‘Business is one of the most exciting things in the world’
A group of highprofile women are speaking in Dunedin next Thursday at Enrich: Celebrating Women in Business — an event organised by the Otago Southland Employers’ Association. Business editor Sally Rae talks to enableMe director Hannah McQueen, who is among the speakers.
HANNAH McQueen believes the realities of business are not talked about nearly enough.
Ultimately, being in business was often very lonely, unless you had the right team of people around you, Ms McQueen said.
And it required being ambitious and most Kiwis, particularly women, failed to be ambitious. Some of that was because they simply did not know how, while others could not sustain it — ‘‘because life is just a pain’’.
But you had to succeed and thrive despite that and all the various other challenges along the way, she said.
Ms McQueen is something of a financial whirlwind — a chartered accountant, authorised financial adviser and author of three personal finance books.
Twelve years ago, she founded enableMe — Financial Personal Trainers, which works with clients to get mortgagefree and retirementready over a yearlong period.
Asked what those 12 years had been like, Ms McQueen quipped it was ‘‘kind of like childbirth’’ — ‘‘nothing can prepare you for it’’.
‘‘Often the reality doesn’t match the brochure. I love it. I think business is one of the most exciting things in the world, but it’s hard.’’
During that time, enableMe had worked with more than
8000 clients and had a success rate of 90%. It had nine offices throughout New Zealand and about 60 staff.
It was now coaching young people aged between 16 and 22 through Equipme Now — rather than fixing a problem, it was about preventing a problem — and was moving into coaching businesses.
Brought up in Havelock
North in Hawke’s Bay, Ms McQueen studied at the University of Auckland, gaining degrees in commerce and taxation.
Fast forward a few years to when she needed to get her first mortgage and, although she got a good interest rate, she realised she would still pay almost $1 million over the 30year term of her $350,000 mortgage. She wanted to save interest costs but was not comfortable committing to high repayments.
She approached the mathematics department at the University of Auckland and worked with a tutor to create a formula that would enable her to repay her loan as quickly as possible, at the lowest cost and with maximum flexibility.
Eight pages of calculus later and she had that formula, which she patented. But there was a sticking point — the formula assumed there was a cash surplus available — and she did not have one.
Although she was earning more money than she had ever earned, she was not inclined to stick to a budget and never seemed to have any money left over at the end of the month.
That was not to do with her financial literacy; she realised she had to change her behaviour and she started studying behavioural economics and how to ‘‘get someone like me’’ to be financially successful.
Focusing on her finances, she discovered she was wasting tens of thousands of dollars every year.
By harnessing that wasted money, she was able to activate the mortgage formula and become debtfree sooner than she had ever thought possible.
Enableme attracted a diverse array of clients with income levels ranging from $50,000 to $5 million and asset positions from negative $350,000 through to $100 million.
But everyone wanted to be in a better place in 12 months’ time than their current default, whether that was someone on the rich list or someone who was struggling to get on to the property ladder.
Some people wanted to be in control while, for others, it was about maximising opportunities, she said.
One ‘‘humble’’ couple, who were earning $1 million a year, felt guilty about earning that much money.
Rather than focusing on that, what they needed to feel guilty about was if they had failed to maximise the opportunity that money had given them.
Too often, people who were ‘‘given the inside lane’’ had nothing to show for it, Ms McQueen said.
When people knew their efforts translated into results, then they were prepared to try four times’ harder. But often people ‘‘get lost in the quagmire of life’’.
The challenge from a financial perspective was that people could not afford to wait until tomorrow; they had to be ‘‘doing it now’’ and purposely moving things in a direction rather than hoping the environment would get them there.
A busy motheroftwo, Ms McQueen also has a healthy dose of realism, and acknowledged that one of her ‘‘nonnegotiables’’ was a daily bought coffee — and also a cleaner.
Asked how she managed to juggle everything, Ms McQueen said she was very honest with herself.
There were times when you just had to ‘‘push through’’ and you needed a good support team, which she had. There was always a tension between balance and success.
She worked with an
‘‘amazing’’ group of people and believed in a highperformance culture. EnableMe attracted highperformance team members and she did not feel threatened about that.
She encouraged people to ‘‘think big’’, and the environment you put yourself in was more important than your mindset.
If you were serious about achieving big goals, then you had to have the right community around you.
If you had the right environment and community around you and the right systems and frameworks in place, then your ‘‘default’’ was to be successful. And you should be as ‘‘brutally ambitious’’ as you wanted to be.
When it came to her own career, Ms McQueen said she felt blessed, but she also did not take it for granted.
‘‘It’s still a grind. It’s just I’m comfortable with the grind.’’
And as far as what she wanted to achieve in life? ‘‘I just want it to be said that it was useful and that I gave practical support — not just airyfairy’’.