Clarity at the moment
that matters
most.

Most owners can describe the business they have. Far fewer can describe the one they’re building toward.

Ben starts with the destination. What should this business become? What should it be worth? And what should that ultimately create for the people who own it?

Until those questions have real answers, strategy is guesswork.

He came to Hawke’s Bay by way of big four practices and some of New Zealand’s largest entities, and he now leads the firm. His clients are commercial businesses of scale across a wide range of industries, and much of his best work has been alongside them through sustained periods of growth — the years when a business outgrows the way it has always been run.

A good deal of that work sits with private and family-owned companies, where the ownership question and the business question can’t be pulled apart. A decision about the operation is always also a decision about the people who own it. He works on both the strategy and the technology that will carry it forward.

He works on the moves that change a business’s trajectory: acquisitions, restructures, capital, and the succession conversations most families postpone until they’re urgent. He also works with boards and trustees, where his view is that a Chartered Accountant in the room should hold the line on compliance and risk while still pressing the question of where value is actually being created.

Ben asks difficult questions early, works well in complex situations, and is more interested in the analysis that changes a decision than the report that documents one.

His view is that no two businesses arrive at the same pivot point for the same reasons. So he asks first and advises second.

Most ownership structures were built for a business that no longer exists.

They sit quietly in the background, and then one day they decide what’s possible. What can be sold. What can be passed on. What it costs to change direction.

Ashleigh’s work is making sure the structure serves the destination rather than constraining it.

She advises on the tax and structural consequences of the decisions owners are already contemplating — developing land, restructuring, buying, selling, moving to or from New Zealand. Her clients range from Hawke’s Bay families to corporates and high net worth individuals with interests offshore. She represents them through Inland Revenue audits, reviews and voluntary disclosures, and other professional advisers bring her in to review their own complex positions.

She also works in governance, holding various governance positions including being a director of Progressive Meats and trustee of Eastern & Central Community Trust. That matters to how she advises boards: she has sat in the chair, carried the liability, and had to make the call.

Her reputation is for challenging clients rather than accommodating them. That is the point of an independent adviser.

Every ownership decision eventually meets a number.

Sell or hold. Buy in or buy out. Bring management into equity. Hand it to the next generation or realise the value. All of it rests on a valuation someone has to be willing to defend — and most owners are working from a figure they’ve never tested.

Mark provides that independently.

He works on the transactions that change who owns a business: acquisitions and sales, shareholder entry and exit, and the restructuring that usually has to happen first. He runs the due diligence that determines whether a deal survives contact with the facts, on both sides of the table.

The advantage of getting the number right early is simple. Owners find out what the business is actually worth before they commit to a plan that assumes otherwise — and they discover what closes the gap while there’s still time to act on it.

Mark also advises on cashflow, forecasting and obtaining finance, because a decision that can’t be funded isn’t a decision.

Every Pivot Map begins as a conversation someone was willing to have.

Getting to that conversation isn’t a marketing problem. It’s a trust problem. Owners don’t open up about succession, family or what they actually want because a firm sent them a brochure.

Brendon has spent a career solving that problem in one form or another.

Seventeen years in the National League, including five with the Hawke’s Bay Hawks, four of them as captain. A decade of live television, most of it co-hosting Good Morning. Then Head of Engagement at Cure Kids, where relationships turned into millions of dollars for child health medical research — which is the same discipline as this one, applied to a different end.

What connects all of it is an ability to get people talking candidly, quickly, and to keep the relationship long after the transaction.

He opens the doors, holds the relationships, and hosts the rooms where owners first start saying what’s really going on.