Aaron Jay is the owner and Managing Director of Hortus, a viticulture and horticulture company delivering expectational services in labour, machinery and management.
Location: Blenheim
Business Type: Viticulture and Horticulture Services
Founded: 2008
Number of employees: +70 (permanent full-time) and over 1,200 Seasonal staff
Current Business Situation: Substantial year-on-year growth and service diversification
Relationship with The Icehouse: Owner Manager Programme Alumni
How did you arrive in the business?
I’m originally from England but I’ve been in New Zealand for 21 years now. I took over the business in 2009. We started off with just four of us, some secateurs, loppers and a van!
I was lucky enough to do my life apprenticeship – I left school at 16 – by working for some pretty good businesses. I learnt some things along the way that back then I probably felt were a waste of my time, but proved to be very useful years later.
When I went out on my own I actually realised that that was my apprenticeship into business ownership – learning about investment and finance, sales and marketing, and so on.
What major changes have you seen at Hortus?
What started out as a contracting business is now a business for success. Originally we started out as Marlborough Vine Works in 2008, and rebranded as Hortus in 2013.
We were a labour company that specialised in viticulture but over the next few years we settled on our goals and that’s our purpose. What drives our business is that we want everybody to achieve their version of success. Providing the machinery, labour and technical experience is how we do it, but our business is quite simply about people achieving their success.
What are your major challenges?
As much as you want to create opportunities for growth and exposure for people, it has to be very deliberate. It’s hard when you’re working in the business and not on it.
Most business owners feel that way. I don’t think any owner wakes up with the ambition of upsetting people. You wake up thinking, ‘How can I make that person’s day the best that it can be?’, ‘How can they be the best that they can be?’.
If that person does all those things their family is better off, the community is better off, and we as people are better off. Most people do that, but they don't necessarily do it consciously. They all use business as the common denominator as opposed to going one step further and saying what does success genuinely mean to you? That’s what we’re trying to do at Hortus.
What did you do with The Icehouse?
I did OMP 27. Twelve years ago! My then bank manager at BNZ really supported me at the time and pushed me to do the programme. I procrastinated for 12 months and didn’t really have the confidence or feel like the business was up to it. I was working 80 hours a week before OMP and I was questioning whether I should even be in business.
The more I researched, the more it seemed like it was right for me as an established business owner. I jumped on it, and here we are. I don’t think it was me choosing The Icehouse. The Icehouse chose me.
What were your biggest takeaways?
Confidence. There isn't even a close second. I had a young family, bills to pay and we almost lost our house because one of my clients hadn’t paid me on time. Life was pretty scary.
If I did the course now, I would take out as much, if not more, because I’d approach it at a high-level. When you're listening to super-smart, confident, highly intelligent, highly motivated, highly successful people telling you've got something good, it inspires you to get on with it. I didn’t have anyone else giving me that advice, and giving me the cold, hard facts I could relate to. That’s where OMP came in.
What were your initial thoughts?
When I signed up I thought what’s the worst that can happen but I went in questioning, ‘who am I?’ and ‘what am I doing?’. On the first day I was thinking ‘this isn’t for me’ and ‘it’s not the right time’ because even though we’d quickly established ourselves in the first two years of business, I was in a room with a bunch of people quite a bit older than me whose businesses were more established than mine.
I quickly realised that they had exactly the same problems and felt the same way as I did. I could relate to these people perhaps better than most because they knew what I was going through and trodden this path for many years.
Have you worked with The Icehouse since your Owner Manager Programme and how does it help your business?
At the beginning of OMP I was wondering if I could afford it and by the end I realised I couldn’t afford not to do it. It was money well spent and you take what is relevant at the time. Even now I still refer to my programme notes. It was awesome.
We keep coming back to The Icehouse. It aligns with our values and allows our staff to have the ownership they’re looking for. We’ve put our people through the Leadership Development Programme, OMP of course, OMX, and The Icehouse’s financial workshops.
The reality is that you turn up, learn a lot, grow massively, and instantly you’ve got a network of very similar minded, highly motivated, and highly organised people who are looking for accountability, for ownership and influence, and want to have a positive impact in their business and in their communities.
On LDP you’ve got facilitators who are subject matter experts with a high-level view of different aspects of the business, which opens your eyes to wider issues. You learn a whole bunch of things and begin to talk a similar language which runs throughout the organisation.
The power of the network is huge, and we deliberately send people individually, so they can benefit from that. The people we send already have company alignment (we work very hard during the recruitment process to match those attributes) but when they come back from The Icehouse they also better understand risk, appreciate what the owners are doing, and much more.
What ownership advice can you offer right now?
If you’re serious about creating a strong and sustainable business that can have a meaningful impact on people’s lives then my two pieces of advice would be, ‘learn to be comfortable being uncomfortable’ and ‘you have got to be consciously selfish to be sustainably generous’.
Follow the link for more information on Hortus and its range of services.