Paul Spain:
I’m Paul Spain, futurist and Chief Executive at Gorilla Technology. I love contributing to the success of individuals and their organisations. The New Zealand Business Podcast is all about this through helping you learn from some of our most innovative and incredible leaders. In this episode, I’m joined by Jarra Borman, who is Director of Strategy at Outrun Global and is Director of Strategy and Growth at at Zeald. Jarrah’s career journey is anything but ordinary. From radio announcer and station owner through the disruption of New Zealand’s media and marketing industries to helping businesses embrace digital transformation, global talent, automation and artificial intelligence. Today, he works with organisations across New Zealand and beyond to unlock productivity, redesign workflows and help people spend more time doing the work they’re actually great at and that they love to do.

Paul Spain:
We also explore the personal health challenges that forced Jarrah to completely rethink how work gets done and how those lessons have influenced the way he helps businesses grow. Today, New Zealand Business Podcast is brought to you by one New Zealand and alongside Guerrilla Technology, making tech enablement and cybersecurity easy for mid size and smaller businesses and by Outrun Global Remote Staffing to help your local teams work smarter, not harder. Jarrad Borman, great to have you on the New Zealand Business Podcast.

Jarra Borman:
How are you? I’m good, thank you. Pleasure to be here. Thanks Paul.

Paul Spain:
Yeah, great to have you here. We met way back, so it’s always a privilege to have friends in the studio. But I love to start when it comes to these stories sort of right at the beginning. So tell us a little bit about where you were born and where you grew up.

Jarra Borman:
Sure, yeah. And first of all, nice to see you again after all these years. So I’m actually from c, spent most of my formative years growing up around there and just had a passion for technology and science growing up. Just loved the problem solving aspect of it. I think from a very early age, I think maybe about 10 or 11, I decided I was gonna be a forensic scientist. At that stage, no one even knew what that was. There was no CSI glamorizing it. I just loved the Idea that you could use science and technology to kind of unpack a problem.

Jarra Borman:
And so I was adamant that that’s what I was gonna do for a career. And in a strange turn of fate, just before I went to university to do, like, chemistry, physics, biology, calculus, anthropology, all of these sort of things, my mum came to me and said, you need. I said, okay. I heard an ad on the radio. They are taking auditions at Kohl’s Lani Femme in Tauranga and you should go and audition. I said, I’m gonna be a forensic scientist. Why do I want to be on the radio? And she said, you talk enough as it is anyway. You may as well get paid for it.

Jarra Borman:
I couldn’t argue with that logic. So I went in for the audition, and I wasn’t expecting to get it. There was like 100 people going for this spot to get trained up. And, yeah, I ended up being selected and trained up to be a radio announcer at Coastline FM before I went off to university.

Paul Spain:
Wow.

Jarra Borman:
Yeah, just a weird, weird little, like, timing. And then it kind of happened again. So, second year at university, I was stuck in the middle of all of the science stuff, finding myself kind of speaking a language that was more and more difficult to use to relate to everybody else. Like you were steering further and further away from people. And I was kind of acutely aware of that. I was like, this radio thing was kind of fun. Let’s see if I can maybe get back into that. So I went, let’s have a look in the phone book.

Jarra Borman:
Picked it up. More fm. They’re pretty big, aren’t they? Gave them a call, hi, can I have a job? And they said, come in and talk to us tomorrow. And I walked in and they’d already reference checked me from my time in radio industry, More FM, Channel Z, George FM, Up FM, digital transformation, website development, digital marketing, sales strategy, remote working, automation, offshore resourcing, COVID-19 response, Get Ecommerce Movement, AI adoption, task automation, organizational productivity, global labour , and they outlined the weekend midnight to dawn shifts and said, look, will you take it? And so instead of an interview I always expect, I was just offered a job at what turned out to be the number one radio station in the country at the time. And it just happened to ring on the day where they had announced the launch of Channel Z and their weekend announcers had just got jobs there and they needed somebody who knew how to use all the equipment. So just out of the blue, like, total pivot. Next thing you know, I’m in radio and forensic science is in the background.

Paul Spain:
Wow. So back to when your mother made that original suggestion. Yes. You know, tell me, why do you think she. What was on her mind around the opportunity, do you think?

Jarra Borman:
I think it was more just she wanted me to get a summer job and I hadn’t got anything organised before I’d gone off to university. I was just kind of cruising. But I did have a background in drama. I’d done lots of stage shows and theatre and things like that. So I was kind of used to getting up in front of people and talking. So from her point of view, she was like, this is a natural fit for your skill set. You should really go and check this out. And, yeah, just the way she framed it, you just can’t argue with that.

Jarra Borman:
And, you know, I thought I was ticking a box going along and doing an interview, and next thing you know, I’m on the radio.

Paul Spain:
So clearly she saw something in you at that point that maybe you weren’t, you know, quite aware of. What was your upbringing? You know, like, what other sorts of. What sorts of things did you do as a youngster? Were there other interests?

Jarra Borman:
Yeah, so I grew up on Kiwifruit orchards around Tauranga. My dad worked as a foreman on Kiwifruit orchards before we moved into Tauranga itself. And I’ve got a younger brother, two younger sisters and so quite a big family. And, yeah, that was really cool and good connection with wider groups of cousins and aunties and uncles and that sort of thing. So strong family connection. In fact, all my brothers and sisters, bar one, have all moved back with their families to Tauranga and we’re kind of creating that same kind of community in the same way that we had as we were growing up. But, yeah, it was really passionate about technology, was the first to be in there, trying to tune the TV TVs and how to make them work and plug in stereo systems. I was always called in to come and do all of that.

Jarra Borman:
In fact, if you go right back from a music point of view, as a little kid, I used to go through my dad’s vinyl collection and play all his albums. And even at the age of two, I had them all memorised. And so I’d go around to his friend’s place and go through their record collections. Oh, no, this one. Everyone’s going, what? So even from a very early age, I was kind of quite interested in music as well. So maybe that was something else that my mum had picked up on too.

Paul Spain:
Now, getting that opportunity at More FM, it sounds like it was partly timing, it was partly that you were actually exactly the right person for that sort of role, but also partly mindset.

Jarra Borman:
Right.

Paul Spain:
Because there would be, I’m sure, other people who offered a Midnight Till dawn slot. And they wouldn’t be saying yes. Yet in business and in life, often there are these decisions that come along and you can pivot one way or you cannot. That sounds like it was a great pivot for you to jump in and say, yes, absolutely.

Jarra Borman:
And I tried to juggle both, like carry on doing university, but then doing midnight till six in the morning on Friday and Saturday nights. And I’ll tell you what, that when you start breaking your sleep patterns like that gets pretty tricky. So. But that was always the way you got where you needed to get to in radio. So even when I started at Coastline FM in Tauranga, the first shift you got was midnight till six in the morning. That’s just where you cut your teeth if you wanted to get onto the radio. You generally went through radio school and then were given an opportunity to do a midnight till six in the morning, and as you got better, eventually moved into your daytime shifts and things like that. So it was part of doing your time.

Jarra Borman:
And I kind of lament a little bit, I suppose, that I love radio still to this day, but that opportunity doesn’t exist in the same way anymore. You don’t have someone live overnight, playing the music, talking, doing everything in a live environment. And so that that training ground and that opportunity for people to kind of do the hard yards in that space and learn their craft doesn’t really exist as much as that, or if at all.

