The Manaaki Story

This is the story of Manaaki.io. It's a story that would never have been told if it were not for an incredible group of New Zealanders, The Manaaki Advisors and Partners. Heroic businesses and business leaders that stood up in a moment of peril to selflessly give their time, resource and expertise in an effort to help so many small business owners adversely effected by COVD-19. Ngā mihi maioha e rau rangatira mā.

When Covid-19 hit, it hit us hard. Indigo was an innovation start-up, just 8 months old. We’d grown quickly to a team of 14, working in Six60’s old recording studio. This little family unit with a relentless drive to fight the status quo with innovation and empathy.

In those 8 months we’d made our presence known. We were seeing wins, making money, building this exciting client base. We were getting referrals every day from all over the world. And we had the freedom that comes from being in demand: the luxury of choosing to only work with clients who truly wanted to change the world. 

But then the world changed.

Covid-19 was spreading fast and businesses were battening down the hatches. And then it happened, on Friday the 13th of March, in the space of 72hrs, we lost our investors, and a half a million dollars worth of work. Literally overnight our business, and our dreams went up in smoke. In times like these you’re meant to fold, say “oh well we tried” make people redundant, and look after yourself. It seemed that everywhere I turned people were saying “you're going to have to let staff go, but don't worry, you’ll pick yourself up, you can always start again”. Although their advice was well intended, for me, that wasn’t an option. I had a responsibility to our people and their families, and if I was going to go down, I would go down fighting.

At the same time, I knew we weren't the only business having these types of conversations. They were happening in small businesses around the country. The businesses who know our coffee orders, cut our hair, do our taxes, sponsor our kids’ rugby teams. The businesses that employ 600,000 New Zealanders and make up 30% of our GDP.

As I collected my thoughts and resources, and began to plan what we’d do next, I couldn’t stop thinking of all the small businesses out there struggling, and the families, and communities they supported. I started sharing my concern with friends and business connections and found an ally in Andy Hamilton. The more we discussed it, the more we became convinced, the impact on small business was going to be catastrophic. Someone needed to do something for them. And in a moment of clarity, I realised it was us.

It was Wednesday the 18th of March when we made the decision. We’re an innovation company and it was time to innovate. We’d design a solution that enabled every small business to access free advice from the incredible New Zealanders that were a part of our network. Our country's best and brightest business minds, good humans, who were willing to step up and give their time freely to help us all find a new way forward. We’d create a free online advisory service to connect small businesses to business experts with answers. 

It was time to run our process. Business model: free expert business advice at scale. Brand: acknowledging the emotion and the moment in an authentically Kiwi way. Platform: Q&A, MVP, we’ll build it as we fly it. Advisors: NZ business leaders with valuable expertise who want to help. SMEs: create scale to reach them by hacking social media. Budget: $1200. Okay (shit), time to execute. That was Wednesday.

By Thursday we had a brand platform, a developer in Poland we’d never met, and absolutely everything on the line. This was innovation under urgency with massive stakes.

The wage subsidy gave us a small amount of financial runway. But we were literally risking it all on the hypothesis that placing the wellbeing of others ahead of our own would provide us with enough revenue to keep everyone in our team employed, before we ran out of money... "We must be out of our F#%king minds".

This was one of those times where you feel like everything you’ve ever learned has led to this moment. If I hadn’t run teams and projects around the world simultaneously at Xero, I don't think we would have been able to pull it off. But our small and mighty team managed to produce a product and a brand, with real human value, that would normally take months to create, in the space of 5 days. 5. Days.

We executed around the clock and across the globe between two time zones. Our product was good enough from a technology perspective. But from a brand perspective, we knew it would grab the moment: the emotion, the pain, the angst, and come back at that pain with care. A cultural concept of care, a concept called Manaaki.

In times of crisis we always grab onto the essence of our collective identity. For Kiwis, so much of that is based in Māori culture. Think of the All Blacks, they start every game with a representation of what it means to be a New Zealander: The Haka. We needed to create a symbol of our collective identity for this moment, one that was intrinsic to te ao Māori, but that all New Zealanders could identify with. Rather than a call to war, it would be a call to care. A call to look after each other, to raise up our fellow New Zealanders. A call to Manaaki.

On the 25th of March, 50 new cases of the Corona virus were reported in New Zealand. A state of emergency was declared. The country was put into lockdown. And Manaaki.io went live.

