eccuity Podcasts

This week on the Ways to Wealth Podcast, Charlie speaks to Ben Nichols, an entrepreneur and industry builder in padel, the fastest growing sport in the world, and the founder of an ecosystem of businesses built around it.Ben Nichols is an entrepreneur and industry builder in the padel world - advisor to some of the sport's biggest brands, founder of Insider 22, co-founder of the Anglo American Padel Cup, and executive producer of Travel Racket, soon to launch on a major global streaming platform. He writes and speaks on the business of the New Padel World through his platform, The 22.A new padel club opens somewhere in the world every hundred minutes, with somewhere between twenty and thirty five million players globally and Olympic status potentially within reach. But Ben has built a business connecting the corporate world with it. He argues the sport isn't really a sport at all, but also a social operating system, a third space between work and home where people are meeting friends, romantic partners, and business partners. He's also refreshingly honest about the risks. Sweden built too many courts too fast and became the poster child for padel's boom and bust, and Ben draws a sharp parallel with what happened to squash in New Zealand and the UK. This is a conversation about spotting a wave early, why the biggest brands are still hesitating, and why he's moving to America to chase a market he believes is exactly where the UK was four years ago.Watch every episode of the Ways to Wealth Podcast hereLearn more about Ben hereLearn more about Padel22 here#waystowealth #padel #sportsbusiness #entrepreneurship #networking #sponsorship #nzbusiness #sportsmarketing #golf #startup #investing #brands #sport #wealthbuilding

This week on the Ways to Wealth Podcast, Charlie speaks to Dr. Shalini Divya, CEO and founder of TasmanIon, a Wellington deep-tech company building rechargeable aluminium-ion batteries, batteries designed to be cheap, made from abundant materials, and crucially, unable to catch fire.The headline is simple: a Tesla Powerwall costs somewhere between nine and twelve thousand US dollars. Shalini is building something that delivers the same energy storage for around $4,500, aimed first at the millions of households in India, Asia, and beyond who could never afford a Powerwall in the first place. For Shalini, this is personal. She grew up in energy poverty herself, and her ultimate goal is to see a safe, affordable battery in every home like the one she came from.What makes her approach so refreshing is how clear-eyed she is about the endgame. She doesn't want to build the next Tesla or Samsung. She wants one of them to acquire TasmanIon, because they already have the distribution and the R&D budgets to take the technology further and faster than she ever could alone. As she puts it, a billion dollars is just a number, what she really wants is for the tech to reach everyone.After nine years, from a PhD in a Wellington lab to validated prototypes and an open seed round, Shalini is honest about the hard truths of deep tech: that the hardest part isn't inventing the battery, it's the years of commercialisation, safety testing, and timing that come after, and why, through all of it, the biggest lesson she's learned is to be bold.Watch every episode of the Ways to Wealth Podcast here: www.eccuity.com/podcastsLearn more about Shalini here: https://www.linkedin.com/in/shalini-divya/Learn more about Shalini's company here: https://www.tasmanion.com/#waystowealth #batteries #cleanenergy #deeptech #startup #energystorage #tasmanion #entrepreneurship #nzbusiness #innovation #sustainability #powerwall #womenintech #wealthbuilding

This week on the Ways to Wealth Podcast, Charlie speaks to Craig McAlpine, founder of MyCareerBrand, a career coaching and outplacement business operating in around ten countries, and Pitch, a tech startup rethinking how people sell themselves into their next role.Craig's big idea will change how you think about applying for a job. He came from a background writing professional bids and proposals, and he realised that when a company advertises a role, it's really issuing a request for proposal, an invitation to prove you can solve their problem. Yet here's the mismatch: a business bidding for a hundred-thousand-dollar contract will happily spend a whole week on its proposal, while a job seeker chasing a role worth a quarter of a million dollars over a few years thinks putting in a single day is a big effort.So Craig flips the whole approach. Instead of listing what you technically do, you lead with the value you create, the problems you solve, and the gold you'd leave on the table if they don't hire you. His tools even let you design the ideal role you want, then go to market with the evidence that you can deliver it.This is a conversation about treating your career like the business it actually is, why he bootstrapped his own product rather than chase easy money, and the hard-won advice he'd give any founder: understand the problem before you build, back yourself completely, but always be willing to walk away.Watch every episode of the Ways to Wealth Podcast here: www.eccuity.com/podcastsLearn more about Craig here: https://www.linkedin.com/in/craigmcalpine/Learn more about Craig's company here: https://mycareerbrand.net/#waystowealth #careers #jobsearch #careercoaching #recruitment #personalbranding #entrepreneurship #nzbusiness #jobhunting #cv #linkedin #startup #mycareerbrand #wealthbuilding

This week on the Ways to Wealth Podcast, Charlie speaks to Jam Mayer, founder of two companies, the AI automation consultancy Conversologie and Divergity, a learning platform built for neurodivergent minds.Jam is neurodivergent, with ADHD and dyscalculia, and she's open about how that shapes the way she works and builds. She makes a compelling case for something the data backs up: a strikingly high number of founders and creatives are neurodivergent, and it's often not because they set out to be entrepreneurs. It's because the traditional workplace, the nine-to-five, the rigid systems, the one-size-fits-all expectations, simply isn't built for the way their brains work. As she puts it, the goal isn't to work around neurodivergent people. It's to work with them.A recurring idea in this conversation is what Jam calls a personal operating system: a way of designing your work around how you actually think, then using delegation and AI to offload the things that drain you, so your energy goes to what you're genuinely good at. It's the philosophy behind Divergity, which throws out the rigid step-one, step-two model of learning in favour of something adaptive enough to meet very different minds where they are.This is a conversation about building a business, and a life, that fits the way you're wired, rather than forcing yourself to fit someone else's system, and about why understanding that difference isn't a limitation, but often a genuine advantage.Watch every episode of the Ways to Wealth Podcast here: www.eccuity.com/podcastsLearn more about Jam here: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jammayer/Learn more about Jam's company here: https://www.divergity.co/#waystowealth #neurodivergent #adhd #entrepreneurship #neurodiversity #founders #ai #automation #nzbusiness #divergity #futureofwork #productivity #learning #wealthbuilding

This week on the Ways to Wealth Podcast, Charlie speaks to Tim Doyle, founder of Doyle Accountants and one of New Zealand's go-to specialists in cryptocurrency tax, who has filed more than 2,500 crypto tax returns and has been consulting with the IRD on digital assets since 2017.Tim got into crypto the same way most people did: chasing the upside. He made a lot of money, lost it all, and ended up buried in CSV files with a tax problem he couldn't solve, and he's a chartered accountant. That realization became a business. Now he works with around 200 clients who each hold over a million dollars in crypto, and he's watched closely enough to know exactly who wins and who doesn't.Here's what he'll tell you: almost nobody gets rich trading crypto. He compares it to quitting your job to chase an NBA contract when you're five foot eight. His wealthiest clients did the opposite of trading, they bought a handful of tokens years ago and never touched them. No stress, no tax nightmares, no risk, because they never sold.Tim and Charlie also get into why the IRD is now cracking down hard on crypto, the real mechanics of how the wealthy structure their money to legally pay less tax, and why he believes the whole game is shifting, away from farmland and tractors and towards digital, movable assets that let people quite literally vote with their feet on where they pay tax at all.Watch every episode of the Ways to Wealth Podcast here: www.eccuity.com/podcastsLearn more about Tim here: https://www.linkedin.com/in/timbdoyle/Learn more about Tim's company here: https://www.doyleaccountants.co.nz/#waystowealth #crypto #cryptocurrency #tax #bitcoin #investing #nzbusiness #accounting #ird #wealthbuilding #dubai #digitalassets #entrepreneurship #doyleaccountants

This week on the Ways to Wealth Podcast, Charlie speaks to Fernanda Da Silva Tatley, the founder of natural skincare company Azurlis, and a woman who describes herself as an artist in her heart, a scientist by training, and a Reiki master in her soul.Early in her journey, a group of overseas investors offered Fernanda the money she badly needed. Just sign here, they said, and don't worry about what we want in return, we'll decide that later. She was bootstrapping, stretched thin, and desperate for the funding. And she said no. She couldn't move forward on something that wasn't in black and white and didn't align with her values, and she's convinced it was the right call, even though it made her road far harder.Fernanda holds a PhD in medical microbiology and once helped a university win tens of millions in research funding, yet she's spent fifteen years quietly bootstrapping her skincare company, working her day job to fund it and building it after hours and on weekends. She's remarkably honest about where that's left her. When Charlie asks what those years have produced, she admits the business hasn't transformed the way she hoped, but she has. It changed her.This is a conversation about staying true to your values when money is on the line, why she refuses to sell anyone hype, and a hard-won redefinition of success, where a chance conversation on a bus can matter just as much as winning the lottery.Watch every episode of the Ways to Wealth Podcast here: www.eccuity.com/podcastsLearn more about Fernanda here: https://www.linkedin.com/in/fernanda-da-silva-tatley-phd-mentr-08a09b4/Learn more about Fernanda's company here: https://azurlis.co.nz/#waystowealth #skincare #entrepreneurship #bootstrapping #values #naturalskincare #nzbusiness #science #founders #womeninbusiness #vegan #azurlis #mindset #wealthbuilding