Paul Spain:
Yeah, yeah. And this, I guess this is one of those areas where technology has come in, made it easier to get a pretty reasonable result. Maybe it’s somebody pre recording some, you know, bits and pieces that get, you know, spread out. Obviously that’s going to vary from, you know, from station to station and so on.

Jarra Borman:
You used to also have independent radio stations and different brands in each region. It was. We had real diversity in New Zealand in radio. In fact, we have one of the most deregulated radio markets in the world. We’ll talk a little bit what happened a little bit later on in my career with radio, when I was running a smaller independent radio station. It was at a time when there was more radio stations in Auckland than there was in the whole of Australia. Just to give you some context around how diverse and interesting our radio market actually is.

Paul Spain:
Wow. Well, obviously, lots packed up in that. So when you look back at that time, more FM and before you started your own station, what are the lessons that you take away from that time in your career?

Jarra Borman:
Oh, it was hard work. There was a dedication to having to get there, to work those hours and Then you’d get the opportunity to do promos and they’d be during the day. So at one point I think I would work midnight till six in the morning. I’d pop into a booth like this that was soundproof, get a couple of hours sleep, get up, run the promotions team, go home, have some food, crash out again, get up, do midnight. So you just took whatever you could get, essentially. And I took that opportunity with both hands. I was working with some of the most incredible people. I mean, the Breakfast show was Kim Adamson and Jeremy Corbett.

Jarra Borman:
The news reader was John Hauksbee, who was later replaced by Hilary Barry. Like, it was like a who’s who of the broadcasting industry. And I got the opportunity to watch firsthand how they approach things and, and pick up skills from them. And I kind of took that with both hands and ran with it and ended up being part of the team, running afternoon shows in the weekend and filling in in the evenings and things like that, picking up some shifts on Channel Z. It was a really good time.

Paul Spain:
So what would you say would be your highlight from that time?

Jarra Borman:
So the highlight would be Breakfast show is on with Jeremy Corbett and Kim Adamson. And I’d done the midnight til 6 and part of the job was to stay and kind of look after the reception thing in the morning before the rest of the team arrive. Cause they start at 6 in the morning.

Paul Spain:
And this was a huge, huge show, like, massive following around the country.

Jarra Borman:
Yeah, it was the number one show on what was the number one Metropolitan Radio station of the year at the time. Right. And like, you know what those gentlemen went on to do. And I think, yeah, John Hauksbee was the newsreader at the time as well. But my family came to visit, right. And so my family came to visit, so I had my sisters there and she would have been, I don’t know, maybe 13 or 14. And she decided she wanted to have some fun with Jeremy Corbett. And so she walked in and handed him a piece of paper and said, I thought you might be a bit too afraid to ask, but here’s my autograph.

Jarra Borman:
And it is the only time I’ve ever seen that man lost for words. It was hilarious. So that was my favourite moment, I think, from my time in radio. It wasn’t my moment, but encouraged my sister to just have a pop. It was hilarious.

Paul Spain:
Yeah, brilliant, brilliant. And then what happened from there?

Jarra Borman:
Well, so one of the things I got the opportunity to do it at More FM was host their Saturday night dance music radio show. Right. And so More FM back in the late 90s was very different to the Maury FM today. It was one of the most popular stations in the city, obviously it also played a much more diverse selection of music and we played some pretty heavy stuff on a Saturday night. There was a. The dance culture was growing in New Zealand and I was lucky enough to host that show. And so I was interviewing international DJs, they would come in for guest sets and it was incredible. Got to interview all sorts of big acts that came through and got to see them.

Jarra Borman:
And the numbers for that show grew to the point where I felt there was space in the market for a station that dedicated themselves to electronic music of all its different shapes and forms and sizes. And then George FM kind of popped up and it was. I actually hosted the Saturday night music show on George FM at one point. And so when I talked about that story during midnights or late shifts and then promos, I’d then pop into this little like studio out the back of someone’s house and pre record a set and get some mates DJ shows and put them on and tried to do that for a while, it just wasn’t sustainable. So tried to be part of that as it was first starting and then there was an opportunity because George got to a certain size, they had their own frequency and they were looking to launch a sister station. And I put my hand up and said, look, I’d love to be part of it. And I got the afternoon shot, which is what it was my dream to run drive time on a dance music radio station. And so they hired me and I launched the UP FM with them.

Jarra Borman:
Within a couple of months I was kind of finding it was moving too slowly, so I said, I’ll dedicate more time to it. Next thing you know, I’m the general manager of it. And then within a couple of years we got to the point where we were actually starting to kind of compete a little bit with George and and so created a bit of friction. So I kind of said, well, look, I’ll buy the brand and we’ll go and do our own thing. And the DJs all came with me and with a friend of mine, Terry, we set up UP FM on its own and yeah, carried that on for another eight years actually.

Paul Spain:
Wow. So that’s quite a pivotal moment there as well, where you’re part of this radio station, it’s owned by. By a bigger brand and then you’re putting forward, why don’t you sell it to me? And you managed to make that happen. How hard was that decision and what was on the line for you?

Jarra Borman:
Well, so it was a really tricky time actually. The decision to purchase it and the negotiation with the bigger brand to let it go, that was actually relatively smooth. Like there was. They understood that we’d kind of got to the point where we kind of probably needed to be out on our own. But going out onto your own without that umbrella of a bigger company is actually quite daunting. And there was a lot of challenges just getting the right frequencies and managing the low power FM radio spectrum which is required to operate a low power radio station. And once again family kind of stepped in. They’d run their own business before they were like, you can do this, let’s do it.

Jarra Borman:
And so they were incredibly supportive and they’d made running their own business while I was growing up look, look relatively easy. It wasn’t as easy as it looked for them. But you know, maybe that’s being, you know, in a saturated radio market where you’ve got to try and carve out your own space. But thankfully we had some amazing communities that were part of it. It wasn’t just a radio station that played music, there was whole communities of people that engage from, from websites like World DJ and Biggie and NZ Rave. Everyone kind of got around the radio station, supported it in an incredible way and that’s what made it, made it worthwhile. It wasn’t necessarily just the radio station, it was the community behind it that made it what it was.

Paul Spain:
What was the hardest thing of being the owner and running a business like that? You know, I think running any business and having that full responsibility from start to finish is pretty significant. But you mentioned earlier around the deregulated radio market in New Zealand being so diverse and you know, you’re on a low power frequency and so, and competing. Yeah, just with so many others. So how did that, how did that play out, you know, for you?

Jarra Borman:
So it was tough. I mean I was incredibly passionate about the on air bit. Like, it’s kind of like the dream I had was to have drive time show on a station that played the kind of music that I liked and I kind of already got there on stage one of the UP FM journey. I just ended up having to do all these other things to support that being able to continue to happen. So that was the driving force behind it. But broadcasting in the low power FM spectrum was like the wild west, right. Anyone could broadcast on any frequency within a certain range just so long as they had the right equipment. So I was actually part of a group we came together, which was the Incorporated society of Low Power FM users in Auckland.

Jarra Borman:
And we actually got together and worked to manage the radio spectrum band ourselves so that we could kind of maximize the coverage that everyone could get out of the space. And so I think without that it would have been even more difficult. But that really did help because we all kind of work collectively to look after this resource that was kind of allowed to function in that way. But what really, I think separated what we did from and made us able to carve a niche in that space was our ability to adopt digital technologies. Like, it really came to the fore because for us it wasn’t just about us broadcasting and speaking and playing music, it was about the feedback we got from the community. So worked with some really lucky to work with people that were highly technical and developers and they helped us build websites that had like a streaming player, for example, that played within Flash, that actually people could log into and they could send us a message and it would pop up in the studio in a live feed with their avatar and picture and all their handle. And so people actually, and that was all linked to a text messaging machine as well. So people actually started to create Personas and be interacting with the station and part of the show.

