The recruitment conversation ranks as one of the more unusual mother and son chats on record. ''I was 15 and she was, well, Mum,'' McGoogan said. ''I said to her, 'When we're in the office you will call me Michael and I will call you Margaret. We'll keep work and business totally separate. Don't expect any special treatment; in fact because of our relationship you'll probably do it tougher than most'.''

Looking back on the incident, McGoogan concedes he was an unusual youth. ''Totally anomalous would be an understatement,'' he said. He says the approach was the right one. ''We had to make it very clear the company wasn't going to favour family over the best person for the job.''

His mum, Margaret that is, turned out to be a model employee. ''She has been absolutely brilliant; working within those rules we have had an extremely successful business relationship as well as family relationship.''

The company first launched by a schoolboy with an afternoon gig at another Canberra success story, Ali Baba Kebabs, has morphed into one of Australia's hottest IT operations, with an annual turnover of $14 million and 73 staff, 55 of whom work in Canberra.

Originally called MCGOOHQ, renamed Aussie HQ in 2005 and UberGlobal since 2010, the company is a software, web and cloud services provider that has a 10th of Australia's 1.1 million active businesses on its books.

McGoogan, who makes a point of spending today thinking about tomorrow, says this will have jumped to 700,000 Australian customers within 12 months. ''We are making a number of strategic acquisitions,'' he said.

After that the plan is to go global.

His efforts have been recognised by the broader business community. Last month McGoogan was named the eastern region finalist in the Ernst and Young Entrepreneur of the Year award (in the emerging category). The national winner is to be announced in November and the 25-year-old Canberran believes he is in with a chance.

McGoogan, who is to feature in the BRW Young Rich Issue to be published next week, is prouder of the fact UberGlobal has made it on to the magazine's Fast 100 list four times in a row than any purely monetary measure of success.

Speaking from the Qantas Lounge at Sydney airport where he was just about to catch a plane to Singapore to address an IT conference before watching the Grand Prix, McGoogan repeatedly acknowledged what his family's support had meant at a time when he was living a very unusual life as a schoolboy entrepreneur.

''One of the reasons I believe I am successful is we have a fairly tight family unit,'' he said. ''We've got problems like every family but essentially the fact my parents are still together and have actually provided me with that stable family foundation has been a very, very good thing''. And, at the end of the day, family are people you can trust - a factor reflected in other recruitment decisions. ''My girlfriend was brought into the company after we started living together 12 months or so ago,'' he said.

In what appears to be a pattern, McGoogan has also recruited 10 of his closest school friends into the fold.

Set apart by unique gifts and interests very different from those of his classmates, the business leader notes his primary school years were ''extremely miserable''.

''It wasn't until I got to Year eight at Melrose High that I found a close group of 'geek friends'.'' In what must have seemed like a supersized episode of The Big Bang Theory, he was shoe-horned into Australia's first computer-assisted learning program. ''Nowadays every kid goes to school with a laptop but we were the first,'' he said. ''There were about 20 of us. We did mathematics in Excel and our English, science and SOS studies in Word and Powerpoint. We were the super geeks.''

While McGoogan's core skills are centred on computers and technology, relationships and trust are a big part of his life and decision making. ''I started out as somewhat of a geek and a technologist [but] I'm definitely not self-categorising myself in that way any more. As a business person I take a much broader view of society and what it means to be successful. My world view has definitely changed a lot over the past 10 or 12 years.''

Asked how he sees himself now, McGoogan has a one-word answer: ''Visionary''.

''Technology can help organisations and businesses be more successful,'' he said. ''We think we can genuinely change the way organisations across Australia use technology.''

Central to that vision is a supercharged version of an app store that makes the best and latest programs available to users without restrictive licensing agreements or massive upfront costs. ''We offer one-click software purchases with cost determined on a per month, per person, per application basis. What it means is that all businesses, regardless of size, now have access to major enterprise level software. We are leveraging up the competitiveness of small to medium enterprises by levelling the playing field with the big boys.''

McGoogan has created an online bazaar where UberGlobal links users and software developers and marketers for the benefit of all. ''We have built an application marketplace,'' he said. ''This software largely exists; it just hasn't had access to sales and marketing.''

That is where UberGlobal comes in. Armed with detailed information on the individual companies that make up its user base, it sends emails targeted at specific enterprises when new programs, or business apps if you like, applicable to their needs become available. ''We cut through the noise; we know how many employees each business has and target products to consumers.''

Trust, largely won by never spamming customers with offers of inappropriate or useless programs, is the key. ''I've learnt a lot of my core values from my dad [Bob] who is an old-school copper. He's taught me a lot of life lessons around what are my business philosophies today. What's right is right; what's wrong is wrong. Say what you mean, do what you say.''

McGoogan recalls time with his father as among the happiest experiences of his life. ''He was the one that got me into cars from an early age,'' he says.

Bob McGoogan's pride and joy, a 1946 Buick with the classic straight-eight engine, was a restoration project Michael became involved in at an early age. This ignited a lasting passion and, over the years, a succession of Fords led to a Ford Performance Vehicles Force 6. That has now made way for an E63 AMG Mercedes - his ''major material asset'' and one visible self-indulgence.

The car, a six-year-old example, is McGoogan's reward to himself for countless long days, late nights and an adolescence spent at the office. He has been working harder for longer than most university graduates in their late 30s. And, remarkably in the eyes of some, the gifted computer genius has got by so far with only a Year 11 education.

AussieHQ had become so all-consuming by the time he was in Year 11 he made the tough decision to leave to work ''full time'' - about 70 or 80 hours a week. He is not anti-academia, however; quite the opposite in fact.

''My journey to this point has been a series of constant choices where I have not, at this stage, pursued tertiary education. I left high school to focus on the business but I have supplemented that not just through the experience of building the business but I read a hell of a lot. It is still my ambition to go back to school at the next intermission. The pursuit of knowledge is still paramount in my life even though I've made the conscious choice not to follow the normal path of being at university straight after school.''

And what of the future? Not just for the company he hopes will become a major player to rival the likes of Microsoft and Google, but for the whole planet. ''I am an eternal optimist,'' McGoogan said. ''When I wake up in the morning the first thing I think of is tomorrow. Yes, we have a huge suite of problems globally but nothing can be achieved by negativity.''