Is Your Business Weathering the Storm? A Critical Look at Risk Management in Aotearoa

 

As a powerful storm sweeps across New Zealand today, businesses are facing the possibility of disruptions. From power outages to internet blackouts, these events serve as a stark reminder: risk management isn't just a buzzword, it's a lifeline.

For too long, many SMEs have viewed business continuity planning as a "nice-to-have," something reserved for larger corporations. But as we've seen with recent weather events, even a short disruption can have significant financial and reputational impacts. Can your business afford to be offline for hours, or even days?

I'm a firm believer in proactive risk mitigation. That's why I've invested in robust backup solutions for both power and internet. When the lights go out, my operations don't stop. When the fibre gets cut, we can still connect and serve our clients. This isn't just about convenience; it's about safeguarding my business's future and ensuring uninterrupted service.

So, as you watch the rain fall and the wind howl, ask yourself: do you have the risks to your business covered? Have you identified your critical operations? What would happen if your essential services were interrupted? Do you have a plan B, or even a plan C?

Don't wait for disaster to strike to think about risk management. Take the time now to assess your vulnerabilities and implement solutions. It could be the difference between weathering the storm and being swept away.

See our Risk Management Consulting and Critical Backup Power Solutions pages to find out how Josty can help you cover your risks. 

What Is a CRM and Why Your Business Needs One

The Indispensable Role of CRM in Modern Business

In today's customer-centric market, understanding and effectively managing customer relationships is paramount for success. A CRM (Customer Relationship Management) system is a strategic software platform that centralises customer data, tracks interactions, and optimises the entire customer journey, from initial contact to post-sale support. For businesses across New Zealand and Australia, a robust CRM is no longer optional but an essential component of a successful digital transformation.

At Josty, we frequently observe the pitfalls of inadequate CRM usage: missed sales opportunities, poor lead follow-up, and disjointed marketing efforts. A well-implemented CRM, however, becomes the "central nervous system" of your organisation, streamlining workflows, enhancing customer experience (CX), and driving data-driven decisions that ultimately boost profitability.

CRMs come in various types, including operational (automating sales, service, marketing), analytical (for business intelligence and insights), and collaborative (for cross-departmental teamwork). Most modern solutions are cloud-based, offering mobility and real-time access, making them incredibly valuable for growing businesses.

The benefits of a CRM are multifaceted. It provides crucial sales pipeline visibility, enabling teams to track every prospect and necessary action. It powers marketing automation for personalised campaigns and improved customer engagement. By consolidating interaction history, CRMs facilitate an improved customer experience, ensuring fast, informed support responses. The wealth of integrated data leads to better, data-driven decisions, optimising everything from conversion rates to team performance. Furthermore, CRMs foster collaboration and workflow optimisation, aligning sales, marketing, and service teams for greater efficiency.

Based on real-world experience, a good CRM boasts features like seamless email integration, easy data entry, quick views of recent activities, smart reporting, and robust mobile app capabilities with automatic call logging. Customisation, user-friendly design, strong security, and comprehensive support are also vital for successful CRM implementation and high user adoption.

Choosing the right CRM involves defining your business objectives, identifying key users, trialing top candidates, and considering scalability and support. At Josty, we offer expert CRM consulting and implementation support, helping businesses define their strategy, migrate data, train staff, and ultimately achieve measurable ROI, empowering growth and securing success.

Read the full blog post here.

Are Your Daily and Weekly Routines Designed for Success or Just Survival?

One of the most overlooked drivers of sustainable success in business, in career, and in life is your routine.

Not just how you manage time…
But how you manage energy, clarity, and focus.

Here’s the question everyone should ask themselves
Have you intentionally structured your day and week to support your goals, your wellbeing, and your growth or are you reacting to what life throws at you?

If your schedule is running you, it might be time to pause and reassess.

Consider this:

🔹 Do your mornings set the tone or steal your momentum?
The first hour of your day often dictates your mindset. Are you starting with intention or immediately jumping into noise?

🔹 Are your priorities reflected in your calendar or just your intentions?
It’s easy to say we value health, growth, or strategy… but are they actually blocked into your week?

🔹 Are you protecting your peak energy times for deep work and strategic thinking?
Not all hours are equal. Working smarter means aligning tasks with your natural rhythms.

