Ashlee Rose is the Founder of Pikle & Fawe, was previously General Manager of Retail at TrailLite, and is a Leadership Development Programme alumni.
This Kiwi Business Story is based on a podcast from 31 May 2023, and all figures quoted are from that time. You can enjoy the complete podcast here. 
Who is Ashlee and what are you passionate about?
If I find something I really like, I’ll get super into it. When I was at TrailLite for example, I loved motorhomes, and now I've got a motorhome! I get behind things, and really enjoy the experience of diving into it. I love the outdoors; surfing, snowboarding, travel, and I'm a yoga teacher as well.
I enjoy the concept of helping people understand and learn about themselves a little bit better, and using the concepts of yoga – flexibility, grounded-ness, calmness – to integrate into people's lives, showing how that can be done from a leadership or a team’s perspective, and how we can apply some of those concepts into business.
We learned this in our Leadership Development Programme. Take 20th century leadership, which was all about the hard line, telling people off and toeing the line. There's been a really welcome shift away from that, and that gets me excited. Anything that's got the ability to influence people's lives for the better, just gets me excited too.
What roles have come most naturally to you?
I think I've got a predisposition towards leadership. I had a “born” personality, but I've also developed a whole lot of learnings and personal development through the decisions and the directions I've taken – especially with that yoga or self-help personal development lens coming in, as well as a professional lens.
Whatever I do next, or in the future, I would really like to focus more on strategic leadership and looking at the bigger picture. I'm so grateful for the opportunity that TrailLite presented me with – to learn a lot about the operational side, Profit and Loss (P&L), and some of the back-end of business.
How did you hear about The Icehouse?
When I was promoted into the role at TrailLite, I was very clear that I wanted some form of leadership development programme as part of it. It was really important to me, and it was important to my own operators, as well. Shaun [Newman, the joint Managing Director] had actually done the Owner Manager Programme. I looked around a fair bit – I didn't just go to The Icehouse – and I did find some other programmes, but The Icehouse’s Leadership Development Programme stood out as being the best, the one that covered the most variety of things and had the best community and the best learning.
Was there anything that you practically took on and then took back into the business?
For me, a lot of the learnings were probably personal reflections as well. We did a leadership blueprint with Jo [Clayton, the LDP Director], and that was really helpful.
From that, I learned something about myself and being very extroverted. One of the things that I always remember Jo saying was how extroverted people can come across to introverts and how sometimes other people might think that means my ideas are shutting theirs down. So I took that learning back, and explained to the team that that was something I was going to work on.
The other thing was being confident being in a room of 30. I did have a seat at the table and my opinions, and my voice, were relevant. It gave me confidence that I do belong as a General Manager or as a senior leader in an SME in New Zealand.
What advice would you give to a first time general manager of an SME, or within a key department of an SME?
The biggest thing is self-reflection, and personal and professional development. It’s always about being a learner, being open to change and open to learning about tangible things – the P&L, for example, or whatever it is you need to learn about. But it’s also learning about yourself and the way you’re responding to your staff or your team and the way you’re responding to your stress, because there's always something under stress.
It’s usually something that you can impact with the way you think about yourself, and I would approach any kind of promotion or step up into another role the same – by combining personal and professional development, and trying to understand every trigger, or every issue, that gets presented to me through a really holistic lens.