Kiwi Business Story: Amanda Barker from Pillar Consulting- (Part 1)

 
This weeks Kiwi Business Story is a special edition that has been broken into two parts, part two launching next week, the 21st of December 2022. 

Amanda Barker is the owner of Pillar Consulting and an Icehouse coaching client of Jamie Brock.  
 
This Kiwi Business Story is based on a podcast from 18 August 2022, and all figures quoted are from that time. You can enjoy the complete podcast here.

Tell us about Amanda. What are you passionate about, and what does life look like?  

The old Amanda is quite different to the Amanda these days. I guess growing up, I did not really know who I was, and it is something that I always struggled with, and I always wanted to know more about myself. I have spent the last 10 years really getting to know who I am and what makes me tick and what I enjoy, rather than, what I portray to other people in the world.

I was not very driven to succeed at high school, or at Uni. I dropped out of Uni quite early on, and then went back and had another crack at it, and then decided, I am just not this person. I love being around people. I love being with my friends and my family. Back then, I felt like I was not a scholar and was not committed or motivated, often not finishing or seeing things through was a huge failure and it got to me. 

I have been with my husband since we were 21, we have grown up together, just being a mum and realizing that I always wanted to create my own destiny and start my own business. Business has really allowed me to find who I am and what I enjoy doing. I no longer feel that kind of angst over what others expected of me back then 

 

Do you think it was just a series of moments finding yourself?

It started at the end of school, that whole need to go to university kind of thing. There is a certain pigeonhole that everybody expects, there is a sense of expectation, and whether that is because of where I was in society, the school I went to, the people around me, the fact that I was sporty and outgoing. I thought I had to fit into this mold, because that is what everybody else is doing. So, I then went away to Uni, and I just absolutely blew out. Looking back, it was not what I should have done. But I learned so much from it.

My parents were great. They were like, you need to come home, this is not working for you, just take some time off. That is when I met my now husband and found my place with good friends from school that had gone to a different university. I went and hung out with them, and my life just took a completely different direction. I do feel, if I had my time over again, absolutely, I would not have gone to Uni, I would have done something different.


I'd love to learn a little bit more about Pillar Consulting, how did you come up with the idea? And what does Pillar Consulting offer?

I always knew that I wanted to have my own business, that was something I always knew. I just never knew what type of business. I never felt in my 20s and my late teens that I was good enough or that I could do it. I have always had these ideas, just never knew what I could do. My career at this stage was in generalist HR (Human Resources) position for large companies. So, I worked for a bank in New Zealand, and then I moved to Australia with them, and then ended up leaving them and moving into a mining company. I did fly in and fly out into that mining environment. I did a bit of health and safety training before I went out into that environment and really enjoyed it. But then very much focused on HR and being part of a wider HR, from the people to the team culture.

After I left that mining environment, I ended up moving to Sydney and moving into a medical device company, and again the role was around HR. I always really liked working with people. But then when I had my second baby, my husband and I always knew, New Zealand's always going to be home. So, we decided to move home to New Zealand. I was not feeling satisfied with my career. It was very full on, my husband was still nine weeks away, finishing off his work in Sydney.

My cousin who is a CEO, sits on boards, really onto it when it comes to business and whatnot. We were talking one night about what I was going to do. I said, I really want to start my own business. I am ready now. I think I will just do recruitment, that is what I know best, even though I did not feel overly inspired by the idea.

My cousin goes, well, you should look at health and safety instead, the law is about to change. So, I did, I just could not get it out of my head. Once I get an idea in my head, I just want to see if I can investigate it and see whether it is viable. I did a lot of research into it. So investigated what that would potentially look like and what I would be required to do. Pulled out the study I'd done and the training I had done to be in the mines. It just all came together in my head and on paper.

I thought I could study this year, then I could launch my own thing helping small to medium sized businesses, contribute towards a positive health and safety outcomes for New Zealand workplaces. We have terrible statistics, twice as likely to die in New Zealand as you are in Australia, and four times more likely to die at work here then the UK, we have a real issue. I think after Pike River, some stuff that happened with the Christchurch earthquake, and even going back as far as sort of Cave Creek, these were all incidents that have happened in our lifetime, that did not need to happen.

Once I started reading it and getting passionate and invested in what I could contribute to it. I never wanted to just be a consultant. I always wanted to own a business that hired people better than me, to help contribute to solving an issue. It was always the plan to have a fully-fledged business with people, lots of people and a team, and see how far I could take it really. Rather than just me out there with my one-year study.

2016 was a funny year, because I was studying, whilst parenting a toddler and a baby. My husband was coming back from Australia too. We were trying to find a new place to live. When I was overdue from having our second baby in Australia, we bought our house in Papamoa on Trade me. We always knew that we had a place to go to if we wanted, originally it was more a rental property. We decided to make the move to Papamoa, the sunny, beautiful Bay of Plenty and live at the beach.

To pay for the setup of the business, I was doing a bit of freelancing, recruitment work for a guy who was still living in Sydney. He introduced me to a guy that owned a health and safety system as a service, that had been launched about eight weeks earlier. I started using the system for some of the local clients, I started doing a lot of very cheap work for local businesses down there just to get my study and my brain around how it all works.

Check back next week for part 2!