This week on the Ways to Wealth Podcast, Charlie speaks to Matthew Cutts, who spent nearly thirty years performing lead roles in some of London's biggest West End musicals, Cats, Starlight Express, Mamma Mia, Jersey Boys, before trading the stage for the boardroom.When Matthew moved back to New Zealand, he expected people to be impressed. Instead, his CV meant nothing, nobody knew who he was, and he had no network and no qualifications to show for a glittering career. As he puts it, the world had moved on and no one really gave a damn. Someone later told him he should have treated himself like an immigrant arriving in a new country, rather than a star coming home. So at an age when most people are settled, he went back to school and earned the first qualification of his life.What he's built since is a business helping companies say what needs to be said. And the insights he's carried over from three decades on stage are quietly brilliant: why the best storyteller in the room is actually the best listener, why telling a great story is only half the job if you can't back it up, and the career truth it took him years to understand, that he stopped getting the big roles because he was the best, and started getting them because of everything else he brought.This is a conversation about reinvention, communication, and why the language of the stage might explain business better than business does.Watch every episode of the Ways to Wealth Podcast here: www.eccuity.com/podcastsLearn more about Matthew here: https://www.linkedin.com/in/matthewcutts/Learn more about Matthew's company here: https://www.matthewcutts.com/#waystowealth #storytelling #communication #leadership #reinvention #westend #theatre #entrepreneurship #nzbusiness #presentation #careerchange #publicspeaking #matthewcutts #wealthbuilding

This week on the Ways to Wealth Podcast, Charlie speaks to Sarah Laurie, founder of Take a Breath, whose breathing software has been tested at scale inside companies like Microsoft, Spark, and The Warehouse Group.Here's the claim that reframes everything: breathing isn't about relaxation. It's a performance mechanism. When you breathe properly, the part of your brain responsible for decisions, focus, and managing your emotions switches fully on. When you breathe shallow, into your chest, the way more than nine out of ten of us now do, that part of your brain switches off and your stress response takes over. You haven't become less capable. Your brain is quietly running in the wrong mode.Sarah explains how our breathing has changed at a population level over the last two decades, why she believes so many high performers are secretly operating well below their capacity, and why the constant pull of our phones and short-form content is making it worse. The results from her corporate programmes are hard to ignore: she's measured 96% of people reducing their anxiety, 76% sleeping better, and 82% with more energy, without anyone stopping work to do it.This is a conversation about the one thing you do around twenty thousand times a day without thinking, why you're almost certainly doing it wrong, and how quickly that can change.Watch every episode of the Ways to Wealth Podcast here: www.eccuity.com/podcastsLearn more about Sarah here: https://www.linkedin.com/in/sarah-laurie-8711a67/Learn more about Sarah's company here: https://www.takeabreath.world/#waystowealth #breathing #health #performance #anxiety #sleep #wellbeing #stress #entrepreneurship #nzbusiness #healthtech #productivity #takeabreath #wealthbuilding

This week on the Ways to Wealth Podcast, Charlie speaks to John Ballinger, a tech entrepreneur and software developer who once built the first iPhone heart monitor app, an app that featured in an Apple ad and detected a user's heart condition.But this conversation is really about how John invests, and it breaks almost every rule you've been taught. He holds 99% of his portfolio in a single stock: Rocket Lab. Not a fund, not a basket, one company. His logic is simple: find an extraordinary founder taking a business somewhere huge, buy in, and ride their coattails through every gut-wrenching dip, no matter how far it falls. He watched that stock slide from ten dollars to three and calls it the best buying opportunity he'd ever seen.John and Charlie get into why concentrating everything in one bet can make more sense than spreading it thin, why John ran the numbers and found that buying the S&P has crushed buying property in almost every scenario over the last seventy years, and why he believes most established companies are now the Titanic heading straight for the iceberg in the age of AI.This is a conversation about conviction, riding your winners, and thinking in decades when everyone else is thinking in months.Watch every episode of the Ways to Wealth Podcast here: www.eccuity.com/podcastsLearn more about John here: https://www.linkedin.com/in/john-ballinger-119903aa/Learn more about John's company here: https://applyhere.co.nz/#waystowealth #investing #stocks #rocketlab #ai #entrepreneurship #nzbusiness #stockmarket #property #wealthbuilding #tech #founders #longterm #conviction

This week on the Ways to Wealth Podcast, Charlie speaks to Natasa Rasic, co-founder of ProBizBalance, a business support and bookkeeping company she runs with her own daughter.Natasa built an accounting firm in Serbia and ran it for twenty years. When she decided to leave it all behind and move to the other side of the world for her daughter's future, she didn't just close the business or sell it to the highest bidder. She sold it to her own staff, the people she'd worked alongside for up to two decades, so that every one of them would walk away with their own stability.That word, stability, comes up again and again. Natasa arrived in New Zealand six years ago with her daughter and two suitcases, retrained for a master's degree to get her visa, and slowly rebuilt from nothing. Now the two of them are building something together, and when Charlie asks her what wealth actually means, her answer isn't money. It's peace. The freedom to not worry about the rent, and the time to spend with the person she crossed the world for.This is a conversation about starting over, the quiet discipline behind the admin most business owners avoid, and building something to hand down to the next generation.Watch every episode of the Ways to Wealth Podcast here: www.eccuity.com/podcastsLearn more about Natasa here: https://www.linkedin.com/in/natasa-rasic-45a99b194/Learn more about Natasa's company here: https://www.probizbalance.co.nz/#waystowealth #bookkeeping #smallbusiness #entrepreneurship #nzbusiness #familybusiness #immigrant #accounting #intergenerationalwealth #stability #serbia #womeninbusiness #startingover #wealthbuilding

This week on the Ways to Wealth Podcast, Charlie speaks to Sarah Clearwater, founder and CEO of Reframer, a customer experience consultancy, and the person who built New Zealand's largest community of customer experience professionals.Here's a number that should worry any business owner: in a typical B2B sale, seven to ten people have to say yes before you ever sign a contract, and at least five different departments touch that customer along the way. Sarah's whole job is finding where that journey quietly breaks, and she argues most deals don't fall apart at the negotiating table. They fall apart in the silent gap after someone has already said yes.A social scientist who grew up in Berlin to East German and Egyptian parents, Sarah came from a long line of entrepreneurs and swore she'd never become one. When she finally cracked, she gave herself a six-month runway and just three months to land a client. She's refreshingly blunt about the conversations she has with the businesses she works with, the ones where she asks "why, and who for, and to what end?" and the room goes quiet.This is a conversation about why most companies are flying blind with their customers, why chasing the next trendy demographic can quietly wreck the business you already have, and why, in Sarah's words, good business is never done in your comfort zone.Watch every episode of the Ways to Wealth Podcast here: www.eccuity.com/podcastsLearn more about Sarah here: https://www.linkedin.com/in/sarahclearwater/Learn more about Sarah's company here: https://www.reframr.co.nz/#waystowealth #customerexperience #cx #b2b #sales #businessgrowth #entrepreneurship #nzbusiness #consulting #marketing #strategy #founders #customerjourney #wealthbuilding

This week on the Ways to Wealth Podcast, Charlie speaks to Jeffrey To, founder of MĀKI, a New Zealand company that builds autonomous boats, submarines, and underwater robots to go where humans can't.Bored in his garage during lockdown, Jeffrey took a cheap fishing kit, turned it into a self-driving boat, and sent it out to scan his local lake. What it found stopped him cold: a 55-metre, star-shaped structure sitting on the lakebed that nobody could see from the surface and nobody could explain. That mystery, and the answer to it, accidentally launched a business now hired by councils, power companies, and industrial operators to map the things beneath our water.But Jeffrey's story didn't start with engineering. It started in Hong Kong, where he didn't do well at school, and a cultural exchange that landed him in a tiny New Zealand town of 3,000 people. To build his future, he and his now-wife saved 60% of their income before tax, working second jobs late into the night, going without food and petrol, eating dinner on the floor because they couldn't afford a table.This is a conversation about building things that don't exist yet, the discipline it takes to bet on yourself, and a hard-won philosophy on failure from a man who has learned that as long as you're still here, there's always tomorrow.Watch every episode of the Ways to Wealth Podcast here: www.eccuity.com/podcastsLearn more about Jeffrey here: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jeffrey-to-637209a7/Learn more about Jeffrey's company here: https://www.maki.nz/#waystowealth #robotics #engineering #autonomousvehicles #startup #entrepreneurship #nzbusiness #innovation #investing #saving #environmental #technology #maki #wealthbuilding