🔹 Do you have white space for reflection and self-improvement or is every moment accounted for?
Growth doesn’t happen in the gaps between back-to-back meetings. It needs deliberate space.

🔹 Is your routine supporting your wellbeing or slowly burning you out?
High performance is not about pushing harder. It’s about creating systems that allow you to thrive, sustainably.

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Your daily and weekly rhythm is either your greatest advantage… or your silent bottleneck.

Success and fulfilment are both the result of structure, structure built with clarity, not just busyness.

So, here’s your challenge:
This week, audit your routine. Ask yourself: Is this aligned with the life and outcomes I want to create?

If not, it might be time to redesign it.

Let me know what’s one small change you’re making to reclaim your time, energy, or direction?

Head over to our main blog for more insights. 

Can Your Business Model Adapt to Market Changes?

 

Navigating Change: The Agile Business Model

In today's dynamic business landscape, change is constant, not an anomaly. Whether it's technological shifts, evolving customer expectations, or global events, your business model must be adaptable to ensure long-term survival and growth. At Josty, we've witnessed how businesses embedding agility, resilience, and continuous learning into their operations consistently outperform competitors, while those clinging to outdated models risk obsolescence.

Your business model defines how you create, deliver, and capture value, encompassing everything from products and customers to cost structures and distribution. The need for this model to evolve is accelerating due to rapid technological advancements, shifting consumer behaviours (demanding transparency and personalisation), and relentless competition. Stagnation in profits, high customer churn, or significant industry and regulatory changes are all clear signals that it’s time to adapt. Are your competitors offering more value, or is your reliance on a single revenue stream becoming a vulnerability?

Strategically pivoting your business model involves several key steps. First, diagnose with data to identify performance issues and market trends. Next, engage stakeholders, your team, suppliers, and customers, to ensure a smooth transition. Crucially, redefine your value proposition to align with current market demands. Then, diversify revenue streams and optimise cost structures, exploring new models like subscriptions or bundling. Finally, implement, measure, and refine using lean methodologies, celebrating quick wins to build momentum.

My own experience highlighted this necessity: adapting our product range and production processes in response to changing customer needs allowed us to not just survive but gain a competitive edge and market leadership. This transformation was only possible by embracing business model innovation and risk mitigation.

To embed agility long-term, cultivate an innovation culture that encourages continuous learning and experimentation. Invest in R&D and talent development, strengthen strategic partnerships, and leverage technology as a force multiplier to automate workflows and enhance customer experience.

Ultimately, your ability to recognise the signs of change, act decisively, and pivot strategically will determine your success. At Josty, we help New Zealand businesses build agile, resilient models that flex with the market and scale with success, ensuring you lead change rather than merely reacting to it.

Read the full blog post here.

Post written by Jason Jost

Cultivating Talent: The Power of Internal Promotion

 

Unlocking Potential: The Strategic Power of Internal Promotion

For businesses aiming for sustainable growth and a truly resilient future, internal promotion isn't just a nice-to-have it's a strategic imperative. As an expert business consultant, I've seen firsthand how nurturing talent from within can transform organisations, boosting employee engagement, strengthening talent retention, and building a robust leadership pipeline. At Josty, we champion this approach, understanding that empowering your existing team is key to unlocking their full potential and securing your long-term success.

Promoting from within offers a wealth of advantages. Firstly, it significantly enhances employee morale and motivation. When staff see clear career pathways and colleagues being recognised, it sends a powerful message that their efforts are valued, fostering loyalty and commitment. This directly translates to reduced employee turnover, saving considerable recruitment costs and preserving invaluable institutional knowledge. Internally promoted individuals already understand your company culture and processes, leading to smoother transitions and faster productivity gains. This inherent familiarity is a significant competitive advantage for any business.

Furthermore, internal promotion is the cornerstone of effective succession planning. By identifying high-potential employees and providing them with targeted professional development and mentorship, you build a ready supply of future leaders, safeguarding against leadership gaps and ensuring business continuity. This strategic foresight, which Josty frequently advises on, helps maintain momentum and stability.

However, it's crucial to navigate potential pitfalls. A purely internal focus risks stagnation and "groupthink," highlighting the need for a balanced approach that can strategically incorporate external talent when necessary. Managing disappointment among those not promoted requires a transparent and objective process, clear communication, and constructive feedback. There's also the "Peter Principle" to consider promoting someone based solely on current performance without assessing their readiness for new responsibilities. This underscores the need for comprehensive talent assessments and targeted leadership development programmes.

