About SED
Founded in Ballarat in 1996 as Strategic Enterprise Development. A network of senior professionals who chose to build their practice in the regions.
Last updated 31 August 2026
SED began in 1996 in Ballarat as Strategic Enterprise Development. Three decades on, we’re a network of highly qualified professionals combining practical, commercial and technical experience with a genuine understanding of the issues facing regional Australia.
Senior expertise, applied in the regions by people who live there, is something metropolitan-based firms can’t match. We work from two offices in regional Victoria, Ballarat and Warrnambool, for clients across regional Australia. Through independent, contemporary thinking, we work to grow the competitiveness of our clients and of regional Australia itself.
We take a long view. Some of our client relationships are older than most consulting firms. The work we do today draws on proprietary method refined project by project, spanning economic and workforce analysis, market assessment, clustering, investment logic and reporting dashboards.
The team: senior people, personally on the work
Dr Tony Irish
Tony is SED’s founding director and leads the practice’s most complex investment cases, economic assessments and strategic reviews. Over more than 30 years in professional services he has combined chartered-accountant rigour with senior public-sector economic advisory, a rare combination in regional consulting, and one that lets him take a project cleanly from the commercial numbers through to the funder’s investment logic and out to the boardroom conversation.
His professional grounding is as a Chartered Accountant. He is a CA Business Valuation Specialist (one of the credentials Chartered Accountants ANZ reserves for practitioners with substantive valuation experience) and holds an MBA and a Bachelor of Business alongside his CA qualification.
Tony’s doctorate is in regional economic development, with a specific focus on knowledge-intensive business services in regional locations. He has continued that line of inquiry through post-doctoral research on the role of knowledge in regional economies: how it accumulates, how it converts into commercial and community value, and why it behaves so differently in regional settings than in metropolitan ones. That research pedigree, held by no other Australian regional consultancy, underpins SED’s distinctive approach to regional workforce analysis, market profiling and economic strategy. He also holds a Graduate Certificate in Research.
Tony leads engagements for state and Commonwealth departments, universities, regional water and energy authorities, industry associations and Regional Development committees. His day-to-day work spans investment cases running into hundreds of millions of dollars, economic impact assessments for major regional infrastructure and higher-education projects, board-level strategic reviews, and workforce and knowledge-economy studies for entire regional cities.
He lives in Ballarat and works across regional Victoria and interstate.
Robert Lane
Robert brings deep commercial discipline and senior governance experience to SED’s work across regional Australia. His career combines executive-level financial and strategic advisory with sustained service in board and governance roles, and he is the director clients most often turn to when a project needs numbers that will survive both a bank credit committee and a board strategic review.
Robert’s practice spans three connected strands. His governance and board work (as a director, board member and adviser to boards) gives him a working command of the questions directors actually ask when they read a business case or a strategic review, and shapes how SED frames advice for board audiences. His strategic and organisational reviews cover governance reviews, organisational strategy, service model reviews and structural options assessments for regional public-sector, cooperative and industry clients. And his financial and economic analysis anchors many of SED’s largest engagements: DCF modelling, sensitivity and scenario analysis, cost-benefit analysis, investment cases and business cases, built so that a successor analyst or an opposing advisor can trace every assumption.
Robert works alongside Tony on SED’s largest engagements and leads projects in his own right for regional public-sector, cooperative and industry clients. Clients value his willingness to say plainly what the evidence does and doesn’t support, and his practical grip on what it takes to move a decision through a board.
He is based in the SED network and works across regional Victoria and interstate.
Specialist arms of the SED network
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