This week on the Ways to Wealth Podcast, Charlie speaks to Harrison Stott, founder of The Kitchen Collective, New Zealand's first cloud kitchen, with sites in Auckland and Christchurch.If you've ordered food on an app lately, there's a growing chance it came from a kitchen with no storefront, no dining room, and no sign on the door. Harrison runs the spaces where that food gets made, a kind of co-working office building, but for chefs and food businesses, where anyone from a meal-prep startup to a fried chicken brand can move into a fully fitted kitchen and start trading almost overnight.Harrison spent years in the UK chasing one question: how do startups actually work? He worked across out-of-home media, an AI company, an EdTech business teaching kids to code through Minecraft, and a cloud kitchen company that raised a quarter of a billion pounds. Then he brought the concept home, bought a building, fitted out the kitchens, and discovered the market he'd built for didn't actually exist here yet. What he did next is the real story.This is an honest conversation about being the only person who truly cares about your business, why he'd rather solve a problem than talk about it, and what it takes to stay sane when every single moving part runs through you.Watch every episode of the Ways to Wealth Podcast here: www.eccuity.com/podcastsLearn more about Harrison here: https://www.linkedin.com/in/harrisonstott/Learn more about Harrison's company here: https://www.tkcollective.co/#waystowealth #cloudkitchens #ghostkitchens #food #hospitality #startups #entrepreneurship #nzbusiness #fooddelivery #foodtech #solofounder #realestate #smallbusiness #wealthbuilding

This week on the Ways to Wealth Podcast, Charlie speaks to Dec Penfold, a chef and food consultant who has built restaurant brands everywhere from Dubai to Melbourne, and who once pitched a now-thriving chicken brand to a room full of famous YouTubers using nothing but a shoebox with stickers on it.Dec has been in kitchens since he was 14, washing pots in a Thai restaurant in North Wales. At 22 he turned up to a French ski resort expecting to snowboard between shifts, only for the head chef to never arrive, leaving him to run the entire hotel kitchen for a season without speaking a word of French. From there he ran a two-storey kitchen at the O2 feeding thousands a day, opened a string of restaurants before he was 27, burned out, and was eventually headhunted by Deliveroo to build something most diners have no idea exists.He explains the strange world of virtual brands, the fake-looking restaurants quietly operating inside real kitchens to squeeze extra revenue out of empty hours, why he brought Mr Beast Burger to New Zealand, and how a business with almost no bricks and mortar actually works. There's also the honest story of swapping a decade in a one-bed London flat for a house by the beach, and what it really takes to run UK clients from the other side of the world at one in the morning.This is a conversation about reinvention, spotting opportunity where others see none, and building a career that travels with you.Watch every episode of the Ways to Wealth Podcast here: www.eccuity.com/podcastsLearn more about Dec here: https://www.linkedin.com/in/dec-penfold-7ba566b9/Learn more about Dec's company here: https://www.decskitchen.com/Timestamps:00:00 Intro00:59 Who is Dec?01:34 A life in kitchens03:08 Thrown in at the deep end in France04:42 London, the O2 and burnout06:17 Sales and the Michelin back door07:09 Deliveroo and virtual brands11:05 Going solo as a consultant14:52 KSI, the Sidemen and the shoebox17:50 Equity vs getting paid19:08 Mr Beast Burger: a passion project20:13 Your salary as an asset20:55 Can you clone yourself?23:48 Will AI replace him?26:46 Your household as a business28:13 New Zealand as a hedge30:02 Life in NZ vs London33:11 The NZ market vs the UK35:19 Growing Mr Beast Burger38:47 Taking it on the road#waystowealth #food #hospitality #restaurants #ghostkitchens #virtualbrands #mrbeastburger #entrepreneurship #nzbusiness #chef #foodtech #delivery #sidemen #wealthbuilding

This week on the Ways to Wealth Podcast, Charlie speaks to Andy Wright, founder of Engage Media, a one-man social content agency that has made videos for everyone from Volkswagen to the local pharmacy down the road.Andy spent a decade as a radio presenter, had a stint as a professional golfer, and now fronts golf coverage for Sky, but the thread running through all of it is an obsession with a single question: what actually makes someone stop scrolling and watch? After years of pouring himself into content he thought was brilliant that nobody saw, he stumbled on a hundred-dollar course from a tiny Canadian startup that changed everything, and boiled the whole game down to one principle most people get completely wrong.He explains why he deliberately makes content look rough and unpolished, how a one-minute video for a small-town pharmacy racked up half a million views, and why he believes the safest thing you can do with a brand is also the most dangerous. There's also an honest thread here about money, the internal battle of charging what you're actually worth when you grew up watching your parents work the land for forty years and say yes to twenty-five dollars an hour.This is a conversation about attention, authenticity, and building a life around the work you'd happily do for free, then learning how to get paid properly for it.Watch every episode of the Ways to Wealth Podcast hereLearn more about Andy hereLearn more about Andy's company here#waystowealth #contentmarketing #socialmedia #marketing #virality #entrepreneurship #nzbusiness #branding #creators #smallbusiness #advertising #ai #engagemedia #wealthbuilding

This week on the Ways to Wealth Podcast, Charlie speaks to Kai Malte Röver, a German-born industrial designer who has spent over 20 years building products on the other side of the world.Kai's career reads like a tour of modern design. He built six-axis robots for Toyota, designed car dashboards, developed luxury fireplaces, worked on hydrogen and solar systems, and now leads product design at Mars Bioimaging, a Christchurch company that just earned FDA clearance for a next-generation medical scanner.But the thread running through all of it isn't the products. It's what happened when a direct-talking German moved to Japan, hit a serious culture shock, forced himself to learn the language, and discovered that the way people think is wildly different depending on where they stand. That lesson reshaped how he designs, how he leads, and what he believes about staying relevant in a world that won't stop changing.In this conversation, Kai makes the case for getting out of your bubble, why simplicity is the hardest thing of all to design, and what he tells young people who want to build a career that lasts.Watch every episode of the Ways to Wealth Podcast hereReach Kai on Linked-in here Learn more about Kai here: Learn more about Mars Bioimaging here#waystowealth #design #industrialdesign #japan #medical #innovation #nzbusiness #circulareconomy #entrepreneurship #renewables #ai #productdesign #culture #wealthbuilding

This week on the Ways to Wealth Podcast, Charlie speaks to Christine Liggins, co-founder and CEO of the DebtFix Foundation, a charity that now helps 8,000 New Zealand families a year claw their way out of debt.If you think the people drowning in debt are who you'd expect, this conversation will change your mind. Christine's average client isn't on a benefit. They're middle to high earners, often self-employed or running their own business, and they owe around $80,000, not on a mortgage, but on credit cards, personal loans, and buy now pay later. The people who felt the most secure in their jobs are often the ones carrying the most, right up until the moment that security disappears.Christine has spent two decades fighting for these people, and she pulls no punches. She'll tell you why she calls bankruptcy a weapon of mass destruction, why money is now the single biggest driver of mental health problems, and the simple thing almost nobody realises they can do the moment repayments start to slip. There's also a story about a franchise owner convinced he owed a fortune, until Christine showed him the truth was nowhere near as bad as he feared.This is a conversation about how quickly things can unravel, why the shame around debt keeps people silent for far too long, and the small first steps that start to turn it all around.Watch every episode of the Ways to Wealth Podcast here: www.eccuity.com/podcastsLearn more about Christine here: https://www.linkedin.com/in/christine-liggins-7454992b/Learn more about Christine's company here: https://www.debtfix.co.nz/#waystowealth #debt #personalfinance #bankruptcy #financialwellbeing #mentalhealth #nzbusiness #money #debtfree #charity #smallbusiness #costofliving #financialresilience #wealthbuilding

This week on the Ways to Wealth Podcast, Charlie speaks to Kristina Mydlar, founder of Mydlar Consulting, a boutique London firm that helps fintech and financial services companies put AI to work where it actually makes a difference.Kristina spent over 20 years in banking and finance before everything changed in a single evening. During COVID, she found out from a Financial Times article on a Monday night that the company she worked for was being shut down. A few days later a stranger messaged her on LinkedIn asking for help, she remembered a line from Richard Branson about saying yes when opportunity knocks, and a business was born. Her partners have since raised over a billion pounds in equity for their clients.The most useful part of this conversation is how bluntly Kristina cuts through the AI hype. She'll tell you that you cannot bolt AI onto a business that hasn't sorted out its own processes, because all it does is magnify the problems already there, and then everyone blames the technology instead of the homework that never got done. She explains why some client meetings feel more like therapy sessions, why company valuations are starting to look inflated, and what investors are now quietly scrutinising before they part with a penny.This is a clear-eyed look at where the money actually is right now, what separates the founders who break through from the ones who stall, and why the hardest part of going out on your own has nothing to do with the admin.Watch every episode of the Ways to Wealth Podcast here: www.eccuity.com/podcastsLearn more about Kristina here: https://www.linkedin.com/in/kristina-mydlar-310b7b10/Learn more about Kristina's company here: https://www.mydlarconsulting.com/#waystowealth #ai #fintech #fundraising #venturecapital #financialservices #entrepreneurship #consulting #london #startups #founders #generativeai #investing #wealthbuilding