Jarra Borman:
And so we had people that weren’t actually on air but were known by everyone in the community based on the comments they’d send through. And it was just this beautiful interaction of everything. And we published that player, I think, on MySpace in the first instance. And so we got very early social media kind of coverage there. We used a little tool called Friend Blaster Pro that would go and add people and got to like 20,000 people friends on MySpace, which was quite hilarious. And then, yeah, as Facebook came around, it was just a really natural fit for everything we were doing around community building, around interacting with our audience. And as I got towards the 10 year mark with Up FM, it was pretty clear that while it’s fun and we did lots of events and everything, it was never going to make enough money to really support a family. And so I kind of had to do a bit of a pivot really.

Jarra Borman:
And I was also acutely aware that the response we were getting through these digital channels, some businesses were buying advertising from us, not because of the radio ads or what we were doing on air, but because of the reach and the engagement we were getting in these social spaces. So it became abundantly clear that the future was digital. And so I was already quite well exposed to a lot of those sort of things. And so it was quite natural for me to look to pivot into that space as well. And so before I’d even got to the end of the UP FM journey, I actually ended up getting a job working for Yellow who were going through a major pivot themselves, trying to transition from their print business through to a digital provider based around Google Ads and websites. And I joined them to help that kind of transformation. And yet when we got to the end of the 10 year with Hup FM, I kind of got it to that point and went, okay, somebody else’s turn and kind of did a weird kind of interview style process for figuring out who was going to buy it and then picked the person that I thought was going to be able to look after the community, not necessarily the one that provided the most revenue or money.

Paul Spain:
So yeah, wow. So, yeah. So incredible foundations there for your future in the digital the online world. Now, Yellow would have been interesting to join because this was what, 2013 type timeframe?

Jarra Borman:
Yeah, 2011, actually. 2011. 2011, yeah. So they were of. They had a, like a senior leadership team that was like a dollar is a dollar. Right. We want to move as much as we can move into this digital space and become the biggest digital provider that the country has. Essentially.

Jarra Borman:
They were already the biggest Google Ads customer, bar none, because they were buying traffic to all of their website platforms. So I came in and helped sell initially directory listings and the very first Google Ads packages that they sold to customers as well, was very successful at that. Yeah, I ended up being the top salesperson within the first year and then got given a team and made the top sales team. But it was all very digital focused. So it was all about like helping build capability and revenue streams from websites and digital marketing services being Google Ads and SEO.

Paul Spain:
Yeah, fantastic. You hit Yellow at that period. I think you were there what, about five years?

Jarra Borman:
That’s right.

Paul Spain:
This was the period where, you know, we saw the Yellow Pages going from what had been. That was the way that you advertised a business sort of going to zero, where really people stopped opening the, you know, the printed pages of Yellow Pages.

Jarra Borman:
It was the first big traditional media type of media that got nailed by digital. Right.

Paul Spain:
Complete disruption.

Jarra Borman:
Complete disruption. So the phone book was being decimated by the Internet and Google specifically and newspapers, traditional tv, those sort of mediums and stuff were. That was coming for them at that time as well.

Paul Spain:
Sounds like you had some great success in being able to take their offerings into the market. But it kind of been an easy period within Yellow. No, it wasn’t how do you recall that period?

Jarra Borman:
Yeah. So they had two separate teams. So they actually had your traditional kind of print teams and you had your digital teams. And the digital team would work alongside the print teams, helping them kind of retain what they could but transition what they couldn’t. And they tried several different models to get that mix right. But there’s always that friction. And unfortunately the margins on print were also. Fortunately, unfortunately was so good that it was.

Jarra Borman:
There was a real friction in the business to just move everything over. So certain while there was that high level strategy to do so, there was also a kind of like, let’s manage and do it as slowly as we can. And probably in hindsight, it should have been done as quickly as they possibly could because I don’t think they realized quite how quickly it was going to decline. Yeah.

Paul Spain:
Biggest lesson that you take away from

Jarra Borman:
that time throughout, like running UP FM, for example, I did that just pure passion. I was broadcaster, loved it. And so I could go out and I could sell advertising on the radio station because it was my baby. I loved it and I could talk about it in that kind of way and get people excited about it. But I never did a very good job of teaching people how to sell that. And so I was always naturally limited in what I could achieve within that business environment because I could never set up a salesperson or a sales team to kind of be able to go out there and replicate what I did. And one of the incredible things that I was lucky enough to be part of at Yellow was to have some of the very best sales management training that you could have. They flew in this lady from New York who had a model called Value Solution Selling.

Jarra Borman:
And she developed that based on analysing salespeople who were door to door salespeople in New York. Now you can imagine that’s probably the hardest gig there is in the world is going door to door in New York and working out how to sell. So she’d built this model on that and what that gave me was an understanding of what it was I was doing in a sales environment that actually helped me be successful and gave me a blueprint to be able to then teach others how to replicate that. And so I went from being able to sell very, very well by myself, not knowing what was working specifically, to having a really clear structure that allowed me to teach others to do similar things. And I think that for me, that was my biggest lesson through that was working out what that structure and process was and actually having some methodology behind it.

Paul Spain:
Are you able to share some highlights from that sounds like that was really pivotal.

Jarra Borman:
It’s about the customer, it’s about them, it’s about their needs, what they require, what their problems are. And that was the whole premise of value solution Selling is understanding what problem you’re trying to solve problem before you start trying to sell the solution. And that’s a really common problem when it comes to sales is going in and going, right, I’ve got the answer. Here it is, here’s the price. Right. So actually taking the time to understand who you’re talking to and what motivates them and what they’re struggling with and then providing that solution underpins most of that methodology. And so getting an understanding of who that person is, how their business ticks is critical to that process. And that’s actually been a skill that’s been transferable through a lot of the stuff that I’ve done throughout the rest of my career as well, which is actually designing products and actually analysis processes and stuff.

Jarra Borman:
It still all comes back to making sure you take the time to understand who you’re working with and what do they really need, what are you trying to solve for them. And so, yeah, that would be my key takeaway from that.

Paul Spain:
Fantastic, fantastic. And you know, any other lessons that sort of really sit with you because it was an incredible opportunity really to be inside a business that was doing its very best to survive whilst being, you know, disrupted by technology and innovation. Yet they were investing and making varying pivots and moves forward right through that period.

Jarra Borman:
Yep. So there was, I got the chance to work with some incredible people through that period and I think that’s why I was there for five years, is because even though there were this friction between where they were trying to go and where they’d come from and all those market pressures, there were just some incredible people working in that space. And I can’t really name them all because it wouldn’t take too long, but gotta say, that was a big part of why I was there for so long and so successful was the people that I was lucky enough to work with. But what I did come to understand is that especially coming from a very small, kind of tight knit radio station in more fm, like it wasn’t a big team, it was quite kind of independent. And then to an even smaller one which was just my own community and then walking into a big corporate environment was just like, man, this is different, eh? Like it’s like a, it’s like the, it’s like a nimble little ship or a Big, big super tanker and it takes a long time to turn. And so I realized after being there for about five years or so that, you know, sometimes you, one person can’t influence the way that that ship is turning in a way that you’d like. And maybe I’m a better fit for me as a company that is slightly different size, it’s just a little bit more nimble and has the ability to adapt and adjust. And that was one of the big reasons why I kind of decided to move on from Yellow.

