The woman who brings businesses back from the brink
Haylee Wrenn helps those in strife decide whether to keep going, or pull the plug. Right now, she's busier than ever...
Kia ora and welcome to Stocktake, created in partnership with Kiwibank. I couldn’t help but laugh at this recent Stuff story which follows Igor and his troubles charging his new electric car. He has power cords out on the footpath, with safety mats laid over top, but even then he’s in breach of several council bylaws. As I’ve written previously, electric vehicles are growing in popularity as owners look to bring down petrol costs and take advantage of subsidies. But stories like Igor’s show just how far behind our EV infrastructure really is. I’ve been an electric car owner for six months and have found public charging stations to be woeful: broken, overused, expensive and, mostly, a pointless waste of time. I hope Jolt improves things as it rolls out new stations, but there’s a long way to go to make them as reliable as they need to be. For now, poor old Igor will have to stick to his mats. This week: How to save your business.
-Chris Schulz, business editor
‘I am the ambulance at the bottom of the cliff’
Peter and Rosa Herron were ready to call it quits. The couple's carpet company was in massive amounts of debt, their government Covid subsidies had run out and they were about to put their house on the market to help take the pressure off. Their lawyer and their accountant had advised them that the only way forward was to pull the plug on Peter Herron Flooring, the Timaru business they'd proudly run together for 14 years. “We were in big trouble,” says Rosa.
All that stress was affecting the couple's relationship. “We were borrowed to the hilt, we were running up to the edge of the cliff and we were about to go over it,” Rosa told me recently. Neither of them could see another way forward. “I'd had enough. I was exhausted. I feared for our marriage.”
That's when Haylee Wrenn stepped in. Through a friend, Peter had heard about the Napier-based advisor who runs Accountabill, a service that helps save small struggling businesses. The pair asked Haylee if she could help. Wrenn got them on a Zoom call and told them what she tells all her clients: “You're about to go on an emotional rollercoaster .... I'm strapped into the seat right beside you. You need someone in your corner to walk this journey with you.”
Wrenn doesn’t promise that she can save every business owner she meets. Instead, she tells them: “Some of my stuff's a bit brutal, but if you trust in me, if I can, I will get you through this.” From her chat with Peter and Rosa, Wrenn saw what she sees in many of her clients: financial problems stemming from years of stresses and strains, including two years of running a business during a pandemic. "They were in a really big hole,” says Wrenn. “They were verging on divorce. Their whole world was ending."
It’s a scenario facing many businesses right now. If anyone should know, it’s Wrenn. She’s the last resort, “the ambulance at the bottom of the cliff”, the person people turn to when they’ve run out of all other options. Many are struggling to adapt to the current economic climate after five years of good times. “People have been able to bumble through business quite nicely, not done as well as they possibly should have, but they've still survived,” says Wrenn. “Covid hit, we had all those government subsidies, that's kept a few of them afloat … now we don't have government subsides propping them up anymore. There's literally nothing left.”
That means another kind of epidemic is hitting business owners, Wrenn says. “It is an incredibly tough, challenging market,” she says. “Everyone is trying to do their best but nothing is working.” The day The Spinoff calls, she’s seen two businesses she couldn’t help go into liquidation, and says another five connected businesses could fold because of those closures. All of that has an impact on those involved in running them. “It is actually heartbreaking the amount of mental health issues we've got out there.”
Wrenn got into this line of work after having her own health issues. She’d been working as a debt collector for the IRD and got sick of seeing the same situation play out over and over again. “Little Joe Bloggs made a dumb decision, or someone didn't pay them, and they'd end up bankrupt,” she says. She wanted to help save businesses before they got to the point of no return, but that wasn’t her job, and her hands were tied. “There were things at IRD that I desperately wanted to tell people but couldn’t.”
A heart attack at the age of 37 forced her to make a change. “It was a case of, ‘I'm going to use my powers for good rather than evil,’” she says. Now, Wrenn answers the desperate calls of people like Peter and Rosa all day, every day. “Where I get the most excitement and exhilaration is taking a company that's due for liquidation and turning it around,” she says. That meant diving into the carpet company’s books, analysing their financial history, examining their personal lives, combing through their spending habits, and setting new goals - often in intimate detail. “I don't need to know your industry,” says Wrenn. “I need to know that you're prepared to work on it and maybe do things differently.”
Businesses can, and should, do this before Wrenn’s services are required. She says the grim economic forecasts could last a good while yet, and that makes it a great time to overhaul any parts of your business that might not be working. “My advice is to batten down the hatches, really think about where you're spending your money, and protect your cash flow,” she says. “You can have the best business in the world with as many assets as you like [but] without cash flow, you're going to die. You've got to start making some really good business decisions to make sure the money's going to the right places.”