This week on the Ways to Wealth Podcast, Charlie speaks to Paul Tranter, a serial entrepreneur from Birmingham whose life has taken more turns than almost anyone we've had on the show.Paul has been a graphic designer in the London rat race, living in a broom cupboard. He chased an advert promising £700 a week on a tropical island and ended up selling timeshare in the Canaries, not knowing at the time that the whole operation was a front for one of Britain's most infamous robberies. He spent years skippering charter yachts around the Mediterranean, where his entire job was to show people a good time. Then he met his wife, retrained on a computer in his thirties, and quietly built a string of internet businesses while everyone else was still figuring out what the web was.Now he lives on a farm at the bottom of New Zealand, planting native trees and building toward something he calls ‘wealthness’. He'll tell you why turning the world off and walking around his land taught him more about security than any amount of money ever did, why he thinks the richest men on earth are missing something in their soul, and the strange story of a screaming crow that he credits with steering his whole life.There's also a masterclass buried in here on how Paul makes his living. No paid ads, ever. Just relentless content, an immunity to the numbers, and a long game most people give up on far too early. This is a conversation about living big, having enough, and the difference between the two.Watch every episode of the Ways to Wealth Podcast hereLearn more about Paul hereLearn more about Paul's company here#waystowealth #entrepreneurship #offgrid #selfsufficiency #contentmarketing #digitalproducts #nzbusiness #wealthness #legacy #simpleliving #onlinebusiness #wellbeing #serialentrepreneur #wealthbuilding

This week on the Ways to Wealth Podcast, Charlie speaks to Peter Bird, a registered nurse who spent 25 years in occupational health before a health scare made him look closely at what he, and everyone around him, was actually eating.Here is the problem he kept running into. You stand in a supermarket aisle holding a product covered in healthy-sounding claims, and you genuinely cannot tell whether it's good for you or not. Around 75 percent of what's on those shelves is ultra-processed. The packaging is built to reassure you, not inform you. And if you've ever tried to work out what to put in your kid's lunchbox, you'll know exactly how confusing and stressful that moment can be.So Peter built Kaiwise. You scan a barcode and a simple traffic light system tells you the truth about what you're holding, the level of processing, the additives, the things the label would rather you didn't notice. No advertising, no brand deals, no judgement. He bootstrapped the entire thing himself, having never worked in tech in his life, and after one video went viral in February it became the most downloaded app in the country almost overnight.The most freeing thing he says in this whole conversation is that healthy eating was never actually meant to be complicated. Scientists have known what a healthy diet looks like for decades. The confusion isn't an accident, and once you can see through it, the choices get a lot simpler. This is a conversation about taking that power back, why doing the right thing and building a viable business don't always pull in the same direction, and what it takes to hold on until it does.Watch every episode of the Ways to Wealth Podcast here Learn more about Peter hereLearn more about Peter's company here#waystowealth #kaiwise #ultraprocessedfood #nutrition #health #foodindustry #nzbusiness #entrepreneurship #bootstrapped #wellbeing #parenting #healthyeating #foodtruth #wealthbuilding

Every founder talks about growth. Raise the round, hit the milestones, scale the team. Nobody warns you about the price tag that doesn't show up on a spreadsheet.In this compilation episode of Ways to Wealth, Charlie Meaden pulls together four conversations that each answer the same uncomfortable question from a completely different angle.Luigi Lenguito (BforeAI) proved traction in the US before anyone would write a cheque, then lost product-market fit four months after closing the round. Simon Millar (Pure Advantage) spent 22 years in Hollywood managing A-list talent and walked away from all of it after one afternoon in a broken air-conditioned cinema. Henry Aung (Octopass) spent $100K and three years building a fintech in Myanmar and ran the brutal maths on what doing nothing would have returned instead. Sayantan Bhattacharya (Love Your Body) moved to the US not to sell, but to learn how global wellness brands operate before scaling Love Your Body.Four founders. Four very different journeys. One truth: growth always costs more than you think.Connect with Luigi Lenguito: https://www.linkedin.com/in/llenguito/ Learn more about Pure Advantage: https://pureadvantage.org/ Connect with Henry Aung: https://www.linkedin.com/in/henryaung/ Connect with Sayantan: https://www.linkedin.com/in/sayantan-bhattacharya-1084a4250/ Watch every episode of Ways to Wealth: https://www.eccuity.com/podcasts Learn more about eccuity: https://eccuity.comTimestamps:00:00 Introduction 00:52 Luigi06:36 Simon11:50 Henry15:21 Sayantan#WaysToWealth #Founders #Startups #Entrepreneurship #BusinessGrowth

This week on the Ways to Wealth Podcast, Charlie speaks to Deborah Crowe, a serial entrepreneur, engineer, and circular economy leader whose career has taken more turns than almost anyone we've had on the show.Deborah grew up on a sheep and grain farm in Southland, the oldest of four in a family with 55 first cousins. She wanted to be an astronaut, until the Air Force told her women weren't allowed to be pilots. So, she became an electrical engineer instead, then rebranded into IT when she realised the people there earned three times what she did. In 2000 she co-founded Run the Red, the company that taught New Zealand how to text, and sold it to Pushpay in 2014.That exit is where her story gets interesting. Somewhere in her mid-40s, the question stopped being "what can I build?" and became "what's the point?" She threw herself into purpose-driven work, decarbonising the textile industry, commercialising climate science, trying to do less harm and more good. And it nearly broke her.In one of the most honest conversations we've recorded, Deborah talks about swinging from being all head to all heart, the burnout that came from never setting boundaries, and what it actually took to put herself back at the centre of her own life. She also shares an observation about why so many businesses survive far longer than they should, and what New Zealand keeps getting wrong about where it puts its money.Watch every episode of the Ways to Wealth Podcast here: www.eccuity.com/podcastsLearn more about Deborah here: https://www.linkedin.com/in/deborahcrowe/#waystowealth #entrepreneurship #circulareconomy #burnout #purpose #nzbusiness #founders #exits #sustainability #leadership #womeninbusiness #impactinvesting #wellbeing #wealthbuilding

This week on the Ways to Wealth Podcast, Charlie speaks to Nathan James, executive director of The Attention Seeker, a social media agency that pulled in 1.2 billion organic views last year across just 20 clients.Nathan has spent 30 years in advertising. He's worked with Nike, Adidas, PlayStation, Budweiser, and the BBC, and lived in New York, London, Amsterdam, and Stockholm before landing in Auckland. So when he talks about how attention actually works, he's not guessing.But the most interesting part of his story isn't the billion views. It's what came before. Nathan built his own agency, six staff, a couple of million in revenue, a beautiful studio space, and watched it fall apart when COVID hit because he didn't understand the one thing nobody had ever taught him. He's refreshingly honest about exactly what went wrong and why he could rebuild it tomorrow if he had to.The thing he's learned since is something most people desperately need to hear, and it cuts against everything we tell ourselves before we put anything into the world. There is no crowd waiting to judge you. No one is watching as closely as you think. The only thing standing between you and the thing you want to build is the belief that it has to be perfect before you start. Nathan has built an audience of millions on the opposite idea, and in this conversation he explains exactly how.Watch every episode of the Ways to Wealth Podcast here: www.eccuity.com/podcastsLearn more about Nathan here: https://www.linkedin.com/in/nathanjames-cooper/Learn more about Nathan's company here: https://www.attnseeker.com/Timestamps: 00:00 Intro00:47 Nathan04:42 Beginnings07:19 Challenges15:41 The Future18:48 Why Video23:44 Success32:00 Outro#waystowealth #socialmedia #content #marketing #attention #personalbranding #linkedin #entrepreneurship #nzbusiness #advertising #contentcreation #creators #ai #wealthbuilding

