HRV
HRV New ZealandOfficial HRV New Zealand site.
Career · Auckland · c. 2007–2009
HRV: the job I nearly rejected because “ventilation” sounded boring.
I reached out to HRV New Zealand ↗ after deciding I wanted out of Compass Communications. I nearly talked myself out of the opportunity during the interview. Instead I walked into the strongest-performing HRV franchise operation in the country, found a call centre that was badly letting the rest of the business down, and rebuilt it from the ground up.
HRV was already a national growth phenomenon.
In 2006, HRV ranked number one in the Deloitte Fast 50, the national index recognising New Zealand’s fastest-growing businesses by revenue growth. That matters to this chapter: I was not walking into a struggling company. I was walking into a business growing at extraordinary speed, and then into its top-performing Auckland franchise operation where one critical part of the machine was still badly broken.
References & historical context
External references are provided for chronology and context. They do not imply endorsement, employment verification or a commercial relationship beyond what the chapter itself describes.
I almost did not take the job.
During the interview I realised the product was home ventilation. My immediate internal reaction was basically: how boring is THAT?
The franchise owners’ executive PA, Mel, was the person who got me over that reaction. She was exceptionally capable, blonde, young and, yes, exceptionally hot. I would be lying if I said that was not part of the allure.
What really stayed with me, though, was the moment her polished professional front faltered. I was seriously considering walking away from the offer and she begged me to reconsider, telling me I would not regret taking the job. There was something disarming, and definitely attractive, about seeing such a strong, composed young woman drop the corporate front for a moment because she genuinely wanted me in that office.
I listened to her.
She was right.
The best franchise in the country had a broken call centre.
The owners actually controlled two HRV franchises, Auckland East and Auckland Central, both run from the same office. Their overall results were already well ahead of the other franchises around the country. The door-to-door sales operation was highly trained and performing extremely well.
The problem was the telephone appointment-setting team. It was supposed to feed qualified appointments into an already successful field-sales machine, but in reality it was doing almost the opposite.
The telemarketers were required to use a strict franchisor-developed script. I understood why it existed: national consistency, legal accountability, brand control and a uniform message. But in practice the script had become dead language. Staff read the same boring lines over and over, pushed appointments too hard, and were under constant pressure to hit numbers or risk being fired.
By the time I arrived the room had descended into what I can only describe as a pit of abysmal despair. The staff were burnt out, resentful and defensive. The appointments they did make were so forced that the field reps had learned to distrust them.
If I had to sum that HRV office up in a song, it would be this one ↗.
Looking back, that must have been part of why Mel was so determined to get me in. She had seen enough of my still-young résumé to recognise that I might be exactly what that operation needed.
The reset
I threw the script in the rubbish.
Not metaphorically. I literally threw the scripts away.
I did not think the team needed another variation of the same failed process. It needed a new foundation: how to attract attention, build interest, create desire and ask for action. I went back to the AIDA process and the sales discipline I had learned at Hotel Dynamics Group, then rebuilt the call structure around what the conversation was actually supposed to achieve.
The appointment itself was the close.
The first conceptual shift was simple but important: the telephone call did not need to sell an entire ventilation system. The field reps were already trained to do that. The call-centre job was to create enough genuine interest, value and certainty to secure a worthwhile appointment.
The appointment itself was the close.
Once that was clear, everything could be rebuilt around that single outcome: the opening, qualification, questions, objection handling, direct-choice language and the final commitment.
That way of thinking had already been forming through Hotel Dynamics Group and TelstraClear. HRV was where I had to take those ideas and make a damaged team execute them consistently.
“My kitten is going to starve.”
One call became the perfect example of what I meant by getting out of the script and actually reading the person on the other end of the phone.
I called a woman who had clearly been hammered by the old high-volume database approach. Her immediate reaction was basically: “Oh GOD, not you guys again!” It was a massive no before I had even started.
So I abandoned the normal pitch completely and said:
“Look, I want you to imagine my kitten, at home, starving. His name is FLUFFY, and if you don't book this bloody appointment he is literally going to STARVE to death! Now will that be TWO o'clock tomorrow or THREE o'clock?”
She cracked up laughing. Then she said: “Ohhh, okay then, fine. I'll take the three o'clock.”
I thanked her, ended the call and thought almost nothing more of it, other than smiling for a moment because I had managed to make someone laugh who had started the conversation completely hostile to us.
The next day one of the franchise owners, Tim, came flying into the office with an excitement none of us had ever seen from him and announced:
“WE JUST SOLD A $7000 SYSTEM BECAUSE SOMEONE IN THIS ROOM TOLD THE CUSTOMER HIS KITTEN WAS STARVING!”
The appointment-setting system was deliberately anonymous so the field reps could not cherry-pick appointments from their calendars. Tim did not know who had made that call when he walked in, but everybody in the room knew it was me.
He went to the whiteboard, drew a box, then drew a person standing outside it.
“Be that person, outside the box.”
Then he left again.
At first, the team hated me.
This was not some inspirational reset where everyone immediately embraced the new manager and applauded the whiteboard. The staff were burnt out, suspicious and carrying a lot of resentment from the system they had been working under.
Some of them resisted me hard. Some tried to undermine the new process. From my point of view, there was outright sabotage happening because if the rebuild worked, it would prove that the old excuses and old habits were no longer defensible.
Then one person broke the deadlock.
One new guy proved the whole system.
He was a little older than most of the team and relatively new to the office. Instead of fighting what I was teaching, he actually applied it.
He listened, used the structure, worked the process and absolutely nailed it. His numbers took off. He became the star of the team and started earning serious commission.
That changed the room.
Once everybody could see someone sitting beside them making real money with the new method, it became much harder to pretend the system was the problem. The resistance started collapsing because there was now visible proof, in the same room, that it worked.
The result changed the relationship with the field team
Before the rebuild, the door-to-door reps had learned to avoid call-centre appointments because so many of them had been pushed into existence and were poor quality.
Within weeks, the dynamic reversed. The field reps started begging for appointments.
The numbers went through the roof, the appointment quality changed, the call-centre staff could make real commission, and the strongest franchise operation in the country finally had a telephone team feeding it properly.
For me it was a success of epic proportions, and it happened in a matter of weeks.
The wider pattern
One job kept opening doors into completely different worlds.
HRV was a sales-management role, but the people around it connected directly into other parts of my working life. ALT After Dark was running at the same time, and one member of my sales team eventually became the connection that put a failed gaming centre in front of me.
How HRV led to Red Vs Blue Gaming Centre.
One of my sales team members owned a failed gaming centre that he was trying to sell in an effort to recover some of his losses after bankruptcy. That is how Red Vs Blue Gaming Centre entered my life.
I took the centre on and, in my recollection, completely revived it within about two weeks, while I was still working at HRV and also producing ALT After Dark.
That overlap says a lot about that period. During the week I was rebuilding sales performance. At night and on weekends I was involved with alternative music television. Then a distressed gaming business appeared through someone on my own team and became another operating problem to solve.
Continue to the Red Vs Blue chapter →
ALT TV was already running alongside HRV.
I had actually met Jack from ALT TV during my very brief stint at Compass Communications. By the time I was at HRV, the television work was already part of my week. The two careers overlapped rather than happening one after the other.
Previous chapter: why I left Compass Communications →