Indholdsfortegnelse for November 2019 i NZBusiness+Management

Ben Grant and Josh Kempton have experienced co-working spaces in both Sydney and Auckland, and say the most important factor is ensuring the space meets your functional needs. With customers and suppliers worldwide, the co-founders of eco-packaging company Grounded Packaging say they spend a lot of time on voice and video calls, so readily accessible private spaces and good meeting facilities are vital. “In both cities we started off in spaces that were beautifully designed and worked well for more creative-type businesses, but weren’t the best for us,” says Ben. “You must be clear on what you need.” He believes the benefits of shared workspaces boil down to a couple of factors: • Access to top-class amenities, meeting rooms, quiet spaces, kitchen, printing, Internet and videoconferencing. “It makes it so…

Many businesses are turning to Bartercard because they’re seeing the opportunities and benefits the network’s cashless currency of trade dollars can bring to their business and lifestyle. Maximising cash flow, retaining customers, clearing excess stock are all important elements of any business, so using trade dollars to buy and sell goods and services can offer a wealth of advantages for business owners. So, how can Bartercard help grow your business? 1. Treat trade dollars as a supplement to cash-paying business By operating as a supplement to cash business, Bartercard gives members complete control over which products and services they sell through the community. No member is obligated at any time to accept trade dollar business instead of cash-based business. When you add Bartercard to your business, you are essentially allowing…

As a boss, manager, owner, yes, it probably is quicker to do things yourself. Sadly, the challenge is that as long as you think that way, you’ll always have to do it yourself. If you want to have a successful business (and a life), then doing everything yourself will have some very predictable outcomes: • In the long term, it will affect your health. • It will slow down the growth of your business. • It could actually cause the demise of your business in the long run. • It could affect your marriage and your family (or significant relationship). • It prevents your people from learning and growing. • It sends the message that you don’t trust anyone. • It says to your staff that they will never be…

WELL, ANOTHER year has all but disappeared and we find ourselves in November, scrambling to figure out why no one has organised Christmas presents for your clients or customers yet. Bugger! In this all-too-common scenario, panic starts to ensue and we all go into a disorganised tailspin; we start stocking up on perfectly adequate bottles of champagne that are on special from the supermarket. Surely these will do to send out?! Next, we all jump in a room for a team working-bee that sees us knee-deep in Christmas wrapping paper off-cuts, with sticky tape stuck to the soles of our shoes, struggling to get the bottles out on time. Then, oh no, we realise we can’t send a bottle to that person; they don’t drink. We call out to Susan…

It is always difficult for business executives to grasp when a new technology is ripe for use, and blockchain is no exception. This is ironic given blockchain is often presented as the “technology of trust”. Blockchains can be thought of as networks of virtual ledgers able to securely store and distribute data without a controlling intermediary. Unlike most digital technologies used to facilitate connectivity and duplicate processes, blockchain can tokenise, securely distribute and transfer anything of value to individuals on the network (such as a person’s vote or their financial assets). The ability to assign and transfer unique value to specific assets has proven particularly useful for helping new markets to emerge (e.g. Bitcoin and Ether) and is now being used to solve some of the most pressing global challenges.…

ARE YOU wasting your marketing dollars? Have you audited your marketing approach lately? You might think your spending is delivering great ROI, but is this a hunch or a fact? Have you ever audited your marketing and communications strategy, or any element of your company’s marketing function? Can you see exactly where it is adding value to your business, and where it is not? We have conducted a number of these audits in 2018 and 2019, and the biggest surprise is often the lack of connection between marketing and sales and even between different advisers on the same team. The problems vary. Sometimes the company is generating an impressive number of leads but often failing to convert them to customers; in other cases the focus is all on the bottom…

