AS DENIS Trotman would walk with his daughter Sarah to Silverstream station each morning — he on his way to the office, she to Wellington’s St Mary’s College — he recalls telling her two things: do your best and be nice to someone who hasn’t got a friend.

The words stood her in good stead in the schoolyard, but he reckons they also provided a philosophy on which her career as a small business champion has been based. Life can be lonely as a business owner, he says, but his daughter has made it her mission to reach out and provide support.

Sarah Trotman has carved out a niche offering support and know-how to the SME sector. Her business, Auckland-based Sarah Trotman and Associates, organises the annual Small Business Expo, which showcases products and services for SME owners. It also created the Vero Excellence in Business Support Awards and produces the SME magazine Your business, your way.

The focus is on small business — but the vision is big. With 96% of New Zealand businesses employing fewer than ten staff, and 87% employing fewer than six, Trotman is reaching out to masses of business owners eager for a helping hand. When the expo was held for the first time in Wellington this year, Trotman hoped for 2,500 visitors. Some 3,250 ended up flowing through the doors.

She plans to extend the business support empire further — into books, television, radio. Then she wants to franchise the concept offshore.

“She once said she wants to be the Jamie Oliver of small business,” says Jonathan Kirkpatrick, CEO of the AUT Tech Park, where Sarah Trotman and Associates was based before shifting to its current home in Herne Bay. “I thought it was a very good description because what she was saying was, what seems like quite complex stuff to many people is actually quite simple and sensible, and she doesn’t want anyone to feel hampered by the thought that business know-how is inaccessible or too hard.”

Trotman’s profile through the expo coupled with her easy confidence, articulate delivery and telegenic looks have made her something of a poster-girl for small business. But she insists she’s a champion, not a guru.

“A lot of people view me as an expert in small business and I’m not at all,” she says. “All I am is very passionate about small business and quite knowledgeable about where small businesses can get support.”

But Trotman can walk the talk. The 39-year-old has run her own successful businesses for years and has entrepreneurialism in the blood; her father set up New Zealand’s first independent computer bureau in 1964, and today runs a business advising investors on technology stocks.

The third of Denis and schoolteacher Gillian’s five children, Trotman lived in Wellington until age 17 when her family relocated to Auckland. In the book Stand up and shout, which profiled Trotman as one of 15 successful Kiwis, she credited being raised with strong Catholic values, and attending a low-socioeconomic Catholic primary school for her ability to relate comfortably with anyone.

She’s a voracious networker — which has undoubtedly helped spur her business success — but it appears to be powered by a real fascination with people. On her birthday each year she’s said to share lunch with someone she’d like to know better, and in Stand up and shout she related how the relationship she built with an elderly and dying down-and-out tenant in a boarding house she once ran in Herne Bay was one of the most profound experiences of her life.

Unlike her siblings, Sarah was not academically inclined, her father says, and she left school after scraping through School C. “But I specifically told her, ‘I don’t care what you do in life as long as you do your best’.”

She joined the family debt collection/credit management company as receptionist, but quickly moved up the ranks, eventually becoming second-in-command to her father.

“He was a very savvy businessman and I learned a lot — not because he taught me, but by default, by osmosis,” she says of the man who instilled in her a drive to never give up.

When Denis sustained serious injuries in a jetboat accident in Queenstown in 1992, however, his young daughter had to step in to run the company.

“I was technically very capable in that I could liquidate a company or bankrupt an individual or conduct a full credit inquiry but I had no idea how to write a business plan,” she says of her time heading the company, which she eventually sold after working there about 16 years.

“It was a very successful business but it would have been way more successful if I’d had a clue as to how to actually really run a business.”

It was through her next role, as chief executive of Business in the Community (BITC), a programme offering free business mentoring to business owners, that she realised she was not alone.

“I thought ‘oh, so I’m not the only one of those 300,000-odd business owners out there that doesn’t know everything there is to know about running a small business. Wow! Let me start collecting all these mentors for these business people.”

Trotman met one of her own mentors, BITC founding trustee Sir James Fletcher, through the role, and the mentoring concept clearly clicked with her philosophy of reaching out to others. In 2002, Trotman became one of the initial mentors involved in the YWCA Future Leaders Programme, which provides mentoring, support and skills development to young women. The programme’s former director, Adele Lendich, says Trotman not only successfully mentored a 17-year-old Otara student, but helped Lendich get the initiative off the ground.

“She gave us terrific support and imparted her wealth of knowledge. A lot of people won’t share that, but Sarah was very happy to share information,” Lendich says.

During her three-year tenure at BITC Trotman drove an almost 70% increase in the number of businesses accessing the free service. But realising she was an entrepreneur at heart, she later set up in business herself.

The first Small Business Expo was held in Auckland in 2005 and this year expanded to take in Wellington and Christchurch. It is now the country’s largest event for business.

Trotman reckons she has been lucky to carve out a niche. Small business is her passion but to most people it “isn’t particularly sexy”, she says.

