold Coast to rent. She went back to work for her longtime mentor the following week, having picked up the phone, driven over, sat in front of him, and said simply: I need a job.
But the moment she returns to most often when she tells this story is not the board meeting or the garage sale or the drive to an unfamiliar city with nowhere particular to go.
It is the day she gathered her staff across four offices via phone to tell them the business was closing.
And then she asked: who would be willing to stay on, unpaid, to help move the furniture out before the liquidators arrived?
Ninety-five percent of them said yes.
Then they came around her in a circle. And one of her senior staff members handed her a card. They had bought it the day before, because they had sensed something was wrong and wanted her to know they were with her, whatever came next.
She did not inspire that loyalty through speeches or incentives. She had simply walked into every office, every time she was there, and said good morning to every single person. Asked how their partner was. Remembered the name of the five-year-old. Checked in on the husband who had a cold. Looked them in the eyes and let them know: when I’m here, I’m actually here.
That, she says quietly, is true leadership. It is not complicated. And it is not forgotten.
Circle over competition
The philosophy Jo is most known for, circle over competition, was not born in a moment of insight. It was built through the experience of approaching her competitors and asking for help.
When her education company needed government funding and was told to wait two years, she sent her sales team to identify registered training organisations that had the funding but were not fully using it. Then she knocked on their doors.
She showed them everything. The customer journey. The workflow. The CRM. The completion data. She told them precisely what she would charge, precisely what she would pay them for the licence to use their funding, and precisely when she would stop needing it: as soon as she had her own. She offered complete transparency because complete transparency was what made the arrangement trustworthy.
Some said no. Five said yes, including large organisations running sixty-five thousand students a year who recognised they could not do what a small, fast, automated, human-centred operation could. The collaboration served both parties. And the business grew from five students a month to two hundred a week.
She still operates this way. When she is exploring a new opportunity, her first question is not who are my competitors. It is whose audience overlaps with mine, and how can we genuinely serve each other?
In a world that teaches business people to protect their territory, guard their ideas, and treat every peer as a threat, Jo finds this mildly baffling. There are nine billion people in the world. No single provider can serve them all. The idea that there is not enough to go around is the most expensive misunderstanding in business.
Why 85 percent finished
When the average online course completion rate at the time was three percent, Jo’s organisation was hitting eighty-five. The difference was not better content. It was not a more sophisticated platform. It was one straightforward decision: automate the compliance work and redirect every one of those freed-up hours to human contact.
She called it the student concierge model. Her team were not trainers. They called students. They asked how things were going, what was getting in the way, what was happening in their lives. They connected people with the right specialist in the group ecosystem. They made sure no one disappeared.
Online is lonely, she says. That is not an observation. It is a warning. And the providers who forget it are the ones with three percent.
This framework is now the core of what she teaches through Navigate. Helping coaches, consultants, and subject matter experts stop reinventing and start consolidating. Stop assuming they need to start from scratch and start realising that the book, the podcasts, the blog posts, the one-on-one sessions, the speeches, all of it is already a course. It just needs to be organised.
Stop pushing the rope
One of Jo’s most repeated pieces of advice is also the most visual. You cannot push a rope anywhere useful. You might be able to pull one. But push it and you just exhaust yourself without getting anywhere.
She learned this at the most expensive possible scale. And then she learned it again last year, when she noticed she had been accepting consulting contracts for work she had never actively sought, work around registered training organisations, simply because it kept arriving and kept paying. Her human design reading confirmed what she already suspected: her profile needs rest. She had not been resting. She had been pushing.
The moment she stopped, the work she actually wanted to do kept arriving. Her word for this year is space. Space for herself, for her clients, for her family. Fifteen minutes of Pilates on the study floor. A morning walk with her husband. Feet on the grass when the brain needs a reset. A swim in summer. Home early when the day is done.
People ask her how she still gets so much done. She does not have a complicated answer. Focus in the moment, then step away. Come back when the mind is clear. The work that matters gets done. The rope stays where it is.
The circle that matters most right now
Jo looks after her ninety-five-year-old mother, who lives with her and her husband and spends roughly eight hours a day at the sewing machine making reversible bags that she gives away or trades for free fruit and veg at the local greengrocer. Who recently decided she wants to make a vest. Who came to ask Jo for an ice cream and was told: you do not need to ask, and if you want five, you can have five.
Jo and her husband are saving for a home. They have not owned one since the liquidation. The home they want is modest: three bedrooms, two bathrooms, a yard for the dog, somewhere close enough to the beach for a morning walk. The appetite for the large and impressive has simply left her. She finds she does not miss it.
She is grateful every morning, for something old or something from yesterday, for whatever the day in front of her is going to hold. She walks without earphones because she wants to say thank you to the trees, feel the shade, be present in the moment she is actually in.
She is not done. She knows that. And she finds that exciting.
The lesson she wishes she had known earlier
Jo takes two.
The first is pace. The business that grew fastest was the one that collapsed. Moving at two hundred students a week felt unstoppable right up until it became unsustainable. Had the growth been steadier, the attention more tuned to the small moments within it, everything might have been very different. Pace is not caution. It is wisdom applied in real time.
The second is circle. Surround yourself with people who can genuinely support, challenge, guide, and hold you accountable. Know the difference between the people offering that kind of guidance from lived experience and the people offering commentary from love. Receive both. Act on the one with credibility behind it.
The friends who ask when she is going to retire, the mother who asks when she is going to stop working tonight, she receives all of it with warmth and lets it pass. They love her. That is enough. It does not need to be advice.
Jo Brooks is still becoming. And she is very much at peace with that.
To learn more about Jo Brooks and Navigate, including her collaborate framework and online course building support, reach out directly to begin a conversation.
