If you are going to take a serious run at building or growing a business you need to be connected to your team, your customers, your community and yourself. Take advantage to have a chat with one of The Engine’s Business Advisors who have walked in your shoes, been hands-on and built the kind of company you want to build or grow many times.

Some of what we do to help our clients grow is: 

– Introduce awareness to wellness into organisations, strengthening culture, retention and attracting talent. There is no doubt right it’s a challenging market and companies who are currently working with us are retaining their talent and attracting new talent.

– Enable work/life balance for company owners and their team. Yes it’s possible to step away from your business with comfort and have time for you and your family.

– Coach businesses on understanding the numbers and the importance of cash flow in order to make informed decisions in the business. 

– Assist businesses with restructures for growth. 

– Facilitate disputes and potential dispute agreements with clients for leases, employment issues, transaction issues, franchise and more. 

– Mitigate potential risk through proper governance.

– Coach to avoid disputes through building better business practices & disciplines.

– Assist businesses out of the risk areas with financiers.

– Build the value proposition for businesses to increase the value for exit.

Everybody wants growth, the real question is where to begin. Get the conversation started by booking a complimentary chat with any of our Business Advisors so you can get your direction set. Now is the time to be planning for your first quarter for 2023 and setting the goals and tone for the year. 

Catherine Cooke | Founder and Leading Business Advisor

Book a free 30min planning session with any of our experienced Business Advisors. 

One Day Sale – Business North Harbour
The biggest one yet!

Date: Saturday the 3rd of December
Time: 9am – 4pm
Location: Albany Junior High School, 19 Appleby Road, Albany, Auckland

The Business North Harbour ONE DAY SALE, Auckland’s Biggest shopping bonanza is back bigger and better than ever. 
Celebrating its 10th year ONE DAY SALE, is a perfect opportunity to grab some great deals.

Wine Time will be participating with some super special deals. If you haven’t sorted your Christmas gifts already, Wine Time’s personalised wine and bubbles are the perfect gift to add value to your clients and keep your brand on their minds over the break.

Save the date and we can’t wait to see you there.

 New Zealand, we’re bringing you the best of Zoho.

Zoholics, an annual user conference for Zoho CRM customers and potentials, is 28th of November in Auckland, 9am to 5pm.

As an authorised Zoho Partner Mello would love for you to join us. Zoholics brings our customers and partners together with the best minds at Zoho for a day of learning and networking. 

This is an excellent opportunity, not only to get your questions answered, but to exchange ideas and experiences with business leaders just like yourself.

Share your experiences with Zoho employees, product experts, and fellow Zoho users. Meet over 400+ people expected to attend Zoholics in Sydney—networking is highly encouraged!

Learn how to get the most out of your investment in Zoho

Use the promo code: THEENGINE for a 50% discount on the ticket

 Provider News and Updates

Incentivising staff with shares

Despite some economic headwinds, New Zealand is still experiencing a tight labour market.  

Many employees are now in a position where they can “shop around” as there are more opportunities available to them.  As well as these options, post Covid employees are looking for more than just a pay cheque.  Employees now want long-term opportunities in which they can grow with a business and reap the rewards of the company’s success.  As a result, an increasing number of employers are looking at different options for staff holding shares as a retention tool.  This article looks at the different options available and highlights that careful legal and tax advice needs to be sought. 

The main reasons for staff holding shares from an employer’s perspective is to hopefully make them less likely to leave the business and contribute more when their efforts are linked to the company’s profits. 

The main benefits are: 

– Assist retention
– Encourage and increase productivity with existing employees
– Offer flexible remuneration
– Attract new employees
– An exit strategy for the owners

Of course, with staff holding shares there is a lot to think about.  If staff hold shares then normally those staff will have voting rights and will be able to see a lot more financial information about the business. 

Employee Share Schemes

An employee share scheme is an arrangement where employees are given the opportunity to acquire shares in the company.  The shares are issued by the company (as opposed to transferred by the existing shareholders) either up front to the employee or the issue of the shares can be linked to certain events or performance (known as options).   

Resources supplied by Provider to The Engine Martelli McKegg.

We Coach – Inspire – Provide – Facilitate – Empower –You to Grow

Most businesses don’t plan to fail, they fail to plan. The Engine are a recognised leading service provider for Business Advisory. We’ve helped many businesses like yours grow.

Some of what we do is:
– Introduce awareness to wellness in to organisations, strengthening culture, retention and attracting talent.
– Enable work/life balance for company owners and their team.
– Coach businesses on understanding the numbers and the importance of cash flow in order to makeinformed decisions in the business.
– Assist businesses with restructures for growth.
– Facilitate disputes and potential dispute agreements with clients for leases, employment issues,transaction issues, franchise and more.
– Mitigate potential risk through proper governance.
– Coach to avoid disputes through building better business practices & disciplines.
– Assist businesses out of the risk areas with financiers.

Making new year resolutions for your business in the new year is too late. You will lose your momentum and valuable time to develop and start implementing your strategic plans. Now is the time to be planning for your first quarter for 2023 and setting the goals and tone for the year.

Catherine Cooke | Founder and Leading Business Advisor

Book a free 30min planning session with any of our experienced Business Advisors. 

Business Health Check Up

Navigating Covid & many winter illnesses, coupled with staff shortages have brought many business’s to their knees and challenged business owner’s own wellness to meet supply and demand. I heard just last week of a business closed permanently as he could not find the staff and was just too tired to continue. So sad to not have someone to turn to for help and a decision we are seeing too often now.

