How New Zealand’s top entrepreneur program built resilience into growth.

Pre-intervention

Icehouse is an entrepreneurial venture between the University of Auckland and the business community, built around a simple belief: that owner-managers grow better when they grow together. Its flagship Owner Manager Program brings cohorts of around 20 business owners through a six-month journey of business skills, peer learning, and applied practice. The impact on revenue, job creation, and export growth across New Zealand has been significant. But sustaining that growth requires more than strategy — it requires the physical, emotional, and mental resilience to lead through uncertainty, setbacks, and relentless pressure.

Intervention

• Embedded resilience assessment and training directly into the Owner Manager Program, treating resilience as a core business competency alongside financial and operational skills
• Delivered the program in cohorts of approximately 20 owner-managers, working through five four-day blocks over six months
• Combined resilience assessment with practical training, giving participants a clear picture of where they stood and tools to improve
• Sustained the partnership across 20+ years and 2,000 participants, iterating and refining the program with each cohort

Post-intervention

• Participants recorded an average 26% growth in resilience across the program
• 2,000 New Zealand business owner-managers accompanied over two decades — one of the longest-running resilience partnerships of its kind
• Resilience became a permanent fixture of the Icehouse curriculum, recognized as inseparable from the business growth it exists to support