Thanks to Wrenn’s help, Peter and Rosa find themselves in a very different situation than the one they were in last November. They put up their prices, pulled in outstanding debts, and found that their business is profitable again. They’re not out of debt, but they’re paying it off at a nice rate and estimate they’ll be doing so for another year. Not only have they saved their house, they’ve even managed a holiday, recently travelling to Auckland to attend a Warriors match.
Wrenn says sometimes it’s as simple as changing a negative mindset. “When you start thinking, ‘This has all happened to me,’ it spirals out of control,” she says. “Let’s focus on what you can do, and do it one step at a time. You do that each day and suddenly you’ve gone a long way without realising you’ve done it.”
Rosa and Peter say it wasn’t easy getting to where they are now. “She pulled our business finances and operations apart. She pulled our personal finances and how we lived our lives apart,” says Rosa. “At times it was a bit upsetting. There were a few tears.” But she can’t speak highly enough of Wrenn, and has even advised others she’s seen in trouble to go see her. “Haylee has helped us save our business, save our house and … save our marriage.”
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The story I’m watching closely: Middle-class millionaires
New Zealand is comprised of 1.6 million homes. New data shows that nearly half of those are worth more than $1 million. “The surge in housing values has turned many homeowners into millionaires, but on the flipside it has now pushed homeownership out of reach for many other Kiwis,” says Dot Loves Data director Tamsyn Hilder. “In one sense, we have a middle class made wealthy by rising property wealth while renting families are struggling to afford the internet and basic household bills.” Justin Lester dives into the data to find some pretty scary statistics about what all this means.
The headlines you need to know about…
I’ve been obsessed with what’s going down at HBO. First, the cable giant axed its already-in-the-can $90 million movie Batgirl, and flagged the $200 million JJ Abrams spectacle Demimonde. Then it announced it’s taking its streaming service global, including into the Asia/Pacific market (us!) in 2024. That’s bad news for Neon, which has had exclusive HBO rights for years. Watch this space: the streaming wars are entering their brutal, no-holds-barred era.
Stuff reporter Brooke Sabin says he’s been looking to prove rumours about a top secret Koru Club for years. Randomly, he recently found the evidence he’s looking for, stumbling across a door leading to the exclusive, invitation-only club that’s rumoured to have just 100 members. Check out his photos here.
Emily Writes is on Facebook and Instagram every day. Promoting her work on her excellent Substack newsletter is an essential business tool. But changes to algorithms could mean bad things for creators like Emily, and she’s conflicted. “Will I lose money and potentially my career if Instagram and Facebook die? Possibly,” she says. “Would it be worth my career ending if we didn’t have these platforms any more? Yes. Probably.” She weighs up the pros and cons here.
We’ve all seen The Tinder Swindler. But Shanti Mathias recently interviewed a Christchurch woman called Anna who found herself caught in a similarly bizarre situation. “It still feels like a mystery to me, and I’m not sure what the scammer really wanted,” Anna tells Mathias. “It’s so twisty – I quite liked him, and I still feel sad that he wasn’t a real person, because he seemed like a nice guy.” Read her full account of what happened here.
Finally, if you’ve seen your supermarket shelves overwhelmed by plant-based meat alternatives lately, you’re not the only one. Some, though, aren’t the same as others. Vince is a vegetable-based mince replacement that is made right here in Aotearoa. Business is Boring host Simon Pound caught up with them.
With the unemployment rate still at a near-record low of 3.3%, the building industry is crying out for workers. It’s a shortage that is driving this male-dominated field to get serious about recruiting from the other half of the population. Bernard Hickey talks with Kiwibank economist Mary Jo Vergara about a surprise growth in women working in construction. Listen here.
Finally, here’s something we’ve been toying with: Drivelive
In the middle of a recent Saturday morning, I heard the faint hum of an electric car purr into the driveway. The 2022 Mitsubishi Eclipse Cross Phev that had arrived was mine to drive for the next half-hour. That’s thanks to Drivelive, an Auckland-wide business taking the hassle out of car shopping. Instead of you driving to a car yard and putting up with pushy sales people, Drivelive brings the car to you. After my last car shopping experience turned into this horrifying story, I was only too keen to give Drivelive a go. And I was pleasantly surprised. A nice man called Court showed up, took me through the car’s details, then let me have a go. It was fun and easy, and that’s because Court isn’t trying to sell me the car. He’s just trying to make sure I have a satisfying test drive experience, and he can help you to decide if the car’s right for you. (drivelive.co.nz) /Chris Schulz
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