NZ Entrepreneur - February 2017 Vol 1

NEW ZEALAND’S E-MAG FOR ENTREPRENEURS AND BUSINESS OWNERS

FEBRUARY 2017 VOL 1

The Most Important Thing about Choosing a Software Developer: Communication Qualifying Prospects How To Put a Stay on the Unsubscribe Button Startup Watch: Celebrate Me

10 QUESTIONS WITH LUCAS SMITH Of WALK ON

www.nzentrepreneur.co.nz

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CONTENTS 4

10 questions with Lucas Smith

10 The most important thing about choosing

a software developer: Communication 14 Qualifying prospects 22 How to put a stay on the unsubscribe button 26 Startup Watch: Celebrate Me 28 The EO Global Student Entrepreneur Awards

/

30 Three-Part Radio Series on What

it Takes to be an Entrepreneur

CONTACT US

w: www.nzentrepreneur.co.nz

ABOUT / Short and sharp, New Zealand Entrepreneur is a free e-magazine delivering thought provoking and enlightening articles, industry news and information to forwardthinking entrepreneurs.

The Panel

f: www.facebook.com/nzentrepreneur

EDITOR / Richard Liew ART DIRECTOR / Jodi Olsson GROUP EDITOR / Colin Kennedy CHIEF FINANCIAL OFFICER / Alastair Noble

linkedIn: NZ Entrepreneur t: @NZpreneur

CONTENT ENQUIRIES / Phone Richard on 021 994 136 or email richardl@espiremedia.com ADVERTISING ENQUIRIES / Jennifer on 0274 398 100 or email jenniferl@espiremedia.com WEBSITE / nzentrepreneur.co.nz

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Interview

10 QUESTIONS WITH LUCAS SMITH

Founder and Managing Director of Walk On

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ike so many of the entrepreneurs #nzentrepreneur talks to, Walk On was founded because of a problem. A problem that Lucas Smith was determined to solve.

After seeing so many hikers’ dream trips cut short because of infected blisters, Lucas set out to find a more efficient solution than the silicone plasters so many of them were unsuccessfully using.

The resulting product is a completely natural and biodegradable blister prevention and protection product made from hyperfine merino wool, and is now stocked in Torpedo 7 stores throughout New Zealand.

Can you tell us a bit about Walk On? What problems do you solve, who are your customers, and what do you sell?

Walk On began under a roar of blades. They belonged to a Black Squirrel B3 helicopter. It was lifting off from the tussock-clad McKinnon Pass on the world famous Milford Track. I had just loaded my fourth patient of my mountain guiding season into the helicopter for medical evacuation. The diagnosis: infected blisters.

The problem annoyed me so much that I simply had to act. Walk On is a merino wool blister protection product aimed at active people who need to protect their feet; everyone from walkers, runners, dancers, skiers, and cyclists to those fond of high heels.

We use a silky strip of hyperfine merino wool to prevent and protect areas of irritation, blisters and sore feet. The wool is kept in breathable packaging that is fully reusable and recyclable.

Walk On is designed to be used once and then buried either out there in the mountains or at home in the vegetable garden. Our hyperfine merino wool is biodegradable and will fully disappear into the soil within a year. www.nzentrepreneur.co.nz

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Interview

You are young and had no prior business experience – what made you think you could be successful in this industry?

How and when did you get started in the industry?

I thought there must be a better way to make an environmentally friendly blister protection and prevention product that actually worked. I began my research in 2014 and ended up at the Alexander Turnbull Library in Wellington. It turns out this method was so effective that the ANZAC soldiers used it in the trenches during World War I. The Milford and Routeburn tracks proved to be exceptional testing grounds. My research and development began in secret on these tracks.

I would find a hiker who was suffering from blisters on both feet. I would place a plastic nightmare on their left foot and Walk On’s hyperfine merino wool on their right. By the end of the hike, I was only having to deal with the left foot blister.

