Kiwi Business Story: Simon Bell at Ashburton Guardian

Simon Bell is Co-Owner and Project Manager at Ashburton Guardian and a Leadership Development Programme alumni. 

This Kiwi Business Story is based on a podcast from 1 March 2023, and all figures quoted are from that time. You can enjoy the complete podcast here. 

Tell us about your career journey…

I'm actually the fifth generation of a family business that’s coming up to 144 years old this year. Growing up, me and my sister would work at the print factory putting newspapers together… In the school holidays, I would work on the printing machines, loading up the ink, and cleaning the print site, and my sister would work as a journalist alongside her schoolwork.

A couple of times it snowed and we had to go out and deliver the newspaper! So, from a young age, I was always destined to eventually have this amazing opportunity.

After finishing university in Dunedin this opportunity came along and I thought, ‘right, I'll give it a crack now’ (having learnt many other skills outside of what I needed to do), and try to bring those skills into the family business and make a real good go of it.

And what about now?

Since becoming Co-Owner in the middle of last year, the stress has definitely risen, and my workload has ever risen. It's just trying to take everything on board and, particularly through The Icehouse, [taking on] a couple of things which have been a real helping hand which I wouldn't have known before. Otherwise it's too overwhelming, but there are ways to cope with your workload and your family, social, and work/life balance.

How did you hear about The Icehouse and the Leadership Development Programme (LDP)?

The idea initially came from my father. Bruce Bell went on the Owner Manager Programme around 18 years ago, and he said it was the best thing he'd ever done for his business and career. Then, a local client of ours, who I catch up with on a regular basis, said, ‘you need to do this, this will help your career. This will help drive results.’ So I went along to LDP, not knowing what to expect, and I'm glad I did it.

Once you got there, you realise that everyone else is in the same boat. There were people there in their early 20s through to 40s and 50s – a wide range of people from different jobs and with different aspects on life.

What did you implement into the business from LDP?

We spoke a lot about having a courageous conversation internally and externally. We made a couple of key business decisions where a property publication, which had been running for a while, had been running at the loss. And we were asking ‘Why are we doing this?’

On programme, we played a finance game for about four or five hours. It was a highly competitive board game, kind of like Monopoly on steroids. We had to bid on the contract, and if we won the contract, we secured the work, and then we were able to pay our creditors and work out our invoicing for the next couple of months and so on. There were some great learnings there – real-life implications without knowing it.

The day I became a co-owner was the last day we did the presentation for LDP. I was thinking, ‘awesome, you've done the course… now let’s get straight into it.’

Anything from a lifestyle perspective?

I was groomsmen at the friend's wedding just outside of Christchurch recently, and had to do a speech in front of 80 people. I ended up speaking last, and after dinner, so everyone had had quite a few drinks and I was feeling quite nervous!

We’d done a resilience breathing exercise on the programme, and I did that for a minute and it calmed the nerves, and that's pretty incredible – just to have that in the bank. And it works!

What’s a current challenge that you're looking to overcome this year?

Further enhancing and building our online model. We are trying to monetise our social media following. In mid-Canterbury we've got the biggest Facebook following in the region, the second being a noticeboard page, which anyone can jump on, so building some sort of credibility behind that… And also like everyone else – and every industry person you talk to says the same thing – looking for key staff is a challenge.

What excites you the most about 2023 and where the business is heading?

Everything around that digital and social media piece. We were discussing AI with some marketing people and the impact of that and writing stories, which is quite hard to get your head around, but I really want to look more into that, and also partnering with local firms and growing nationwide.