This week on the Ways to Wealth Podcast, Charlie speaks to Matt Mudford, CEO of Ngāpuhi Asset Holding Company, the commercial arm of the largest iwi in New Zealand.On paper, Matt runs a $100 million portfolio. In practice, he thinks about something most CEOs never have to. He is not managing money for shareholders who want a return next quarter. He is managing it for 200,000 people, most of them young, many of them paycheck to paycheck, across generations that stretch back to the signing of He Whakaputanga and forward to grandchildren not yet born.Matt grew up working class in South Auckland. His dad worked at Fisher and Paykel before driving taxis. His mum was a social worker. He watched his cousins, who came from the same grandparents, face challenges he somehow got a clear run from. That gap never sat right with him, and it became the thing that drives everything he does now.What makes this conversation different from almost any other you'll hear with someone running a fund this size is what Matt says he wants to be remembered for. It isn't the assets he grows or the returns he makes. He'll tell you the deals get done over a cup of tea, that his guiding lights are his ancestors and his mokopuna, and that he refuses to let a Treaty settlement he can't control define the future of his people. He is building that future now, on his own terms, and he is not waiting for permission.This might be the most important conversation we've had on the show.Watch every episode of the Ways to Wealth Podcast hereLearn more about Matt hereLearn more about Ngāpuhi Asset Holding Company hereTimestamps: 00:00 Intro01:01 Who is Matt?02:19 Making Change04:11 Opportunities 07:00 Access 15:29 Sovereignty 17:13 Young People19:44 Internships32:18 Excitement35:26 Community38:45 Challenge47:43 Equality#waystowealth #ngāpuhi #māori #iwi #economicsovereignty #leadership #nzbusiness #investing #intergenerationalwealth #community #assetmanagement #aotearoa #wealthbeyondmoney #wealthbuilding

This week on the Ways to Wealth Podcast, Charlie speaks to Leonard Hope, a US patent attorney and computer engineer who has spent nearly three decades protecting the ideas of companies like Microsoft, Amazon, and Nintendo, and who now builds his own AI tools for legal work.Here's the contradiction at the heart of this conversation: Leonard writes AI software that could draft a patent in seconds, and he deliberately refuses to use it that way. He explains why he forces himself to do the hard thinking first, why offloading your brain to AI is a slippery slope that quietly costs you something you can't get back, and what that means for all of us, and our kids, in a world where the answer is always one prompt away.Leonard also built a patent firm from just himself to twenty-five people before a national firm acquired it, and he's candid about the reality that professional partners are business owners doing every job there is. But maybe the most striking part of his story is how he got to New Zealand at all. He and his wife fell in love with the country, sold their house, packed their entire lives into a shipping container, and then the border slammed shut. It took them nearly five years, and a lot of refusing to quit, to finally arrive.This is a conversation about protecting what makes you valuable, the discipline of thinking for yourself, and what it really takes to chase a life on the other side of the world.Watch every episode of the Ways to Wealth Podcast here: www.eccuity.com/podcastsLearn more about Leonard here: https://www.linkedin.com/in/leohope/Learn more about Leonard's company here: https://www.hopeiplaw.com/#waystowealth #ai #patents #intellectualproperty #law #legaltech #entrepreneurship #nzbusiness #cognitiveoffload #parenting #resilience #immigration #technology #wealthbuilding

This week on the Ways to Wealth Podcast, Charlie speaks to Thomasge Aravinda, founder of CareerCraft and a supply chain professional who spent 15 years working across Sri Lanka, Dubai, Singapore, and New Zealand before building a business around the question most people are too comfortable to ask: is my career still going to exist?Thomasge started helping friends land jobs during COVID when the market seized up and nobody knew what to do. He was good at it. People started telling him to turn it into something real. When he dug into the research, he found that almost everything people rely on to advance their careers, the CV, the LinkedIn profile, the degree, is about to stop being enough. Within the next few years, he believes you will need video just to prove you are a real person and not a bot.His message is uncomfortable. Job titles as we know them are disappearing. The preliminary tasks that graduates used to cut their teeth on are being automated. A student who enters the workforce in 2027 won't be able to get the same internship that was available in 2023. And most people, and most organisations, are not preparing for any of it.The biggest barrier he faces isn't technology. It's mindset. People hear it, they understand it, and they choose not to act on it. He compares it to the start of the industrial revolution when workers smashed the machines because they couldn't accept what was coming.Watch every episode of the Ways to Wealth Podcast hereLearn more about Thomasge hereLearn more about Thomasge's company hereTimestamps:00:00 Intro00:42 Who is Thomasge01:19 What Thomasge does01:52 His Pathway10:04 Ownership15:06 Goals22:59 Challenges25:47 The Edge30:46 Outro#waystowealth #careercraft #careers #ai #futureofwork #jobsearch #cv #automation #graduates #migration #nzbusiness #supplychain #entrepreneurship #wealthbuilding

This week on the Ways to Wealth Podcast, Charlie speaks to Alexa Karpova, co-founder and CEO of Davos Premier, an agency that gets businesses, founders, and investors into the rooms they can't access on their own.Eight years ago, a crypto client asked Alexa if she could help host a dinner at the World Economic Forum. She didn't have a plan for it. She had a business partner in Switzerland who could open a few doors. They hosted one dinner, and people kept coming back for more. She never intended to build a company around it. The company built itself around her.Davos is a tiny ski village in the Swiss Alps where Fortune 500 CEOs, heads of state, and policymakers all end up in the same few streets at the same time. Alexa now runs a 2,500-person community and operates across WEF, Cannes Film Festival, Milken Summit, and Formula One, giving her clients visibility and access to the people who would otherwise be unreachable. She does it with her sister from opposite sides of the Atlantic.What sits underneath all of it is a simple belief that hasn't changed no matter how remote the world has become: the deals that matter still happen in person, in small rooms, between people who showed up.Watch every episode of the Ways to Wealth Podcast hereLearn more about Alexa hereLearn more about Alexa's company hereTimestamps:00:00 Intro00:39 Alexa01:22 Beginnings02:39 Foundations04:03 Duration05:45 Location08:49 Success10:24 Entry11:10 Markets13:43 NZ vs US15:46 Suprises16:20 Ai17:38 Impact19:46 B2B v B2C20:06 Networking21:11 Challenges22:19 Outro#waystowealth #davos #wef #networking #entrepreneurship #cannesfilmfestival #access #startups #events #familybusiness #businessdevelopment #switzerland #dealmaking #wealthbuilding

This week on the Ways to Wealth Podcast, Charlie speaks to Lorraine Miller, co-founder of Foot Mechanics, New Zealand's largest privately owned podiatry business, and co-founder of Whai Basketball in Tauranga.Lorraine and her husband John have spent 29 years building businesses side by side. Literally. They sit at desks next to each other. They are 50/50 partners in everything they own. At one point they were running a podiatry business, two Rodney Wayne hair salons, a Robert Harris cafe, and an 18-property portfolio all at once.Then the GFC hit, and they had to make a decision that most business owners hope they never face. They were highly leveraged. Cash stopped flowing. Three of their closest friends were in the same position. Within months, they were liquidating every property they had, some for less than they paid, to funnel everything into one asset: the podiatry business. They knew it was the engine that could pull them out. It did.What makes Lorraine's story different is that she never felt like she started at the same line as everyone else. Being Māori and female in New Zealand business, she has always felt like she had to run further just to stand in the same room. That honesty runs through the whole conversation.Watch every episode of the Ways to Wealth Podcast hereLearn more about Lorraine hereLearn more about Lorraine's company 'Foot Mechanics Podiatry' here#waystowealth #footmechanics #whaibasketball #nzbusiness #entrepreneurship #gfc #property #couplepreneurs #māori #womeninbusiness #governance #tauranga #resilience #wealthbuilding

This week on the Ways to Wealth Podcast, Charlie speaks to Marcus Nelson, co-founder of UserVoice, the feedback tab that sat on the side of Twitter, Facebook, and Microsoft Xbox before most people knew what customer feedback software was. He sold the company last year and moved to New Zealand as a single father with his youngest son.Marcus raised $900,000 during the GFC when only five companies in all of Silicon Valley closed a round that quarter. Three weeks after the money hit the account, UserVoice was breakeven. He wishes he had never raised a cent. That one decision, and what it cost him, shaped how he thinks about capital, ownership, and what founders actually need versus what they're told they need.After two decades in Silicon Valley, he packed up and moved to New Zealand. What he found when he got here surprised him in ways he hadn't anticipated. Not the ocean or the lifestyle, those he expected. It was the things he had been trained to fear in America that simply didn't exist here. And it was the startup ecosystem he walked into, full of clever people building great things, almost entirely invisible to the networks and capital that could change their trajectory overnight.Watch every episode of the Ways to Wealth Podcast hereLearn more about Marcus here Learn more about Marcus's company here #waystowealth #siliconvalley #uservoice #startup #venturecapital #entrepreneurship #nzbusiness #saas #ai #capitalraising #branding #immigration #bootstrapped #wealthbuilding