My product. I saw the instant relief and subsequent smile Walk On gave my customers. The existing footcare products are incredibly boring and are about as effective as an ashtray on a motorcycle.

There is no beauty, performance or passion left in the footcare industry, let alone anything biodegradable. Being young allows me to quickly adapt to rapid changes, find creative solutions to problems, and unlike companies in the industry, actually listen to what their consumers would like.

Many people put off starting a business because they don’t have any money, does it really take money to make money?

Yes, it does take money to make money.

However, you simply don’t need a large Walk On was pushed to its performance investment to get you started. Yes, you limits. The product had to deal with extremes need psychological investment, but large – 4,810 kilometres of mountainous hiking, financial investment, not necessarily. I freezing temperatures, mud, water, sweat and started Walk On with next to nothing. Having heat were only a few of the challenges. After no money is simply a license to learn. I two years of intense testing, we sat down to couldn’t afford the $25k price tag of a see how it performed. I don’t think I have ever beautiful, powerful, eCommerce website. smiled so much in my life.

So, I sat down for three days with a stack Accompanying Walk On in these vigorous of design magazines, several pots of coffee tests were the yellow silicone blister and a playlist of YouTube tutorials. I just pads. Disappointing and painful are taught myself how to do it. Having limited the two words that come to mind when money forces you to become an expert in thinking about their test results. your respective industry. As a result, you become incredibly resourceful and will After being tested on 372 blisters, 21,390 understand the true value of a dollar. toes and 2139 feet, Walk On was unveiled. www.nzentrepreneur.co.nz

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Interview

A lot of people believe building businesses is too risky for the average person, do you agree?

I agree. If you look at the people who have started companies, you will very quickly see that most of us aren’t ‘normal people’. I’m learning that if you believe in yourself, your product and those around you, then welcome to the most incredibly challenging hunt of your life.

To enter you will need to invest your savings, time and energy. The hunt comes with one condition: you can’t do a half-arse job. It’s either all or nothing.

Are you ready to hunt? Good.

What comes first – confidence or success?

Confidence. I managed to tee up a meeting with the world’s second largest outdoor equipment retailer because I rang them every day for a month and asked to speak with their purchasing team. They got so sick of me that it was just easier for them to hear me out.

It doesn’t matter if you don’t feel confident, simply fake it until you make it.

Starting and building a business is the one of the most stressful things most people are ever faced with – what do you do to cope with stress?

I usually just shoot glass bottles with a large rifle. It helps that I grew up in the country!

What’s been the biggest challenge you’ve faced in building your business so far?

Do you believe anyone can be a My biggest challenge was learning to slow down, successful entrepreneur? plan and execute my moves. When you have We live in the most beautiful country in the world an incredible idea or unrelenting drive, it can and have the most amazing opportunities, but be tempting to dart off and chase the first thing it’s a case of utilising all the resources at your that comes to mind. I would tear off in the ‘right’ disposable, being positive, believing in yourself direction with no plan, no revenue streams and and following your mission.

I’d quickly hit a very big wall.

Being a young male on a mission, I’m not very good at listening to those standing on the other side of the wall. It’s hard to stop your mission and listen, but I simply wouldn’t be on the journey I am today without the help of those around me.

W: www.walkon.co.nz F: www.facebook.com/walkonnz www.nzentrepreneur.co.nz

What are the three most important skills or traits you would advise up and coming entrepreneurs to develop?

• Don’t listen to what you ‘should’ be doing • Resourcefulness • Dogged determination. •

I: @walkon_merino T: @walkonnz

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Entrepreneurship

THE MOST IMPORTANT THING ABOUT CHOOSING A SOFTWARE DEVELOPER: COMMUNICATION

BY Ben Liebert

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good software developer won’t just listen to what you’re saying – they will also listen to what you’re trying to say and incorporate this into your planning. You won’t need to speak geek because they’ll interpret your non-geek requirements accordingly. For example, they may recognize that two of your requirements are competing with each other, or that two could be rolled into one to save money.

