The Founder's Story
Built from personal experience — not theory.
Stephen Fairbairn is not an accountant, a lawyer, or a career governance professional. He is an independent researcher who experienced the consequences of inadequate solvency monitoring firsthand — multiple times — before spending ten years developing the framework that became the Fairbairn Formula and ultimately BoardSolvency.
The journey began with failure. Business closures during economic downturns — including the loss of a promising startup when rising interest rates and insufficient cash reserves made it impossible to continue trading. In each case, the problem was not a lack of revenue or ambition. It was the same thing every time: insufficient cash coming in above all obligations, with no buffer for the unexpected.
That personal experience became a research question. What would a director — or a founder — need to know, at every board meeting, to ensure this never happened? What framework would translate a complex legal obligation into a practical, repeatable test that any director, regardless of their financial background, could apply?
Ten years of research, an Excel workbook prototype, and hundreds of hours of analysis of Australian business insolvency data produced the answer — the Fairbairn Formula. BoardSolvency is the platform that implements it.