We all have different personalities. Gilligan Sheppard have recently run a Belbin Team Role survey with our leadership team. My results indicated that I can be caring, territorial, helpful, encouraging of others, outgoing, enterprising, over-sensitive, and the list goes on. Others in our team have a different makeup of words. These individual traits are what […]

[box] “There’s always someone who knows something.” ― Stephen King   “Even though there are no ways of knowing for sure, there are ways of knowing for pretty sure.” ― Lemony Snicket   “There’s more to getting to where you’re going than just knowing there’s a road.” ― Joan Lowery Nixon [/box]   How many […]

Recently Debra and I made a trip to Clark, Philippines to spend some time with our team there – Grace and Arlyn. My time over there led me to reflect on my experience with outsourcing to the Philippines, the changes that this way of working has brought about and the differences with our two outsource […]

Recently, I wrote about the challenges of the public works act engagements we are undertaking (click here to read). Since then, a number of people asked why were we still doing what appears to be soul destroying work? I have struggled with answers as to the why, especially after we have made such a big […]

So you’re an entrepreneur. Maybe you decided to change the world. Wanted to put your dent on the universe. Revolutionise something. Maybe you just wanted to stick it to the man, man. But then you discovered something you weren’t expecting. This is hard. You know it’s hard when you find yourself working late and missing […]

One of the most painful situations businesses encounter is getting back their tax return with a big profit, accompanying tax bill, and no cash to pay the IRD. In fact, they haven’t seen any cash benefit of the profit throughout the year. There are a number events that can conspire to create the aforementioned unfortunate […]

Skateboarding is a really fun activity, but it is also very challenging. It all started while I was cleaning up my garage earlier this year. I found my old skateboard from back in my high school days. With all the good old “Sk8er Boi” memory in mind, I took it to the skate park to […]

Over this last year, we have had many due diligence engagements (both purchase and sale side) and this month alone have completed six due diligence engagements, so as this is on my mind, it becomes the default technical topic this month. Each due diligence engagement is unique and there is no one approach, however the […]

Ten years ago, we could not foresee, even in our wildest dreams, that one ACT would so fundamentally impact the Finance industry and later, other professional services. The Act I refer to, is the Anti-Money Laundering and Countering Financing of Terrorism Act 2009 (AML & CFT Act, hereafter the ACT). Due to this ACT, NZ […]

Embracing new technologies that make life easier should be a no brainer, for example, being paperless in the digital age should be simple right? However, as the move from paper to digital records has evolved, a twilight zone has emerged where some records are paper based and the other half are scattered about in cyber […]