Ideally your developer will also have an appreciation of the non-technical parts of your business, such as sales, and advise on how your product can be built to complement these. Remember that they’ve been building software for a long time and have seen a lot of successes and failures so their experience is a valuable resource.

Make sure you listen when they speak up – good communication is a two-way street.

Finally, it helps if you have a personal rapport with the developer. It’s really important that you remain partners in the project and don’t devolve into adversaries.

Clear and open communication is key to this. The best way I know to establish a developer’s communication level is to.... communicate with them! Organise a faceto-face meeting and make sure you have a chat about non-technical things too.

Many people choose to look offshore for a developer. Exchange rate differences between countries can save you a great deal of money when purchasing products or services, and this includes software development. For this reason, many western companies outsource their software development to places in Asia such as China or India.

The price offered by these offshore companies can be very appealing – I often see quotes at 30% of their western counterparts – however you must remember that this only represents value if the product is delivered to an equivalent level of quality and timeliness. www.nzentrepreneur.co.nz

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Entrepreneurship

It is my experience that this is rarely the case. Specifically, communication becomes a major problem when dealing with offshore companies:

To mitigate this, you must be prepared to write extremely detailed instructions in a manner that the developers can understand, which ironically requires a skill level akin to the developers themselves. This is why the companies that get the most value out of offshore development are other development companies that can outsource parts of their development process.

• The client and developers are usually in My recommendation is to start with a local different time zones, so turnaround time developer until you get an understanding of on communication is massively slowed the development process and then slowly outsource parts of the project as you grow.

• The developers do not always speak the same language as the client – certainly not to a comfortable conversational level. Many times the offshore company does have a fully conversant project manager, but this puts you a level removed from the developers themselves

Communication is one of the most important factors to take into consideration when deciding on the right developer to develop your product. Spending a little extra time considering the communication between you and your developer of choice could save you in the long run. •

Ben Liebert is a software developer with several years experience in dealing with a variety of business types. Ben runs Blackball Software.

L: Ben Liebert T: @benliebert www.nzentrepreneur.co.nz

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14

Sales

QUALIFYING PROSPECTS

BY Dan Symons

www.nzentrepreneur.co.nz

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Prospecting for new business is a difficult activity but in reality it is the core job a salesperson is hired for.

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ne of the areas salespeople spend an incredible amount of time is on the transition of prospects to clients. Many things can cause salespeople (and sales leaders) angst in this process. Prospects which, while making the right noises, never present an opportunity. Prospects who you can never close. Prospects which you win and then wish you hadn’t. It is demonstrated by a funnel in which the top doesn’t shift. It stagnates no matter how much you put in.

Our clients and prospects seemingly always want to negotiate the price down and features up while we, as salespeople, wish to protect our margins and volumes. It can be a tension rich situation. There are existing relationships in play – sometimes these work in our favour, sometimes they don’t. Inertia features heavily.

As a result, many salespeople defer to simply farming their existing clients for more business, rather than finding new clients.

However, the same issues can present themselves, albeit more discreetly. Because we already earn money from our existing clients, our failed prospecting activities to generate more from them are hidden. We don’t see that we are failing here.

It’s obvious when we are working with prospects as we don’t yet earn any revenue from them, so not being successful here is plain to see. But the same failure happens with our clients and it can just be disguised.

Prospecting for new business is a difficult activity but in reality it is the core job a salesperson is hired for. While the below is focused on acquiring new business, it can equally apply to growing the business of existing clients. www.nzentrepreneur.co.nz

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Sales

LOW

Attractiveness

HIGH

HOW DO WE GO ABOUT IT?

Few Insignificant Unaware

www.nzentrepreneur.co.nz

Motivation

Many Significant Aware

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ATTRACTIVENESS It starts with a clear understanding of what our ideal clients look like. Based on what we do, how we do it and why we do it, what are the five characteristics that make up our ideal clients? How do you describe your ideal clients? Can you?

If you don’t know what your ideal client looks like – how can you discern a great prospect from an average (or worse) one?

