Articles

Sometimes a product solution and a customer come together as though they were made for each other, and that is rather like what happened with hot NZ startup Tradify and ASAP Contracting. The problem Wes Cooper – owner of the Waikato building company ASAP Contracting – wanted to scale his business, but was having trouble managing  its […]

Most Viable Business winning team The Abnormals with AccuPoint Emma Liu, Rob Scovell, Rowan Scovell-Lightfoot & Wintec CFO Paul Holloway The 6th annual Innes48 Business Startup Competition was held in Hamilton in the last weekend of April. The largest of its kind in New Zealand, Innes48 saw 15 teams compete for the chance to pitch […]

When you know nothing, even fools can sound like geniuses. This is a vital lesson that all entrepreneurs need to learn as soon as possible – one that I and other entrepreneurs I know have had to learn the hard way, many times over. When you first start out in entrepreneurship – by this I […]

Sales training often fails, because it isn’t training that is needed in the first instance. Like water flowing downhill, and human nature, we all tend to find the path of least effort and lowest resistance. If a manager wants sales improvement, it’s easy to assume the first thing your employee needs is more training. Training […]

Founders: Amy Scott-Thomas and Julian Thomas HQ: Kaikoura Tell us about your business. We are a free pet magazine distributed New Zealand-wide in vet clinics, pet stores, pet friendly establishments and libraries; we are also available online. We started Pet Life magazine because we felt there was a gap in the market – there were […]

Like advertising, the commercial imperative for content marketing is to grow sales. But content marketing is not advertising; the strategies on which each are based could not be more different. While advertising relies on interrupting the attention that customers are trying to pay to another destination (eg a TV program, an article, a video clip), […]

Salespeople can have a tendency to over communicate. They fill the conversation gaps with excess drivel. Saying too much can dilute the main point you are trying to communicate and confuse the listener. Mark Twain is quoted as saying, “The right word may be effective but no word was ever as effective as a rightly […]

With 83% of baby boomer businesses not having an exit strategy there is big problem coming our way. If this problem is not met, a lot of business owners will face a bleak future. We talk to small business financial specialist Warwick Russell on how we can address this issue and turn the problem around. […]