Rachel Tūhoe  |  Owner, Tūhoe Amenity Services  |  Rotorua

Rachel Tūhoe didn't plan to run a grounds maintenance company. She planned to be a teacher. Three years into a degree in Hamilton, she came home to Rotorua, helped her uncle with a mowing run for a summer, and never really stopped. Twenty-two years later, Tūhoe Amenity Services has 23 staff, 14 vehicles, and contracts with councils, schools, and commercial property managers across the Bay of Plenty.

She describes how it grew the same way every time. "One yes at a time." Someone needed help, she helped them. Someone needed more, she figured out how to do more.

The business got bigger. It also got complicated.

 The question she kept asking

When Rachel came to D/srupt, the business was turning over $4.1 million and she was working harder than the numbers seemed to justify. She knew her customers well. What she didn't have was any real picture of the market she was operating in.

Where it was going, who was winning in it, where the gaps were.

"I didn't even really know what I meant by 'my market' until someone pushed me on it. I'd built the whole thing on gut feel and relationships. That had worked. But I could feel it wasn't going to be enough for whatever came next."

Getting into it

The first session is always direct. We needed to understand Rachel's business from the ground up: what she actually does, who she buys from, who she sells to, and who she's competing with. From there we map the value chain — where her industry sits, how value moves through it, and who captures what. Simple questions, but the answers tell you a lot. You start to see where the business sits in its market, who the real players are, and where the pressure points are.

"They kept asking me why. Not in an annoying way. In a way where I started to hear myself giving answers I didn't actually have evidence for."

That's what we needed. Once we understood the shape of her world, we knew exactly where to look.

What the research showed

Over the following weeks, we mapped Rachel's market from the outside. Demand trends across her sectors. How the competitive landscape was structured. Where value was being created and captured along the service chain. Where the gaps were that nobody was filling.

When we brought the findings back, we put a question to her before showing her anything: which of your markets do you think is growing fastest?

She said local government. She'd built her business there. She knew it well. But the data said something different.

The commercial property sector she'd been treating as secondary was growing faster, with a better margin profile. She'd spent years pursuing volume in a tightening market while a more valuable one was opening up right beside her.

She went quiet for a moment. "It's a strange feeling. Someone sits you down and shows you a map of the territory you've been working in for twenty years. And you realise you'd been navigating by memory."

There was something else. We identified a gap in compliance reporting for commercial property managers, adjacent to work Rachel's team already did. Larger competitors weren't delivering it well and smaller operators couldn't resource it. She'd never seen it because she'd never looked at her market that way. Once we showed her how the value chain worked, it was obvious.

"I'd been so busy running the business I'd stopped looking at it. They handed me a pair of glasses I didn't know I needed."

- Rachel Tūhoe

What she did next

We finished the engagement with a prioritisation session, working through the scenarios together, testing what was real, what was realistic, and what the right sequencing was. Rachel doesn't make decisions quickly, which is a strength. She left with a short list of moves she actually believed in.

She stopped renewing a category of domestic contracts that were high maintenance and low margin. It freed up two crew members for work that was worth doing. She approached three commercial property managers she'd previously ignored. One became a contract. Two are still in progress.

The compliance reporting opportunity is on the list for next year. "I don't want to start something new before I've bedded in what we're already changing. But I know it's there."

Her operations manager said she seems less reactive. Rachel thinks that's about right. "I'm not chasing everything anymore. I know what I'm chasing."

The bigger picture

Her youngest daughter started secondary school this year. Rachel has been thinking about what the business needs to look like in four years, when she wants to work a four-day week. It's the first time she's had a real starting point for that conversation.

 "I used to think I didn't have time for strategy. What I didn't have was a way in. This gave me a way in."

- Rachel Tūhoe