Kiri McRae: From transport logistics to inspiring business mentor

Business mentor Kiri McRae. Photo / Jules Cavanagh.

• Kiri McRae, once passionate about sport and friends, now thrives as a business mentor.
• She overcame early family struggles and a redundancy, leading to a successful logistics career.
• McRae mentors others, emphasising mindset growth and learning from setbacks to achieve business success.

Disruptive in class, passionate about sport and hanging out with friends. It’s not exactly what you might imagine to be the origin of a successful transport logistics career and business mentor, but this is how Kiri McRae describes her passions as a young person.

Now a trustee of her marae as part of Ngāti Pū, Kiri has found immense joy as a business mentor for others. Her journey to this point, however, involved learning a lot for herself.

McRae lost her father at age 12, which meant the family struggled to meet the family budget. On her mother’s advice she studied accounting at university. This led to a career in auditing: “I learned about how important controls are in a business and then as I moved into management, I learned about how important your mindset and your people are.”

She started to formulate how to use “forecasting” to set her own business goals.

Kiri McRae. Photo / Jules Cavanagh.

“When you’re trying to visualise a goal, you can figure out the range of what could happen if everything went wrong, and what could happen if the sky was the limit.”

It’s this mindset following a redundancy that saw Kiri gravitate to the world of transport and logistics, where the daily challenges means she has to find creative solutions.

“There is no utopia there, no absolute ideal. It’s all about understanding the levers that can support efficiencies.”

McRae saw success in her own career as well, an achievement she put down to how she’s shaped her mindset towards business.

“The thing that has worked best for me is before I go into anything, I remember that it’s okay if it is a ‘no’, and reframe it in my mind that success can still look like a ‘no’. There’s always something that I can learn or discover that will turn that ‘no’ into making me that much more agile, knowledgeable, or stronger. You can eliminate possibilities and then concentrate more on what works rather than what’s not.”

Her experiences inspired her to want to help others in their own enterprises, which led to her joining Business Mentors New Zealand, a nationwide network of mentors who volunteer their time to work with businesses for a few hours each month for up to 12 months. Kiri has seen the value supporting others can provide and encourages fellow business owners to involve a mentor of their own.

“What I enjoy the most is seeing someone’s mindset grow. Business owners discover that it’s not about needing to succeed, but being able to appreciate what they are able to achieve, and who they are becoming, in spite of any headwinds that come along. Seeing that growth in the people that I support through mentoring is my mark of business success.