Growing A Successful ICT Business in New Zealand: Christopher Gracie

I sat down recently with Chris Gracie, founder of Pro Partner, an ICT project management business he's built from the ground up over the last four years.

Chris works with medium to large businesses, think multi-million dollar systems like work order management, finance management and asset management, helping them navigate the kind of business-critical technology changes that most of us never see happen behind the scenes.

What struck me most about this conversation wasn't the tech side of things.

It was how honest Chris was about the risk, the sacrifice, and the mindset shifts that come with building something from nothing.

I want to unpack some of that here because I think there's a lesson in it for every business owner, whether you're in ICT or not.

The Catalyst Was Family
Chris had been contracting for about a year after leaving permanent employment when he made the call to start Pro Partner.

But the real catalyst wasn't some burning entrepreneurial itch.

When he and his wife had their first child, they decided they wanted one parent at home.

Chris knew he couldn't sustain that on a single permanent employee's income, and that pushed him to finally act on something that had been "nagging away" at him for years.

What I found interesting is that this is often the most risky time to start a business and Chris admitted as much.

He talked about watching the bank account drain, knowing work was coming but hadn't been paid yet, and having to back himself with a plan to understand cash flow well enough to know they'd recover.

It's a good reminder that you can't remove risk from going into business. You can only plan to mitigate it.

The First Client Came From One Ordinary LinkedIn Post
Chris wasn't an active LinkedIn poster before starting the business.

His first client came through two degrees of separation, an old colleague who'd since moved jobs saw a single post Chris put up. He described it himself as "a shitty post" a photo of an empty chair and an empty phone dock, with a caption along the lines of "this is the beginning of my next chapter, starting a business, reach out if you've got any work."

And to his wonder someone actually did!

Sponsoring A Summit And Bringing A Rally Car
Fast forward to now, and Chris has just sponsored the CIO Innovation Summit in Auckland, with one condition attached to the deal, he wanted to bring his rally car onto the showroom floor.

The metaphor he used to say why he did so goes like this "In rally driving, it's impossible to fill in every pothole or put a hay bale in front of every tree, you can only plan to mitigate the risks you can anticipate."

It's exactly the same in ICT project management. You do the work upfront to identify risks to the business, to personnel, to vendors, to the technology itself, but you can't anticipate everything.

What you can do is have a plan for how you react as a team when something comes up, just like a co-driver's pace notes calling out the corners ahead.

He Doesn't Treat Profit As His Money
This is the bit I think all business owners need to hear.

Chris made a conscious decision, alongside his team, to reinvest profit back into the business rather than take it all out personally.

His words were that the profit the business makes isn't his money, even though it sits in the account and is technically his to take. It's money set aside to reinvest.

That's a mindset that only a small percentage of business owners actually operate with.

Most people, understandably, want to take every dollar out once they start doing well.

Chris has a clear five-to-ten-year vision for where he wants Pro Partner's office to be, and he knows that vision doesn't happen if he's pinching pennies from the business now.

Growing From One Person To Eight Staff
Chris now has eight staff, but he described the first hire as "the scariest thing" he's ever done.

He started with contractors because it was an easier financial decision, a variable, direct cost tied to project work rather than a fixed overhead.

But he was honest that this isn't a healthy long-term model, both financially and because his vision requires people who stick around and carry forward experience with clients.

One thing I really respected was his discipline around the 90-day trial period with structured 30, 60 and 90-day check-ins where he reviews performance against expectations with the employee, so there are no gaps or surprises.

He built the framework using Copilot to help structure the right questions, then tailored it to his business.

Having that objective piece of paper in front of both parties, he said, took the "yuck feeling" out of performance conversations.

AI & Foundations Before Automation
Chris believes you need the foundations right before you can properly leverage automation and AI.

As he put it, "there's no point paving a road that goes around in circles."

He shared a conversation with a prospective client whose business had grown 40% in headcount purely to manage and control the rollout of AI internally a cautionary tale that it's not a silver bullet that removes work.

It often creates more of it, at least initially.

Advice For Anyone Thinking About Making The Leap
For contractors thinking about starting their own business,

Understand how long your network can sustain you before you need to rely on marketing spend or other ways to generate pipeline. Know your numbers, forecast your cash flow, and be honest with yourself about whether you actually want to build something bigger or whether you're happy where you are, and that's okay too.

Chris was also refreshingly honest about admin.

Hiring an administrator early on was one of the best decisions he made, freeing him up to focus on higher-value tasks.

For anyone nervous about that cost work out the differential between what the admin work costs you versus what you could be earning doing something else with that time instead.

Takeaway
What I loved most about this conversation is that Chris hasn't sugarcoated any of it, the fear of the first hire, the sacrifice of family time, the risk of watching a bank account drain, the missed hobbies.

But he's also crystal clear on his vision, disciplined about reinvesting in the business rather than stripping it for personal gain, and deliberate about building relationships that compound over years, not weeks.

If you're sitting on the fence about taking your own leap, there's a lot here worth sitting with.

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This article is based on insights from the Next Advisory podcast, where Luke and Phil help New Zealand business owners navigate economic challenges and build better businesses. Visit nextadvisory.nz to find out how we can help you.

Checkout more of our blog content at https://nextadvisory.nz/podcast