A born entrepreneur with a gift for social interaction and a natural aptitude for refining systems and processes, the career path that led Andrea to Resolve Group clearly explains her value to us and to our clients.

Building effective relationships with people is the foundation of business excellence; experience has taught me that strong relationships make it easier to amplify and facilitate collaboration, communication and productivity; we achieve better outcomes together.

At 18, and straight from school, Andrea walked into a job at Bendon in Hamilton, helping the company make their procedures and practices more efficient. Recognising her skills, she was moved to their head office in Auckland where she continued with time and motion improvements and assisted them to set up a business model, which she then helped to apply to their newly acquired Australian company, Hickory. She left to run a Payless Plastics in Hamilton and made it the third most profitable in NZ in its first year.

When children came along, she and her husband moved to Christchurch where they ran first a TipTop franchise and then a Supershuttle franchise, both of which had the level of flexibility that works well when you have small kids at home. She says she wouldn’t run a shuttle service in any other town, but that in Christchurch she got to, “enjoy her customers, taking them to see all the fun things the city has to offer. A ride was a social event, not just a way to get from around.”

She worked for a number of companies, including Fonterra, before finding real satisfaction in helping improve a Sportsground web site and then working as Office Manager for Sport Waikato. During this time, with two boys fully involved in the BMX circuit, she found herself coaching new riders and discovered she got great pleasure in the role. Moving to Auckland in 2010, she got a job in planning and purchasing with the Airforce and was drawn to joining the base’s mentoring programme where she helped grow and improve the scheme. She then moved to a role in disposals analysis, finding buyers for decommissioned aircraft and improving other waste management processes.

Andrea joined Toastmasters as a member, an evaluator, a chairperson and the club president for a year. It was, she says, “a fun experience where, while making new friends, I learnt about some awesome and interesting cultures.” The involvement with Toastmasters didn’t just improve her public speaking abilities, she learnt other, invaluable skills such as critiquing others with respect and running workshops, and says it helped her grow more confident as an individual. These skills combine very usefully with Andrea’s abilities as a mentor. She trained through NZ Mentoring, an organisation she joined while helping manage the RNZAF mentoring scheme at Whenuapai Air Base, Auckland. She says this scheme is one of the best in NZ and she still volunteers there today.

It was around this time that Andrea did her degree in Applied Management through Otago Polytechnic and gained a Graduate Diploma in Supply Chain Management through Massy University. This led her to a job in procurement with Auckland Transport, which is where our General Manager, Ben Sherriff, came across her and recognised in her a self-motivated person, always striving for personal excellence, with a breadth of experience that would be a great fit for Resolve Group. We are very pleased to have Andrea join our team and look forward to seeing the ways in which her ability to see the bigger picture and to sensitively apply change management, and advocate for efficiency where she sees it being helpful, will benefit both us and to our clients. Welcome aboard, Andrea.

Six years spent travelling and working in USA, the Netherlands, United Kingdom, Belgium, Sweden and Finland have shaped how Mark approaches his life and his work. “I have learnt from experience that projects are more successful when a group of people with different skills and perspectives create a shared vision and then work together to achieve it,” he says, and adds that Resolve Group’s reputation for creating and maintaining strong, productive relationships is a major factor in his choosing to join us.

The experiences he gained overseas have also contributed to his interest in working over the full life cycle of a project from initial advice and guidance to business case development, procurement and project delivery. In many of his roles, he introduced new business processes, such as innovative procurement methods, early contractor engagement and the establishment of a tiered system of supplier panels. I like a challenge, from working on a project with a diverse range of stakeholder requirements to reshaping an entire infrastructure programme so that it can be delivered more efficiently.

While in the Netherlands, Mark pursued his interest in Intelligent Transportation Systems and delivered a data exchange platform for connected and autonomous vehicles, which included the implementation of services such as road user charging, priority for sustainable modes of transport, efficiency measures to reduce vehicle emissions and driver alerts to increase awareness of potential hazards. He is hoping to find ways to use the knowledge and skills he has acquired in transport technology to help transform the mobility sector in this country also. The best thing I learned from spending time in USA and Europe is that technical solutions are readily available and can be deployed at very low cost; the hardest part is bringing various organisations from the public and private sector together in order to make a real transformational change.

Mark is looking forward to working with government agencies and technology suppliers in New Zealand to find innovative solutions that address the key challenges in mobility such as reduction of carbon emissions, increasing public transport patronage, encouraging active modes of transport and improving safety. For example, traffic signals can be adapted to give priority to public transport, cyclists and pedestrians. Motorists can be given in-vehicle warnings of speed limits, roadworks and approaching emergency vehicles. Distance-based revenue collection can be used to replace fuel tax, or to manage demand on congested routes. A lot of people think that these types of services require significant investment in IT infrastructure, but cellular technology is now at a point where these systems are being deployed at large scale just using smartphone apps.

Mark enjoys volunteering for community projects when he can. Most recently, he was involved with a not-for-profit organisation that develops educational resources for schools in Africa. Mark used his engineering background to develop exercises in mathematics and computer science for 10-11-year-olds. The reason I got into engineering was because I loved science as a kid, in particular solving real-world practical problems. I like the idea that I can create some fun exercises that might inspire the next generation to also consider a career in engineering.