Business Is Boring

Today's guest is a trailblazer in law, business and leadership. Mai Chen, together with Sir Geoffrey Palmer, opened Australasia's first public law specialist firm in 1994, and since then has built a company and record that has resulted in more gongs and top positions than this intro could fit. Here's a few notable ones: New Zealand's Best public law firm a bunch of times, Inaugural Chair of Global...

If you want to see the power of great execution, walk into any of the hospitality offerings that our guest today has brought us. You might think a burger is a burger, but that is until you’ve been to Burger Burger. Consistently named a top option in town, their great ingredients, atmosphere, energy and engaged team have made their affordable treat a household name, with half a million plus diners...

Today’s guest has broken new ground, confounded any stereotypes and excelled at every level of business. Leaving school in South Auckland with School Cert, going to be a bank teller, marrying her boyfriend and having a baby at 21. This could be the end of the public life story of many women 40 years ago. What happened instead has been a career leading some of New Zealand’s biggest media companies...

One of the common kind of bleats from this podcast is that as a country we invest too much in unproductive assets like houses and interest payments, and not enough into companies. One of the reasons we are like this is that it actually isn’t that easy to invest in other stuff. In order to get into something like shares there are risks, and also you need to get a diverse range of investments to spr...

Today’s guest is a pioneer in organics, sustainable business and has won awards for being the world’s fairest trader. You have definitely sampled his wares, if you’ve enjoyed a fair trade banana, a cola made with actual cola, or a few years back tasted a lemonade sweetened with honey. Chris Morrison was the co-founder of Phoenix organics, when, more than 20 years ago there was no organics industry...

One of the big ingredients for business success is other people’s money. Who are these other people and what motivates them? There are stereotypes in pop culture -from Silicon Valley style VCs that unseat founders and are machiavellian - through to the Dragon’s Den approach of omnipotent geniuses bidding to lend their capital and reputations for a big slice of the future pie. Somewhere in the midd...

Alas, Simon is away this week so we've decided to republish one of our favourite episodes from 2016: fashion Svengali Karen Walker. Their discussion is worth a listen because Karen lays our her philosophy of no compromise and how that's helped build her business into a kind of super brand. As Simon wrote at the time "Karen Walker is not just a significant figure in New Zealand, she is a fixture on...

If you like to read and follow the stories of successful people some common themes emerge - never giving up, always persevering, get knocked down and get back up, never take no, feel the fear and do it anyway, fail until you succeed. It sounds ghastly doesn’t it? And it can be; it is hard, emotionally and physically. What does it take to do this - to get the resilience to keep going, to make it. S...

If you’ve enjoyed a scented candle in glass, perhaps one with a lovely gold foil on the front or with letters artfully arranged you may have been enjoying the fruits of the work of today’s guest, a kiwi that has had great success in international fragrance, an entrepreneur now based in London who has also been a champion for the new wave of kiwi companies. Christopher Yu is the MD of United Perfum...

Much of what we talk about in entrepreneurship in NZ comes to us from Silicon Valley. Whether its the lean, agile, the series A, the seed round - the terms and actions come out of this place. So it makes a lot of sense that AUT, for their inaugural entrepreneur in residence, have brought to NZ a 30 year veteran and key figure in the valley. You might have heard of some of the firms he has founded,...

Many small business people get into business to pursue their passion, yet end up spending a lot of time on the admin and accounts, and the salt in the wound is that this can also be wildly expensive black hole to throw hours, dollars and tears down. It’s a pain-point alright. And where there's pain there’s profit to be had. Enter Beany, a company that has come in to ride the wave of disruption cur...

One day when working on an online marketplace entrepreneur Holly Cardew was trying to get some imagery clear-cut onto a white background. Unless you’re a bit of a photoshop whizz, that is a real mission. Holly thought that if this was a problem for her it probably was for others looking to make a professional site, and that insight has led to her successful online enterprise pixc. The demand was o...

In a few years' time, once enough cars are autonomous and car ownership has collapsed and we’re turning roadside car parks into bike lanes and garages into four storey apartments, we will look back and wonder at how much space was left vacant just waiting for these cars that only ever got driven five percent of the time. It’s bananas. Some people didn’t have to wait until the future to see this. T...

One week ago, on the second week of this podcast, we had a lovely chap in to talk about the Techweek that was going on. A week to bring in local and international experts to talk about how tech can solve today's problems and advance tomorrow's industry. It was a great success and it's now back for its second outing. To discuss what the week has in store, we are again joined by Patrick McVeigh, gen...

Here’s a cool idea. How about taking a service every company needs, then doing it for free for them while also managing, as part of the deal, to get funds to charity. It sounds like you’ve just managed to clock life. Well, today’s company has done just this with Thank You Payroll. It's a clever service, where they’ve turned an IRD subsidy into a force for good. Christina Bellis and Lani Evans of T...

Adàn Tijerina is the director of Almighty Beverages. It's a Wellington based company producing a range of organic juices now to be found in stock around the country. It's hard graft making a boutique company work, particularly one that has a organic and community based ethos at heart. But hard work is something Adàn's well acquainted with. His background includes farm work in the States, working w...

It's a remarkable success story: create a enterprise that combines both business and philanthropy and before you blink, you're knee deep in work. The idea is simple: order a lunch and the price pays for another free lunch to go to a hungry school kid. Such is the journey of Eat My Lunch, which started from a home kitchen and very quickly ended up supplying 40 schools and a similar number of busine...

If you're looking at companies in the last few years that have made a real impact in the local entrepreneur and general scene, you can't go past My Food Bag. Pulling an idea in from overseas and making it work here in tiny, weird New Zealand was a passion for Cecilia and James Robinson. The idea was weekly delivered food parcels that contained everything a family needed to make meals for the week....

Vic Crone was announced as the new CEO of Callaghan Innovation in February of this year. Crone comes with a high profile won in executive roles at Chorus and Xero and from her bid for the Auckland Mayoralty. Simon invited her in to talk about her career, her time at Xero, what she learnt from politics and what's coming next for Callaghan.  Disclosure: Simon works at Vend, who have received Callagh...

You might have heard of the PayPal mafia, a term given to people that came through PayPal and then went on to invest in, found, and help grow other tech companies. People like Elon Musk, Peter Theil, Reid Hoffman; companies like Tesla, LinkedIn, Yelp, all trace back to PayPal. Well, in New Zealand I think we have our own version of that, the Trade Me mafia. The people who helped that company start...