It’s also worth pointing out that this requires constant assessment throughout the prospecting cycle as you learn more about your prospects. As you uncover more information, this may determine whether they become more or less attractive.

Similarly, you need to constantly refine these criteria as both you, your market and your prospects change. What was ideal yesterday Why five characteristics? Well, any more than is by no means certain to be ideal tomorrow.

The next part of the assessment this and you risk describing anyone, not the right ones. Sure, you may need more at times of attractiveness is the potential or less – but the key here is ensuring you are opportunity. Whilst the client themselves may be attractive, the opportunity distilling this down to your key features of that presents itself may not be. your ideal client.

This can be by industry, by size, values, structure; whatever, but you need to determine what your ideal client looks like.

The reality is, whilst you are describing your ideal client – if you get this correct, you are also describing their ideal supplier/partner.

This is why this step is important – this is about identifying which of your potential prospects you can deliver the most value to through working together.

It doesn’t mean you avoid anyone who doesn’t meet these criteria – but it means you make a conscious decision to work with them if you choose to. It also allows you to prioritise prospects when you have execution capacity shortages.

It’s easy to fall into the trap of doing a seemingly easy, but unattractive piece of work for an ideal client, for a favour or to gather goodwill. But do so with your eyes open as the question you need to ask is whether you’ll upset your relationship with an ideal client over a less than ideal opportunity to do business with them.

Attractiveness could be paraphrased as your own motivation, as you are far more likely to move mountains for a highly attractive prospect and opportunity than you are for one that isn’t. www.nzentrepreneur.co.nz

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MOTIVATION

• Aware V Unaware

Nothing is more frustrating than having a great relationship with an ideal prospect which never goes anywhere. Sales pipelines everywhere are full of them. Somehow you get ‘friend-zoned’ through the process as someone they like, but seemingly never do business with.

As sales professionals, we will often uncover opportunities or risks in a prospect’s business that they aren’t yet aware of. Of course, before that prospect is going to get anywhere near motivated enough to do something about it, are they aware of it?

Have you questioned their motivation? What is their motivation to move to you?

Most prospects/clients will either do something to dissolve pain or resolve opportunity. There are always challenges competing for attention in your prospect’s business. What you need to determine is the level of their motivation to do something about it. You need to consider:

Making a prospect aware of a potential risk or opportunity in their business is hugely beneficial to your relationship to them. It proves you’re an advisor; that you know their business enough to open their eyes to something that can make it better. However, until you do this, they are highly unlikely to do anything about it.

Selling before you’ve done this will just result in them not listening.

The first step to motivating your client is making them aware of the pain or opportunity, and quantifying the value of resolving it.

The first step to motivating your client is making them aware of the pain or opportunity, and quantifying the value of resolving it. www.nzentrepreneur.co.nz

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• Significant V Insignificant Not every opportunity is of the same materiality to your prospect. Other priorities can dwarf the one you are trying to help them realise, or it can simply just be something which is there, but not worrisome enough to do anything about.

Your prospect’s motivation to do something about the pain or opportunity will be directly correlated to its significance. For low significance opportunities, unless you can change your prospect’s perception of its importance, you are likely to encounter a prospect with a very low motivation to proceed.

A great example of this is why price usually only becomes an issue after a service failing. A catastrophe of service is usually more significant than price.

www.nzentrepreneur.co.nz

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• Few V Many A single issue may not warrant your prospect’s attention enough to motivate them to do anything about it. Many issues will usually get that attention.

When looking at your prospect, ask yourself: what are their triggers to move? Do they have one or many? The more impetus they have to move, the greater the likelihood that they will.

This is often why simply rolling in with price doesn’t work – you’re pulling on one lever only.

If you start to assess your opportunities with your prospects against the two criteria of attractiveness and motivation – you’ll quickly form a plan around how better to motivate them to action and win more attractive business in doing so.

