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.

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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.

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First Impressions Matter

Returning to a life from ZOOM has been quite challenging for many people. In fact, I’m spending a lot of time working with business owners on the importance of punctuality. Time is the one thing in life that you can never get back but can be the one thing you are remembered for if you are late. Being punctual has so many benefits.

1. Punctuality shows you are organised;
2. You are a dependable partner;
3. You care about your company’s reputation;
4. Punctuality reflects professionalism and attention to detail;
5. And that you respect the time of others.

Punctuality also reflects greatly on productivity. Having work ready employees, engaged and with a plan means you are more likely to be celebrating achievement.

Is punctuality a value of your business? Does your business have values?

We’d love to help you build meaningful values in your business.

Read our full newsletter below.

Establishing Culture Foundations

Good business is about connection;
Connecting with your team;
Connecting with your customers;
Connecting with yourself;

Discover the tools you need to create a vibrant, connected work culture with us here at The Engine.

Organisational culture or company culture is the set of values, behaviours, practices, and attitudes that the people in a company share. It informs the way they interact with each other and with customers, and it can make or break even the strongest business models.

We are proudly riders&elephants Practitioners which means we can help you make stronger connections to grow a healthier company culture and business. Connect with us to build a better company with an employee and customer engagement that inspires. We’ll help you build a better culture, become more customer-centric and be more resilient.

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