AHEAD OF the recent Future of the Future conference, AUT Business School hosted speaker Aiyemobisi Williams, co-founder and chief insights officer of Massive Change Network (MCN). Aiyemobisi boasts more than 20 years of communications experience and strategic design expertise with a deep focus on innovation at the intersection of disciplines. Her work takes a holistic approach to helping clients create impact at scale and drive growth while making the world a better place. “From the second we are born until the day we die, everything we see, hear and feel is designed. Design offers a path towards making positive impact on any scale and it is a path that is open to all,” said Aiyemobisi. For Aiyemobisi, good leadership is born at the crossroads of empathy (what she describes as…

For the thousands of Kiwis and tourists from all over the globe who have experienced it, Rotorua Canopy Tours is a special place. It is educational, exhilarating, and it has a deeper purpose in its work to restore the flora and fauna and promote sustainability in what was originally regarded as 500 hectares of low priority conservation land. For James Fitzgerald, who had a varied background in the tourism industry, the genesis for his eco-adventure business was the steady increase in demand for recreational activities by overseas travel agents, in the US especially, and securing a land concession from the Department of Conservation. With the original building and design quote in excess of $2 million, James was going to need a hand. And he found that hand in the form…

In 2018 start-up business Emergency Q won the inaugural Race for Space competition at the distinctive, purpose-built B:HIVE co-working facility, located at Takapuna’s Smales Farm. The Dragon’s Den-style contest was for a one-year rental and marketing package and was perfectly timed to help the business scale to the next level. Emergency Q targets New Zealand’s hospital emergency departments with its digital app designed to help reduce crowding and bottlenecks. Morris Pita, Emergency Q’s founder and CEO explains how their software safely empowers people with non-acute ailments to consider starting their journey in primary care. In just over two years more than 20 thousand people have chosen to use Emergency Q and been redirected from emergency departments to GPs and urgent care clinics. While it’s still early days in terms of…

NZB: Looking back over your 18 years with The Icehouse, if you had to pick two standout personal moments, what would they be? ANDY: Starting at the beginning on both our key target markets. For the start-ups, day one was the 11th of June 2001 at the Textile Centre – in an area with no fit-out. It was a cavern with a stool and a table – just me – and it was like: right, let’s get some bodies into this place. For the owner managers, day one was in mid-August – our first OMP programme at Hotel du Vin with our facilitators and David Irving. It was like ‘crikey, what have we let ourselves in for, with this group of amazing owners and rather outspoken people!’ Then there was…

Have you ever driven in rain so heavy you knew you really shouldn’t be driving? Remember how it felt? Barely able to see what’s in front of you, every sense heightened, tensed for a possible collision. The critical question is – did your lack of vision cause you to travel faster or slower? I’m guessing you slowed down. Significantly. Which is exactly what happens when your vision and plans for the future of your business remain unclear. Causing doubt and uncertainty for those traveling alongside you. It doesn’t have to be like this. You can remove this uncertainty and accelerate forward by lifting your leadership approach and team culture to becoming ‘Futuready’, instead of being… RESISTANT We’ve all met them. Even been one of them at times. People who resist…

In September I had the pleasure of listening to Warren Rustand speak to a small audience of entrepreneurs in Auckland. Warren is a remarkable individual. Among his many accolades, he is a former NBA basketball player; he served as the appointment secretary to US president Gerald Ford; he has been the CEO or chairman of 17 companies; and he served on the board of directors for 50 public, private and not-for-profit organisations. He also has six children, and is still going strong and keeping up with his grand-kids. All this at the ripe old age of 76! There was a huge number of takeaways from his two-hour talk, far more than I could fit into this column. However, I’ve decided to focus on a small area of his talk –…

A PRODUCTIVE workplace starts with staff who are reliably attending work and are engaged when they get there. When staff are habitually absent from work, a small business can be immediately impacted. Absorbing the workload and covering the gap can quickly become a real issue. It is important when faced with an employee who either takes a lot of intermittent leave at short notice, takes unauthorised absence, or takes long periods of sick leave that you have in place a strategy and framework for responding. Employers are often equipped to deal with disciplinary issues, and the temptation is to approach absence from work in the same way. In many cases this will be a mistake. The reason being that where the reason for intermittent or long term leave is a…

