Purpose-Led NZ

We have some big exciting plans under way in the coming months... things that honestly have been decades in the making!

We would love for you to follow along and support the kaupapa where you can, making spaces and opportunities for women's empowerment and the betterment of whanau and community.

Watch this space!! 💜💙💚💛🧡❤

I had my first taste of working in the corporate world while I was still at high school. I worked in a call center for a large telecommunications community here in NZ.

When I left school, I had been working in part time roles for various roles for years. I had lots of ideas of things I didn't want to do, but not a great deal of what I did want. I left school in the days where the cultural norm of 'go straight to uni or fail' was a strong rhetoric, particularly at a private school in Auckland.

I was now two years out from high school and had the bitter taste of a boss who utilized the power imbalance for their benefit against a young adult, fresh into a full time working role post school. So I did what I know I'm not alone in and chose a university degree in Business.

I was one of those naive types who decided to study Human Resources as one of my business majors because I thought it was about people. I thought I could make a difference or impact around the imbalance of power between employee and employer. I thought I could help the 'little guy'.

That's not what HR is. The bigger the company, the further from that it often is. I ended up studying Business and Information Management as a double degree.

Before I had even graduated, I made my way into consulting roles in the corporate business world, primarily doing project based contracts with my lecturers in their consulting businesses. I mostly spent time dealing with fast growth organizations lacking structure required in a bigger operation, business takeovers, restructures and business development coaching.

After graduating my undergraduate degree and consulting with a number of large name consulting firms I branched out to working on my own in consultancy. Frustrated at the lack of change in the business world I was able to achieve from working with small to medium enterprises, I decided I needed a different approach and went back to uni for postgraduate studies and research.

I spent over 7 years in university study and research, working alongside at the same time. I studied business, management, information technology, cross cultural communication, education, how people learn, fundamental research principles and more.

I wanted to understand how we could make capitalism work better for humanity, how we could make the system work for people, particularly to help uplift those from lower down the privilege chain and improve the opportunities for their family line.

I established a trade sharing website project with some friends and fellow students and after it was up and running and proved successful on a small scale, we presented it for funding to investors. The lack of ability to factor in taxation or how to deal with IRD was a killer for scaling the project and I felt despondent about actually trying to make real change. Regardless of how I could spin it, it felt to me that the business world and capitalism prioritized money over people and the planet and attempts to change that often just felt like lip service.

It took me a while to work it out really on reflection, but those things I was seeking, they are not the specialty of capitalism. I finally ventured into Not For Profits, social justice and political reform arenas. Over that time I established and ran two further successful organizations, one a consulting agency working with community groups, small businesses and sole traders and the other a charitable trust that pushed for legal reform and social change in the digital space.

It was this stage of my life, my mid 20s that everything completely took an unexpected turn….

One might say that I kind of grew up as a business protégé from the start.

This is my sister's birth notice. She's nearly four years younger than me and while I have had a bit of a way with words my whole life, I doubt I was articulate enough to write this alone at the time 😆

I did have a number of my own entrepreneurial efforts throughout school, starting more underage organisations of various kinds than I can count! As I grew up, I intimately watched the process of big businesses buying up smaller ones over and over again. Watching my Dad move from business creation to sale back to the start again.

Slowly over time he himself got absorbed into the corporate world and worked as a change manager internationally for corporate takeovers as my family moved around the world. But my early years teaching of how to identify market need, find solutions and then market them was well ingrained.

After leaving high school, I went on to work in a small family run education provider in their office. I quickly identified, within three months of working as the receptionist fresh out of school, that they were missing a massive part of the potential market share as the short term course we were offering was not NCEA accredited and therefore was not eligible for funding support from a number of providers.

I rapidly moved from reception to program development, office manager and course content teacher. That organization had exponential growth in an incredibly short period of time and still very much thrives today, going from just the one short term course offered when I joined shortly after the schools conception in early 2000s, to now over six different programs offered all NCEA accredited. They have won NZ Training Establishment of the Year awards for four years running.

I moved on quite quickly in the scheme of things from that role and then into bar management in hotels alongside beginning my uni studies. It turns out this first hand experience of how I could support other peoples entrepreneurial endeavors also came with another, less pleasant side...

My boss at the time was top level narc bully material who quickly realised I had was a resource he liked to throw his problems at. So much so was he generally problematic and awful that I later found out that his two previous employees before me had taken him to employment court for personal grievances and won!

This job was pivotal for me in my career development though and while I wouldn't wish that level of bullying and nastiness on my worst enemy, I am grateful for the push into the next stage of my journey regardless….