Innholdsfortegnelse for July 2018 i NZBusiness+Management

Over the years this publication has covered a wide range of businesses and sectors on its printed pages and digital platforms, but as far as I can recall we’ve not covered a pharmacy business prior to this month’s cover story. It may seem a slightly unusual choice but the attraction with Mark Webster’s Stay Well Pharmacy in Christchurch is the community-focused story behind the business and the naturopathic approach to the business by Mark. Even in these enlightened times naturopathic pharmacists are extremely rare. We’ve always been about telling the real stories behind businesses and showcasing those businesses that choose to go beyond the traditional way of doing things. There is a lot that’s real, and very little that’s traditional, about our July cover story. It’s concerning, I believe, how…

Some time ago while working as a chartered accountant in the UK, Kim Helas had an unfulfilled dream. “All these guys came in with these boxes. I thought if they can run their own business – why can’t I?” That’s where her business idea all started, she recalls. Inspiration finally came through a visit to Italy. Seeing the beautiful stationery sold there provided the necessary spark to launch Passion For Paper in Auckland almost 22 years ago. Like a typical business owner, Kim does everything ‘hands-on’ – from product sourcing, ordering, pricing and warehousing to merchandising. Her reverence for past traditions and manners instilled from a young age around acknowledging others were key business drivers. She could see an opportunity caused by “everything going electronic”. “When people want to write…

It is hard to keep a pioneering adventure tourism operator down. Henry van Asch, co-founder and now managing director of AJ Hackett Bungy New Zealand, continues to prove that just because you are a pioneer it doesn’t mean you can’t still be innovating. At the recent Tourism Industry Association’s major trade event in Dunedin, TRENZ, Henry was much in evidence, most notably as he launched his company’s 30th anniversary campaign with a pretty scary looking bungy jump from a helicopter hovering 150 metres above Dunedin Harbour. And there’s also a promise of a new “and never been done before experience” encompassing height, flight and speed at the company’s Nevis Valley site. The company says its 30th anniversary means it wants to do “something that acknowledges our place at the cutting…

1 Do your due diligence! Kiwis wanting to do business in China need to first check whether their brand is already in use there. Having your brand registered in New Zealand doesn’t necessarily mean you own it elsewhere. China has a ‘first to file’ trademark system which means businesses have no rights to their trade mark in China until they actually register it there. Until then, businesses risk someone else registering it and suing them for infringement, regardless of whether you’ve been using your brand for years or not. 2 Is China a viable market for your goods/services or is a China partner the best way to meet demands for goods/services in other countries? If China is a viable option, what are the best channels to use? 3 Seek advice…

I have been involved with Unfiltered for a few years, first as an interviewee and subsequently as a commercial partner. The third annual Unfiltered Live event was held on Tuesday May 22 at Shed 10 on Auckland’s waterfront. Hosted by former Saatchi & Saatchi CEO and Unfiltered chair Kevin Roberts, the event saw speakers and panellists who have reached high levels of achievement in the entrepreneurial space deliver engaging lessons to a captivated audience on attaining business success. The title of this year’s event was “How to Win in Business. Fast” – and the theme of winning quickly couldn’t have been more present throughout the day, as the ten speakers all shared not just their own success stories, but each provided five ideas for entrepreneurial success within their allotted 20…

IF YOU’VE DREAMT about your business making it big in China, you’re not alone. Capture even a fraction of the market, and your business can experience growth unfathomable in New Zealand. The trouble is, 48 percent of foreign businesses fail in China within two years. I don’t know about you, but I don’t like those odds – particularly since we’re talking about businesses like Nike, Uber and Louis Vuitton. Just last month I was speaking with Gabriel Walker from Silk Cloud – specialists in Chinese market penetration – who confessed, “China is completely different in every way. There’s always stuff that surprises.” Does this mean Kiwi businesses should give up on their dreams of Chinese success? No. I strongly believe that in a vast, saturated market like China’s, customer experience…

Worksafe has just released the first in a series of webinars with CEO Nicole Rosie in discussion with prominent CEOs in New Zealand on what health and safety in the workplace means to them. Rosie told Management the purpose of these webinars is to help leaders realise that health and safety is mainstream and should be as much a part of any business discussion as financial risk or commodity risk might be, because leaders need to have that same currency on health and safety practice. The second purpose is to get people to understand that health and safety is not an extra and to showcase CEOs who put health and safety at the centre of everything they do. She says the webinars highlight that health and safety is about people…

Co-ops come in different forms and the CBNZ website points to: Producer cooperatives: Owned by people who produce similar types of products. Purchasing/shared services cooperatives: Owned and governed by independent business owners that come together to enhance their purchasing power. Banking cooperatives: Financial entities which belong to their members, who are at the same time owners and customers. They can be set up as a bank, a building society or a credit union. Insurance mutual: Owned entirely by those who take out policies. Surpluses are either used to reduce future premiums or rebated to policyholders as a dividend. Consumer cooperatives: Owned by the people who buy the goods or use the services of the cooperative. Worker cooperatives: Owned and governed by the employees of the business.…