To successfully implement internal promotion, businesses must establish a clear talent development framework. This includes identifying high-potential employees, creating visible career pathways, investing in training and upskilling, and establishing robust mentorship programmes. Fostering a culture of continuous learning and regular, constructive feedback is also vital. Critically, the promotion process must be driven by transparency and fairness, with clear criteria and consistent communication. Finally, empowering managers to actively develop their teams through coaching and identifying growth opportunities is paramount.

In essence, prioritising internal promotion means investing in your most valuable asset: your people. It’s a strategic move that not only optimises resources but also builds a resilient, adaptive, and forward-thinking organisation ready to thrive in a dynamic market. It directly supports business growth, strengthens sales performance, and mitigates risk. Read the full blog and let's chat about how Josty can help you unlock this powerful potential within your own team.

How Business Culture Can Make or Break Your Success

Culture: The Real Driver of Your Business Success

Culture isn't just a buzzword or a statement on a wall; it's the collective behaviours, attitudes, and shared beliefs that quietly power your organisation. As someone who has seen its impact firsthand, from the Navy to large corporates, I know that culture either propels your business forward or drags it down. At Josty.nz, we've seen it time and again: a brilliant strategy is useless without the right culture to execute it. Culture is the very context in which your team operates, innovates, and performs.

Why Culture Matters More Than You Think

Think of culture as your business's unseen operating system. It dictates everything from how decisions are made to how employees engage and how customers perceive your brand. A supportive culture acts as your strategy's execution engine, fostering collaboration and trust. It also forms your organisational identity, reflecting your true mission and values. Crucially, culture directly impacts performance and productivity. A positive environment cultivates loyalty and high performance, while a toxic one leads to disengagement and high turnover.

Subtle Shifts, Major Consequences

Even minor shifts can undermine a thriving culture. New leaders introducing hierarchy or micromanagement can crush psychological safety, stifling innovation. When core values are neglected, even "just this once," accountability can erode, subtly changing the entire environment. Ignoring employee wellbeing also leads to burnout, stress, and declining engagement. Lessons from disciplined Navy crews highlight the power of trust and unity, while examples of corporate teams unraveling due to a focus solely on outputs show the devastating impact of cultural drift.

Building a Culture That Works For You

Cultivating the right culture requires intentional effort. It's not just a leadership responsibility; everyone must be empowered to uphold it. Design your structure with intent, ensuring clear communication and accountability. Prioritise psychological safety and trust, creating an environment where people feel safe to speak up and innovate. Most importantly, live your mission and values every day. During times of change, open communication and aligning structures with your cultural goals become even more vital.

Culture isn't a "nice-to-have"; it's your ultimate strategic advantage or silent saboteur. At Josty.nz, we believe that Empowering Growth and Securing Success begins with a strong, intentional culture. Every decision is a chance to reinforce the culture you want. Invest in your culture now, because investing in your people is investing in long-term performance and innovation. 

Do You Recognise Opportunity When It Knocks?

Seize Growth with Strategic Opportunity Identification

"Do You Recognise Opportunity When It Knocks? Seize Growth with Strategic Opportunity Identification" underscores that recognising and acting on opportunities is crucial for business growth, rather than simply relying on luck. Many businesses miss out by failing to identify and capitalise on potential.

The post highlights two real-world examples: a supplier squandering a market opportunity by refusing a reseller's request for territory protection, and a General Manager dismissing a productivity tool due to a narrow focus on cost, which allowed competitors to gain an advantage. These cases emphasise the need to pair opportunity identification with an effective innovation and change strategy.

To avoid squandered chances, businesses should implement structured frameworks. This involves utilising ROI models for technology and innovation (considering both tangible and intangible returns), employing a Market Opportunity Navigator to assess potential growth, and drawing up clear exclusive partnership agreements. Lessons learnt indicate that minor concessions can yield significant returns, a solid ROI is vital, and the successful adoption of tools truly drives value.

Josty recommends embedding opportunity responsiveness by establishing a "scan rhythm" for external information, evaluating with discipline using ROI scores and risk parameters, testing with pilot commitments, and making swift, transparent decisions. The article concludes that in today's rapidly evolving business landscape, structured opportunity identification and disciplined follow-through are fundamental for "Empowering Growth, Securing Success."

Read the full blog post here