Jarra Borman:
Yeah, that’s one of the challenges you have in those big organisations. It takes a long time to move that ship.

Paul Spain:
And so yeah, tell us about the move and how you decided where you wanted to be and what you wanted to do next and how that all came together.

Jarra Borman:
Well, so yeah, I just made the decision to move on. I think one of the things that precipitated that as I was in a development role at Yellow to design new strategies to help grow and acquire products. So it was into kind of a kind of advanced BDM kind of role and I was asked to actually try and work out ways to sell print. I think that was the point. I went, okay, there’s something that’s not quite checking out here. I’m here to do digital, not that. So anyway, so looked around the market and decided to apply for a job at a company called Zeald, which I’ve been lucky enough to be working with for nearly 10 years now. And so they were originally a web website development company.

Jarra Borman:
They have diversified into a range of different website technologies including their own. And they were actually doing really good things in the digital marketing space as well. And so look, this looked like a really good opportunity to move and so I put an application to work with them. Loved their background and their story. Like there’s two brothers and their cousin from Mangawhai and they, what they went through to build that company and their challenges that they had faced and dealt with was just extraordinary. If you’re interested in that. They’re very open about it all and they’ve got the whole story published on our website. But I read that and it just resonated with me.

Jarra Borman:
I was like, I know what it’s like to battle. I’ve done that. And so there was an element, I think I’m going to get these people and the fact that you were still a family owned run company but still had some scale and, and had a diverse range of products just really appealed. And so yeah, applied and got to meet the chairman and yeah, we Got on really well. And yeah, they hired me and I started out as a digital business strategist for them. So essentially helping sell their products and services. But it was quite fascinating. One of my friends is a software developer, I’d known him for years.

Jarra Borman:
He thought I was absolutely mad to go and join a website development company in 2016 because you had all of these big technology companies from overseas all popping up. You had Shopify, WordPress was taking off, you had Squarespace coming in and it was getting highly commoditized. And so the idea that there was like a Runway for a website development company, I was told it was crazy to go and join them. But once I got to know and saw what they were doing behind the scenes, I was like, actually these guys have got something really special here that they’ve created and they’re in a really. They’re really well positioned to navigate this. And turned out to be quite true.

Paul Spain:
Yeah, there’s some interesting lessons in that, isn’t there? Because we see disruption happening all the time, we see markets changing, we see AI coming in more and more. So there is no sort of constant, you know, when it comes to what the business landscape looks like.

Jarra Borman:
And

Paul Spain:
there are certainly going to be sectors that are impacted as technology matures, as new innovations come through. But for those who differentiate themselves and really find the right niche, there can be a significant opportunity and they can deliver a significant benefit to the market over some of the newer options that come into play. And having good specialists in the market, there’s usually always a space, right?

Jarra Borman:
Yeah, for sure. They’d also like. So as an organisation they’d also been kind of in a super competitive environment for some time. Everyone knows someone who can build a website, right?

Paul Spain:
It used to be hundreds of thousands of dollars to build a website. So 2016 you came in and the market would have changed at least for those kind of those lower end basic sort of business needs a brochure type website.

Jarra Borman:
Yeah, so that’s the interesting point. So we had those products available, but they weren’t ones that we focused on at the time. There was some thinking that that was where the market needed to go and we needed to have more of a slightly self service model and lower cost websites and so on. But invariably when you sit down and you have a conversation with a business owner and work out what are they struggling with. A standard website isn’t what they need. They need something that has booking systems, that has E commerce functionality, it has integration with their other systems so that it can create business efficiencies when you use that kind of solution based selling that I was talking about, and you sit down with business owners, you can actually understand there’s a lot more that they can get out of digital services. And so we were really well placed to be able to provide not just the website, but the integration and the digital marketing and some automation from very early on. And a lot of that was because the guys that built the company worked really hard to build everything in a way that was scalable, that had production lines.

Jarra Borman:
We leveraged remote working. Very early on, right from when I first joined the company, the teams were spread out and we were using GoToMeeting I think was the first one we used before we moved to Zoom. This is 2016, 2017. That was. They were already working in that environment. They had people in the Philippines, they had their own office in the Philippines where they were support staff and production lines that were created. And so that allowed us to deliver really high quality services at a really competitive price point as well. So they’d kind of taken a lot of like the market conditions and used them to their favor.

Jarra Borman:
In their favor to be able to be competitive in that space. Yeah.

Paul Spain:
So you came into the business obviously well placed with your previous skills. It wasn’t too long. And then Covid hit.

Jarra Borman:
Yeah.

Paul Spain:
What did. What was the sort of the impact

Jarra Borman:
that was just even like getting ready to have a chat with you today? I went back and had a look at some of the things that we were writing and doing at that time, just to kind of get myself back in that headspace. And my goodness me, it was actually a scary time, wasn’t it? So when it hit, I’d actually moved to the point where I was a agency director. So Zeel had a model where we had little micro agencies which were cross functional teams. And so you’d have your marketing specialist, your technical specialist, your relationship manager, your strategists, and an agency director and a gm. So you kind of little cross functional team who’d kind of work really closely with clients and then use the engine room of zeal to deliver the services. It was a really good, good model. So Covid hit well was kind of hitting. And we realized that we needed to lean into our remote working pretty quickly.

Jarra Borman:
And so before there was any kind of work from home mandates or anything, we were packing up screens and keyboards and mice and everyone was going to a work from home trial. And on the first day that we got there on the Monday for the work from home trial, we’re like, this is working well, this could be permanent. I think it was only two days later where they announced everyone had to work from home. So we were in this position where we could kind of see what was happening. And we were actually as a digital company really well placed and had most of the equipment we needed to be able to move to that space immediately. And so while a lot of other organisations were scrambling, even the government was scrambling to work out how do they continue to operate. We were already set up and working from home really effectively. And we had this really interesting space where those customers that had worked with us for a long period of time and were mature e commerce businesses, they started booming, right? And so we had some customers, we were having to spin up multiple extra servers just to keep their websites online because their orders were going through the roof.

Jarra Borman:
A lot of them, I think they probably set records they’ll never beat again. During that time I remember one equipment exercise equipment supplier, we had to re rebuild their e commerce experience based around wait lists for all of their products. Cause they sold out completely. So they’d build a wait list for a product and then they had hidden products behind like on a URL they’d send to their waitlist as soon as they had confirmation they had a container of those pieces of equipment on the water, they would send it out to the wait list and pre sell the whole container of equipment before it even had only just left port basically. And so we were, we were helping people that had already digitally transformed do incredibly well. We started to get really concerned though. There were a lot of businesses, really good businesses that just hadn’t embraced the digital space properly. And at that time our thinking was that if we had no idea how long the lockdowns were going to go for, we didn’t know how long social distancing was going to be a thing.

Jarra Borman:
But what we did know is that if a lot of businesses didn’t transition to like digital experiences really, really quickly, we were going to lose a lot of really good businesses within New Zealand. So we did some kind of basic math and worked out that there was the need for like 10 to 20,000 more websites being produced in New Zealand every single year than the current total output of the industry. Like if, if it was an extended period of time and obviously it didn’t quite play out like that. But we, so we decided to challenge ourselves. And in terms of disruption we actually kind of disrupted our own business model because we decided that we were going to try and save as many of those businesses as we could and did created the Get E commerce movement, which was 500 free websites, e commerce websites to businesses in New Zealand. We would create templates, help them, load them and get them online so that they could start functioning. And so we decided that our response was to use our technology that we had all the licenses to and work out how to deliver 500 of them at no cost, essentially kind of disrupting our own business model quite massively. But at the same time we were supporting some very successful businesses as well.

