Julie Treanor grows flowers and grows leaders. The Upper Hutt-based floral entrepreneur, leadership developer, and business coach lives a remarkably fulfilling life. When Julie Treanor emigrated to New Zealand from the UK in 2006, she brought with her 20 years of experience in leading and managing communications and marketing teams.
Here she took up a role as GM communications for the Ministry of Social Development before working as a leadership coach and consultant in Wellington. A desire to work with smaller businesses and startups led her to launch Just Lead, a consultancy that focuses on leadership for all humans.
But there was one real passion Julie could not ignore – her passion for growing and supplying flowers. So she started up The Pickery – a small seasonal cut flower growing business with an ethos of using sustainable, environmentally and wildlife-friendly methods of working, and located in Kaitoke, Upper Hutt.
As if that didn’t keep her occupied enough, in 2019, she co-founded The Wellington Flower Collective together with grower Heidi Holbrook, based in Carterton, and working with other small-scale flower growers in the lower North Island selling directly to florists and buyers.
How does she manage all this? “Dividing time between coaching and flowering depends on the time of year, but typically I split my time into two days coaching and three days flowering during the season and then flip to three days coaching and two days flowering out of season,” explains Julie. “It varies, though. No two days or weeks are the same.”
The Wellington Flower Collective is a crucial part of the success of The Pickery, she says, “so I don’t really separate the two.”
Read the complete article at www.nzbusiness.co.nz.