Ao Roots

We have talked about what Ao Collaboration translates to from te reo. You shared your pepeha during te wiki o te reo Māori so we know where the connection comes from. Can you explain why it was important to bring your Māori heritage into your business?

I decided to found Ao Collaboration when I realised I needed to switch from freelancing to having a company persona, and also apply a more structured approach by creating business processes around the work I was doing for clients.

At its core, the company still had my personal touch on every aspect of my work. From making sure my clients were happy with what I was doing, to engaging with and collaborating with their wider teams to ensure processes worked across the board, all the way down to invoicing and accounts.

I’m not who I am without my heritage so it was an easy decision to bring it into the business - regardless of the fact that I’m still on a discovery journey to define what that means to me.

I needed to include what I knew about me into the company. Not only what I knew when I started a year ago, but also what I continue to learn and grow as I dig deeper into the history, culture, and language of my whenua.

I wanted to be able to intertwine my personal growth with the company’s, and impart some kiwi-ness into the everyday business world that I interacted with.

How do you weave your roots into your daily work?

I often include simple phrases or words interspersed in my communication. Although at the moment I’m sticking to the more standard “Kia Ora” or “Nga Mihi”. I also enjoy listening to songs in Te Reo while I work. I think the recent and past 2019 Waiata Anthems Albums are fantastic and I have added a few into playlists I’ve got. I particularly love Drax Projects “I Moeroa”.

How do you want Ao Collaboration to differ from the competition from a cultural perspective?

We’ve only begun to dip our toes into te ao Maori, both in a personal capacity and the company as a whole. I would love to continue the trend by engaging with and helping a wide range of people whilst simultaneously growing our understanding of and assistance in Te Ao Maori.

I’ve had the great privilege and pleasure of working with a Maori Land Trust to create and establish a database in Salesforce for their shareholders, grants and koha systems. I’ve learnt so much about how a Land Trust works and the struggles it faces that I wasn’t aware of due to my own upbringing in Tāmaki Makaurau. The conversations I’ve had with them have been deeply eye opening, and I would love to continue connecting with and assisting in areas such as these.

Ao Customers

We know Ao Collaboration's mission is to be there for the small emerging businesses. Why go against the trend of snatching big projects with big clients?

It’s my own personal ethos, I prefer a more personal touch. Quite often with small clients you end up being able to know everyone at the company, how they work, what motivates them, what small changes in the system could be made to make their process easier. That’s virtually impossible to achieve with the big players, where you may develop a professional rapport with the person assigned to the project and there’s typically no time to really understand what they’re about, just focus on what they need done.

Small clients also have very specific needs, which often aren’t uniform even across the same industry. Each small client has their own set-up and structure that is unique to them. Often the owner is wearing a large number of hats, and staff numbers can fluctuate over the standard roles you might typically see. By taking care to understand how each client operates, we are able to nurture and build a system that will allow them to transfer some of those roles easily as they grow while maintaining a database and processes that will continue into the future. We want them to succeed not only in implementing solutions, but in keeping those solutions working for them long into the future.

Ao Collaboration has a very strong stance on the type of clients that fit its culture. What other characteristics do we look for, aside from its size?

The culture inside the company and the willingness to engage in our collaborative approaches are important. We can build all the systems that a client may want, but if it isn’t flowing down the chain to the people that will be entering the information, you will lose the functionality of any system and end up paying large amounts for something that isn’t giving you the expected results.

A Company is only as good as the people working within it.

How does Ao Collaboration give back to its clients and community?

We have various initiatives that we are working on internally to give back not only to our clients but also our local communities as well. One of these initiatives involves clients who have grants or charitable aspects through the work that they do. If these align with our core values, we happily give a koha back in appreciation of what they do.

Ao Team

We recently had a Mental Health Awareness Week in New Zealand, and Ao Collaboration actively participated with the whole team. What was the biggest takeaway from it?

Mental Health is a very important topic here at Ao Collaboration. My biggest takeaway from the activities during that week was that there is always more we can be doing to check in with our team. Due to the nature of our remote work and environments it’s easy to forget that there is a wider team you can connect with. Finding time to stop and check in with everyone is important to help foster and build on that connection.

We are all very open in our team about what is going on in our lives and how it may impact any work we have going on. I love that the team is available to assist and chat when people need it.

What do you aspire the biggest point of difference to be between Ao Collaboration's team and the rest of the competition?

Our supportive and helpful nature, both within the team and also with our clients. Communication is important to be able to make sure our ideas and processes are working, and I pride myself on being able to do that in a way that is supportive and that fosters collaboration.

Ao Sustainability

Here's a quote from Dreamforce 2021: "At Salesforce, we believe business is the greatest platform for change", speaking of sustainability and climate change - something so central to Salesforce that they created a Sustainability Cloud. Are these topics on Ao Collaboration's radar at all?

Given we are still a new company and we’ve been transitioning from a sole freelancer to a consultancy this one hasn’t really been on our radar, beyond being a fully remote company with very little need for paper etc. From a personal standpoint, we have been looking into things like Solar Panels, Rainwater Tanks, and growing our own fruit trees and vegetables in our front yard.

Tackling sustainability and climate change can be overwhelming. What does the next 12 months' roadmap look like for Ao Collaboration's contribution to global sustainability? Especially being a cloud-based company with the entirety of its workforce working remotely?

This might be a question for our Operations Manager. As we are still in our first year of business, I’ve been focused more on the day-to-day and client side work. It’s an interesting conversation to have as we are a fully remote cloud-based company, so the carbon footprint we have is more in how much electricity we use, what the data centres of the places hosting our work are doing etc. So calculating and working out how to off-set that would be very interesting. Definitely something to look at in the future.

Māori values revolve around a concept known as kaitiakitanga, where humans act as stewards for nature so that nature can protect and care for them. This speaks of a different approach towards sustainability than classic western culture (more concerned with the flow of resources and how they can serve humans). Does this approach align with how Ao Collaboration deals with sustainability?

I would love to take an approach that revitalises and helps to protect natural areas in our path to off-set our carbon footprint. This is definitely an avenue I would be looking into for future initiatives at Ao Collaboration.