Kirkpatrick, who nominated Trotman for the Sir Peter Blake Emerging Leader Award she won last year, says she has displayed a singular vision while forging ahead in a new field.

“She’s been able to step into this territory in a way that no one else has and pull it together,” he says. “It’s quite a lonely furrow to plough being a visionary in any field, when other people are happy to follow and join you, but you’re the one forging ahead, breaking new ground all the time.”

Trotman agrees it’s been damn hard work. She recently bought a section in Raglan where she can kick back, but admits her time is focused on her dual passions: her children — Matilda (10) and Elliott (8) — and her business.

Because there’s still new ground to be broken.

That includes developing ‘different touchpoints’ through which busy SME owners can access know-how and support. As well as the expo, awards and magazine, these might include radio, TV and books, says Trotman. She has also previously publicly discussed the possibility of setting up a one-stop small business mall, a concept she didn’t want to comment on for this article.

Once a suite of SME services has been established under a parent brand in New Zealand, Trotman says she plans to franchise the concept internationally.

“We’re starting to put our feelers out in international markets now, inviting people to come to New Zealand to look at the work we do,” she says.

Watch out world — a helping hand is on its way.



GIRLS, GIRLS, GIRLS

Does attending a single-sex school make or break the rise to the top for women in senior management? It’s a question that’s impossible to prove but an informal survey Unlimited conducted of 24 Kiwi women CEOs shows a definite bias one way. By Fiona Rotherham

MICROSOFT NEW Zealand CEO Helen Robinson says attending Carmel College, a single-sex Auckland school, gave her a focus on values such as honesty and integrity, which have proved important throughout her life, and a self-belief that girls can do anything.

“I don’t think the school promoted a focus on business for its pupils but it fostered a self-belief and underlying self-confidence that girls can do anything and an ability to think for myself that has helped in my business career.”

There’s longstanding debate worldwide over whether single-sex schools improve girls’ achievement and a ton of literature on the subject. Robin-son thinks girls are generally better off in single-sex schools for their secondary education so they’re less distracted by boys, while, somewhat ironically, boys do better in co-educational schools, as boys in single-sex schools tend to be very loud and physical.

Carmel Fisher, managing director of Fisher Funds Management, plans to send at least one of her two daughters to a single-sex school — not for academic reasons but because she thinks it will lift her daughter’s confidence. “I see it all the time when talking to groups on funds investing. Women are more likely to ask questions if the audience is women-only and they won’t ask questions when men are around. The single-sex environment allows girls to be more open-minded and to speak out.”

A recent UK study assessing the longer-term consequences of types of schools has some telling results. Research by the Institute of Education’s Centre for Longitudinal Studies followed almost 13,000 individuals, born in 1958, throughout their lives. The study reveals those who went to single-sex schools were more likely to study subjects not traditionally associated with their gender than those who attended co-eds. At age 16, students in girls’ schools were more likely to gain maths and science A-levels than their peers in co-ed schools, while boys’ school students were more likely to gain A-levels in English and modern languages. The pattern continues at university; girls’ school alumni are more likely to gain qualifications in subjects typically dominated by men and, crucially, go on to earn higher salaries than co-educated women.

“This could be because they are carrying out more technical or scientific roles even within female-dominated jobs, for example, becoming science teachers rather than French teachers, or because they have learned to be more self-confident in negotiating their wages and salaries,” says researcher Professor Diana Leonard.

But the study also shows single-sex education brought almost no advantage in terms of exam results, with students from girls’ schools doing only slightly better than their co-educated peers, and boys doing no better at all. Other studies have found any difference in girls’ educational achievement at single-sex schools to those co-educated diminishes once ability and socio-economic variables are taken into account.

New Zealand has some 111 single-sex private and state schools and the Independent Schools Association claims, anecdotally, roll numbers are up in the private sector, particularly in single-sex boys’ primary schools. The South Island’s Waihi School, for example, has had its highest roll numbers in its 100-year history this year.

Past suggestions of a link between high-level women business achievers and single-sex education in the UK prompted Unlimited to survey 24 top Kiwi women CEOs on where they went to school. The majority (see opposite) attended single-sex schools and most attribute their career attainment to the sense of self-confidence they gained there. “It gave me a sense of security and self-esteem,” says Annie Dow of Dow Design. “I also had a lot of drive and ambition and the nuns recognised that in me at an early age.”

Those who attended co-eds say they don’t think it made any difference. Securities Commission chair Jane Diplock says energy and passion are the biggest drivers to business success rather than education. Fujitsu CEO Jo Healey says mentoring from a UK boss who encouraged her to lift her goals early on helped shape her career the most.

Yet most of those surveyed have opted, for various reasons, to send their own children to single-sex schools.

Film Commission CEO Ruth Harley says she did so due to her experi-ence of teaching at co-eds. There the boys received more teacher attention to prevent their bad behaviour disrupting the class, whereas girls tended to have better work rates and were left alone to figure things out because the teacher didn’t have time to focus on them all.