Reading a novel about grief and looking at contemporary artworks may sound like part of a liberal arts education or languid diversions of people of leisure. Of late, MBA students at Carnegie Mellon’s Tepper School of Business are also engaging in such pursuits in the name of empathy. Empathy training, to be exact. Before you dismiss it as woo-woo, Tepper’s programme is only one of the latest entrants in the growing drive to incorporate empathy in the workplace, as study after study attest to the benefits of empathetic offices even though they are far from being the norm. Empathy is seen as helpful to every aspect of business, from management and relationship building, negotiation and conflict resolution, sales and productivity, to customer loyalty. The top 10 companies in the Global…

From problems stemming from the recent New Zealand census to data collected by Facebook, data has been in the news a lot lately. It may seem obvious that large organisations such as Statistics New Zealand and Facebook need to continually improve their data capabilities, but the same is true of nearly every organisation. Organisations that lack data capabilities are at a strategic and operational disadvantage. Data can help organisations be more efficient and effective, and in the case of private-sector organisations, get ahead of competitors. For example, mining data on who watches what armed Netflix with insights about what original content is likely to be popular. Closer to home, most New Zealanders no longer have to fill out tax returns because it can be done by the IRD with data…

The owner of a small software company once came to me with a unique problem. As well as selling software he also provided training and support in how to use it. But what he couldn’t understand was why the training often worked well and sank in, but in other cases, didn’t, meaning the client's subsequent use of the software was patchy, or floundered altogether. Understandably, his focus was on getting to the bottom of the variance in the customer experience, and how his company could address that by improving the delivery of their training. My response was to ask if [he thought] the problem wasn’t his training but rather of the organisational cultures of the clients he was working with. From the look on his face, it seemed he hadn’t.…

YOU’RE ONE of the older people in your workplace. You love the vitality and enthusiasm of the younger people you work with and you know your experience and wisdom is appreciated. You know the shortcuts, the methods that work and you have the relationships you’ve built over time. You have no doubt climbed the career ladder over the years and are enjoying your management role. You believe you are adding significant value, but you also worry slightly about how you are perceived. Are you thought of as the “mum” or the “uncle” of the team? Are you keeping up with the rapid changes that technology now brings to the workplace? Are you still relevant? Being older in the office can be both a very cool place to be and a…

HOW SIMPLICITY TRANSFORMED A LOSS-MAKING MEGA-BRAND WHICHEVER WAY you look at it, DHL’s turnaround from the brink of bankruptcy in 2008 to the world class performer it is today, makes a fascinating story. However, without doubt, it’s a story best seen through the eyes of the mastermind behind that seemingly impossible transformation – the remarkable Ken Allen. The former CEO of DHL Express is a no-nonsense Yorkshireman who rose from humble beginnings to reach the pinnacle of his industry, and his career, as CEO of DHL – the world’s most international company. As an expression of his drive to share his business insights, his passion for DHL, and his personal experiences, Allen penned Radical Simplicity – a book that reveals how he went about transforming what was a loss-making mega-brand…

In the process of researching business stories I’ve visited a number of Auckland’s shared workspaces, and although each has a unique environment and configuration, I’ve noticed they all share a common vibe of quiet productivity; they ooze style and shout professionalism. For business owners and entrepreneurs they offer a whole new level of collaboration. While every co-working space is different, one user summed up his experience as “being amongst a community of like-minded, interesting people and businesses, which makes for a much more dynamic environment, and provides strong opportunities for networking and collaboration”. Why have shared workspaces proliferated around the country in such a relatively short time? For some answers NZBusiness caught up with Pierre Ferrandon, country manager of IWG, the flexible workspace multinational behind 16 locations in New Zealand,…