THE WAY a business is structured and operates will go a long way towards its success. Of course, when an organisation grows, it can be tricky to work out who should be doing what. Should this factor be based on skills or in line with what customers are demanding? This is when organisational modelling can be implemented. Organisational modelling is the art of taking the accountabilities that must be met by an organisation and developing logic for the distribution of these among the constituent parts. There is one element every organisation needs – structure. It doesn't matter whether you're a small business with a handful of employees or a multi-faceted council with countless departments, the more structure and process in place, the greater the chance of success. With this in…

WITH THE role of privacy and its importance in the digital age once again hitting the news, it’s worth reflecting on some underlying assumptions about it that are frequently made. We take it for granted that our right to privacy is always assumed from a modern perspective and something worth defending at all costs, and maybe it is, but to really understand how to construct appropriate and effective safeguards for privacy (if that is the end goal), it’s necessary to start looking at how privacy has evolved throughout history and into the digital age. Perhaps David Houle sums it up best when he says: “It is now time for humanity to engage in a deeper discussion of privacy. Do we still have it, and how do we choose to live…

The productivity of New Zealand businesses, or lack of it, has had a bit of attention lately and that looks likely to continue as the Government’s Fair Pay Agreement working party gets underway. Productivity can be a difficult concept to really get to grips with, as is why New Zealand is seen as less productive than many other countries. This issue we have an excellent article from the Productivity Commission’s Paul Conway on why so many businesses have low productivity and what needs to happen to lift the collective bar. He says lifting productivity is the key to a successful business community and a more prosperous New Zealand. “But moving from an economy based on low-cost labour and long working hours to one driven by productivity improvements is difficult and…

PART 6. PRODUCT LAUNCH My experience with product launches comes from the various software start-ups I’ve been involved with, that have typically sold software or cloud services to businesses. I expect that most of the concepts discussed here will be applicable to other types of businesses, but there are bound to be some differences and exceptions in other industries. EARLY ADOPTERS Prior to launching a product or service in a geography or market segment, seek out suitable friendly “early adopter” customers that would be typical of the market you are targeting. Work closely with them to understand their needs, ensure they have an excellent experience with your offering and make sure you have confidence that your offering genuinely fits a real market need. MARKET COMMUNICATIONS Engage the services of a…

A GOOD EXAMPLE of how digitalisation delivers productivity efficiencies into every aspect of a company’s operation is Pitney Bowes’ LobbyTrac (pitneybowes.com/nz/lobbtrac) – a digital solution for managing visitor and employee traffic in office lobbies. Digital solutions are an effective means to manage business practices, such as Health and Safety at Work Regulations, and ensure proper compliance processes are being met. There are serious penalties for non-compliance of the regulations but in the event of an emergency, those penalties are nothing compared to the risk business owners carry if they’re not sure who is in the building or where they are. It’s no longer enough to simply have a visitor write down their name on a sign-in sheet to gain access to business premises. In an emergency, you need to know…

In this era of disruption and change, how do you recruit for the future? Traditionally, people reference past job descriptions (JDs) and those who have come before – looking at those who have filled the roles, and what has been on their CVs. But it’s a new time – and a new time requires a new approach. It’s critical to take a fresh, holistic look at a candidate’s background. It’s about what a person has achieved, rather than who has employed them before. Where the focus might once have been on how similar their previous roles were to what you’re now looking for, it’s time to rethink – is that really the best way of doing it? Plenty of people – especially women and those from diverse backgrounds – haven’t…

I caught up with Nic Wetere, CEO of Canary Enterprises, fresh off the plane from Singapore where she had been attending the Food & Hotel Asia Trade Show. “It was an amazing experience – the buzz and excitement of working with like-minded companies in the NZ Pavilion with NZTE, and seeing so many New Zealand companies doing amazingly innovative things,” reported Nic. “You wonder why you haven’t heard of them! It’s a great event for networking and showcasing.” While you may have seen Canary brand clarified butter in New Zealand supermarkets, Canary’s products go beyond this to individual portions of butter medallions and rosettes. They were exporting from day one; now producing 120,000 portions of butter a day to countries all over the world, including their biggest customers in Australia,…

WorkSafe CEO Nicole Rosie seems to have been preparing herself for this role her whole working life. She’s a former tennis champion, a Fulbright Scholar who passed law with first class honours at Otago, then went on to complete a Masters of Public Health at Harvard and she is a mother of four children under 12. Add into this mix a woman who is living with chronic pain from a neck injury sustained from sport, who was told that she may end up being disabled for life, and you begin to get a sense of the type of determination that drives her. Time spent in an Auckland pain clinic helped cement her interest in the connection between law, medicine and health and in an employee as a whole person. It…

