Tucked away in Tauriko is a tranquil haven where doing business is a breeze.

That place is BloomCo, a co-working space that director Jade Maddox affectionately dubs the “luxury workplace home away from home” alongside the city’s other co-working spaces.

Once a showhome, BloomCo is now a thriving, close-knit co-working space that boasts a warm, welcoming environment, a waterfall for relaxation and meditation, and local businesses looking to do meaningful business.

It was also the host location of our inaugural Business @ Breakfast, which provided an intimate networking opportunity for our community to connect over a delicious breakfast (thanks to Lemongrass Catering).

Alongside Jade, we heard from two other business owners: Jaclyn from Thrive Business Consulting and Geoffrey from The Why Marketing.

Jade was up first and immediately made an impression with her passion for BloomCo. They have about 20 full-time members and another 30 who use the space part time.

Jade has a diverse background, first studying psychology, then working in HR and on to running her own business in orthodontic products.

Self-employment created a lot of joy for Jade at first, but when the business was faced with a number of major challenges – including working through the Christchurch earthquakes and the wipe out of their manufacturing facility in Fukushima – it quickly created a lot of stress in her life.

She was very honest about experiencing burnout, and her lack of healthy habits and coping mechanisms to get through this time. So, relocating to the Bay of Plenty, Jade re-evaluated what was important in her life and how she wanted to live her life, and from this place she developed BloomCo.

Through this process, she learnt about the seeds of happiness and spent the next 10 years watering these, focusing on her own happiness as a way to help bring others happiness around her. She says BloomCo is about creating an atmosphere in which happiness can grow – hence the name.

After Jade’s discussion, Jaclyn from Thrive Business Consulting gave us a snapshot of her background – again, highly diverse with teaching, HR recruitment, telecommunications and more. For Jaclyn, she is driven by wanting to help others, which is a key part of the ethos behind Thrive.

Jaclyn and her husband Gavin pride themselves on being a business’ partner, a combination of coach (focusing on the human being), consultant (analysing the business) and advisor (taking numbers and advising how to grow the business). They get to know the business owner and stay the course to set them up for success and help them maintain into the future. The biggest thing for Jaclyn is that their work is a relationship, so they offer three free hours of business consulting first up to get to know if they are a good fit for the business (and vice versa).

Jaclyn says too often business owners focus on the operations, on their products and services first, without building a strong strategy behind it. That’s where they come in, to help put all the building blocks together for a successful business.

The speeches closed with Geoffrey from The Why Marketing. His business is focussed on helping small business owners get started with their marketing – helping them understand the fundamentals, helping them put plans and strategies in place to manage their marketing, and helping them upskill where they need.

Using the analogy of dating, Geoffrey explained the importance of building awareness of your business as the first step to successful marketing – you wouldn’t go up to someone and ask them to date you without doing the groundwork, so you can’t tell someone to buy from you without building awareness of who you are and what you do.

At the close of speeches, we had our usual business card draw with two day spots at BloomCo up for grabs, plus a $50 voucher to CBK.

Thanks to everyone who attended our first Business @ Breakfast and to our excellent hosts for a wonderful morning of mixing and mingling. We had great feedback about the new format, so will look to hold another event soon.

Keep an eye on our events calendar for the details and make sure you are subscribed to our newsletter.

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