What we do know is that Business Owners we work with appreciate the sounding board they have with us as their Business Advisors and the fact we are in the trenches with them. Many have already pre-positioned their business problems with solutions through working with us. Do you know how your business is performing in all areas? Do you receive regular management reporting and review actual against your plan and modify where necessary? Is your business burning you out and not giving you the freedom you deserve?

It can be so easy to get swept into being on the shop floor. And you don’t know what you don’t know but what we know is that when preventable businesses problems happen it is not acceptable to say you are busy and didn’t have time. Complete our business healthcheck so we can provide you with an analysis.

Read our full newsletter below.

We were very excited to host our first Forum for 2022 on Workplace Wellness.  Having businesses return to these types of events was encouraging and what a turn out it was!  Over 100 businesses started their morning at 7:30am with a light breakfast & networking and finished at 2pm with a great deal of insights, connections and from what we heard satisfied bellies from breakfast, morning tea and lunch.

Allely Estate and their sister company WineTime sponsored this event and we got to hear from their Director, Peter Cooke, on his journey from corporate to business and the benefits of WineTime impressing guests and customers with their personalised wine. 

We all loved Peter’s rounding up of how his focus is on happy employees = happy customers.

Catherine Cooke, our Founder and Leading Business Advisor of The Engine got to tell the audience of her own journey personally and in business with success & adversity.  While she has helped 100’s and 100’s of businesses nationwide as a Business Advisor her key pearls always were “know who you are and use it to your advantage”, “delegate to elevate but don’t abdicate” as well as 10 words “if it is to be it is up to me”.  Catherine also gave away her 3 trade secrets for marketing and branding across the event too.

The event had great Keynote Speakers such as Charlotte Lockhart – 4Day Week Global who champions ‘Working less is our future. The 4 Day Week conversation, together with flexible, reduced hours work, has reached the tipping point. We are excited to be leading and supporting the journey for 100’s of businesses around the world with our Global Pilot Programme.’ Charlotte was talking about paying your staff 100% for 80% of their time and how we borrow our Employees from their lives so we should be looking for the balance between keeping your business, clients and people happy.  We were really intrigued by the contents of their book, written by Charlotte’s life Partner, Andrew Barnes that presents a radical, convincing case for a sustainable, profitable future in which we work less, but are more productive, engaged, and satisfied.  A wee break to morning tea had attendees with an array of more cuisine from the Chefs along with an opportunity for more networking.

After morning tea we had 3 of our clients on the couch discussing their Business Journey from Kelly Young, Co-Owner 9Round Albany, discussing the benefits of having a Business Advisor in your business, to Sarah Donaldson and rebranding her business Fitworks Health and the koru meaning on her new brand, to Curtis Stowers and the creation of his new business with his wife Monica Moore, Conference In A Box that brings incredible speakers to Events – speaking of which we had the most amazing hour from 3 speakers he will be offering – the ladies from Organised Chaos.

Following the couch we got to hear from sought after Tony Alexander which was not only insightful but had the audience laughing with his comedic delivery.  Tony has a way of drawing the audience in, however his insights provided an order of calmness to all attending to hang in there, we may be seeing a peak and a drop by the end of the year in interest rates. 

It was a working Buffet lunch as the audience got to hear from the ladies at Organised Chaos who each individually spoke and performed. From Julia Grace  who introduced us to the theory of lizard, mouse and monkey brains.   You see when stressed out brains are offline brains, we are all on a wellbeing spectrum and we can always get weller, when we are mentally unwell.  That we’ve all had those moments of thinking we are pulling the handbrake and find ourselves flying back in the seat as we have just lowered the car seat, not pulled the handbrake. As we are usually the last to know we are unwell she cautioned never book flights under pressure – you may end up somewhere else! And last but not least what an incredible voice and heartfelt version Julia sang and strummed with her guitar for the song True Colours.

Next up was Christine Rankin who came back from the most awful public office treatment to working with businesses on transformative leadership.  That when facing extreme adversity, we need to lead, follow, or get the hell out of the way!

And if we thought we had been truly inspired Monica Moore took to the stage with her hilarious props of cardboard boxes and encouraged us to change our world, change our stories, and FLIP your thinking – FLIP = find life in problems. We strongly recommend you look to buy Monica’s book – Buy the Damn Dress which is not only hilarious but has practical tips for you to practice.

The Engine Specialist Provider Business Community and Sponsors kindly donate $7000 + in prizes from branding, copywriting, tax reviews, a legal review, wine, more wine … and more that were won on the day.

Gift bags were also distributed to all attendees with flyers from 9Round Albany, Fitworks Health, Sassy Mamma, WineTime and The Engine along with yummy chocolate from Rapt about Gifts and NZ organic rub from It’s Organic Darling, pads and pens by The Engine, Walker Wayland & Martelli McKegg.

If you would like to connect with any of the Keynote Speakers: 

– Tony Alexander – Leading Economist

– Charlotte Lockhart – 4DayWeek Global

– Christine Rankin, Julia Grace and Monica Moore – Organised Chaos

Feedback Matters

Good business is about connection. Connecting with your team. Connecting with your customers. Connecting with your hapori. Connecting with yourself. As a business owner what do you do to prioritise to understand your customers better, to know your future customers?

Customers aren’t data points. They’re human beings. Truly understanding your customers means understanding how they want to feel. At The Engine we help you to understand what you do and don’t know about your customers so you can start to have meaningful conversations and create a truly customer-centric business. After-all if you are going to be building a community it is best to know what your current customers think of you first.

So how do you find out what they think? At The Engine we create and deliver Customer Surveys that achieve insights and learnings which we then turn in to action points of opportunities. Listening to your customers makes them feel valued, which grows retention and loyalty as well as has so many more benefits for growth.

Read our full newsletter below.