We had the platform, which kind of worked… And thanks to Andy Hamilton’s unparalleled network, we’d already established an incredible base of business experts, including Craig Hudson MD of Xero, and the brains behind Charlie’s Juice and Lewis Road Creamery. But we needed more. So as business people volunteered to be experts, we asked them a simple question: “why?” When we shared their answers as red tiles on LinkedIn, it created a movement: a sea of Manaaki red. More and more business people came to us in waves. It was Kiwis rallying to help Kiwis. And our experts quickly outnumbered our small businesses. 

Adding massive weight to that was our High Performance team: Dillon Boucher, Ardie Savea, and Roger Tuivasa-Sheck, led by Monty Betham. They took high performance to new heights, hacking social influence to saturate social media with Manaaki, and create the awareness we needed to reach small struggling Kiwi businesses. The pain and fear in their questions pushed us even harder.

By the end of week one, it looked like we might be onto something. The small tests we’d been running were producing positive results. Could we attract high quality advisors? Yes. Could we get SMEs to the platform to ask a question? Yes. Could we facilitate answers through a beautiful (enough) user experience? Yes. Was the quality of answers high enough to help SMEs? Yes. Okay, last test: will it scale? Hundreds of small businesses were coming to Manaaki every day, but we needed to reach more. So, inspired by the “why” of our experts, we created a video love letter to small businesses. Using the networks of our High Performance team, so many influential Kiwis offered their time to be in the video that we couldn’t feature them all. With support from IAB, the Manaaki message reached millions of screens and hearts around the world, and our numbers swelled to thousands of small business owners coming to Manaaki for help everyday. In fact the campaign worked so well that many mistakenly assumed we were a large Corporate or Government initiative, that of course could not have been further from the truth. In reality we were little more than a plucky group of New Zealanders empowered by our deep sense purpose, and driven to act out of desire to help our fellow business owners make it through.

We've had precious little time to reflect over the last 6 weeks. But now on the eve of the of life returning to some semblance of normality, we can look back on the impact Manaaki has made since launch. SMEs have asked over 400 questions and received 1500 answers from experts and advisors. Even more interesting however, is the extent to which Manaaki has become a valuable source of content for SME. Over 44,000 users have read 155,000 pages of content and spent 106,684 minutes on the site. 

Manaaki has become a real-time source of data on business challenges, sentiment, and insight. We’ve created a business advisory service that operates at scale, a brand that’s recognised by small businesses throughout the country, and a powerful platform that, next month, will be used to power an international tourism industry advisory service.  But the most important outcome of all is that we managed to prove our crazy hypothesis. Every single person in our little Indigo family unit will keep their jobs and be paid their full salary. That’s the metric that matters to me most.

Many people have asked us about the long-term plan for Manaaki. We will continue to be there for small businesses to answer their questions as they shift from survival mode, into revive and then thrive mode. But, perhaps more importantly, the Indigo team will start designing solutions to the major challenges facing small businesses, based on the insights we’ve found through the Manaaki platform. In fact we launched our first initiative just last week: an ambitious strategy to transform the digital capability of SMEs, virtually overnight. Our goal, to get 1000 kiwi businesses online and selling in the space of a week as the first step in a broader strategy to transform New Zealand into the world’s leading nation for E-commerce adoption. At the time of publishing this article we've had 1250 small businesses sign up and over 200 websites have gone live in one week.

Winston Chruchill once said “Never waste a good crisis”. It seems callous to reference this quote in the face of a global catastrophe, but I get his point. A crisis is a significant moment. A moment to demonstrate the best qualities of humanity, to test our expertise and our mettle, to show the world what we are truly capable of. 

What this crisis has reinforced for me, is that in every business journey we are presented with a series of moments. Moments that represent an opportunity to bring to market an idea whose time has come. Manaaki is one example of this, but there are many more that will emerge from this crisis, and in the new normal that awaits us all.

At Indigo, we live by two simple mantras. The first is “don’t tell me, show me”. It can be expressed as a challenge, or a statement of intent. It’s the challenge we accepted by creating Manaaki, driven by our intent to save our jobs, our business, and the businesses of thousands of other Kiwis. Driven by our intent to demonstrate our ability to innovate, in the face of what may be the greatest crisis of our lifetime. It’s a mantra that also speaks to the moment that stands before you now. This crisis, for better or worse, has manufactured a moment, where we can choose to either continue with the status quo, or innovate forward into a brave new future. For those of you who wish to seize your moment, embrace innovation, and create the new business models and organisations that will personify success in the future, Indigo is here for you. And together, we won’t just tell them… we’ll show them.

Oh, and our other mantra? “Don’t be a dick”.