For Blue Sky Recruitment’s Kathryn Sandford, choosing to set up base in a shared working space was a nobrainer. “A commercial real estate agent introduced us to Generator in Britomart Place. We did the virtual tour before it opened and liked the concept. We felt that because we are a small recruitment company being in our own office was too isolating, so the idea of Generator really appealed.” Kathryn says the “engaged” Generator staff encourage members in a positive way to be part of a community. She points to the acknowledgment of birthdays and organising the monthly social calendar as examples. “You could say we’ve been able to outsource our culture and really focus on our business. “Shared workspace works really well when you get a group of people who…

The self-employed sector is growing steadily in this country, mirroring trends offshore. An estimated 15 percent of the population is now earning some form of income independently. The so-called “gig economy” is on the rise, as is the number of contractors and freelancers managing “portfolio careers” – the art of mixing income-generating jobs. Hnry is a service for these self-employed people that takes care of all their financial admin. When the business launched in early 2018, the goal was to have 2000 users by September 2019, and when NZBusiness caught up with its co-founder and CEO James Fuller recently, he reported the start-up had already exceeded its goals for the whole year. “It’s interesting that there has been a very high referral rate through existing customers,” he says, “which is…

The Pitney Bowes SendStation™ tablet was created to bring small and medium sized businesses many of the shipping benefits that are often only available to larger companies, such as access to courier discounts, says Sharon Souproanuck, the Australia and New Zealand head of sales operations and product management for Pitney Bowes Sending Technology Solutions. She explains SendStation is aimed at what Pitney Bowes describes as ‘office shippers. These are companies that may send somewhere between 40 and 80 parcels and packages per month. These mid-size senders are particularly interested in SendStation as it provides them access to discount parcel sending rates. The convenience factor of having a single device handle the job of getting packages ready to send with an integrated label printer will for many be another key reason…

Recently someone asked me, “Duncan, what keeps you up at night?” While my list could go on and on, one of the key responses would be my role in helping to contribute to a thriving New Zealand economy. I have three kids, all who are nearing the end of school or university. I want to see them get great jobs and work in a strong, healthy and innovative business environment. That’s why a key focus for my agency is to help New Zealand businesses grow and, where possible, help those businesses earn more through exporting. In terms of context, exporting is hard. There is no getting around it. It’s already incredibly challenging to grow a strong domestic business, but to grow a successful export business on top of that is…

Research by the Productivity Commission shows how New Zealanders have experienced big changes in the jobs they do and the places they live and work. These changes reflect shifts in the industries in which people work. Between 1976 and 2013 employment in manufacturing declined from 25 percent to 10 percent of the workforce. The commission says there was, in contrast, significant expansion in employment in professional services, health and education, accommodation and hospitality, and financial services. It says in a media release that similar trends have been seen in most developing countries, with manufacturing employment declining from 32 percent of the workforce in 1950 to nine percent in 2010 in the United States. This expansion of employment in services encouraged a reallocation of jobs away from smaller centres to Auckland…

In a Harvard Business Review (HBR) article Do you hate your boss? Manfred F.R. Kets de Vries shares a global survey where 70 percent of employees are not engaged at work and they did not have anything nice to say about their bosses. Gallup research reports that companies fail to choose the candidate with the right management talent for the job a staggering 82 percent of the time. When managers account for 70 percent of variance in employee engagement scores and study after study shows that engagement impacts productivity, turnover and profitability, the quality of leadership is a real issue. It’s not to say there aren’t any good leaders out there, but we hear of too many stories about leadership failures despite billions of dollars being invested in leadership development.…

A KEY consideration when doing due diligence for a board role – and even before applying, is what is the potential reputational risk from this role. Similarly actions you take outside of your governance roles can incur reputational risk damage. Essentially reputational risk is the potential for negative publicity or perception stemming from being a director of that organisation – or from one’s own activities within, or outside, the organisation. This is distinct from reputational risk for the organisation itself, although the two will be linked in many situations. Reputational risk is much harder to quantify than, say, financial or health and safety risks, as it is much harder to predict as it is often from the conduct of individuals. In today’s hyper-connected online world, any damage to your reputation…