18 Years of Small Business Success with Andrew Hamilton and The Icehouse

Started by the University of Auckland Business School in 2001, The Icehouse is an organisation dedicated to enabling SMEs and start-ups to reach their full potential. CEO Andrew Hamilton was their first employee and has steered the ship the last 18 years.

The Icehouse journey

“I think when we started we may have approached things with an education and a corporate mindset that said everything was about logic. That was how you grew a business. But I don’t think we realised then just how important emotional factors were, like mindset, confidence and self-belief were to these owners and founders.”

“What’s changed over the past two decades is our understanding of what it’s like to be a small business owner, what they go through, and how we at The Icehouse, can meaningfully contribute to their personal and business growth.”

Ten years in, the board challenged The Icehouse to shift focus, the team giving themselves a goal to impact New Zealand’s GDP by 10%. This was measured broadly in job and wealth creation. Hamilton says this created the opportunity to serve their customers more effectively and move beyond profits and revenue. Not only that, but they’re on track to achieve their goal by 2021, with close to 5,000 jobs created by The Icehouse’s customers in 2018 alone.

Last week, Andy’s achievements were honoured at the EY Entrepreneur of the Year 2019 awards, where he received the Exceptional Services to Entrepreneurship award, presented by ASB. Now, as he prepares to step down as CEO of the Icehouse to pursue other interests, Hamilton is quick to offer parting advice to this country’s budding start-ups and SMEs.

Andy’s advice for start-ups and SMEs

1. Time spent dreaming about the future

“I think many start-up founders spend too long dreaming about what they’re going to do, rather than focusing on what will actually work in today’s reality. Meanwhile, SMEs don’t spend enough time dreaming about what they’re going to do in the future and are too focused on what they’re doing today.”

2. Being ready to change

“Context is really important for the ones that succeed. Any business owner needs to understand where they are and what they’re trying to achieve. They recognise they must change over time - they have to learn and adapt to the conditions, so they can get to where they want to go. The leaders who succeed are the ones who recognise when they need to change.”

3. Learning through failure to grow

 “When we have failed to dream, we’ve not been pushing the boat out. When we have not aspired to grow the business, we have not been going as well as we could. But guess what? When we have aspired to grow the business, and we’ve failed, we’ve learnt more from that than we would have if we’d not tried. I think for all businesses, if you’re not trying to achieve more impact and more success then you’re not challenging yourself enough and you’re not learning enough. You just need to get on and do those things. Failure is not as big a problem as you think it is.”

“It’s hard being in business. Being able to do it and do it successfully, we all understand and appreciate that the choices we make are extraordinarily difficult. We at The Icehouse never realised how fun, how rewarding and how challenging this could be. It’s amazing to have the opportunity to work with SME owners and founders. They’re putting it all on the line, risking everything, and that makes it a real honour to make a valuable contribution to their lives.”

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