Career Progression Stories: Tim de Groot

We caught up with Tim de Groot, the CEO of Shortcuts Software, to talk about his career progression story before Jonas and since he joined the team.

Hi, my name’s Tim De Groot, and I’m the CEO at Shortcuts Software. I just started the role in January 2026, a couple of months ago, and so far so good.

Career Background

Prior to joining the team here at Jonas, I had a very varied background, starting in banking and finance. It was a really good foundation for the skills that I needed in running a business.

Businesses are about different products and services, but at the end of the day, a commercial entity needs to be profitable. I learned lots of different skills there around credit, financial management and managing people. Additionally, working across different parts of the business enabled me to work with different types of businesses, different individuals, and it was a really good grounding for skills that I needed further down the track.

After that, I left banking and finance and ended up in a registered training organization world and started my own business. I started it from scratch at home with another partner. In 10 years we built that up to having about 60 staff around Australia.

Then went through the process of selling the business. So having been in a business where you’ve started from scratch, you’ve grown it, you’ve got great people in the business and then selling that business on to someone else… there were lots of lessons learned in that.

Interestingly, that was one of the things that drove me to Jonas when the opportunity came up to join the team. The fact that they buy businesses and hold onto them and really look after the legacy that you created. It was certainly something that drove me to it. But over that time, I’ve been sort of in and out of lots of different businesses in terms of running businesses, both in software, not in software. So again, a really good experience to be able to bring all of those skills together here at Shortcuts.

Career Progression Since Joining Jonas

My career progression since joining Jonas, or Shortcuts, has been great. I started about two and a half years ago. I originally came in as the General Manager for Jonas Australia and New Zealand. It was a really exciting role with a great team. There’s an opportunity to sort of work with the people and the process and the product.

I did that for about 18 months, and then in January 2025 there was an opportunity to step into sort of a Global General Manager role where I looked after the other regions that we have. We also operate in North America, the UK, and we have a reseller network across France, Germany, Spain, and a couple of other regions.

And then in January 2026, I then stepped into the next role, which is the Global CEO role, which means that I’ve now taken on finance and product and R&D as well, and ultimately responsible for the whole business.

Typical Day as the CEO of Shortcuts

A typical day for me is probably not very typical in terms of every day is slightly different. There are obviously themes and things that are recurring weekly, monthly that you need to get into. But it’s quite a variety. For me that’s one of the things that I love about it – I love that every day is a bit different.

You may be dealing with a different customer base, or different regions or you’re dealing with different things you’re trying to implement across the business. That variation is really exciting to me. Plus, it’s great to be able to work closely with the team, but also to be able to work closely with the customers as well.

What Do You Enjoy Most About the Role?

I enjoy a lot of things about my role, but the thing I enjoy the most is helping staff members grow and sort of give them an opportunity to progress themselves.

As I mentioned before, I’ve had the opportunity to come in and progress. By me progressing, that’s created an opportunity for someone to step up into other roles behind me as well.

Another thing I really love about the Jonas ecosystem, it’s helping, guide, mentor, coach the team. Working with the team is really important because at the end of the day, our customers are the number one thing and we’ve got to look after our customers. But it’s really the team that helps do that. So I can’t do what I do without a really good team. Having that team capable and ready to go and look after our customers is really important.

How Have You Seen The Jonas ABC Differentiators in Action?

The Jonas ABCs is actually one of the things that drove me to wanting to work in a Jonas business. The fact that each business operates autonomously, you get lots of great guidance and input and feedback across lots of other people within the Jonas group. But the ability to sort of operate the business unit autonomously was really exciting.

I’ve worked in some other businesses where you are sort of the manager, but then you’re not really given the autonomy to succeed or to learn. Because sometimes – you learn better through failing. So the opportunity to learn fast and then fix things is really good, and I’ve seen that in the ability to now step into the CEO role and to be able to shape the strategy with some guidance, but really own that strategy and be able to drive it forward is really exciting.

The buy and hold forever philosophy was also one of the other things that I loved about it. As I said earlier, I had my own business and I sold it. One of the things that they said was that they were going to make no changes. But unfortunately, there were some changes made quite early in the piece. Dealing with that was difficult because you’d made promises to the staff and that seemed to change really quickly. And so, I love the idea that the legacy that you set, the name, what you’ve created, the unique identity that you’ve got in the market, is then taken and really amplified and is looked after going forward, which is really cool.

Then there’s the culture of sharing best practices, sharing the values and knowledge within CSI is really important.

So you’ve got the ability to be in business on your own, but not on your own, which is a really interesting sort of scenario.

You get to be able to have the autonomy to run the business, but then you get some really good feedback and support from others.

As I said, I’d started in banking and finance, so I thought I had a pretty good understanding of ratios and so on and then running my own business as well, you sort of get a bit of a feel for what needs to get done and what’s good best practice.

But Jonas has some really good metrics that are really easy to understand and the ability to follow those metrics is sort of a blueprint for success.

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What Gets You Excited About The Future of Jonas?

There’s many things that get me excited about the future of Jonas! Thing that drives me the most in terms of that focus is the ability to learn from other businesses. Not just those that are in other industries, but you also get the opportunity to network and share ideas and thoughts with people that are in the same industry.

I think there’s still a great opportunity across Jonas. If you’re looking to sell your business, it’s a great place to put it. It’s going to get looked after really well. And as a founder in a business, sometimes if you’ve got a partner and one of the partners wants to leave, it’s a great opportunity to be able to enable that partner to leave, but then still be able to have some rails to run the business on and be really successful.

There are opportunities to also, once you get your business unit running really well, to take the next step where you can have another business unit come in and then you become a group leader. And I think that’s pretty exciting because then that gives you the ability to do more coaching and mentoring across other businesses. And as I said before, bring the next group of people through in that succession planning. So if I can actually create a really good environment where the business is running really well, create some succession planning where someone can step into that role, then that gives me the ability to take on more responsibility and also look after a couple of other businesses at the same time, which would be huge, but I’ll be up for it.

It’s been a great opportunity, great experience to come and join Jonas. And I think it’s got a really good name and reputation. And that’s one of those opportunities where I thought the ability to work in a business but be part of another bigger entity was really exciting. And that’s what drove me to be here.

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