Business Is Boring

Zac De Silva is one of the top rated business coaches in the world. His background is in accountancy, and he was CFO of Flight Centre at the age of 28. He went on to lead a $100m organisation, run the turnaround of Barkers, and then became a coach in the corner of great local businesses, with 38 clients landing on the Deloitte Fast 50. I took part in one of his workshops, and working with Zac he has helped me get clearer about business than anything else I’ve done. Along with his wife, Sip, he runs Business Changing and the Nurture Change events, and with his experience in business we thought he was just the person to get on to talk about how to navigate business in 2020. Please note: This was recorded Tuesday morning, before the Government assistance package announcement. If you are in business and looking for the first thing you can do to help your situation, do check out the help you can get here. Business is Boring is presented by The Spinoff in association with Callaghan Innovation. Hosted on Acast. Se

Chia Sisters is award winning for its nutrition and commitment to sustainability. Its founders have been lauded on the Forbes Asia 30 under 30 list, named Obama Foundation Asia Pacific Leaders and have done some pretty cool stuff like put solar panels on their roof, more-than-doubling the power needed for their solar juicery and giving the excess back to the grid. To talk about how good business and sustainable practise can work together and what's next for Chia Sisters, Florence and Chloe Van Dyke joined us on Business is Boring. Business is Boring is presented by The Spinoff in association with Callaghan Innovation. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

All is for All came to many people’s attention with its trailblazing fashion shoots using diverse models. It’s continued to grow into an advocacy and accessibility consultancy, helping brands like The Warehouse better understand a good section of their customers and design their stores accordingly. Founder Grace Stratton has been a powerful communicator for the issue, talking to companies, speaking on the TedX stage and being named in the InStyle magazine top 50 Badass Women. To talk about what’s involved in starting a business in an industry that is chronically underinvested, how to work this around university study, and what’s next for her, Grace joined us on Business is Boring. Business is Boring is presented by The Spinoff in association with Callaghan Innovation. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Earlier this month Asia Pacific agritech conference evoke AG hosted 65 Kiwi delegates in Melbourne, and among the Kiwi companies represented was Sparrows. Their purpose is to cut food waste by using smart sensors and data to keep track of where everything is and where it’s meant to be, at what temperature and for how long. It’s leading to less product being written off, a huge problem in the food industry. Sparrows CEO and founder Andrea Watson and Simon Yarrow, who leads Callaghan Innovation’s agritech team joined us on Business is Boring this week. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Nemi Teas creates employment opportunities right across their business, with the first steps being running chai stalls at festivals and markets. They sell their tea through retail and wholesale, and are plastic free, using innovative materials and techniques to keep the nasty stuff out of their product. It’s a growing business addressing a growing problem, and helping to drive the idea that you can vote for the kind of world you want to live in with every dollar you spend. To talk about social enterprise, the Nemi Teas journey and what’s next for the brand, Founder and CEO Pranav Chopra joined us on Business is Boring. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

For a new spot, Bar Céleste has been received extremely well. It was named the best new opening of 2019 by Viva, reviewed glowingly by Metro, and is now a fixture and favourite of food influencer EatLitFood. If you haven’t been yet, you might wonder what’s so different about this 'neo-bistro' idea. Inspired by a new style of dining that's grown in France, it's where the idea for Bar Céleste began. Brought together by the team behind the La Pêche pop-ups that happened first in Paris and then around Auckland, Emma Ogilvie and Nick Landsman joined Business is Boring this week to talk about what goes into creating a dining experience and how in hospitality – a notoriously fickle industry – opening a restaurant is never as easy as it seems. Business is Boring is presented by The Spinoff in association with Callaghan Innovation. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Minaal's two founders landed on the idea of making travel bags as a way to continue a life lived abroad, and it’s still working, with this week’s podcast guest, co-founder Jimmy Hayes in Auckland on a trip back from Japan, one of their biggest markets and one of his home bases. Jimmy joined us on Business is Boring to talk making a dream into a life, global success, taking on an industry with massive incumbents, and the power of the crowd. Business is Boring is presented by The Spinoff in association with Callaghan Innovation. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Business is Boring is a weekly podcast series presented by The Spinoff in association with Callaghan Innovation. Host Simon Pound speaks with innovators and commentators focused on the future of New Zealand. This week he talks to Morris Pita from EmergencyQ. You might have been unlucky enough to have been sitting with a kid at an emergency department, wondering just how long it might take and if you were even in the right place. It's not a nice feeling, or a very productive one, and it turns out that a lot of people in the queue ahead of you, and maybe even you, might not be best served at that place. This insight helped lead this week’s podcast guest to take a side-step from a successful academic and business career into software entrepreneurship. He made an app called EmergencyQ that works with DHBs and emergency and community health providers to make sure everyone gets the fastest, most appropriate care for their needs. It's saving millions of dollars, countless hours, and meaning stretched emergency depar