There are some things to be mindful of here though. The lower left hand quadrant can be a graveyard for salespeople/teams. A prospect that is of low attractiveness coupled with them having little motivation to move?

Why spend time here? Unless something can or does change – this is not an area a salesperson or team should be playing. You run the risk that it will take a long time to win mediocre business.

Also, the lower right hand quadrant can either be considered low hanging fruit or a poisoned chalice. You must ask: why are they motivated if they are of low attractiveness? You can pick up great business here – but you also risk picking up prospects who are running from something rather than to something.

The upper left quadrant is about managing relationships. You have identified them as attractive but, as yet, they aren’t highly motivated to move. You need to either maintain and deepen that relationship until they are, or work with them to alter their motivation through further discovery and value assessment.

Prospecting is undeniably one of the hard aspects of selling – but when executed well, it is also one of the most enjoyable.

This is especially the case when you have a potential client highly motivated to realise an opportunity and you have identified them as some you really wish to work with.

Hopefully by better qualifying your prospects, you can benefit from higher quality relationships, a more wholesome sales pipeline and happier clients and salespeople. •

Dan Symons is a development professional, sales leader and mentor at Sales Deconstructed.

L: Dan Symons T: @dan_symons www.nzentrepreneur.co.nz

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Marketing

HOW TO PUT A STAY ON THE UNSUBSCRIBE BUTTON

BY Colin Kennedy

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f you cleaned out your inbox at the start of the year by hitting the ‘unsubscribe’ button on almost every email that came in, you aren’t alone. As a consumer of content you probably feel relieved, as a marketer, you should be worried.

Nobody’s surprised that ad blockers are on the rise – some would say it’s just ‘marketers’ getting their just desserts for trying to force commercial messages down our throats. Even more ominous is that companies like UK telecommunications and Internet services provider Three are implementing network-wide adblocking.

It may seem that the dominance of interruptive advertising is coming to an end, but not in the habit of learning from past mistakes.

Some marketers are repackaging advertising messages, with a thin veneer of ‘adding value’, and calling it content marketing. This kind of ‘corruption of content marketing’ is one reason ‘permission’ based tactics are under threat and why people are hitting the unsubscribe button.

A recent survey by performance marketing company Fluent found that 34.8% of people unsubscribe because they receive emails too often while 20.8% said they unsubscribe because the content is irrelevant or not useful.

This doesn’t mean to say that there isn’t any information in the content that’s being delivered, just that it’s irrelevant or not helpful.

Much of that is down to lazy content creation and one culprit in particular – list articles.

If you cleaned out your inbox at the start of the year by hitting the ‘unsubscribe’ button on almost every email that came in, you aren’t alone.

As a consumer of content you probably feel relieved, as a marketer, you should be worried. www.nzentrepreneur.co.nz

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Marketing

Content creators think people like them because they can skim through them. Where’s the engagement in that? They take very little thought and can be, and usually are, compiled after a quick flick through Google.

The Director of Strategy and Business Development Asia Pacific at Mashable, Gwendolyn Regina, told Ad:tech New Zealand in November that the overwhelming competition for attention has made it into currency.

Most list articles require no research, no credible opinion, not much thought, the points are old, subjective and irrelevant. Oh, and I’ve never come away from one feeling like I’ve learned something new. That, in a nutshell, is how list articles are screwing up the content marketing space. No wonder we’re reaching for the ‘delete’ and ‘unsubscribe’ buttons.

“Where you choose to spend your time is precious,” she said, not withstanding the fact that Mashable is guilty of a few list articles.

Regina said that 80% of millennials sleep next to their phones (I’d venture that so do most Gen Xs and Baby Boomers), and one of the tactics that have led to Mashable’s success is to deliver news to people on the platforms That, of course, doesn’t apply to all lists, and some where they live. Bearing in mind that people move across multiple devices at different times might have something worth saying. But surely anything of value worth creating deserves a bit of in different spaces. time and attention rather than simply listing it? If But before we get hung up on the mechanisms you want the audience to invest some of their time of delivery, or on what platforms we will find and attention in your piece, you owe it to them to them – such as ‘everything is mobile’ – we have put some effort into the content. to make sure that our messages are relevant. www.nzentrepreneur.co.nz

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One way to create relevant content is to apply the PESTLE model: • POLITICAL: What is happening on the political front that may impact your audience? And how can they deal with it?

