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Hayley Wrenn Stocktake
Haylee Wrenn is a last resort for some struggling to stay in business. (Photos: Supplied)

BusinessAugust 9, 2022

The woman who brings small businesses back from the brink

Hayley Wrenn Stocktake
Haylee Wrenn is a last resort for some struggling to stay in business. (Photos: Supplied)

Haylee Wrenn helps business owners in strife decide whether to keep going or pull the plug. Right now, she’s busier than ever.

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 businesses that are struggling. 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.”

Hayley Wrenn
Haylee Wrenn helps pull businesses back from the brink. (Photo: Supplied)

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 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.”

People 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 may 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.

Hayley Wrenn
Peter and Rosa Herron meet the Mad Butcher during a recent Warriors games. (Photo: Supplied)

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 advised others she’s seen in trouble to pay her a visit. “Haylee has helped us save our business, save our house and … save our marriage.”

Keep going!
Singer Te Karehana Gardiner-Toi, known as ‘Teeks’ (Ngāpuhi, Ngai Te Rangi and Ngāti Ranginui) in front of his Spark 5G ‘Street Museum’ exhibit (Photo: Supplied)
Singer Te Karehana Gardiner-Toi, known as ‘Teeks’ (Ngāpuhi, Ngai Te Rangi and Ngāti Ranginui) in front of his Spark 5G ‘Street Museum’ exhibit (Photo: Supplied)

BusinessAugust 5, 2022

Teeks is opening portals to his tūpuna – with technology’s help

Singer Te Karehana Gardiner-Toi, known as ‘Teeks’ (Ngāpuhi, Ngai Te Rangi and Ngāti Ranginui) in front of his Spark 5G ‘Street Museum’ exhibit (Photo: Supplied)
Singer Te Karehana Gardiner-Toi, known as ‘Teeks’ (Ngāpuhi, Ngai Te Rangi and Ngāti Ranginui) in front of his Spark 5G ‘Street Museum’ exhibit (Photo: Supplied)

The Northland singer-songwriter is one of five artists spearheading Spark’s ‘Street Museum’, a 5G-powered collection of exhibits utilising augmented reality. Reweti Kohere asked him what it’s all about.

I have found the metaverse, tucked inside The Cloud, an undulating, slug-like events venue on Auckland’s waterfront. Spark rolled out its “5G Street Museum” here on Thursday, complete with food trucks, free drinks and the wizardry of augmented reality (AR) to marvel at. A version of an imminent future, minus any vegetarian hot dogs.

For the next four months, across the streets of Auckland, Hamilton, Wellington, Christchurch and Dunedin, the telco is offering New Zealanders a collection of exhibits powered by its fifth-generation mobile network, rendered in AR and co-created by five of the country’s best-known modern artists. The Street Museum is accessible via a free app and QR codes on the exhibit markers that you scan. There’s no need for a bulky virtual reality headset: the AR technology, which the exhibits are built upon, superimposes computer-generated imagery and video on your view of the real world.

Having a 5G-enabled phone will make for a faster experience, but you can still view the exhibits on a 4G connection – the virtual world might just take a bit longer to load. All you have to do is ignore the odd stares in public as you hold your device at eye level while meandering about, immersing yourself in the imagined universes of world-renowned choreographer Parris Goebel, alt-pop star Benee, rapper David Dallas, post-graffiti artist Askew One and soul singer Te Karehana Gardiner-Toi, better known by his stage name, Teeks.

The augmented reality ‘Street Museum’ superimposes computer-generated images, such as these from rapper David Dallas’s exhibit, onto a user’s real-life view (Photo: Reweti Kohere)

It’s been over a year since the Northland artist (Ngāpuhi, Ngai Te Rangi and Ngāti Ranginui) released his debut album, Something to Feel, and five years since his maiden EP, Grapefruit Skies. Listeners know him for writing sad songs, and that same catharsis pervades his exhibit. Inside The Cloud, I make my way to his marker, pick up a smartphone and pair of headphones and learn I have to walk toward the virtual Teeks when he appears. I scan the QR code, wait mere seconds for the download and place a pin drop on the ground nearby. Immediately, I spot him, sitting cross-legged. As I walk a few steps in his direction, making sure I don’t accidentally walk into anyone IRL, a wharenui is erected around us, holding us as it floats among the stars. 

In his deep baritone voice, Teeks finishes a karakia and says, “When I sing, it’s as if I’m opening portals to an ancestral realm…When I sing, I know I’m never alone.” The songwriter is on his feet as he starts to croon the first line of ‘Through It All’: “If this house should burn, can you stand the flames and watch it fall?” A one-on-one performance by a spectral Teeks, dressed in a white singlet and black trousers.

The exhibit ends in less than five minutes, and then I notice the corporeal Teeks, dressed in a similar white singlet, this time overlaid with a cream Gucci cardigan. I’m introduced to him and – because Covid is still around – ask if he feels comfortable to hongi. Of course, he says, and we press the bridge of our noses together.

Teeks tells me he started conceptualising the exhibit just before last Christmas, but work didn’t ramp up until February and March. Now launched, the experience of building a virtual world for the very first time was fun, he says, one that he gifts viewers by inviting them inside a “place of high ascension”, a whare wānanga. The singer wants people to see and feel his creative process, and to appreciate the culture in which he is rooted. The exhibit is a hononga with his tūpuna, Teeks explains. Māori performers understand it’s not just them on stage. “You have us in the physical realm, but also the spiritual realm.”

Whether it’s through haka, karakia or karanga, Māori know intimately what the spiritual realm feels like. But other than in our dreams, we can’t ever “see it”, Teeks says, finishing my sentence. Translating that sensibility with a limitless technology at his disposal was challenging, but the singer knew a whare wānanga cast in the celestial heavens felt true to his vision. “It feels like home,” he says. 

Teeks scanning the QR code to access his Street Museum exhibit (Photo: Reweti Kohere)

He’s not opposed to incorporating more immersive experiences into his craft, but the situation has to be right. “As long as it works, it’s executed well and it comes across well. I don’t want it to get in the way of what matters – singing, standing on stage,” he says, having learnt from working with Spark that the more opportunities he has to create, the more he can trust his instincts. AR was a new, “intimidating” world, but Teeks made sure he was his full self and no one else when approaching it. “When you experience the exhibit, it’s very me. It’s very much who I am.”

Teeks’s exhibit is powerful, says Spark marketing director Matt Bain. “You connect with him in a way you don’t through a video.” The telco provided him and the other four creatives with the technological scaffolding from which they could build their worlds. “We said ‘leave the technology to us, we’ve got that bit. You think the unthinkable’,” Bain explains.

The future that 5G promises consumers may be exciting, and businesses may already be benefitting from the ability to transfer bigger quantities of data. But besides faster download speeds and low latency, there’s not a lot more it offers to ordinary smartphone users beyond what they already get with 4G. It seems the only advantage to 5G lies in these entertainment-driven use cases that try to drum up greater adoption, where telcos like Spark tap into the cultural capital of artists to make New Zealanders feel they need to be online a lot more, rather than needing it to make their lives easier.

In the near future, AR apps, much like the Street Museum, could conjure giant holograms of sports players and mascots, right there in a stadium with its own 5G network; tourists could witness giant moa roaming the whenua or the signing of Te Tiriti o Waitangi; and people could watch their favourite recording artists live right without having to leave their living rooms. Until then, New Zealanders can witness a virtual Teeks doing what he loves, being his best self. “When I sing, that’s when I’m ascending.”


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