"I'm happy to get my first contract and excited for the season but there's been a lot of hard work behind it," Tickner hastens to add.
"It's hard when you have to work and play cricket and I know a lot of guys for whom it is hard to do that as well as train and go to the gym so it's a good next step," he said.
CD coach Heinrich Malan says Tickner deserves his contract as well as kudos for his venture with Walters.
"Ticks has set up a coffee business with his partner ... it's great to see a guy take some initiative for his own life and cricket," says Malan, before naming two other players to round up the 15 contracts on July 12.
While in the Bay, Tickner has worked at City Hire Centre, a business his father, John, owns in Napier and helped out in vineyards through CHB cricket.
Napier-born Tickner spent a decade in the Gold Coast after his family emigrated there when he was a youngster.
He returned to the Bay late in 2015 after he met fellow Ruahine Motors Central Hawke's Bay cricketer Angus Schaw while the pair were playing against each other in Cambridge, England.
Over a few beers Schaw convinced the former Taradale Cricket Club age-group member to return to his birth region to play for CHB.
The former Greenmeadows School pupil, whose grandparents hail from Tikokino, saw it as an opportune time to catch up with friends and family.
Last summer, he was on an "elevated contract", after having accrued enough games to warrant one.
Tickner played all the four and one-dayers in the season and carried out the drinks in the Twenty20 format.
He is mindful securing a contract is one thing, maintaining it is another to remain among a privileged group of young men.
"I think you assume someone is always working harder than you so that's how I think of it and I'm always doing 1 per cent more and, yeah, you still want to play as many games as you can because, at the end of the day, you want to play cricket and win for CD."
The coffee business is the brainchild of Walters - "75 per cent hers and 25 mine".
"I contributed to half the name. Brown Dog's after my father's dog whose name is Bruin [which is brown in Dutch]," he says with a laugh of the Brown Dog Espresso nestled on one side of the Four Square Supermarket, which Walters' sister, Marie and her hubby Michael Percy own, since they began operating on March 5.
Walters, since leaving Napier Girls' High School, has been a barista for nine years after gravitating to Wellington to hone her skills.
She returned to Napier four years later to ply her trade here for a year before going to the Gold Coast where she again met Tickner, a family friend.
"We ended up coming back here separately and then meeting up again in October two years ago."
With Tickner playing cricket in New Plymouth, the couple got talking to coffee suppliers Ozone for their wicked "medium roast blend" that only one other outlet sells in the Bay.
"We fell in love with it," says Walters. "We tried about six other brands of theirs and chose the middle range because we think it's what everyone will love."
While they missed out on last summer, the neighbouring coastal residents have toasted her brew.
"Every time Blair went away to play cricket we put it on the backburner. All we'd do is talk about it and then he'd go again," she says with a grin, realising while working at her sister's supermarket, the place was "screaming out for coffee".
"We just jumped on it and Blair was behind me 100 per cent so he was the one pushing me in the end because we were taking so long.
"We wondered if it was going to work out but he said what have got to worry," she says, indebted her parents, Trevor and Debbie Walters, of Waipukurau, for helping because it entailed a lot more than the budding entrepreneurs had anticipated.
"We've had a lot of help from our family so we owe a lot of people a few coffees."
They are in the process of creating a bigger sitting area down the alleyway for customers in summer.
"We're going to bring street art so it'll be pretty vogue as we'll be bringing a city buzz in a coastal area."
For Tickner, the feeling is he can live another life alongside cricket and Walters although it helps that he loves coffee, too.
"It feels like I'm living two lives," he says, not ruling out going back to England further down the road together to reignite that flame.
With training likely to gather momentum next week, cricket will be top priority for an injury-free Tickner.
"I came from Australia to push for a professional career so I'm halfway there," he says, still keeping that Black Caps dream alive.