What should they expect?

• ECONOMIC: Consider the economic environment. Are interest rates on the rise?

What does this mean for your audience?

What should they do?

• SOCIAL: Consider social trends, like political correctness. Is this an opportunity to be opinionated, take a stand or champion a cause that your audience can align with?

Influencers are always happy to share their opinion, and leave the selling to when you have your audience’s interest, liking, and trust

• TECHNOLOGY: What technology developments and trends will offer opportunities or threats to your market?

• LEGAL: Regulatory changes always make for good content, including examples about how those regulation changes impacted other people or what they did to cope.

• ENVIRONMENTAL: Sustainability, recycling, organic, traceability, global warming… any one of these developments will have an impact with your audience and your brand. Talk to them about it.

Relevant content takes time, but it drives engagement and stays the ‘unsubscribe’ button.

Put some thought into it; use your expertise or do what journalists do and interview some experts. Influencers are always happy to share their opinion, and leave the selling to when you have your audience’s interest, liking, and trust.•

Colin Kennedy is a content marketing expert and owner/operator of Iron Road www.nzentrepreneur.co.nz

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NEW ZEALAND IS A HOTBED OF ENTREPRENEURIAL GOODNESS EACH WEEK WE PROFILE A STARTUP WE’RE WATCHING ACROSS A RANGE OF INDUSTRIES

CELEBRATE ME FOUNDER: Annouschka Martinsen HQ: Wellington

Please describe your business. What problems do you solve and/or what Products, Services or Solutions do you sell?

Our website is effectively New Zealand’s only ‘one stop shop’ that provides all options to assist families seeking to celebrate their loved one’s life at a time when they need to make personal decisions, and before these decisions need to be quickly made.

When developing the Celebrate Me website after my father’s death, I found, during months of research, that a lot of families struggle to find available funeral-related products and services.

I spent time speaking with hundreds of people www.nzentrepreneur.co.nz

about their experiences with grief and life celebration planning, and I realised that the biggest challenge is finding what all the options are when planning a funeral or life celebration.

So, I wanted to provide people with a clear idea of what is available to them; then when they go to see a funeral service provider, they already know what they might want. Celebrate Me also provides information on inspirational ideas, articles, and support services.

These services include support for people who are faced with a terminal illness and support to help cope with the loss of a loved one. After all, the grieving process is much longer than a 90-minute funeral service.

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Who and where are your target customers?

All New Zealanders that are planning a funeral for themselves, their loved ones or pets. People needing bereavement and grief support and resources.

Who, how and when did you first come up with the idea for your business?

I came up with the idea for my business when I decided on a significant career change from the corporate world in July 2015. After months of research (and my experience following my father’s death) the site was born.

What are your three biggest unique selling points?

• I’m independent (I’m not in the funeral industry and not a funeral celebrant) • I cover a breadth of possibilities for support services for the terminally ill, funeral services, ongoing grief and support services • I support many SMEs that don’t get a look in with bigger companies within the funeral industry – I help them be ‘found’ across New Zealand.

What are three things about your business that you are proud of?

• That I’ve built the website myself (with no prior knowledge) • That it’s a unique concept that no one else provides • It’s helping people all over the country – even when I’m asleep – and that is something I am hugely proud of.

What is the biggest entrepreneur lesson you would like to share with other Kiwis thinking of starting their own business?

Make sure you respond to your customers.

When I was first looking to create the site, I found some sites that I liked the layout of – contacted the site creators and never heard back which was really disappointing.

