NZBusiness May 2020

New Zealand’s media has been awash with inspiring tales of business owners defying the pandemic through reinvention – by navigating and pivoting across alert levels, and emerging wiser and better prepared for our ‘new normal’.  Here is a tiny selection of those warriors’ stories – delivering useful lessons on innovation and resilience. Well here we are at the tail end of 2020. If we hit ‘pause’ and review the past nine months we can be forgiven for thinking “did all that really happen?” Unfortunately we’re surrounded by reminders – the ubiquitous face-masks and sanitizers, the shuttered business premises and ‘closed’ signs, the struggling tourism, hospitality and tertiary education sectors. For business owners there have been countless stories of resilience and

A short collection of Covid-crushing insights to help businesses navigate the ‘new normal’. By editor Glenn Baker. When you consider how this insidious virus has wreaked havoc on the economy, and how New Zealand’s diverse SME community has generally responded, you can’t help but be inspired. We’re smart, we’re inventive, we’re gutsy in this part of the world. There were, and will be more, business casualties, but they’ll be outnumbered by the survivors and successes – businesses that have embraced new thinking, new technologies, and alternative revenue streams. “Pivoting” became the new buzzword during, and after, lockdown. We’ve all read about the companies that reinvented production lines to make hand sanitizers or face masks; the tour operator that delivered food

What is the key to enduring business partnerships? What are the warning signs that things aren’t right? NZBusiness went in search of some stellar partnerships and some expert advice.

A leader’s role is to understand the different personalities of their employees in order to bring out the best in them. It all begins with respect, writes Richard Conway. I learnt one of my biggest and most formative business lessons in the early 2000s, which was to “treat others how you want to be treated yourself.” Back then, I was working for a boutique, but highly profitable, commercial real estate company in London. The guy I reported to had a tendency to micro-manage to the utmost degree; not to mention he was also very quick to hand out criticism and almost never handed out praise. As a result, my confidence eroded and I was reticent to go the extra mile.

If your business has been experiencing sluggish sales growth in recent times, then perhaps these two suggestions from Logan Wedgwood can get things moving again. If you have ever failed, you know something that those who never tried don’t. You learn much more from failure than you do from success. If you pay attention. However, salespeople are failing every day and missing the opportunity to learn. I’ve distilled what I think are the two main lessons here:   Look at the ones that got away The first powerful way to grow your business is through lost deal reviews. What happens when a salesperson loses a deal they should have got? It was their target market customer; they were a shoe-in;

Creating a customer-centric culture that’s great for both your customers and your people will improve your business’s performance significantly. Mat Wylie explains how. In 2019 we interviewed some of Australasia’s top business leaders and asked them one key question: What are your biggest challenges?  Across the board, virtually all of them had the same two answers: 1.      They wanted to empower and grow their people; and 2.      They wanted to retain customers and grow.  That’s unsurprising – after all, you couldn’t run your business without your people and you wouldn’t have a business without your customers. What perhaps is surprising to some is just how inter-linked the two are. Too often, businesses will fall into the trap of