Welcome to the sixth part of our 20-Year Anniversary Publication serialisation. Each week, we’ll be publishing a new chapter telling the stories of the people and places that have contributed to our history. You can view part five here.
The Owner Manager Programme
There are so many stories that illustrate the uniqueness of owner-managers of Kiwi businesses, it’s too hard to choose just one.
Any one of the many stories would illustrate the sometimes precarious nature of owner-managed Kiwi businesses. When challenges strike the business, there is no corporate team to call to come and help fix it. There’s often no HR manager. There’s often not even someone to talk to who might understand the nature of the issue. But there are many issues that can plunge a business into crisis, and the impact on the owner-manager is always personal.
These are the peculiarities of the small to medium enterprise where the person earning the salary is also the person paying the salaries – not just to staff, but also to themselves.
It’s these unique circumstances that made The Icehouse co-founder David Irving so determined to find a way to give owner-managers a learning experience that would help grow their businesses; and why so many founding partners were willing to make significant financial commitments to make it happen. It’s why academics and businesswomen Chris Woods and Deb Shepherd designed the Owner Manager Programme (OMP) that has run for 20 years and has significantly impacted more than 1000 Kiwi and Australian businesses.
It’s also why the likes of Liz Wotherspoon, The Icehouse’s chief executive of Growth, and Raewyn Goodwin, Icehouse employee number 2 who provides the relational glue in the programme, refer to the impact the programme has on participants as being a kind of ‘magic’.
Over their 20 years The Icehouse has studied success. Not flash-in-the-pan, easy-come-easy-go, overnight success. The real kind. People who achieved meaningful things. And kept achieving them. They asked what made them so successful. And what did they find?
It wasn’t brains. Or beauty. Or luck. Or God-given gifts. It was grit. A funny little word for a great big important idea. That passion and perseverance are more valuable than anything when it comes to making it. And what do Kiwi business owner-managers all have in common? Yeah, grit.
’They are the unsung heroes of the New Zealand economy,’ Wotherspoon says of all owner-managers. ‘They are humble and recognised as gritty; people with passion and perseverance.’
Goodwin agrees: ‘It’s a privilege to be let inside the world of owner-managers.’ It’s worth mentioning the difference that Goodwin personally makes to the programme, as anyone who has gone through it would attest. A ‘journey’ with owner-managers over the course of five months is more than an academic programme – it requires relational connection. That connection is what Goodwin nurtures and facilitates. She is not only the relational glue in the programme, but a model of the operational difference a close attention to relationship between participants makes. She’s like a human CRM. How many organisations can say they have someone working with them who has touched and interacted with every single customer they have ever had!
That ‘privilege’ extends to the bottom line. It’s no secret that the OMP has been core to The Icehouse’s sustainability as a business. Ask former chief executive Andy Hamilton, who can’t say enough about the contribution owner-managed SMEs make to the New Zealand economy, or to how The Icehouse was able to reinvest resources in its operation and ecosystem so that it could push the boundaries on both the growth side of the operation, and the startup side.
‘One of the hidden secrets of The Icehouse is the Owner Manager Programme,’ Hamilton says, letting the cat out of the bag. That mission, as David Irving describes it, was to take owner-managers on a journey of learning – three days in a month, for five months – because they were unlikely to be able to access learning like it anywhere else.
Chris Woods describes that mission as helping owners grow their business; It’s not about making them a success because they are already that – it’s helping them grow sustainably. And the programme does that in two key ways.
‘From the very first OMP, the programme built confidence, and it’s a reminder of going back to the basics,’ Woods says.
A major factor behind that confidence is the fact the programme puts 25 or so owner-managers in a room with people who have gone through, are going through, and will go through similar challenges. For business owners who feel alone a lot of the time, they suddenly don’t feel so isolated or misunderstood. They discover the issues they face are also being experienced by other owner-managers – and a collective pooling of practical wisdom takes place.
This is where the magic happens, according to Wotherspoon.
‘It’s lonely being an owner. But you come along to an OMP and you realise it doesn’t matter what industry you’re in, you have similar issues. You can unashamedly talk about your business in an open and safe environment.’
It doesn’t stop when the programme stops either. They exit the programme with a cohort and join an incredible new network of alumni – of friends and mutual support.
‘Many people don’t quite get owner-managers’ Wotherspoon says, ‘They’re not like managers in corporates. So, when you put a group of them in a room together, where they’re sitting with people like them, and having conversations with people like them – about things that are going on in their heads and which are also going on in other people’s heads – and they realise they’re not so different, then good stuff happens.’
They’re determined, they’re street smart, they’re resourceful, they’re resilient. Where others say ‘we can’t’, they say ‘we can’. Where others just talk, they get out and do.
And that pays off. That grit gets them further than any amount of IQ or luck. Often all by themselves but the Owner Manager Programme changes that. It provides a way to experience the confidence found in a community of others that have that same abundance of grit. To learn from the best, and from each other.
As The Icehouse has seen from the more than 1,000 Kiwi business owner-managers who’ve experienced OMP since 2001, when they come together in this way they go on to grow at a rate that’s two and a half times the average business. They arrive alone, leave together and go much, much further.
Next Week: Ice Angels
Want to read more? You can download the publication here.
For information on how capability building programmes, workshops and advisory can help your business, click here.
For more business ownership and leadership advice, check out more of our blogs.
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