When I was getting out about and talking to businesses in the sector, some were particularly helpful with the startup component of my business – they gave free advice, and hugely helpful suggestions early on which has helped me immensely! •

W: www.celebrateme.co.nz L: Celebrate Me F: www.facebook.com/CelebrateMeLimited/ www.nzentrepreneur.co.nz

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Ecosystem

THE EO GLOBAL STUDENT ENTREPRENEUR AWARDS www.nzentrepreneur.co.nz

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acebook was started in a dorm room and has since revolutionised the way people communicate and stay in touch.

It has created numerous jobs and changed the online environment to become what we know today. But Facebook isn’t the only students in business success story.

The EO GSEA competition gives these young entrepreneurs the opportunity to learn from the people who have already walked the walk, and win some awesome prizes to help their business excel.

do today can be scaled and replicated, or used as a platform for them to develop as entrepreneurs. They can then go on to develop something bigger and better; they’re the ones who will change the face of business as we currently know it.

The event will be held on Friday 10 March from 2pm until 6pm at the ASB building in the Viaduct. The winner of this competition will then have the opportunity to compete at the APAC Regional Finals on Monday 13 March and the Global Finals held in Frankfurt, Germany on 27–29 April.

Successful business leaders will judge entrants. Also, the event itself will The Global Student Entrepreneur Awards feature some of New Zealand’s top (GSEA), run by the Entrepreneurs’ entrepreneurs sharing their stories and Organization (EO), create a platform advice through a Q&A panel. Made up where students who own a business while of Josh Comrie, Angel Investor; Geoff attending university can compete against Baldwin, Haven Financial Advisers and their peers and gain mentorship, recognition Deployed; Seeby Woodhouse, Voyager and connections to take their business to the Internet; and James McGlinn, Eventfinda, next level of success. the panel provides a fantastic opportunity It’s these individuals who are or will become to learn from some of the best about how they see entrepreneurship. the employers of tomorrow. What they

Research has indicated that jobs won’t be the same in the future. Predictions are that 65% of today’s school children will be employed in jobs that are yet to be created and it is young entrepreneurs who will be the employers creating these jobs.

So, come along to see the future of business – and learn a few things yourself along the way. Entry is free with ticket. For tickets, please contact admin@eoauckland.org.•

For more information, visit GSEA or the Entrepreneurs’ Organisation www.nzentrepreneur.co.nz

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Listen

THREE-PART RADIO SERIES ON WHAT IT TAKES TO BE AN ENTREPRENEUR

EPISODE TWO ‘A new generation’s entrepreneurial spirit’ Radio NZ, The Weekend (15 January 2017)

A

re you braver when you’re younger?

Undaunted perhaps by family responsibilities, are you more likely to take a leap of faith in your early twenties – or late teens even, and launch a business idea... become an entrepreneur?

But can lack of experience work against you? Three young people who’ve thrown caution to the wind before they’ve had a chance to become cautious, are Scott

Cardwell with his virtual reality language tool Immerse Me, Orion Scott and her fashion label Orion Kendal, and Nicole McCallum who has a software platform for seasonal workers called Cohelix.

Terry Shubkin from the Young Enterprise Scheme also joins Lynn Freeman in this discussion about being a young entrepreneur.

LISTEN here.•

Ask

THE PANEL

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were up all night thinking that one up!). So if you have a question or hurdle you’re facing, let us know and we’ll put it to The Panel. PM or email nathanm@espiremedia.com.

We’ve aptly called it ‘The Panel’ (yes, we

The Panel – Starting in February, exclusive to NZ Entrepreneur.•

eing an entrepreneur means a lot of challenges, and we want to help. We are putting together a panel of great minds to help you out with the challenges you may have on your own journey.

www.nzentrepreneur.co.nz

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“When we face hard choices, we shouldn’t beat our head against a wall trying to figure out which alternative is better.

There is no best alternative.

Instead of looking for reasons out there, we should be looking for reasons in here: Who am I to be?”

Ruth Chang, Ted Talk WATCH IT HERE: ‘How to Make Hard Choices’ www.nzentrepreneur.co.nz