Kylie Matthews and Michele Wilson
Co-Founders, AWWA Period Care
Clothing/Healthcare, Blenheim

Kim: AWWA was referred to me by New Zealand Trade and Enterprise. After some online research by Michele and a couple of compatibility and scoping coffee meetings, I was engaged to help the founders focus on the strategic needs of their business and support them in navigating the challenges of growing and managing a successful company. While both Michele and Kylie were passionate about AWWA and dedicated to its success, they had reached a point where they needed guidance to move forward in the most constructive way.

Initially, my work centred around helping the owners align on the business's future direction and providing the tools and frameworks necessary for them to effectively collaborate. As we worked through these foundational elements, it became clear that the best path forward for both was to prepare AWWA for sale, ensuring that the business continued to thrive while providing the right exit opportunity for the owners.

Throughout the process, I provided monthly one-on-one coaching sessions and facilitated group meetings with both owners. These sessions were crucial in maintaining focus on the business's needs, ensuring accountability, and fostering constructive dialogue. I also facilitated strategic conversations around the fundamentals of preparing for an acquisition: What is the best time to sell? What does success look like? How can we align on the exit strategy and the steps required to get there?

From these honest foundations, we tackled key strategic steps: building clear KPIs, installing stronger accountability measures, preparing PR strategies, and curating the right team to support the exit. I structured a facilitation plan with myself as independent advisor, coordinating time priorities, key actions, and clear next steps. Maintaining professionalism at all times, I navigated the different dynamics between the owners, ensuring the focus remained firmly on the end goal.

Preparing a business for sale requires much more than financial housekeeping – it demands strategic readiness across every part of the business. Strong operational systems, clear growth metrics, robust legal and compliance frameworks, and consistent performance are just the beginning. It also calls for steady, strategic leadership behind the scenes – ensuring the owners remain aligned, focused, and equipped to make the big calls when it matters most.

Importantly, I guided Michele and Kylie through the emotional and practical challenges of business valuation – balancing the tendency to either undervalue “your baby” or overinflate it – and connected them to a trusted broker from my network to ensure a fair and successful negotiation.

In the end, Michele and Kylie achieved a great outcome, protecting the brand they had worked so hard to build and unlocking the next exciting chapter of their entrepreneurial journeys. It’s always a thrill to see wāhine to soar – and it was a privilege to help guide them through this pivotal moment with structure, clarity, and absolute professionalism.

Michele: I initially found Kim on LinkedIn. We had a few conversations to work out what was going to be the best fit for me and the best fit for AWWA because we weren’t quite sure in which direction we wanted to go. From the beginning she was very calm, understanding and highly rational, so I knew she was going to have a good impact on the business. I also loved that Kim bought Te Ao Māori into our conversations, which was critical for me.

Kylie: We were at a pivotal moment in the business – looking at our growth strategy, how to expand to export markets, and then move towards acquisition, and that was a little bit outside Michele’s and my areas of expertise. We’d both had successful businesses before, but we'd never scaled and taken it to that next level. We also needed to build up an advisory board and have an advisor to support us – someone who had that deeper breadth of knowledge to help us make informed decisions and move forward with clarity.

Michele: Kim was really brought in to help us get the very best outcome we could for the acquisition; making sure our brand was still intact and was culturally strong and relevant. It was great having her as that crucial third person, helping us get all our ducks in a row for acquisition. Kim helped us with our marketing, operations, big decisions, even who to sell to – introducing us to the broker who oversaw the acquisition. Kim sat on our board and through regular check-ins made sure we ticked everything off our list, getting things unstuck so that we could move forward. 

Kylie: She was incredibly valuable as we moved through the due diligence and sale process [of the business], focusing on that higher level strategic overview, advising us on what we needed to focus on for success and preparing the business for that sale; ‘What are we?’, ‘What does AWWA represent?’, ‘What is it in our business plan that potential buyers want to see?’.

Michele: Kim’s good at taking a high-level approach, seeing the bigger picture, which I think is her superpower, and she got us out of the weeds when it was needed.

Kylie: One of the many things that I really value in Kim, and I value it in anybody, is that honesty, and not being afraid to tell you how it is. She does it with the utmost respect, because she wants to see you succeed. She's also highly knowledgeable, results driven, and solution and future focused. Her direct approach is extremely refreshing but she also worked in a way that enabled Michele and I to be the final decision makers. 

Kim has been key to the success of the business over the past 24 months and having her on board enabled us to address any challenges as they came up. She's also a great person outside of her business nous and a genuinely lovely human.

Michele: I don't think I would have got the good result that I did, and I wouldn't be here now, if it wasn't for Kim’s help. She brought with her a lot of Manaaki and despite her working for the business, she always tuned in with my well-being. I always had the idea that her concern was for me first and foremost, as the shareholder, director and the CEO, and that was always something that she regularly checked in on. I really did love that. As well as being one of my good friends, she's now a part of my network who I’ll always reach out to or think of when other women in business need help.