In business, experience is a wonderful thing. Over time it allows you to work smarter, better understand the market, and increase the chances of success in everything you do. For Grant Foggo, his business journey has seen him experience vastly different cultures, a variety of business sectors, a major setback, and some solid business growth based on his knowledge of sales management. Grant left the UK aged just 23, worked in Saudi Arabia for ten years, Brunei for another ten where he married his Kiwi-born wife Sally, before relocating to Wellington 16 years ago. After finding his feet, Grant took on a sales position for an office relocation company, and some years later purchased a Hutt Valley-based recruitment business. Then the GFC bombshell dropped and in Grant’s words “we lost…

TO HELP GET established in your own pharmacy business, here are Mark Webster’s top three tips: 1. Obtain as much information as you can, and from multiple sources. 2. Remind yourself that science is fluid not static – what we know today is not what we knew yesterday and it isn’t what we’ll do tomorrow. 3. Team up with good people – but ensure you learn as much about what you shouldn’t do or don’t want to do as about what you should do and do want to do. “I worked for around 35 pharmacies and some of them taught me things that made me think ‘no I’m never doing that [in my own pharmacy]’.”…

The world we are living in mostly operates on what is called the linear economy. The line starts when we extract raw materials from our planet. It ends when we discard or destroy our rubbish somewhere. Employed at the scale it now is, on the materials we now have, this creates a few problems. We will eventually run out of the raw materials we can easily get out of the ground, and our rubbish ends up all over the place. One of the best examples is plastic. The raw material is crude oil. This is increasingly expensive for us to get out of the ground, especially as we account for the environmental damage of doing so. At the same time, we have ended up with plastic literally everywhere. This was…

• If you have a distribution model like us, do your homework and ensure you’re matching yourself with like-minded people. The culture’s got to fit. You can’t sell a product without the right people. • Utilise NZTE’s in-market research to help you find the right person. • Be flexible in your strategy so you can take up opportunities when they arise. • Get in front of your customers. Our sales team are out every two to three months meeting distributers. • Use your network for getting on-the-ground intelligence. We’re such a small community in the New Zealand food space, so share recommendations and utilise your contacts.…

TO BE sustainable, a franchise network needs to be set up with a tried-and-tested model that allows for three things: 1. Sufficient income for franchisees to achieve an acceptable return on their investment; 2. Sufficient profit margin for the franchisor to retain their interest in managing the franchise; 3. Sufficient revenue to fund the support services that franchisees need on an ongoing basis. None of these is easy to get right, which is why new franchisors should always use an experienced and trustworthy consultant. Even if they get the income and profit margin right, getting the third one wrong can cause considerable grief further down the track. Support services come in a variety of types. There’s research and development – keeping up with market trends, developing new products or services,…

ONCE UPON A time… no, this is no fairy tale. It’s a real account of a how an Auckland-based SME was dealt with during a business loan application. The business owner is in his mid-30s, with three year’s history and no debt. Better yet, he has never had any debt. It is a hospitality business and the owner an award-winning chef. Current profit (for the year 31 March 2018) is over 40 percent of turnover and both gross margin and sales are well up on the previous year’s turnover by double-digit growth. As a direct result of growth, a solid three-plus year history, and numerous reviews in both specialist and national media, an opportunity to secure new (larger) premises occurred and business plans drawn up. By using its own capital…

The absolute importance of the role that health and safety plays in our workplaces was tragically underlined when Management interviewed the chief executive at WorkSafe, New Zealand, Nicole Rosie. As we wound up the interview, Rosie turned on her phone to see a mandatory notification of a workplace death that had just occurred. She is notified of all workplace deaths immediately and it’s hard to imagine how difficult it would be to get 50 to 60 of those notifications each year. But, says Rosie, who has an extensive background in health and safety and change management, New Zealand is poised for real changes in its health and safety culture. “I am the change person, there has to be a big vision. New Zealand is poised for change on how to…

WHEN I create a shopping list with a client we usually also set a budget together for what we’ll be buying. Sometimes this is very specific, as in when a client asks “Do you think $3k will cover it?” and sometimes it’s implied. Often, it’s about what the client wants as an outcome, with men in particular happy to admit that they need to “lift their game” sartorially, and that they are seeing a shopping trip with a stylist as an investment in their career. Women will also do this, but are less likely to state it so openly. The budget can also be set by the items that are hanging in a clients’ existing wardrobe. Obviously, if the wardrobe is full of label designers, you know your client is…

Earlier this year LinkedIn Learning published the 2018 Workplace Learning Report, which surveyed more than 4,000 professionals: 1,200 talent development professionals, 2,200 employees, 200 executives and 400 people managers. The findings showed that talent developers are increasingly being asked to play a central role in strategic workforce planning. Through interviews with industry experts, the report also details a more holistic view of modern workplace learning, and the challenges that HR professionals face in today’s ever-changing world of work. Here are some of the key findings highlighted by LinkedIn communications team: 1. As the shelf life of skills shrinks, business leaders worry that talent developers are focused on training for today’s skill demands, at the expense of preventing tomorrow’s skill gaps. The LinkedIn research shows that in 2018, talent developers are…