Mentor helps Auckland business climb stairway to growth

Warwick Kendon was a successful, self-made businessman in his mid 50s when he realised he needed help.

His business in attic storage, Sellwood Products in Albany, Auckland, had grown from a one-man band selling four attic stairs a year in the early 1980s to an enterprise with 400 annual orders by 1999.

The fast-growing business required management well beyond Mr Kendon’s business expertise.

“I didn’t have processes and systems in place to cope with the growth of the business. We caught a tiger by the tail and I didn’t know what to do with it.”

Staff were being hired in a random fashion, quality had started to slip, processes and systems for projecting orders were non-existent, customers were being hit with delivery delays.

Mr Kendon felt vulnerable. He knew a better operator could breeze in and replace him as market leader.  “I knew I needed help.”

Through his local council’s business enterprise group, he connected with a corporate mentor – someone who had built a successful business from scratch and was now helping others to do the same.

Mr Kendon hoped his mentor’s expertise in building a business could be applied to his own business.

His mentor led Sellwood through a process of “best business practice” which has cleared the way for annual growth of 32 per cent in recent years. Sellwood now employs seven full-time staff, one part-time and Mr Kendon, 62, and his wife Marie can still boast market leadership.

The manufacture of the stairs is outsourced in New Zealand and sales have shot past 3000 units annually. The product retails at between $599 and $3099.
Where once they met weekly, the businessman and the mentor now meet monthly and communicate by email regularly.

Mr Kendon says the bill for mentoring – some of which has been subsidised in through a New Zealand Trade and Enterprise grant – has been a small price to pay for allowing him to unlock the potential of his business and get into a much stronger position in the market.

That has increased the value of the business which, down the track, means the Kendons can look forward to bigger rewards when the time comes to retire or move on to their next challenge.