Business is Boring is a weekly podcast series presented by The Spinoff in association with Callaghan Innovation. Host Simon Pound speaks with innovators and commentators focused on the future of New Zealand. This week he talks to Greg Brebner from Blunt Umbrellas. This week on the podcast, a business that began with the realisation that umbrellas really sucked, that's grown into a business turning the industry inside-out. Blunt Umbrellas sell brollies for 5-10 times more than the market, are found in countries all around the world, and have now sold over a million units of their signature styles. Through fashion collaborations, a lot of market building, and clever design they have created their own section of the market for their wind proof, strong, beautifully designed umbrellas, that won’t take your eye out or be heading straight to landfill after seeing some weather. To talk about making an idea into reality, the importance of a clear vision, and loving bad weather, creator and inventor Greig Brebner joine

Business is Boring is a weekly podcast series presented by The Spinoff in association with Callaghan Innovation. Host Simon Pound speaks with innovators and commentators focused on the future of New Zealand. This week he talks to Bridie Picot, founder of Thing Industries and Wrappy. This week’s podcast is a chat about turning cool ideas into great businesses, around day-jobs and responsibilities, and having those products be picked up by some of the great taste arbiters in the world. Bridie Picot started out in New Zealand, and then went to London and New York, working at some of the most influential ad agencies in the world. Around the edges she always had an interest in design, thoughtful and warm characterful pieces. She turned this love into Thing Industries, a partnership with a New Zealand based designer. The brand grew, running fashion collaborations, was named the maker of the year by local title Urbis, and was featured in Wallpaper* and in the New York Times for its playful products like the Banana P

Business is Boring is a weekly podcast series presented by The Spinoff in association with Callaghan Innovation. Host Simon Pound speaks with innovators and commentators focused on the future of New Zealand. This week he talks to Mike Taylor, founder of Pie Funds. On this week's Business is Boring, host Simon Pound talks to a founder and chief investment officer who has taken a company from starting with a small loan to having a billion under management in just over a decade. If you were a uni student around the year 2000 you might remember that you could draw down student loans, ostensibly for living, but we would all know stories of people who turned them into trips, parties or other forms of massive future liability. I went to a study trip in Russia on mine and resented the debt for the next twenty years. But how many people do you know who were onto-it enough to use that opportunity as the seed capital to kickstart an investment career? One that now means this week's podcast guest runs a company with $1b

Business is Boring is a weekly podcast series presented by The Spinoff in association with Callaghan Innovation. Host Simon Pound speaks with innovators and commentators focused on the future of New Zealand. This week he talks to Bruce Turner and Thomas Rowe from Urbanaut Brewing Co.   There are probably a few people listening that have kept up with friends from school and kicked around some business ideas. Maybe even some that have enjoyed the odd beer together and thought about making some. But how many people actually go ahead and make it happen? That is the founding story of today's company, Urbanaut. It came about after three friends bought the worst house in Auckland, turning into one of the best, so they could fund their very own brewery in Kingsland. The three friends came from Marton - malt growing country, so it seemed fitting that they would open their own brewery, and now their brand is blowing up. Two of the co-founders, managing director and chief brewer Bruce Turner and sales director Thomas Ro

Business is Boring is a weekly podcast series presented by The Spinoff in association with Callaghan Innovation. Host Simon Pound speaks with innovators and commentators focused on the future of New Zealand. This week he talks toRobyn McLean, co-founder of The Hello Cup. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Business is Boring is a weekly podcast series presented by The Spinoff in association with Callaghan Innovation. Host Simon Pound speaks with innovators and commentators focused on the future of New Zealand. This week he talks to Campbell Ellison from Callaghan Innovation and Alexandra Allan, CEO of FoodBowl. One of the coolest things about Business is Boring is when listeners, inspired by the people we talk to, share their ideas for cool products. Just the other day a friend talked about an idea for an innovative food product, and I was able to tell him about the existence of the FoodBowl - which provides support and resource for companies and innovators looking to move from small scale to the big time. He was amazed to learn that there is a facility that is part commercialisation and export readiness lab and part mad scientist workshop where food technologists, scientists and other enthusiastic inventors tinker, explore and create new food ideas. It’s an open access service supported by Callaghan Innovation