This week on the Ways to Wealth Podcast, Charlie speaks to Manuele Messeri and Kenny Au, co-founders of GEMS, an asset management platform built for the people who keep New Zealand's electricity, water, and critical infrastructure running.Both spent decades inside the industry before deciding that the tools they were forced to use were not fit for purpose. The process was always the same: pull data from one system, paste it into a spreadsheet, run calculations that would inevitably get corrupted, do it again, pass it to a colleague who would question every formula. That was the job. Manu decided to build something better and brought Kenny in to co-develop it from the engineering side.The problem they are solving sits underneath everything. New Zealand's infrastructure is ageing, and the figure to modernise it sits somewhere around $185 billion over the next decade. The people responsible for deciding where that money goes are still working across disconnected systems with no unified view of what's healthy, what's failing, and what needs replacing next. GEMS is designed to change that.This conversation covers what it's like to leave a stable corporate career to bootstrap a startup with savings and sweat, why the barrier to building software feels lower but the barrier to selling it is higher than ever, and why two very different personalities might be exactly what a technical product needs to become something real people actually want to use.Watch every episode of the Ways to Wealth Podcast: www.eccuity.com/podcastsCheck-out Kenny on Linked-in: https://www.linkedin.com/in/kenny-au/ Check-out Manu on Linked-in: https://www.linkedin.com/in/manuele-messeri-74563079/Learn more about GEMS here: https://www.linkedin.com/company/gemsassets/ #waystowealth #infrastructure #nzbusiness #startup #assetmanagement #utilities #water #electricity #engineering #bootstrapped #saas #entrepreneurship #criticalinfrastructure #wealthbuilding

This week on the Ways to Wealth Podcast, Charlie speaks to Jase Te Patu, founder of Hauora Aotearoa and a man who has spent 33 years in wellbeing work, driven by something deeply personal.Jase started this charity because his brother passed away and left eight kids behind. When he asked his 12-year-old niece how she was doing, she told him she couldn't sleep because every time she closed her eyes she wanted to be with her dad. That conversation broke something open for him and set the direction for everything that followed.But this isn't just a story about helping other people. Jase has had two bouts of suicidal ideation himself, lost five friends to suicide, battled alcohol addiction, and spent most of his adult life chasing external validation to prove his worth to an absent father. In the process, he became exactly the kind of person he was trying not to be. It took him until his 50th birthday to feel settled in his own skin.The most powerful moment in this conversation is the contrast between two teachers. When Jase was six, Miss Watt told him he could be anything. His younger brother got told the opposite. That gap is what Jase has built his entire life's work around closing.#waystowealth #mentalhealth #suicide #youthwellbeing #hauoraaotearoa #māori #aotearoa #sobriety #teachersmatter #entrepreneurship #nzbusiness #leadership #healing #wealthbuilding

This week on the Ways to Wealth Podcast, Charlie speaks to Anne Cullen, a relationship advisor who works with entrepreneurs and high performers navigating the overlap between business and family life.Anne spent the first half of her life in the US and the second in New Plymouth, New Zealand. She started out working with kids and families before realising that the parents she understood best were the ones who thought like founders. The ones building something while raising someone at the same time.Her perspective is that business and family are not two separate challenges to balance. They are one system, and when that system breaks down, it usually starts in the gap between what a couple says matters and how they actually spend their time. She sat in university classrooms hearing peers talk about their absent parents who were off building empires, and she now works to make sure her clients don't become that story.This conversation gets into why pressure is an internal signal that something is misaligned, why the people with the most decision-making power are the ones who most need to pause, and the question that sits underneath everything Anne does: if you had to choose between your business and your family, you already know the answer, so why aren't you acting like it?Watch every episode of the Ways to Wealth Podcast here: https://www.eccuity.com/podcastsCheck-out Anne’s website here: https://www.annecullen.com/ #waystowealth #leadership #entrepreneurship #family #parenting #cofounders #relationships #intentionality #burnout #nzbusiness #businessowners #worklifebalance #couples #wealthbuilding 

This week on the Ways to Wealth Podcast, Charlie speaks to Will Zhang, CEO of EmoX, an AI mental health companion that has grown to 450,000 users since launching in 2024.The idea started as a joke. A friend showed up late to coffee after the worst road rage incident of his life, and someone said: what if you could just scream at an AI instead? That conversation led Will and his co-founders into a much bigger problem. One in three New Zealanders face mental health issues, but there are only 15 therapists per 100,000 people. The gap cannot be closed by training more humans. It's too slow.What makes this conversation different is that Will is building an AI product while openly questioning how far AI should go. His team deliberately made the voice feature sound less realistic so users wouldn't form unhealthy attachments. They're working on making the AI more assertive rather than endlessly agreeable, because constant validation turns out to be its own kind of harm. And research his team conducted with the University of Lincoln found that children will share more with a robot than with their own parents or teachers.Will also talks about a side effect of AI that nobody in the productivity conversation seems to be addressing: when your team can research in two minutes instead of three days, you end up making 10 to 20 times more decisions per day. You might be creating more value, but your mental health is dropping. His closing advice is two words: just be human.Watch every episode of the Ways to Wealth PodcastCheck-out Will’s Start-up, The AI Health Innovation Hub#waystowealth #mentalhealth #aicompanion #emoex #healthtech #startup #entrepreneurship #nzbusiness #wellbeing #autism #ai #loneliness #digitalhealth #wealthbuilding 

This week on the Ways to Wealth Podcast, Charlie speaks to Yashar Ahmadpour, co-founder and CEO of Impressive, an agentic AI company based in San Francisco. Yashar was born and raised in Sweden to Chilean and Iranian parents, moved to California to study, and ended up in tech after a degree in literature and writing.He is building AI agents for businesses every day, and he thinks most of what the industry is selling right now is noise. In this conversation, he pulls apart a string of real examples: a startup that claimed $7 million in annual recurring revenue within two months and attracted investment from Andreessen Horowitz before the numbers turned out to be fabricated, a compliance platform that stole a partner's product and got kicked out of Y Combinator, and a $400 million revenue company whose doctor testimonials turned out to be AI-generated fakes.Charlie and Yashar also get into why nobody in corporate America wants to say the word recession even though the signs are everywhere, why companies are using AI as cover for layoffs instead of using it to scale output, and why both of them believe we may be heading back towards a more distributed, pre-industrial model where individuals build smaller businesses and keep what they earn.Yashar’s Linked-inCheck out Impressive hereEvery episode of the Ways to Wealth podcasteccuityTimestamps: 00:00 Intro00:42 The Ai Truth Gap05:19 The Ai Goldrush08:12 The Opportunity 09:59 Outro#waystowealth #ai #siliconvalley #startups #agenticai #recession #techscams #entrepreneurship #venturecapital #ycombinator #bootstrapped #futureofwork #impressive #wealthbuilding

This week on the Ways to Wealth Podcast, Charlie speaks to Jon Randles, business coach, co-founder of marketing agency Mosh, and a man who started with a literature and classics degree, zero interest in business, and a student loan he had been spending on CDs and posters from an ATM machine.Jon's view of business changed completely when he got a job at the second ever Hell Pizza store in Wellington and realised that building a company could be creative, fun, and human. From there, he went to Japan, got into property, made $100,000 on a deal, thought he was going to be a property magnate, and then the GFC happened.He pivoted into business banking, co-founded Mosh in 2009, and spent years growing revenue without keeping any of it. When a business coach came in and helped them go from six figures in debt to six figures in the bank within 12 months, it changed how Jon thought about everything. Three years ago, he drew an org chart on a whiteboard, realised there was no circle that needed him, rubbed out his own job, and stepped away. Revenue went up.This conversation covers what it actually takes to remove yourself from your own business, why worrying is not strategizing, and why sales fixes everything, but only if three other foundations are already in place.Watch every episode of the Ways to Wealth podcast here. Check-out Jon Randles' website here.#waystowealth #businesscoaching #entrepreneurship #nzbusiness #smallbusiness #mosh #leadership #burnout #profitability #gfc #businessgrowth #delegation #wealthbuilding #startuplife

This week on the Ways to Wealth Podcast, Charlie speaks to Kim Barker, founder of Full Stack Creative and a marketer with decades of experience across analytics, digital strategy, and website optimisation.Kim left employment last year to start a boutique agency and expected it would take years to move into fractional marketing leadership. It took months. Small and medium businesses kept coming to her with the same problem: they knew they needed marketing, they had pieces in place, but nobody was connecting the dots or telling them what to actually focus on first.This conversation is about the gap between doing marketing and doing the right marketing. Kim talks about a blog post that went viral, landed on the first page of search results, became the highest performing page on her website, and brought her zero leads. That one example opens up a bigger discussion about why being busy with content is not the same as being effective, why the shiny new platform is rarely the answer, and why the basics of knowing who you are talking to and what you want to achieve still matter more than any tool.Checkout every episode of the Ways to Wealth Podcast hereLearn more about Kim’s business, Full Stack Creative here#waystowealth #marketing #digitalmarketing #fractionalcmo #smallbusiness #nzbusiness #marketingstrategy #contentmarketing #entrepreneurship #seo #analytics #ai #wealthbuilding #startup

