Matt White: Leveraging Chronic Pain as a Gift and Making Transformation Achievable for Everyone

Matt White is the CEO of XaaS Ltd and the former Global Head of InfoSec Strategy at CHANEL. With a career spanning more than 20 years, incorporating experience in virtually every vertical, industry and Big 4 Consultancy, he has spent most his working life helping companies and individuals with transformation. From media to public speaking, he has built a reputation around cyber security and leadership. 

He is also a man of true grit. Matt suffers from Complex Regional Pain Syndrome (CRPS), a chronic pain condition, which leads to sleep disorders and an inability to switch off his brain.  He has to continuously do something to distract himself from the intense burning pain he feels. However, Matt has not allowed his unbearable physical pain to impede his personal and professional progress, forging ahead with determination and hardened will.      

In 2021, Matt took a big step in his career by co-founding XaaS Ltd, an investor backed start-up. XaaS aims to make the transformation easier and achievable for everyone, by helping individuals and companies – big and small — improve, removing the ‘witchcraft’ surrounding cybersecurity and guiding them through their transformation journey.  

As a CEO of a start-up, he is responsible for almost every aspect of XaaS. “It’s difficult to find anything that isn’t my responsibility; however, most days, my role is strategy, administration, and sales,” Matt says.  

Using Pain as Fuel

When Matt was 12, he injured his right hand, which then developed into CRPS. At 18, he learned that he had to live with his chronic pain condition for the rest of his life, as there is no cure, killing his dreams of becoming a surgeon. “I was a mess for several months before a couple of things aligned within me,” Matt says. 

“Firstly, I needed to accept once and for all that I was never going to live the life I had originally planned,” he adds. “Secondly, I finally realised the power of my grandfather’s favourite phrase; ‘You can always quit tomorrow.” At that point, Matt realised that his pain was his fuel, and his challenge was a gift. “I could push harder, and I had longer days as I wasn’t sleeping,” he says. “And I had a point to prove to myself and the world.”

“My affliction had transformed me into someone with a superpower! For the past 25 years, I have lived that way, embracing my challenges as opportunities to transform things and make them better,” he adds. 

Founding XaaS – Building an Aeroplane on the Way Down 

Matt has spent most of his professional life working with companies on their transformation journeys in one way or another. Outside of his work, he has been helping and mentoring people with everything from professional development to motivational advice. However, despite successfully transforming companies and the lives of individuals, he had no plans of becoming an entrepreneur.     

“This time last year [2021] I wasn’t planning on having my own company, but then everything seemed to just ‘align’; it felt the universe was telling me it was time to take a leap of faith and launch my own company,” Matt says.

At the start of 2021, Matt was given the opportunity to write a book on “Transformational Leadership” under the mentorship of New York Times Bestselling Author Neil Strauss whilst he was working with luxury goods and jewellery company CHANEL as Global Head of Information Security Strategy.    

“I had successfully been running the cybersecurity transformation programme at CHANEL that I and one of my XaaS Co-Founders (also the COO) had built,” Matt says. “We had talked to organisations such as Gartner about our approach and how we had solved some of the main challenges faced by cybersecurity transformations, and we had gained a bit of notoriety.  I entered a process of selection to write the book with mentorship from Neil and was lucky enough to have been chosen.”  

Matt recalls that one day, he was having a drink with a friend, and he introduced him to a VC who said they would fund the idea if he wanted to “go outside the wall” and start up a company.  “So, I took my leap, deciding I could work out how to build my aeroplane on my way down,” Matt says. 

The result is a company with a mission to make transformation achievable for everyone.  Matt says that whist it often seems the world is in a constant state of flux, with technology and society changing at an almost exponential rate, the fundamentals of what it takes to manage transformation has not.  Matt and his team don’t try to predict the future, instead they apply a core set of principles that will always lead to success.

XaaS Core Products

XaaS’s offering comprises of three core products. ‘Advance’ is an enterprise-level product designed for organisations that need to undertake a full transformation. The second product is called ‘Evolve’. Matt says that it is a cutdown version aimed at helping improve those who don’t need to progress as far as an enterprise-level customer by guiding them through a much more simplified journey.

The third product ‘Oversight’ allows different companies working together to share a view of their progress via a combined dashboard. Matt explains that it is a bit like sharing fitness results on an Apple Watch. 

The initial focus of XaaS is on cybersecurity. “Our platform allows you to assess yourself against our cybertrak-X model – mapped to the industry-standard control frameworks such as NIST and ISO 27001/2 and Cyber Essentials,” Matt says. “It helps you assess where you need to be for your type of business and delivers you a simple, step by step dynamic roadmap, tracking progress and offering reports.”  

“In essence, we give you self-service consultancy, offering a dynamic route like modern-day SatNavs, rather than the traditional, static line drawn on a map,” Matt adds.

A Fan of ‘The Innovation Stack’ 

As Matt is a fan of Jim McKelvey’s “The Innovation Stack,” he and his team have built – and continue to build – the XaaS ‘innovation stack’, solving the challenges faced along their own transformational journey. Matt says that each solution adds to the whole and makes the stack greater than the sum of its parts.