Jarra Borman:
So what an incredible exercise that was. Like the whole team came together from New Zealand and the Philippines and we all worked incredibly hard to set up structures where we could deliver those websites. Pretty quickly we realized that there’s actually going to be a skill gap as well. So we didn’t just create e commerce templates that we could give away for free. We also created the GM Academy, which was a training program where people could learn how to manage e commerce sites and load e commerce sites and so on. So we had a way for people to upskill and be part of the digital economy. And we created this. What I thought was we still to this day, I think is an incredible ecosystem.

Jarra Borman:
The problem was we were just one business trying to do it by selves, right? And while we were able to work out how to deploy websites really efficiently and effectively and host them and optimize everything and build production lines and and so on, we were just trying to do it by ourselves. There wasn’t a lot of support for that program coming through from government or anything like that, which we kind of expected there might be, you know, like, based on the severity of the situation, but it didn’t quite eventuate.

Paul Spain:
And there’s always this thing when you give something away free, whether the value of it will be, will be understood. It’s certainly going to cost you and your team. I’m sure there are some areas where there are ways to do things at a near zero sort of incremental cost, but picking that wasn’t the case here. So what were the sort of challenges that you dealt with when it came to giving the websites, the e commerce websites away for free?

Jarra Borman:
Yeah, it’s a great point. And I think that’s something we took away from that initiative. I think, you know, is that you can’t just give stuff away for free. People either, they don’t trust it, they don’t value it. And ultimately I think that was potentially the key downfall of that program. Like I would say we were hoping to help hundreds of businesses. I would say we probably had dozens of businesses that engaged with us in the right way, got something out of it and were able to like navigate through those lockdowns with our support. But.

Jarra Borman:
And it was things like there was this one company I worked with, they made their own health creams and things and sold them at the markets. Markets were no longer running. Right. And we helped them set up an online shop and they were able to sell again. And just, it was just such a lovely experience to support them through that process. So there were lots of stories like that that were really positive. But we also got weighed down by like there was probably three or four hundred applications from people that we accepted that then just didn’t do their bit. They didn’t fill out some really basic forms to give us the information we needed to load.

Jarra Borman:
And so we started having to chase them. And because we were giving it away for free, they didn’t really value it, so they didn’t feel like they had to put their time in. Correspondingly, that was one of the challenges. Or then there was the other end of the spectrum. We’re giving it away for free, so why aren’t you doing all of this other stuff as well? The reality was it was an incredible offer and gift to the business community in New Zealand. We had a 2. The other piece was we had a 2% transaction fee for sales through the website so that we had a way to kind of COVID the hosting costs that scaled with the revenue. And a lot of people were like, that’s the trick.

Jarra Borman:
You’re going to try and fleece us with 2%. You do the numbers and it doesn’t really kind of stack up. But what we did is we then, okay, 2% up to a normal hosting fee of say $100 and no more and just try and counter it. Because we were getting people trying to tell us that that, that was, that was the trick. We were just trying to get 2% of their online revenue. So which was, which was kind of ironic because at the same time you had Shopify, which was a monthly fee plus a percentage of revenue. And no one was questioning that. But I don’t know, it was just an unusual experience to go through.

Jarra Borman:
And I know at a certain point I was on the phone with a gentleman and I was trying to sell him a free website and I realized maybe we, we’re trying too hard here. Maybe, maybe we haven’t quite got this right. I think we did it with the best intentions and we helped some quite a few businesses through it, but ultimately I’d say it wasn’t successful. We didn’t have the impact we wanted by any stretch, but we did learn a lot from it, like learning how to gear up to be able to do that. We learned to leverage automation tools even more and also how to streamline processes and leverage our offshore capabilities to be able to deliver at that sort of scale without it breaking the bank, because we were doing it on our own.

Paul Spain:
Fantastic. Well, that’s probably a good juncture to sort of delve in a little bit to leverage of automation, but also offshore resourcing. And when it comes to scaling a business, automation can be absolutely key, but also having access to the right sort of resourcing for the work that needs to be carried out. You know, keen to hear a little bit from you around that journey. You’d already highlighted that the business had been using international team for, you know, for quite some time. So quite an early adopter of actually having that operation there in the Philippines. So walk us through how that looked and the learnings that came through when it very much was a remote. Well, not even remote first, remote only type of way that we largely had to operate during COVID Yeah.

Jarra Borman:
So the journey that Zeald as an organisation had with using global labour teams started quite early on. I mean, just even getting enough software developers in New Zealand because the skill set was, in short, there was a shortage of people with that skill set. Meant that we were having to look offshore and there was a lot of other organisations doing the same thing. Even in the early days.

Paul Spain:
Yeah. So very common in the startup world. Right there. Quite a bunch of companies that are remote only tech startups that have just got different people wherever they can find the expert skills that they need. And your location becomes virtually irrelevant. There are obviously things to think about with time zones and ways that those get addressed.

Jarra Borman:
Yeah, for sure. So we started going down that path, looking at contractors offshore and found that the quality and the ability to kind of incorporate them properly into our workflows, it just was a bit hit and miss. And so it was originally decided to look at the Philippines based around that time zone and work with an organisation there to help us build a. Build a team. And it became so successful that we actually created our own legal entity within the Philippines and contracted our staff directly and set up our office there. And our CEO was actually in the Philippines when Covid hit and got stuck there. Okay, so. And no way home.

Jarra Borman:
He hasn’t actually. I don’t know if he’s actually been back. He’s set himself up there really nicely. He loves it over there. Built A house and everything. But he works remotely from the Philippines, an English gentleman by the name of Andrew Forsyth. And yeah, so he actually got stuck there during COVID and worked with the team in the Philippines to help grow their capabilities and streamline things. And what we found is over time it was such a critical part of how we were able to operate successfully in our competitive environment.

Jarra Borman:
We actually started to have our customers that had e commerce websites, for example, asking us if we could help them source people to fill skill gaps within their organisations. And so it kind of came about with, with one of our E commerce customers not wanting to spend like an hourly rate with us to get a website administrator to load all their product content, which was quite a like big job, was like almost a full time job. And so we were like, well we can, we can hire someone for you. We’ll, we’ll manage them and contract them in the Philippines and they, they just work for you and report directly to you. And so we started down this path of being able to offer remote employees for our customers based on demand and that just started to grow organically over time. Right.

Paul Spain:
So this was the organic beginning of what became Outrun Global.

Jarra Borman:
That is correct, yeah. So eventually, yeah, we formalised it became Outrun Global and it’s gone from strength to strength because there’s this real, there’s this confluence of factors we see in the market at the moment. You’ve got the rise of and access of global labor. So you’ve got whole countries like the Philippines. That’s one of their major exports, right. Is their talent and remote workforce. Then you’ve got the technology changes that were brought on and precipitated by Covid where everyone’s used to doing video conferencing. Now it’s just a normal thing.

Jarra Borman:
It wasn’t before that. And so having an employee that is working remotely, whether they are in the south island or they’re in the Philippines, it doesn’t make any difference anymore. And the third is the rise of AI. And when you’re able to combine all of these things together, which is what Outrun does as a service, you have quite an incredible mix of services to really unlock the capabilities within an organisation.

