What COVID-19 Taught NZ SME Owners About People, Leadership and Resilience
We live in interesting times.
I grew up expecting The Big Shock to arrive in a single, dramatic moment. I was terrified by Orwell’s 1984 and when 1984 the year rolled round, I braced for the terrors to come. In 1999 I was ready for Y2K and the collapse of society through computer meltdown. In 2001, I watched the planes go into the towers and said to my brand new partner Nicki, “the world is going to change from now on and it won’t be pretty”.
MERS and SARS came and went and I thought we’d dodged a bullet. Ebola happened and I thought we’d dodged an atom bomb. Obama happened and I wondered if this might be a turning point for humanity. Trump happened and I had my nose bloodied by the reality that for every action there is an equal and opposite reaction.
Then came COVID-19.
Standing here in 2025, COVID isn’t just a bad memory. It was a stress test. For our country, for our families, and especially for anyone who owns or leads a business.
Two Ways of Seeing Risk - “Am I OK?” vs “Are We OK?”
When COVID first arrived, it was easy to fall into the trap of thinking it “only affected old people” or “people with underlying conditions”. For too many, that was oddly reassuring. They’re old. I’m fine. Who cares?
But then young, healthy people died. Others were left with long-term impacts. That quiet, gnawing doubt crept in - What if I’m not as safe as I thought?
For some, that doubt stayed locked inside the question, “Am I going to be OK?”
For others, it turned into something different -
Who around me is more vulnerable than I am?
What can I do to help them?
What kind of person – and what kind of leader – do I want to be in a crisis?
Those people – the ones who looked beyond their own bubble and asked, “Are we going to be OK?” – became the quiet heroes of workplaces and communities. The ones who checked on staff, rang customers, dropped groceries to neighbours, or simply kept turning up with kindness when fear and anger were running hot.
COVID didn’t invent those people. It just made them visible.
What COVID Revealed Inside Our Businesses
In business, we love to talk about “respect for staff” and “looking after our people”. There are posters, values statements, HR initiatives and “People & Culture” teams.
But in my experience, that care doesn’t always seep into the bones of a business. Too often it sits at bumper-sticker level - good slogans, thin practice.
It’s not that SME owners are bad people. Far from it. Most I meet care deeply. The problem is that we’ve been given very few real-world examples of how kindness, generosity, honesty and openness actually fit inside a business setting.
COVID ripped the cover off that gap.
Under pressure, you find out very quickly whether your business is built on -
Genuine trust, where people speak up, share bad news early, and back each other; or
Fear and control, where people hide mistakes, protect themselves and quietly plan their exit.
You also discover that the “secret sauce” of business success is almost never the whizz-bang idea or the giant cash injection. Over decades of working in businesses large and small, successful and failing, I’ve seen the same truth reinforced over and over: -
The businesses that held together in crisis were the ones where suppliers, customers, team members and leadership genuinely saw themselves as being on the same journey.
A good business feels, at its best, like a healthy family.
People want to come to work feeling -
loved (or at least respected)
valued
that their contribution matters
They want to be recognised – with pay, with promotion, with a simple public “thank you”. They want to know that when things get tough, they will not be thrown under the bus.
In every business I’ve worked with or employed people in, this has been universally true.
A Personal Reset - Losing a Job, Finding a Mission
COVID hit and like many New Zealanders, I took a hit too. I lost a job I loved in an iconic NZ business. Along with it came the familiar cocktail - fear, uncertainty and that hollow feeling in the pit of your stomach at 3am.
I was lucky. I had and still have – a wife who crazily believes in me. That support gave me enough courage to ask a different question -
Instead of “How do I get back to what I had?”
I started asking “What do I actually want to contribute now?”
I looked around my community and saw people hurting, confused, frightened, sometimes aggressive and angry. I’ve learned over the years that aggression and anger often ride in on the back of fear – fear of the future, fear of the past and fear of the present.
What keeps me human is feeling that I’ve made a real contribution. So I reached out. I gathered a small group of trusted colleagues – people with good hearts, big brains and a lot of battle scars – and we decided to go back out into the world and try to do some good.
Not by “fixing” every business. Not by helping organisations that exploit people or trash the environment to do it a bit more efficiently.
Our work is with businesses that have good hearts and broken bits. Owners who genuinely care about their people and their impact, but are exhausted, overwhelmed or unsure how to turn that intent into resilient, profitable practice.
Lessons for NZ SME Owners in 2025
COVID gave us all a golden opportunity. Some of that window has closed - people are tired of talking about pandemics. But the lessons are still there, and they’re deeply relevant to the reality SME owners face now - inflation, talent shortages, climate events, political whiplash and customers under strain.
Here’s what COVID should have made non-negotiable -
People-centred leadership isn’t fluffy – it’s risk management.
When people feel safe to speak up, they raise issues earlier, own mistakes faster and help you adapt quicker. That’s resilience.Culture drives performance under stress.
In a crisis, policies and processes matter. But what really shows up is whether your team feels trusted, informed and respected. Culture is the invisible system that either holds you together or tears you apart.Values need to live in decisions, not posters.
Your real values are revealed in how you handle rosters, sick leave, redundancies, supplier payments and customer commitments when cash is tight.Your business is a web of humans, not just transactions.
Suppliers, customers, staff and their families all watch how you behave. They remember who tried to do the right thing when things got ugly and who didn’t.You have a choice about what kind of world your business builds.
I want to leave a world to my kids that I can be proud of. Right now, it ain’t looking flash. That’s exactly why people with good hearts and decent intentions need to recognise each other and work together to make sure this isn’t just something we say.
Turning a Shitstorm into Something Better
There will always be people who see any crisis as an opportunity to exploit. COVID was no exception. We can’t control them – but we can choose not to join them.
As SME owners and leaders in Aotearoa, we have an ongoing choice -
We can devolve into our most self-absorbed selves, focused only on our own safety, our own bank accounts, our own exit plans.
Or we can tap into the extraordinary energy, love and generosity that COVID briefly made visible – and build businesses that are tough, decent and worth handing on.
My recommendation? Learn from the shitstorm. Use it. Let it sharpen your sense of who your business is really for and what kind of leader you want to be when the next wave hits – whatever form it takes.
Because there will be a next wave.
The question is not if.
It’s who you will be, and who your business will be, when it arrives.