The Icehouse · Entrepreneurship · New Zealand
How New Zealand's top entrepreneur programme built resilience into growth.
+26%
growth in resilience
2,000
people accompanied
20+
years of roll-out
Privileged to work with The Icehouse for 22 years helping owner-managers secure their leadership and growth by managing their physical, emotional and mental resilience.
The starting point.
The 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.
What we did.
- 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 programme 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 programme with each cohort
What changed.
- Participants recorded an average 26% growth in resilience across the programme
- 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, recognised as inseparable from the business growth it exists to support
Facing something similar?
Every engagement starts with the Resilience Assessment — a clear baseline before anything else.