Academic Chris Woods remembers her mum saying to her a few years back, ‘You know dear, when you started your work on entrepreneurship you didn’t hear much about that word, but now you’re hearing it a lot. Is that good for you?’
“I said, ‘Yes, mum. It’s really good for me’,” recalls Woods today.
Woods and Deb Shepherd, a fellow senior lecturer at the University of Auckland Business School, have been involved in the Icehouse’s business growth programmes since its flagship Owner Manager Programme (OMP) was a kernel of an idea more than a decade ago. The pair’s passion for working with the country’s entrepreneurial owner managers is contagious and clearly hasn’t waned over time.
“One of the things we love about this space is this is the heart of New Zealand business,” says Shepherd. “[Owner managers] are generally really down to earth, good men and women at the heart of our economy. They’re the unsung heroes.”
The establishment of the OMP was led with clear vision by former Heinz Wattie’s CEO and Icehouse co-founder David Irving, say Woods and Shepherd. After attending a Stanford University course for CEOs of large businesses, Irving returned to New Zealand wondering what similar programmes were available for owners of small and medium-sized enterprises. Finding nothing, he pulled together a team, including Woods and Shepherd, to develop the OMP.
“Deb and I got involved even before there was a clear sense of what it was going to be, but we believed in the vision and the need,” says Woods. “We were blessed from an entrepreneurial point of view; one way of looking at us is as entrepreneurial academics.”
Corporate partner the Bank of New Zealand funded all participants in the first OMP held in 2001 at Hotel du Vin, south of Auckland, giving the new programme crucial credibility, says Woods.
Twenty-two cohorts of owner managers have now been through the 17-day residential programme, which consists of one three-day learning blocks a month for five months, and two follow-up workshops. The programme covers an audit and fine tuning of the owner manager’s current business, as well as opportunities for growth and future plans.
“We didn’t get it completely right,” says Woods of that first course, “but if you wait to get it right then you’re going to be too late in the market.”