This week on the Ways to Wealth Podcast, Charlie speaks to Stephanie McKee Wright, founder of Epic People and an HR and leadership development consultant with 30 years of experience.Stephanie spent decades in senior HR roles across public and private sectors before her company was acquired by a global and the job she had built for herself disappeared overnight. The creativity was gone, the autonomy was gone, and she decided it was time to go too.She started from what she calls a standing position. No clients, no website, no product. Just 30 years of knowledge and enough savings to give herself a runway. Ten months in, she is still figuring it out, still building courses between client calls, and still learning what works. Her biggest surprise so far is that TikTok, not LinkedIn, has become her primary source of leads. One video filmed at her kitchen bench with no makeup and messy hair hit 125,000 appearances.This conversation is an honest look at what the first year of running your own business actually feels like, the self-doubt, the wet cement, the Friday that was supposed to be marketing day but got swallowed by a client emergency, and the small wins that keep you going.Check out Stephanie's company Epic People here: https://epicpeople.co.nz/Watch every episode of the Ways to Wealth Podcast here: https://www.eccuity.com/podcasts #waystowealth #epicpeople #hrconsultant #entrepreneurship #tiktokmarketing #leadership #nzbusiness #solofounder #startingabusiness #smallbusiness #womeninbusiness #selfemployed #wealthbuilding #yearone

This week on the Ways to Wealth Podcast, Charlie speaks to Andy Rolston, founder of Rolston Leadership Group and a leadership coach who learned more about leading people on a rugby sideline than he ever did in a corporate office.Andy left school and became a mechanic, moved into computing, spent time in corporate, then walked away to retrain as a rugby coach. He coached across New Zealand, Canada, and England before buying a carpet cleaning business, building it up, selling it to his partner, and eventually landing where he is now, helping managers become leaders.The conversation covers why most people get promoted for being good at their job and then get no preparation for the completely different skill set that leadership requires. Andy explains why he used to do his most technical coaching when players were exhausted rather than fresh, why he never told his team what to fix at halftime, and how giving one nervous young player a single thing to focus on unlocked her entire game.He also gets into why ego is the biggest barrier to good leadership, what the All Blacks got right after the 2007 World Cup, and why he thinks every business owner should be building for sale even if they never plan to sell.Listen to every episode of Ways to Wealth here: https://www.eccuity.com/podcastsLearn more about Andy at: https://andyrolston.com#waystowealth #leadership #rugbycoaching #entrepreneurship #nzbusiness #managertoleader #trust #teamculture #allblacks #coaching #businessexit #personalgrowth #wealthbuilding #smallbusiness

This week on the Ways to Wealth Podcast, Charlie speaks to Ray Nicholls, owner of Chi International and the brand behind Chi Herbal Drinks.Ray spent decades inside blue-chip New Zealand companies as the person they put on anything that needed to break the mould. He launched products in the Middle East during a civil war, helped grow a beverage business through a private equity cycle, and then bought a 28-year-old brand he had admired for years.What he found was not what he expected, and the biggest shift came from the last person on the team he would have predicted.This conversation covers what corporate life prepares you for and what it doesn't, why a business track record can be misleading, and why giving young people real trust might be the most underrated decision a business owner can make.#waystowealth #entrepreneurship #nzbusiness #beverages #chi #frucor #privateequity #leadership #youngtalent #acquisition #venturestudio #resilience #wealthbuilding #smebusiness

This week on the Ways to Wealth Podcast, Charlie speaks to Mindy Gibbins-Klein, founder of the first book coaching company in the UK and the person behind over 1,400 published thought leaders across 18 countries.Mindy moved from the US to the UK following a boyfriend, got left behind, and decided to stay. After three redundancies in five years, including being laid off while pregnant, she used her severance as a financial cushion to start her own business. That was 25 years ago.She has since built a career around helping experts, executives, and entrepreneurs get their thinking out of their heads and into books that serve their business. Her method, which earned her the name "The Book Midwife", starts before a single word is written, helping clients make the dozens of decisions around scope, structure, tone, length, and format that most people don't realise they need to make.In this conversation, Mindy explains why publishing is the easy part and why most books fail long before they reach a publisher. She talks about the client who handed her a self-published book and the 23 problems she found immediately, why she now works with only ten private clients per year, and what she learned from supporting 32 Tony Robbins events as a senior leader.Charlie and Mindy also get into why long-form content is becoming more important as AI floods the market with short-form noise, and why someone spending four hours reading your book creates a completely different relationship than someone seeing your ad.Check-out Mindy on Linked-in: https://www.linkedin.com/in/mindygibbinsklein/Check-out Mindy’s company here: https://www.linkedin.com/company/giving-1-percent/ Watch every episode of the Ways to Wealth Podcast: https://www.eccuity.com/podcasts #waystowealth #bookcoaching #thoughtleadership #entrepreneurship #publishing #writingabook #credibility #personalbranding #nzbusiness #wealthbuilding #contentcreation #selfpublishing #tonyrobbins #authors

This week on the Ways to Wealth Podcast, Charlie speaks to Julian Zhu, founder and managing director of MiDeer Limited and partner at Skychee Ventures.Julian has spent over 25 years leading cross-border business between New Zealand, China, and the US, managing a $500 million investment fund and advising organisations from Fortune Global 500 companies like Tencent and NTT through to New Zealand health brands entering the Chinese market for the first time.Julian graduated with a Bachelor of Science in Chemistry from Nanjing University, one of China's top ten, and later completed an EMBA there alongside a Postgraduate Diploma in Business Administration from Massey University. He was named Person of the Year by the Nanjing University Business School in 2016.Before building his own advisory practice, Julian worked at a company backed by Peking University and spent time at US Fortune 500 firm Shaw Group. After arriving in New Zealand 26 years ago, he started as a research assistant at the University of Auckland before falling into cross-border consulting through helping Good Health Products become one of the first NZ supplement brands to enter China.In this conversation, Julian explains why he calls himself a lighthouse rather than a bridge, because most Kiwi businesses looking at China can't see where to go, who to trust, or how to structure a deal that works across both cultures. He walks through how he structures partnerships that give NZ companies access to Chinese capital, agents, and distribution without requiring them to sell equity, and why co-branding agreements and agent-funded marketing models often close faster and protect both sides better than traditional raises.He also talks about why China should never be treated as a single market, the trust-building process that sits behind every deal, and the radio story about New Zealand birds that made him choose this country over anywhere else in the world.Learn more about JulianLearn about Julian’s companyWatch every episode of the Ways to Wealth Podcast#waystowealth #crossborder #nzbusiness #chinamarket #export #tencent #entrepreneurship #investment #auckland #shanghai #capitalraising #jointventures #traderelations #wealthbuilding

This week on the Ways to Wealth Podcast, Charlie speaks to Joe Slater, co-founder of Six Barrel Soda and head of product at Consumer NZ. Joe built six businesses across hospitality, beverages, distribution, and e-commerce before stepping out of his own company and getting a job for the first time in years. The transition from founder to employee raised a question he hadn't expected: can I do this, and who am I without the business?Joe started with a caravan cafe on an old car yard in Wellington in 2008. He opened a bar and restaurant shortly after, then launched Six Barrel Soda in 2012 during the early days of the craft beverage movement. The brand grew to export to six countries, landed in Target stores in the US, and was eventually sold to St Andrews Limes in early 2025.But the exit wasn't a straight line. Joe talks about the burnout that led to him stepping out of operations, how he found and hired his replacement in six weeks over a single coffee, and the systems he put in place years earlier that made the handover possible.He also spent three years at Creative HQ running startup programs and coaching pre-launch founders. That experience gave him a different view of what makes businesses succeed and fail, and he is direct about the traps he sees founders walk into, from copying other companies instead of being themselves, to not understanding how long it takes to make money, to raising capital before knowing what they actually want.The conversation covers what it feels like to go from running your own thing to having a boss, why full-sugar Coke sales still go up every year despite the health movement, and what Joe and his wife are planning across the next 20 years.Watch all episodes of the Ways to Wealth Podcast here.Check-out Joe’s Linked-in here.#waystowealth #sixbarrelsoda #consumernz #entrepreneurship #startup #nzbusiness #craftbeverages #founders #smallbusiness #burnout #exits #wealthbuilding #businesscoaching #wellington

This week on the Ways to Wealth Podcast, Charlie speaks to Peter McKay, former Wall Street Journal markets reporter and Web3 content creator.Peter covered oil and commodities for the Journal during the Iraq war, reported on the 2008 crash from the trading floor, and says what's unfolding right now with Iran, oil, and the global economy is giving him flashbacks. Except this time, he thinks the uncertainty might be worse.Peter spent over a decade at the Wall Street Journal, where he was part of the team that won a Gerald Loeb Award for coverage of the 2010 flash crash. He has since moved into Web3 marketing and content, co-authored white papers on blockchain supply chains for the World Economic Forum and writes the w3w newsletter on decentralisation.This conversation is a wide-ranging look at what's going on in the world right now. Peter and Charlie break down why 2008 started in finance and spilled into the real economy, but this time the reverse is happening, starting with supply chains, oil, and consumer spending before working its way into markets.They get into the concentration of both consumer spending and R&D in the US, where the top 20% of earners now drive an outsized share of the economy. They also discuss why AI might be following the classic hype cycle pattern, why most companies outside of tech still haven't found a real application for it, and the growing problem of bot-generated content on social media that could be undermining the entire digital advertising model.The conversation finishes on blockchain's quiet momentum in finance, including the fact that the clearinghouse behind the New York Stock Exchange is now experimenting with on-chain settlement.Watch all episodes of the Ways to Wealth Podcast here.Check-out Peter McKay’s Linked-in here: Timestamps:00:00 intro00:59 The world right now06:54 The technology shift18:05 What you can actually do23:18 Outro#waystowealth #wallstreetjournal #oilprices #geopolitics #ai #web3 #blockchain #socialmedia #markets #inflation #supplychain #iran #fintech #economy