Paul Spain:
Fascinating. Now some organisations have outsourced their direct first line sort of customer interactions offshore. Sometimes that side of things hasn’t, you know, hasn’t gone so well. Have you landed on a, I guess an approach that tends to consistently deliver a good result for your customers. Customers as well as for the customer? You know, I guess these are experiences you would have learned in house as well.

Jarra Borman:
Absolutely. So, yeah. And the short answer is yes. And the reason being is traditionally, when you’re looking at outsourcing, look, it’s actually something that big global companies have been doing for decades. Right. But they generally do it at a process level or a process group level. So essentially they outsource their entire call center or they outsource their entire finance teams or something like that, and they engage an organisation to own that business process and deliver the outcome. And as a result of that traditional outsourcing model, you lose the ability to control quality.

Jarra Borman:
It’s kind of in a little bit of a black box. You don’t really see what’s going on. And as a result, you do tend to get those sort of outcomes where the quality of the call centre work is not quite what you’d like because you’re not directly managing those people.

Paul Spain:
I imagine that’s probably got a lot better over the years and I think of my own experiences with calling. Yeah, when you’re talking to an international call centre, it’s probably not.

Jarra Borman:
It’s not as bad as it is, not as bad as day, different to

Paul Spain:
what it was when we first encountered it. Right. So that has certainly matured.

Jarra Borman:
That has improved. The way that we do things, though, is slightly different. We actually hire somebody that works within your organisation and directly reports into your organisation. And kind of essentially in the same way that we incorporated our offshore teams into our organisation at zild, we allow organisations to do that themselves. So they don’t just have a remote employee that’s. That’s managed by somebody else. They actually have that person join the team and become part of the organisation. As a result, that quality control and those sort of issues are managed in exactly the same way as you would if it was somebody that worked in the office next door.

Paul Spain:
Now, when we caught up recently, you shared with me about pretty big thing that happened in your world that changed the way that you’ve been able to work.

Jarra Borman:
Yeah, for sure. So right through my. Well, like through Up FM and through Yellow and early days at Zeald, for me, output represented effort. Right. So if you needed something done, you just put in more and more time. That was the quality that you had. You’d use that and get more output. And unfortunately I had an accident in 2019 and I did some pretty serious damage to my lower back and it was misdiagnosed as a hip problem and so didn’t really get any proper kind of support or treatment for it until things got really dire in 2022.

Jarra Borman:
And I actually basically lost the ability to walk. I was in so much pain. I was bedridden and couldn’t function. Dose up on medication and just trying to stop spasms and leg pain and everything like that. It was pretty heavy.

Paul Spain:
Yeah, it’s pretty huge.

Jarra Borman:
Yeah. And so I literally lost. Lost the ability to walk there for a while. And so that was. That happened quite suddenly.

Paul Spain:
I was this for. Are you talking a few days? Is this what sort of feel?

Jarra Borman:
So, so what had. Like the original injury was 2019. I’d had some pretty big flare ups, one of which had rushed to hospital. Took me like about a week or two to recover from. And so there were these regular flare ups. And then at the start of 2022, I started getting just consistent pain in my leg and it was becoming more and more difficult to move. And I also realized that I started letting so many things in life go. I’d stopped coaching the kids soccer, I’d stopped doing this because I was just trying to avoid being in pain.

Jarra Borman:
And so I’d started engaging with a new specialist at the start of 2022 and he’d actually worked out that there was some, some damage to discs and they were impacting nerves. And so I was probably going to need surgery anyway, but got to. I think it was around July in 2022 and had done a trip up to Auckland and so on. Got back and. And it just got. It just. Something went and I just couldn’t walk any more and I just couldn’t do anything. So I kind of got surgery booked in pretty quickly because I’d already been engaged with someone to have what was called a double discectomy where they try and shape the discs away from the nerves.

Jarra Borman:
And that was my first experience going in for surgery. Like having someone kind of go in and cut into your back was pretty scary. But I tried to continue to work how I could in and around it. So within a couple of weeks, so I think it was even a week or so after the first surgery, I was back to doing a couple of hours a day because I had so many projects that still needed to function. And so how were you able to work?

Paul Spain:
Because you would have been on your back recovering, would you? Yeah, yeah.

Jarra Borman:
So I was literally lying in bed using a laptop and like joining video calls without the video on. No one needs to see me from that angle or. But yeah, so. So I would just join calls and answer emails and just try and keep things ticking over. And I remember quite vividly it was probably the second day Back at work after that, and that was just the first surgery. CEO got in touch, said, oh, look, we need to have a chat. And so, yeah, we jumped on a call. I was a little bit worried.

Jarra Borman:
I’ve just had a major injury and I’ve got a long recovery ahead of me and I’m being asked for a chat. And the first words out of his mouth was, I’ve talked to the chairman and we’ve decided we’re going to need to make some changes based on your injury. And my heart just dropped. I was just like, oh, no, here we go. I’m going to have to deal with that as well as everything else. And it was the complete opposite. They said, look, we value what you can do so much that we want to strip away everything that’s operational. There’s so much of your role that you do right now that we can get other people to do, but there are parts of what you do there’s no one else can do.

Jarra Borman:
So I actually got promoted to the director of strategy role for the group. And I was looking after an agency at the time. They got other people to manage all of those aspects. And so I just looked at specific project work, strategic initiatives, and just gave me the opportunity to just dip in when I could each day and slowly build up time and be quite productive. Even though I was now down to this very narrow amount of time and I’m still not back to full time, I can only sit in a chair like this for maybe an hour or two at most. So it was quite an experience to have to go from. You just work longer and get more time to, okay, how do I work with other teams and figure out a way to be really productive in that environment? And unfortunately, that became life for a couple of years. So I had the first surgery, was a failure, and I had to have a revision December of that year.

Jarra Borman:
So a couple of months later and then try and start from from scratch again. Kind of almost got to recovery midway through 2023 before it kind of went again and went through a series of steroid injections to try and work out where it was coming from. And by the time I got to the start of 2024, I was like, I just can’t take this anymore. And I had to go and get booked in for what’s called a fusion, where they remove the disc and so on. I’d been trying to avoid that because it’s pretty major surgery and has some risk.

Paul Spain:
What are the risks with a surgery?

Jarra Borman:
Well, it’s. I mean, I think it’s got like a 90% success rate. The risks are that you get left with like just as much, if not worse pain, but there’s a good chance that it works. So had to take the take the risk. So I did that in 2024 and then I actually got back to 95% healthy again. Like towards the end of 2024, I was actually able to travel up to Auckland. I’d just done a couple of trips to work with strategic partners here. Like being able to build capacity again.

Jarra Borman:
I felt like I was back to myself. And then I had an accident at physio where we just did something that wasn’t in hindsight, was very unwise. And the fusion locks down part of your spine puts pressure on the structures above and below. And it damaged the structures above the fusion. And I was back to not walking for most of 2025. It’s only really been this year that I’ve been able to start heading out into the world again and seeing people even then, it’s a little bit limited, but it really, like, it’s not something I try to look at the bright side, what did I learn from it and everything like that. It’s certainly not something I wish on anyone to go through, but just that moving from this understanding that I just need to work harder to how do I apply my time and thinking in a way that is productive was such a big change. And I almost go on about it a little bit too much to my friends who I see still doing things and just working lots of hours and so on, it’s like there’s another way we can do this.

