I left teachers' college at 21, pregnant with my first child. I spent seven years at ASB. Then my husband Eli qualified as a chartered accountant and I saw an opening - I like to say I pimped him out. We opened WE Accounting with one client who didn't pay us: my dad. He did our office fit-out, we did his books.

Fourteen years later we had a team that felt like whānau, a branch in Samoa, hundreds of business owners behind us - mostly Māori and Pacific. In 2025 we sold it. Not because we were finished, but because we never built it to own forever. We built it to outlive us.

Somewhere in the middle of all that I was diagnosed with breast cancer. Four surgeries, a lot of Mexico, and one very clear lesson that now sits under everything I do: live fully, die empty. Don't take your dreams to the grave.

I lost my dad and my Koko in 2017, the same year as my first diagnosis. My grandfather died having lived his purpose. My father died with his still inside him. I know which one I intend to be.

Today I lead WE Mana with Eli, I sit on boards, I'm writing Business the Mana Way, and I'm mum to five sons and grandmother to soon to be six moko. I speak because the gap between what business owners need to know and what they're actually told is enormous - and the cost of it gets measured in families, not spreadsheets.