Find out more about Zac de Silva, his Business Changing team and his other business ventures, which are all focused on helping business people improve their performance.
ZAC DE SILVA
Zac loves business. In 2010 he started Business Changing and today he is a business adviser for more than 120 clients who love his unique style and down-to-earth practical advice. If business advisers intimidate you with their buttoned down and suited up image, Zac may be more your style – he’s more of a café-and-sneakers kind of guy who shares his knowledge in layman’s terms, without confusing jargon. Business without the bafflement.
After being widowed as a young father, Zac decided that whatever he did in business from then on needed to count. Before he ventured out on his own to help others achieve success, Zac worked for several very successful and well-known businesses (at 28 he was CFO of Flight Centre and at 30 he was running FCM Travel), learning business from the ground up. In that time both he personally and the companies he was leading won a host of notable awards including the MYOB Customer Experience NZ Award and Best Workplace in NZ for Barkers Menswear.
A chartered accountant by trade, Zac has been told that he is lucky to have a great grasp of the softer side of business too – innovation, strategy, customer experience, people and culture.
Today, Zac works with clients of all sizes (from owner-operators to 1500+ staff), in all industries to grow their profit and reach the next level of success. In the past year, businesses Zac has worked with long term had an average profit growth of 102% (ie. more than doubled their profitability in today’s market). Our customers love what Zac and his team deliver too, we are rated in the top 2.5% in the world for customer experience.
Zac contributes articles and commentary regularly to NZ media and is a member of the Institute of Directors and a judge for the Westpac Business Awards. He also sits on the board of directors or advisory boards for several clients.
Zac is married with five children and is getting better all the time at work life balance – ie. walking the talk!
ZAC’S TEAM
Carlee Paterson
Business Changing clients rate Carlee highly for the impact she has on their business and their understanding of where they make their money (or not), cash-flow, gross profit and cost control. Carlee is the “financial controller” of several of our clients and also does project or training work and can assist with ensuring you have the right financial controls in place in your business too. Carlee is a qualified chartered accountant, who has worked at PWC, Deloittes, Dresdner Bank, Grenada TV, NZ Herald and House of Travel.
Chris Sutton
Sutts has worked with Zac for over 15 years as both a fellow director at House of Travel (Sutts was Group Marketing Director) and as a marketing services provider. He offers a great balance between strategy and execution and delivers solutions in easy to understand layman’s terms. Sutts is experienced in brand and channel strategy, creative solutions, marketing planning and its execution across both services and product and has worked on some great brands including House of Travel, Avanti and Tourism Australia.
Debbie Harrison
Debbie Harrison is an experienced journalist with more than a decade in the media industry under her belt! In her career, she’s written for everyone from the NZ Herald to NZ House & Garden to Sunday magazine (which she also edited for two years). She’s always loved business, completing a post-grad Certificate in Business at the University of Auckland in 2008, so she’s happy that her writing and editing skills have proven valuable to the corporate world. Debbie uses her enthusiastic attitude and skill set to help Business Changing clients with PR and social media strategy, newsletters, website copy, blogs, content marketing, copywriting and marketing collateral.
Niki Franklin
Niki Franklin is an IT whizz, having worked at House of Travel’s IT helpdesk (where she consistently got rave reviews on fantastic customer experience) and then for Orbit Travel, supporting a specialised invoicing and reporting program. All of which proves helpful in her current role as Zac’s virtual right-hand support (Niki’s based in Christchurch). In a usual week you’ll find Niki creating custom online surveys for Business Changing clients, reporting back on those surveys, dealing with various clients email databases, collating various group facilitation sessions for Zac and working behind the scenes on Business Changing’s new accountability and virtual coaching software package, AccountabilityMe.
NURTURE CHANGE
Nurture Change is a separate business Zac runs with wife Sip. It’s designed to help businesspeople carve time out of their busy schedule once a year to work on their business and on themselves. The Nurture Change Business Retreat is an annual conference held in Fiji or Hawaii at a luxury resort, where business people spend 5 days listening to amazing speakers, get to think in-depth on their business, connect with like-minded people and get in some much-needed R&R. For four years the Nurture Change Business Retreats have been sold-out successes with over 200 attending each one, and attendees giving a customer experience score of 9.75 out of 10 over the past 3 years. Zac is also the co-founder of sister company, Nurture Her.
ACCOUNTABILITYME
Zac has created a virtual coaching and accountability app called AccountabilityMe, which is a helpful tool for business owners and managers. Each week AccountabilityMe followers are sent a set of powerful questions that make them think differently about what they need to do each week in order to be more successful – and then holds them accountable to doing just that. AccountabilityMe will help you to set your goals and then each 30 days you will establish tactics you need to take to move closer to achieving your goal. It even lets you include your friends if you want added accountability to improve and be more successful.