Your What & Why
Q1. Briefly, what does your business do, and what is the purpose?
Civic Marketplace is rebuilding the way local government buys. Right now, municipalities and public bodies are locked into slow, opaque procurement processes that favour incumbent suppliers and shut out innovative SMEs. We’re changing that – creating a transparent, efficient marketplace where public sector buyers can discover, evaluate and procure from a much wider pool of suppliers. The purpose is simple but significant: better use of public money, and a more level playing field for the businesses trying to serve their communities.
Your Spark
Q2. What originally sparked the idea to start the business?
I’d spent years working at the intersection of government and technology and kept bumping into the same frustration – brilliant companies with genuinely transformative solutions, unable to get through the door of a municipality because the procurement process was designed for a different era. Meanwhile, public bodies were spending more and getting less. The spark wasn’t a single moment; it was accumulated frustration turning into a question: why hasn’t anyone fixed this? Once I asked that seriously, I couldn’t stop thinking about the answer. I met my co-founders Ron Holifield, who spent years in local government and the private sector, and Kip Harkness, the then Deputy City Manager of one of the largest municipalities in the US, through a shared passion and interest in doing the ‘good work’ of tackling this significant problem.
Hardest Challenge?
Q3. What’s been the toughest challenge you’ve faced so far?
Trust. Public sector procurement is deeply risk-averse for legitimate reasons – these are taxpayers’ funds. Convincing municipalities to try something new, even something demonstrably better, requires an enormous amount of patience and relationship-building. You can’t just ship a product and wait for adoption. You have to earn your place in a system that has seen a lot of broken promises from tech companies. That takes time, and early on, time is the one thing a startup never feels it has enough of.
Q4. What advice would you give other entrepreneurs / leaders?
Don’t confuse momentum with progress. In the early stages it’s easy to stay very busy – pitching, hiring, iterating – while the core problem you’re solving quietly drifts out of focus. Come back to the problem constantly. Talk to your customers obsessively. The best strategic decisions I’ve made weren’t made in board meetings; they came from listening carefully to the people we were trying to help.
The Highlight
Q5. What achievement are you most proud of? Why?
Honestly, the team we’ve built. It would be easy to point to a funding round or a landmark contract, but what I’m most proud of is that the people who joined us early, when we were still just a thesis and a slide deck, are still here, still energised, still believing in what we’re doing. That doesn’t happen by accident. It means we’ve built something worth showing up for, and that matters more to me than any milestone on a cap table.
One Piece of Wisdom
Q6. What one piece of advice would you share with your younger self?
Get comfortable with ambiguity sooner. I spent a lot of energy early in my career trying to resolve uncertainty, waiting for more data, more validation, more permission. Entrepreneurship is fundamentally a practice in acting decisively with incomplete information. The sooner you make peace with that, the more effective you become.
Ignition Journey
Q7. What led you to work with Ignition Law?
We were at a critical inflection point, closing our first meaningful funding round and starting to formalise commercial relationships with municipal clients. Both of those things carry real legal complexity. We needed advisors who understood the startup journey intimately, not just the legal mechanics. Ignition came highly recommended within our network, and it was immediately clear they’d been in the room with founders at exactly the stage we were at.
Legal Support
Q8. How did Ignition support you through this, and what difference did we make?
They translated. That sounds simple, but it’s everything. Legal documents and term sheets can feel like they’re written in a language designed to intimidate rather than inform. The Ignition team broke things down, flagged what genuinely mattered versus what was standard, and helped us move quickly without cutting corners. In a funding round especially, pace matters – delays cost you momentum and sometimes deals. Having legal counsel that moves at startup speed is genuinely rare.
The Experience
Q9. What do you value most about working with Team Ignition?
The relationship feels like a partnership rather than a transaction. They’re interested in where we’re going, not just the document in front of them. That means they give advice that’s contextualised to our actual situation, not generic guidance dressed up with our logo on it. In a world where founders are pulled in every direction, having advisors who feel like they’re genuinely on your side is something you don’t take for granted.
Keeping Motivated Beyond Work
Q10. What keeps your spark alive, inside or outside of work?
Outside of work, my family – full stop. They keep me honest and grounded in what actually matters. Inside work, it’s the moments when the system works as it should: a small supplier winning a contract they never could have accessed before, a municipal procurement officer telling us they found exactly what they needed in half the time. Those moments remind me this isn’t abstract. There are real people and real communities on both sides of every transaction we facilitate.
Sharing Knowledge
Q11. What book, video, Ted Talk, quote or single piece of advice can you share with our SME Community?
I keep coming back to a line attributed to the stoic philosopher Epictetus: “We cannot choose our external circumstances, but we can always choose how we respond to them.” For founders navigating the unpredictability of building a business, especially one trying to change something as entrenched as public procurement, that’s not just philosophy. It’s a daily operating principle. You will face things you didn’t plan for. What defines you is what you do next.
