Sydney - the New York of the South Pacific

A US entrepreneur friend once said that Sydney was the New York of the South Pacific, and if you wanted to have a real business, you needed to be where the action was.

I had dreamed about having a Height Sydney Office for over six years. That dream became a reality this year, and I visited our office for the first time last week. It had our height logo on the door, people in the office, Australian clients, and deals – all the moving parts of a real Australian business.

I sat outside and listened to one of our team, who I met in person for the first time today, manage a call with one of our clients. It was surreal and like listening to one of our NZ team manage and coach a client. It was so exciting – words cannot describe how jubilant I felt; my dream had become a reality.

This didn’t just happen overnight.? People often don’t see the effort and stress that goes into what we have created. We had tried to scale a sustainable business from NZ. We were successful in part, and had several sporadic contracts, but the consistent client feedback was if we wanted to be a trusted partner, they wanted boots on the ground and us close to them.

So that’s what we did.? We invested heavily in recruiting an Australian-based team with an Australian Director and General Manager. We backed ourselves and built an overhead without an immediate secured Australian pipeline of work. Even with solid market intelligence, this was the right decision. I can tell you it was scary. ?We knew that we had a good product and people, but we needed to be patient. We missed a couple of deals, and there was a juggling of work back from New Zealand to support the team here in Sydney. And then it happened – a trickle at first and now a building torrent of Australian work coming through the door.

My dream has been the collective effort of so many people within our business, and like everything we do at Height, our success has been led by great people. We were so lucky through Alan Munro at New Zealand Trade and Enterprise to be introduced to Australian Employee #1 Greg Harrison - our Australian Operations Manager and Director. Greg has just been phenomenal. He has worked hard and diligently to support and lead this whole endeavour – so a huge thank you to him. He has also been ably supported by our amazing NZ team, in particular Claire McCarthy , Melanie Llewelyn , Sue Hart , Leanne Corkill , Kel McBeath , Susan Thomas , Steve Killeen and Geof Nightingale . ??

It’s also important to acknowledge our Australian-based team, who joined us and had faith that this NZ business had some credibility and was a good place to work. , So thank you to Greg Harrison, Isobelle Fulford , Louise Griffiths , Sophie Mak , Perry Fon Sing and Daniel Woodman . ?

There is still work to be done as we scale, but we have ended 2024 in a good place and are excited about our future in Australia. Finally, ego aside, it just makes so much sense for us to be here in Australia, with the scale and diversity of the market. Simply put, if Sydney is New York, Auckland is Antarctica... (Caveat – I actually love Auckland!)

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