Jarra Borman:
And it was such, I suppose, a kind of a formative experience to go through. And it’s influenced a lot of what I do and what I’ve designed at Outrun in terms of our activity analysis process, where we go into an organisation and we don’t look at roles, which is a traditional kind of archaic structure, which is an accumulation of tasks and activities that has just always been that way. And we look at what are those tasks and activities across an organisation that don’t have the same cross profile as others. So essentially any given role, especially in the knowledge economy, is made up of over 50% of the tasks are things that aren’t the skills that the person was hired to do. It’s quite incredible when you stop and actually think about it, right?

Paul Spain:
It’s so. It’s so true. And those things can be, you know, fairly draining on an individual having to do absolutely, you know, tasks that maybe they’re not. So they’re not so keen on, they’re not suited to.

Jarra Borman:
And it’s just the way that we’ve always done it. Right. We’ve always had a role and there’s a set of responsibilities for this business unit and so that gets organized between everyone that we have. We look at roles in that way. And so, yeah, this process that I’ve been through and an actually lived process where I’ve actually had to try and work out another way to be productive, and also had incredible support from an organisation that had the skills to be able to implement something, has allowed us to build this process where we can go into an organisation, as I said, and analyze the activities that they have and try and work out ways to pull them off the people involved. Liberating them in their time and allowing them to focus on the skills that they actually have can be an absolute game changer for an organisation and an individual as well.

Paul Spain:
So maybe run us through what that sort of process tends to look like and what you end up with.

Jarra Borman:
Yeah. So possibly just a little bit of background just to what I mean by activities and tasks, we tend to look at things from using the APQC process classification framework. So at the top level you’ve got all work divided into categories and then you’ve got process groups and processes, then you’ve got activities and then a task is the smallest unit of work. I like to look at things at the activity level because it’s a group of tasks that have a similar kind of feel to them. So what we generally do is we’d go in and do an activity analysis workshop where we look through different and look at different lenses through the business. What are those repetitive tasks that are being done that are just grinding and slowing the business down? Maybe something that has a process that you could just write out the process and anyone could pick that process up and do it and deliver it effectively. Right. And so you go through and start to identify these little pockets of activities right across the organisation, which can actually be grouped into clusters and then given to somebody to own.

Jarra Borman:
And even if you just got a local administrator to do some of those admin tasks, you’d actually have a really positive impact on the organisation as a whole. You then assign that to someone offshore with an even lower cost profile who’s got some AI skills as well, to be even more productive and efficient. And you can really unlock the capabilities within an organisation. And most organisations haven’t taken the time to look at things through that lens before, so they usually find it Pretty enlightening to go. I hadn’t even really looked at how everyone was working in my organisation before. This changes the way I see my organisation and maybe how I’ll allocate resources in the future. And it’s not necessarily about replacing people, it’s actually about liberating them to a certain extent. Because especially in today’s economic climate where businesses are maybe having to do some contracting, often they’re shedding headcount and they’re reducing their resources and capability.

Jarra Borman:
The work still needs to be done and they’re essentially loading more and more work onto the people that remain and burning them out. And going through it can be quite a difficult cycle. Whereas if there’s some task and activity relief that you can provide, it allows those people with the skills you need to focus on revenue generation and strategic initiatives.

Paul Spain:
So how did that play out for you? Did your role change enough that effectively you had exited from those tasks for the most part that weren’t the best for you and you were able just to zoom in on the things where you’re really going to deliver value? Was that the change in.

Jarra Borman:
Absolutely, yeah. Yeah. So there was some. So I’ve got a small set of clients I work with directly and help them with their solutions. I work quite closely with one of our strategic partners, which is MediaWorks. Kind of looped back into radio. Kind of makes sense. Right.

Jarra Borman:
So we help deliver their Google Ads and SEO services. And so I was able to focus on helping train their sales team and those products and services and work together in that partnership that’s nearly five years old now we’ve been been doing that. So that kind of coincided a lot with my time working from often lying from bed. But they understood and we were able to work really effectively together and grow that partnership through it. But by not having those other tasks, I was able to put enough time into initiatives like that to help them grow.

Paul Spain:
Yeah. Great. Doing that work of looking at the activities and analyzing it. This also crosses into the world of AI, doesn’t it?

Jarra Borman:
Absolutely. It’s almost the first step you need to go through. Right. A lot of people and you would have had plenty of conversations with other organisations about this of late. There’s a perception that AI is there to replace people. And as good as it is and as amazing as the outputs from AI are, you can’t just take a role and put in an AI agent and replace it. It doesn’t work like that. And so this lens of looking at how we work, and that’s my real key message I think we need to change the way we work.

Jarra Borman:
I’ve had to. I’ve been forced to. It was a hard way to do it. Hopefully I can help other people do it without having to go through the same level of literal pain. But if you go through and look at tasks and activities in your organisation and start to allocate them to special specialists, it also is the first step to being able to create automation and agents that can support with those tasks. Because it’s at that task and activity level, you can deploy agents and AI far more effectively than at a role level or a department level.

Paul Spain:
Yeah, I agree. And that’s certainly been the experience that myself and my team have had. And you can get a real unlock as well, not just on being able to have certain things picked up by AI, but actually being able to lift the quality of what you do and what you deliver in certain areas as well. Right. So there becomes that sort of balancing act of how much do we focus on maybe getting better and delivering a better result in a particular area versus letting things go as well. That can be a pressure. Have you thought much about that? And how do you get that balance, right, between taking something off the plate that look, an AI can handle this task, or oh, actually should we double down in a particular area because the technology can do that so well and so efficiently.

Jarra Borman:
So I think there’s kind of two parts to this. The first bit I think it’s quite important to understand is the way that I see, and especially as an organisation, we see the levels of AI adoption. And as you move through those different kind of classifications or categories of AI adoption, the answer to the other question becomes a little bit more obvious. So in the starting point, you’ve got basically no AI adoption. Right. And so that’s a lot of businesses still there, a little bit scared, don’t know quite where to turn and what steps to take. Lots more starting to take those first steps where you move into the space where you’ve got some level of AI in support. And this is where I think most businesses should be at.

Jarra Borman:
At the very least, some of them are trying to jump too far ahead too quickly. But if you have AI in a supporting role, so it’s human led and AI supported, you can actually improve productivity, you can improve output and quality and so on, and do so in a really nice controlled way where you’re letting the technology help and really allowing the skills of your team and your organisation to shine through. And so that’s kind of where we sit with Outrun for The most part is we provide access to global labor that’s augmented or supported or enhanced by AI. And so that’s what we call human led. Then you’ve got level three, where this is where some of the power users are at. And of certainly got some power users in my organisation who are at this level where it becomes AI led, there’s still human intervention, but you’re now allowing that AI to work in a more autonomous manner, but you’ve still got human input and oversight. Level four is agentic, where it’s totally. The AI agent looks after everything.

Jarra Borman:
And the reality is we’re not really at level 4 as much as there is a lot of talk about it being at that level where it can have complete autonomy and do everything for you, that most of the trials that I’ve seen in that regard have kind of not played out quite so well and fall back on some level of human support. So understanding those different levels is really, really important. For me personally, when I’m using AI, there’s certain things that I will. If it’s difficult and I need to think something through, if it’s like a strategy document or something like that, I’ll often write that by hand still. Because I really want to crystallize my thinking when I’m creating that document. So it’s a lot harder, takes more time, but I’m challenging myself to think through. Have I really understood and thought through this process? If I’m researching and collaboration, definitely using AI to come up with ideas and things like that, or if it’s something I know really well and I just need to output it, I’m there within that space, or if it’s something I’m doing on a repetitive basis, then, yeah, I’m looking to see what I can do to automate there as well.