He also says that XaaS has taken the lead from industries like health and fitness where fad diets and rapid exercise programmes have been replaced with a sustainable change in behaviours and eating habits. Moreover, their focus is not on technical controls but on the actions, people should take and how they should apply them to their systems to ensure successful and sustainable change.

The future of XaaS revolves around the continual development of the product stack, building additional models, and the creation of the ‘Transformation EcoSystem’, where people will be able to find help with any form of transformation. Matt points out that it will be like HubSpot’s forum, where one can today find all things related to CRM and Marketing.

Not a Fan of the Classic Definition of Success

For Matt, the classic definition of success, focused on achieving goals doesn’t work. He agrees with Simon Sinek’s, author and inspirational speaker, views that everyone lives in an infinite game rather than a finite one.  

“As entrepreneurs, we can never truly achieve our goals (vision) because they are a part of our continual transformation, a living and breathing entity growing with our business,” Matt says. “As such my view of success is based on effort and service.”

Matt believes that he is successful if he always gives his all, in turn having a positive impact on the world and those around him. 

Little Things Matter

Whilst being competitive throughout his life, Matt does not seek awards or external recognition, believing that value is determined by our impact on others. For him, it is the little things that matter. He considers it a reward when people he helped years ago get in touch to thank him for his advice. Matt says that it means that his advice and help enabled them to change their career path for the better.

“My most emotive example is a good friend telling me he wouldn’t be where he is today had I not introduced him to my grandfather’s moto of ‘you can always quit tomorrow,” Matt adds. “It solidifies to me that if XaaS can change even just one person’s life for the better, it is worth the work.”

Climbing – From a Hobby to Obsession

Whilst Matt is proud of all his accomplishments, he is particularly pleased that he achieved third place in the British Paraclimbing Championships 2021. For years, he was climbing as a hobby, but since he has started working with Team GB Paraclimbing Coach Belinda Fuller, climbing has become an obsession for him. He now intends to try out for Team GB later this year. 

Despite his hectic work schedule, he makes sure to carve out time – four times a week – for climbing.

“The Paraclimbing journey helped me to realise that hiding my CRPS and hiding my disabilities meant that I was withholding an opportunity to help give others hope and inspiration – no matter what afflictions they are suffering from – and so I decided to stop hiding my CRPS from the world and I ‘came out’ so to speak,” Matt says. 

Struggling to Maintain Work-Life Balance

As Matt struggles to switch off due to CRPS, he is always driven by a need to move forward and do more. As a result, he has always struggled to maintain a work-life balance. “Over the past few years, it has improved, but I’m far from a perfect role model,” says Matt, who is a father to two daughters.

“Don’t work on weekends” is one of the standard things he has learned. But, then, as co-founder and CEO of the startup, it has become tough for him to follow that mantra. “In a startup, the truth is that it is not always possible,” Matt says. “So, to me it is about trying to find a balance, giving myself enough time for my family – and myself – outside of work, then applying the same principles to the XaaS team.  We don’t worry about working 9 to 5, but instead are all deliverable focussed, with it coming the benefits of flexibility.  In this day and age, especially after multiple lockdowns and the pandemic, we all need to spend time on what’s important whether it be taking our daughter to a baby class or going for a run whilst the sun is shining.    

Personal Goals

Matt shared three of his personal goals with us. One of his goals is to see XaaS grow and his team develop. In recent months, Matt’s focus has been mainly on establishing XaaS and because of that, his book has been put on the back burner. His second goal is to see that the book becomes a success.

Thirdly, Matt’s ultimate goal is to impact the lives of people in a positive way, whether that be through his work or something else.

3 Pieces of Advice to Aspiring Leaders

Matt gave these three pieces of advice to aspiring leaders. His first advice was to stress the importance of courage in making a decision. Leaders do not have the ability to see the future, they have to make a good judgement with the information they have and own it, Matt tells aspiring leaders, adding that they shouldn’t necessarily judge themselves on their outcomes, remembering that a good decision doesn’t guarantee a good outcome any more than a bad decision does a bad one.  What matters is having the courage to make the decision and own it.

The second piece of advice was to highlight that it is people who help a leader win a war. “Leadership is not about plans or strategies; it’s about people,” Matt says. “You can win a fight on your own, but it takes an army to win a war, and starting up a company is a war.”

Matt’s third piece of advice to aspiring leaders was “It is not always going to be easy, but the opportunity to shape our lives and that of those around us is worth the stress.”

Advice to a Younger Self

If the adult Matt were to meet the younger Matt, would he advise him to avoid getting injured so that he did not have to live with chronic pain for the rest of his life? No. Matt does not want his younger self to live a mistake-free, injury-free life. He says that life is a web of choices, and people’s interactions do not just impact their future selves but also those around them. “As such my advice to a younger me would be to  do exactly what I did,” Matt says. “Make the mistakes I made and learn from them as I did.”  

“I would say to myself ‘You may not realise it for many years, Matt, but you’ll be helping more people than you’ll ever know, and you’ll be a good person,’”