This week on the Ways to Wealth Podcast, Charlie speaks to Kerri McMaster, CEO of ‘Goodair Nosebuds’. One in four people worldwide deal with chronic nasal congestion, and fewer than 15% are happy with what's available to them. Kerri took a prototype sitting in a university lab, one she initially dismissed the first time she saw it and turned it into a drug-free consumer product that sold out within days of launch.Kerri is a two-time karate world champion who has spent most of her career doing one thing: taking ideas that are stuck and turning them into businesses. She ran 42 karate schools, built a consulting business in sports performance, co-founded Performance Lab Technologies, and spent over 20 years in sports tech before the company merged with a US partner in 2020.When a contact at AUT showed her a vibrating nasal device with a clunky prototype and a giant battery, she didn't see the opportunity at first. But the deeper she went into the research behind nasal breathing, nitric oxide production, and how the body's own systems can be activated without pharmaceuticals, the bigger the potential became.In this conversation, Kerri talks about what it took to move from 20 years of university research to a product on a pharmacy shelf, and why her decision to position it as a wellness device instead of going down the medical route changed everything.She also opens up about the quality control crisis that nearly ended the business before it launched, what happens when demand outpaces your ability to scale, and what she learned across multiple startups about finding the right people to build with.Watch all episodes of the Ways to Wealth Podcast here.Check-out Goodair Nosebuds here.#waystowealth #goodairnosebuds #nasalcongestion #healthtech #breathing #drugfree #entrepreneurship #nzbusiness #wearabletech #hayfever #wellness #sportstech #wealthbuilding #startup

This week on the Ways to Wealth Podcast, Charlie speaks to Stephanie Pow, founder of Crayon and former equity derivatives trader at UBS. She studied at Wharton and Harvard, spent years on one of the largest trading floors in the southern hemisphere, and then spotted a gap in financial support that almost nobody was solving. When her first child arrived, she saw firsthand how life transitions change the way people engage with money, and she set out to build something around it.Stephanie started her finance career at 18 through a co-op program that landed her internships at UBS, Goldman Sachs, and Commonwealth Bank of Australia. She joined UBS full-time after graduating and spent four years on the equity derivatives desk, finishing up running the hybrids book as one of five women on a floor of over a hundred.Before Crayon, she founded Capital W, Australia's first organisation for women studying undergraduate business, won a General Sir John Monash Scholarship, and joined Kiwi SaaS startup Vend as Chief of Staff. Then she had her first child, and everything changed.Her first attempt at a startup was a robo-investing platform. She got an FMA license, built wireframes, and tested with users for two years before looking at the unit economics and realising the model wouldn't work in New Zealand. She binned it all and started over.What came next was Crayon, a bootstrapped and completely independent financial coaching company that works through employers to support people during the transitions that forces them to engage with money, whether that's having a baby, losing a job, or starting a new career.In this conversation, Stephanie explains why she chose not to raise VC, how she navigated the trade-offs with her partner, and what she learned from burning out while pushing a startup forward as a new mum. She also gets into why most financial education fails and what she is doing differently.Watch all episodes of the Ways to Wealth Podcast here: Check-out Stephanie’s Company, Crayon here: #waystowealth #crayon #financialwellbeing #parentalleave #fintech #entrepreneurship #womeninfinance #nzbusiness #startup #financialcoaching #bootstrapped #wealthbuilding #personalfinance #tradingfloor

In this episode of the Ways to Wealth Podcast, Charlie is joined by Sajita Setia!Sajita is a physician specialising in pharmaceutical medicine, with experience across global organisations including Pfizer and Johnson and Johnson. Now based in New Zealand, she leads research into digital wellbeing and its impact on mental health, productivity and emotional development in young people.This episode explores one of the most underappreciated risks of modern life: how technology is shaping behaviour, focus and mental health at scale. Sajita breaks down why children are not “addicted” to devices, but instead being systematically manipulated by design, and what that means for parents trying to navigate screen time.Charlie and Sajita discuss the rise of passive consumption, artificial rewards and short feedback loops, and how these are rewiring motivation and attention. They also explore practical strategies for families, from setting shared rules and boundaries to reframing technology use as a game that can be won.This is a conversation about awareness, responsibility and control in a world where devices are only becoming more embedded in daily life.Check out Sajita Setia here#digitalwellbeing #parenting #mentalhealth #technology #focus #productivity #socialmedia #screen time

In this episode of the Ways to Wealth Podcast, Charlie is joined by Joost Schouten!Joost is the co-founder ofnestr.io, a platform building collaboration software for the next generation of organisations. Born in the Netherlands and now based in New Zealand, Joost’s work sits at the intersection of organisational design, distributed authority, and the future of work.This conversation goes deep into how organisations actually function beneath the surface. From early experiences inside large corporates to building and rethinking SaaS businesses, Joost unpacks why many of today’s systems create more friction than performance.They explore why motivation is often misunderstood, how power structures shape behaviour, and what happens when authority is distributed instead of concentrated. The discussion also covers self-organisation, governance, decision-making, and the real challenges of building teams that can adapt in a rapidly changing world.Along the way, Charlie and Joost connect these ideas to real-world experiences managing distributed teams, investing in businesses, and navigating the shift toward AI-driven organisations.Check out nestr.ioConnect with Joost here#waystowealth #podcast #entrepreneurship #leadership #futureofwork #startups #management #ai #businessgrowth

In this episode of the Ways to Wealth Podcast, Charlie is joined by Alexander Bikeyev!Alexander shares his journey from corporate finance and financial modelling into biotech, machine learning, and entrepreneurship. After years of building models, working in audit, and pursuing algorithmic trading, he explains why he walked away from trying to beat the market and instead focused on solving real world problems.They explore the limits of forecasting, why most projections are inherently flawed, and how professionals build “reasonable” forecasts using external data, scenario analysis, and judgement. Alexander also breaks down his experience building products versus solutions and why understanding the customer journey matters more than the technology itself.The conversation dives into the rapid pace of change in software and AI, the shifting role of sales, and why human involvement remains critical in both biotech and machine learning. Alexander also reflects on career pivots, meaning in work, and what it takes to transition into a completely new industry later in life.Check out Alexander’s LinkedIn here.#waystowealth #entrepreneurship #machinelearning #biotech #investing #startups #careergrowth

In this episode of the Ways to Wealth Podcast, Charlie isjoined by Siddharth Sthalekar! Sid has lived on both ends of money. He ran a major equity derivative and algo trading desk in India, then walked away from finance to explore community led, trust-based economics and later returned to build new infrastructure for distributed finance through Sacred Capital. If you have ever wondered why markets feel emotional, why “being right” can still lose you money, or how to protect your buying power when currencies swing, this conversation gives you a clearer mental model. It also covers what DeFi gets right today, where it is still fragile, and why stablecoins are one of the most useful building blocks so far. Sacred Capital is building modular reputation infrastructure for micro networks, including tools like reputation libraries and a reputation vault designed to help communities define culture and carry reputation across contexts.  Check out Sacred Capital here: www.linkedin.com/company/sacred-capital/Learn more about Sid here: www.linkedin.com/in/siddharth-sthalekar-143a8113/ Watch all episodes of the Ways to Wealth Podcast here: www.eccuity.com/podcasts #web3 #defi #stablecoins #economics #investing #wealth #nzd #currency #bitcoin

In this episode of the Ways to Wealth Podcast, Charlie isjoined by Matt Hardy! If you’re struggling to find work in start-ups without aglowing CV, Matt has a playbook that gets you in the door. He went from “no real marketing experience” to managing social for the Cricket World Cup, then helped drive 1500 percent growth inside a start-up, and now leads growth at Landlord Studio, a product led company built on SEO, content, conversions.  This one is for anyone trying to level up fast: how to manufacture experience when nobody hiresjuniors, what “right message right time” looks like, and why equity beats salary if you want real upside.Check out Matt here: https://www.linkedin.com/in/qmmhardy/Watch all episodes of the Ways to Wealth Podcast here: https://www.eccuity.com/podcasts #startups #marketing #careers #productledgrowth #seo #saas #founders #equity #esop #newzealand