Paul Spain:
Yeah. Any words of caution that you would, you know, you would share?

Jarra Borman:
Absolutely. Honestly, it kind of scares me, like anyone that kind of understands the power of the technology that’s being developed and the speed at which it’s being developed should be understandably cautious. I think most credible AI researchers are saying, let’s slow down a little bit until we understand what we’ve actually built here. When they start talking about emergent properties within AI systems, you know, they’re basically having outputs they didn’t really intend and it’s doing things they don’t. Didn’t really know. So these AI tools are really powerful and they’re moving really fast. And so that’s why I do recommend looking at some of those Level two And three, adoption, where you’ve still got human LED or human supported because then you’re still in the loop. The other thing to keep in mind is a lot of these tools when you run them, they want access to everything to operate and they’ll constantly be trying to get access to everything.

Jarra Borman:
And there’s real massive security implications for that. So where possible, all AI systems need to be essentially within a harness, within guardrails and given the information they need to operate, but not given access to everything, because that’s another common issue as you just leak all your information out into these systems.

Paul Spain:
Yeah, that’s a problem. Sometimes when we look at technology, it creates experience and results that can be dehumanizing or just not, not, you know, feeling that great to be involved in. Whether that’s, you call up a call centre and you know, you’ve got all sorts of menus and you can’t speak to the right person that can actually help you. There’s a whole lot of variations on that. How, how do you think about that, that balancing of sort of, you know, human versus autonomous technologies?

Jarra Borman:
Well, I think you’ve got to be really intentional with where you deploy AI and if there’s a customer experience you’re trying to create, then ensuring that there’s a human as part of that process is really quite important. We can do a lot with digital experiences. We prove that with websites and E commerce and things like that. There’s always going to be that point where you’ve got an edge case that needs human intervention. And so when you create those experiences, look at what you’re trying to solve and make sure you’ve got a way for a human to be involved when it falls outside those kind of parameters, at least at a high level. That’s kind of how I see it. But there’s always going to be, I think, this need to have a people to people relationship. You can pick up so much more nuance sitting down in an environment like this, where we’re chatting together than you would ever be able to gather from some sort of AI generated conversation with a customer or something of that nature.

Paul Spain:
This mix of, for yourself and the team in New Zealand, you’re able to work with kind of core local resource. You’ve got technology and AI and you’ve got a remote team. How do you find that sort of works together, having that mix of capabilities and how do they cross over?

Jarra Borman:
First of all, our entire organisation is remote now, right? So like we don’t have an office anymore. We actually like Covid as A result, we never went back to the office. Interestingly, with Outrun, we’ve got the option for people to hire someone remotely and have them work in an office. And they invariably. Every business we work with goes, no, it’s going remote. Let’s just let them work from home. That actually creates a really fascinating dynamic because we, as an organisation, both in New Zealand and in the Philippines, can hire really, really exceptional talent because there’s a massive benefit to working from home. And so by embracing especially that remote side of it, we are able to access incredible talent in both countries and even in Australia as well.

Jarra Borman:
So that side of things works really well and harmoniously across the board.

Paul Spain:
And do you or your clients at times get pushback from their customers over. Hold on, these people aren’t all. In New Zealand. That’s not very patriotic. I mean, how do people think about that? Because if we look at, say, Australia, us, different markets, the level of resourcing that’s done offshore in those countries, by my mind, would be a lot higher than what we’re used to in New Zealand. Do you see some different patterns there?

Jarra Borman:
Yeah, look, we’re really behind in New Zealand, to be perfectly blunt. Australia have embraced remote working and global labor teams in a way that we just haven’t even started, really, in New Zealand. But I mean, in terms of people’s perception of it, there is still this perception that if you’re outsourcing, it means that you’re restructuring, you’re getting rid of jobs in New Zealand and you’re just sending them offshore. That’s not the reality for most organisations that pick up this sort of service. It’s about picking up someone that can own a set of tasks and liberate the local team and provide more cost flexibility within the organisation, maybe even allow it to get back into growth mode. And so some pretty challenging economic conditions. So there is a mindset change that I think needs to happen within New Zealand to just be more open to what’s possible by accessing offshore labour and AI enhancement in this way.

Paul Spain:
And in terms of lifting our productivity, which is a challenge for New Zealand as a nation. Right. In terms of lifting that productivity, if we can double down on the street of the people that we have here in New Zealand, so they’re doing the most valuable part of what they’re capable of and maybe not doing so much of the mundane, monotonous tasks, taking up their time that are often less valuable.

Jarra Borman:
Absolutely.

Paul Spain:
Is that how you see New Zealand’s future? Getting that uplift from a productivity perspective? Obviously Technology’s in the mix there as well. But has that been the extreme experience of Zeald and Outrun Global?

Jarra Borman:
Absolutely. I think it’s the answer to our productivity problem. This is something that’s been bouncing around for a long time within New Zealand. How do we lift wages, how do we grow our organisations and improve our output and productivity? And a lot of it is that we are stuck within that traditional role based mindset where you hire someone for their skills and then load them up with all of these other tasks and not allow them to actually leverage their skills properly to help you grow. So if we were able to support people in this way, what it creates is leverage. Right? So you’ve got one person that can actually fully utilise their skills, maybe not 100% of the time, but if we can lift it from under 50% to 75%, that’s going to make a massive difference to organisations within New Zealand. And so if you’ve got one person who’s got access to a number of specialists offshore who can help them do the things that they need to get done, those grinding tasks, those creating those reports, those processing invoices and data entry, or even just loading all the products on their e commerce site that you can never get around to, which is going to boost your SEO because you’ve written a whole bunch of really nice product content instead of just scraping it off other sites. Those are the types of things that become possible when you have access to resources like this.

Jarra Borman:
And I personally believe that’s one of the big things we’re missing in New Zealand is this ability to really raise our output by taking advantage of global labor and automation and AI.

Paul Spain:
Fantastic. Well, I think we’re about out of time, but I wonder if you could leave listeners with one tip, something that they could action today or this week that you think would help them, what would that be?

Jarra Borman:
Okay, so I would say if you’re like a business owner or manager and you’re organizing things, you should be looking at what are the things your team shouldn’t be doing. That’s the lens, right? Instead of going, what do we need to load them up with? What should they not be doing? To allow them to do more of what they should.

Paul Spain:
Fantastic. That’s great. Full of insights. Thank you very much. Jarrah Borman. Been a real privilege to have you on the show.

Jarra Borman:
Absolute pleasure. Thanks, Paul.

Paul Spain:
Cheers. Wow, what a fascinating chat with Jarrah Borman. I trust you’ve come away with some valuable insights and practical ideas that you can apply within your own organisation. From digital transformation and remote teams through to AI adoption, productivity and leadership. There were plenty of lessons packed into the conversation. Today. The New Zealand Business Podcast has been brought to you by One New Zealand alongside Gorilla Technology, making tech enablement and cybersecurity easy for mid size and smaller businesses and by Outrun Global Remote staffing to help your local teams work smarter, not harder. Be sure to listen in to our other episodes featuring many of New Zealand’s most incredible leaders, including Brooke Roberts of Sharesies, Sir Peter Beck of Rocket Lab, Cecilia Robinson of MyFoodbag, Sir Stephen Tyndall, and many more.

Paul Spain:
And be sure to share this episode with a friend or colleague who you think will benefit from it. Thanks for listening in. This is Paul Spain signing out. I’ll catch you again on the next episode.