Business is Boring is a weekly podcast series presented by The Spinoff in association with Callaghan Innovation. Host Simon Pound speaks with innovators and commentators focused on the future of New Zealand. This week he talks to Jodie Fox, co-founder of Shoes of Prey. For many years this week's podcast guest executed every move from the big start-up scale-up playbook. She and her co-founders came up with an innovative new idea, and worked out how to do something that had never been accomplished before - they created the technology and systems to allow people to customise shoes, in pretty much anyway you could imagine, and have a one of a kind shoe made and sent to you within about two weeks. They were profitable from very early on, having found a customer that loved the ability to make their dream shoe. They then attracted top tier investors and partnered with some of the world's top retailers, like Nordstrom, to grow from a niche product to mass market. They followed every sensible step -customer research,

Business is Boring is a weekly podcast series presented by The Spinoff in association with Callaghan Innovation. Host Simon Pound speaks with innovators and commentators focused on the future of New Zealand. This week he talks to Jeff Xu, CEO, and Ollie McDermot, co-founder and designer of Micropod. At over $60 for one kg, microgreens are a hot commodity. Commonly served in tiny portions on top of cafe eggs benedict, or placed delicately on a seared salmon fillet at a fancy restaurant, the teensy leaves are packed with nutrients and flavour like you wouldn't believe. This week's guests on Business is Boring have come up with a home grow kit for microgreens, having created an environmentally sustainable seed layer innovation that helps people grow on demand quantities of the nutrient-rich microgreens on their kitchen windowsills. Catering to the huge numbers of people who don't have the space outside to plant vege gardens, this process is easy, quick, and most importantly takes up a tiny amount of space. The c

Business is Boring is a weekly podcast series presented by The Spinoff in association with Callaghan Innovation. Host Simon Pound speaks with innovators and commentators focused on the future of New Zealand. This week he talks to Dr Brian Ward of soft-tissue repair company Aroa. Coming from New Zealand it is so important to keep in mind that what may seem pretty niche here can translate into a massive business overseas. On the podcast this week we talk to someone making big international business out of a health solution you might not have even heard of. Dr Paul Callaghan, who inspired Callaghan Innovation, had the idea that 100 great companies doing tightly focussed products with global ambitions could change our economy, and this week on Business is Boring we have one of those companies. You might not have heard of soft-tissue repair, but it is big business. It’s highly focussed healthcare, where in this instance a company called Aroa uses materials from sheep stomachs that were previously a low value commo

Business is Boring is a weekly podcast series presented by The Spinoff in association with Callaghan Innovation. Host Simon Pound speaks with innovators and commentators focused on the future of New Zealand. This week he talks to Jade Tang-Taylor and Anna Guenther from Cheese Cartel. This week on the podcast we have something a bit different: our first returning guests. It's very cool to have someone come back to the podcast on a second mission, and today that's happening twice.Two people from two different previous podcasts have created a kind of entrepreneur supergroup. Cheese Cartel was the outcome of a bunch of friends who know how make things happen coming together for a higher purpose (cheese). A self-described slow startup, Cheese Cartel is an antidote to the kind of businesses that are out to take over the world at any and all costs. Instead, it is a cool meditation on growing a company with the best people possible to get the best results. Two of the Cheese Cartel’s five (and a half) founders join Bu

Business is Boring is a weekly podcast series presented by The Spinoff in association with Callaghan Innovation. Host Simon Pound speaks with innovators and commentators focused on the future of New Zealand. This week he talks to Victoria Carter, founder of car-sharing company Cityhop. The benefits of car share in an increasingly dense and urban Auckland are clear. Why own a car and carry all of the costs when you use it so little? Why not go easier on the earth by sharing resources? Why not make more trips by public transport and only use a car when you really need one? Today this appears obvious, but how about 12 years ago, when Auckland’s pioneering car share service, Cityhop got underway? It was 12 years before smartphones, and before a lot of the awareness for the sharing economy had been built out by services like Airbnb. With Cityhop now in Auckland and Wellington, for way less per hour than an e-scooter you can hire a range of cars, from little runabouts to great big vans to completely electric Volksw

Business is Boring is a weekly podcast series presented by The Spinoff in association with Callaghan Innovation. Host Simon Pound speaks with innovators and commentators focused on the future of New Zealand. This week he talks to Valentin Ozich, the founder of I Love Ugly. The fashion industry isn't an easy one to break into. A lot of it makes no sense and very rarely do New Zealand brands become leaders around the world, and that's exactly why I Love Ugly is special. Worn by some of the world’s top stars – with Justin Bieber famously buying 15 pairs of their signature pant – they had a store in LA with lines around the corner on opening day, built hundreds of thousands of followers and were one of the most highly engaged-with Facebook pages in New Zealand. I Love Ugly changed the rules to sidestep some of the silliest parts of fashion. Instead of running interest free loans to all their stockists like most small fashion labels would, they innovated their model and became pioneers in ecommerce. But then thing