Swain & Co

Business should be joyful - not a constant source of stress.

Yet here you are - brilliant at what you do, successful by most measures, but wondering why running your business feels so damn hard some days.

Shh don't tell the advisors, but you don't need more advice. What you need is a fractional business manager - someone who gets it & helps you focus on what will actually make a difference.

Hi 👋🏻 that's where I come in - here to infuse your business with joy (and solid AF commercial outcomes).

Unlike VAs who handle admin, I bring strategic thinking AND execution. I'm your commercial sounding board who actually does stuff. We work together for 90 days to see what's going on (and getting pushed aside), what can be removed, changed, delegated or automated, then create the plan to get it done - whatever your business needs to bring your je ne sais quoi to the front & centre of the work you do.

What this delivers:
→ Strategic clarity without consultant waffle

→ Real-world solutions that honour your reality

→ Someone to bounce ideas off

→ Progress on things that actually make a difference

→ Systems & processes that stick

→ Change that sneaks up on you (humans need time to shift habits)

I specialise in 90-day resets & fractional partnerships for established consultants, plus support growing businesses preparing to hire their first manager.

The results? Clients go from 60-hour weeks to proper holidays, constant firefighting to strategic thinking, "how did I get here?" to "hell yes, I love this."

Ready to stop feeling like you're making it up on the daily?

→ Join my Monday office hours (12-1pm)

→ Book a virtual cuppa 

→ Visit www.alanaswain.com 

You bring your brilliance, I'll bring the practical support & strategic thinking. Let's make your business work for you, not against you.

Director

Me-Moir

Freeing trapped photos. Slayer of photo purgatory. 
Bringing back old school photo albums with convenience. 
Determined our next generation will know where they came from so they know where they are going.

TBH - life with one business and 3 kids under 5 is pretty hectic, so ye old Me-Moir is on the back burner until 2025 but I'm so excited to kick things back off and get more photos into your hands then!!

Chief Memory Officer

Your Business Club by Your Success Team

** Now included in my weekly office hours!!** 

Connection and help - by business owners, for business owners.  


When you're in small* business, there's common themes:

💰 You're not making enough money (or if you are, it's not in the right places at the right time and cashflow is bloody hard) 
⏰  You've not got enough time (for all the things, ideas and stuff you want and need to do) 
💡 You have SO many ideas and working out which are most impactful is HARD work
😔 It's bloody lonely at times and the rest of the online world looks like it's got it's 💩 sorted. 

We help with that. Your Business Club is built for connection and help - by business owners, for business owners.  

So who are we? 

Your Success Team is a collective of business experts, formed by  myself and my business partner Robyn Brown. We're heart based entrepreneurs, who have created NZ's first space built by business owners - for business owners.  

Because, at the end of the day, YOU as the amazing business owner you are, you want to make money from your talents, while living life on your (very unique) terms.  Which is why when we all get the chance to bring our talents, experience and grit to the table, we're going to be amazed at what we’ll create together. 

We're here to help you with truthfulness, doggedness and not a small dose of common sense, walking alongside you, supporting you to run a business where you’re no longer holding all the cards to your chest and trying to do this alone. 

Meet, learn, connect, thrive. Be blinking awesome and make business more fun!

Co-Founder & Business Owner

Ballance Agri-Nutrients Ltd

Created & embedded amazing capability programmes and initiatives that supported the overall development of Ballance's people across New Zealand, including creating a tailored embedded literacy programme, revamped onboarding experience and helping increase the insights from the Employee Experience survey platform.

Organisational Capability Advisor

Westpac New Zealand Limited

180 staff.  3 locations. 2.5 million phone calls per year. Thousands of emails each week.  I loved leading this great team who are the "voice" of Westpac. 

Customers from all walks of life need help in many moments of truth (or transaction) and chose to use us. So that meant I had the very great opportunity leading the team, creating the customer experience which created those moments of real connection with each customer, in the right way for them, treating them with warmth, empathy and respect, taking the fear or stress out of banking jargon and financial situations. 

Our challenge was to create an environment where our amazing people were in a position to be able to do that, for every customer, during every interaction, consistently.  Our diversity and empathy enabled that to happen, alongside the creation of new CX focussed capability programmes including onboarding and upskilling. 

During my time here with these great folks, we dropped out attrition from over 40% to  below 15%, increased staff engagement from the 30% mark to over 70% and onboarded some 70+ new staff within a 12 month period. 

This time also saw the implementation of a full onsite outsourced staffing model (with a further 30+ onboarded, meshing two sets of company values into one site) and the establishment of a cloud based telephony platform. Both required significant change and project management.

Senior Manager Service Contact Centre 

Got asked to come back to the Big Red W.  Hooray - nice to know I was missed.  Red suited me a bit better than Green did.  

What an great new team and role this was! We got cool stuff done, differently! Thinking outside the box to disrupt the norms, for employees, customers, and shareholder impact.  Key focus on CX,  NPS, Revenue and Team Engagement.  Knocked it all out of the park - so the aussies then came to steal our ideas! (more of the details below!) 

It was a huge privilege to set up & lead this amazing team of digital banking advocates.  We  were dedicated to transforming our customer service experiences across a number of interaction points - creating the best of two channels - branch and contact centre for our customers. 

Changing consumer expectations & technological advancements, mean banking relationships are firmly being place in hands of our customers - so that they choose when and where they do their banking.  What I loved about this role, was balancing the dynamic between forging personal connections, balanced with digital advancements, facing into the future while honouring our experience and past. 

Fair to say, I loved this gig.  There was also the HUGE transformation project sitting alongside the executive team and Mckinsey Consultants, with a focus on optimising revenue, decreasing wastage and expenses, and increasing staff and customer satisfaction (hit me  up if you want the war stories from this one - so many lessons, still a few bruises held, totally worth the ride!)

Digital Bank Manager and Change Leader

Kiwibank

Got shoulder tapped. How cool.  

Got to mesh two different brands into one team, in a change adverse community on Auckland's North Shore.  

Tons of fun, lots of learning.  Got to run a post shop and Christmas - ticked that off the bucket list! 

Had an amazing team that went through transformation, new learning and change at a pace that would make eyes water.  They nailed it.  Love them to pieces!!

Local Manager

Turned a team around - from bottom 5 branch to top 5 branch. 

They rocked it.  Loved being in a community, having an impact for my team and those around us.

Bank Manager

Saw all the ways money impacts us humans. 

Helped people suss their finances. Get out of debt. Get on top of bills. Learn how to budget. 

Buy homes, first homes, first investment homes.  Buy new cars, start savings accounts. Plan trips back to the islands to see family. Have money left over to send to family.  Got to see their joy. Loved it.

Customer Banking Consultant

Helped the Bank Managers run better teams, with more confidence. 

Sales training, reporting, analysis, performance management support.

(Did the "boring stuff" behind the scenes which enabled them to do the important stuff!)

Operational Support

Supported basically every branch managed in the country at some stage across their employee's lifescycle. 

I've hired right across NZ for them and loved it!!

Hr Administrator, Retail recruitment consultant

AER Recruitment

Helped small business owners, public sector managers and corporate HR to find the right people at the right time.

Recruiter

Bachcare Holiday Homes

Kept customers happy, the managers loving their work, the home owners proud to share their homes. 

AKA kept the lights on, the emails and phones answered, the cashflow going, the invoices going out and coming back in. Cleaned a few houses when it really got pinchy too - because, you know #startup life! (well, and an excuse to get to the beach!)

Office Manager

It's 3am and you're lying awake thinking about your business again. Sound familiar?

Your business looks successful (& on the good days, feels it) but here's what I know: your expertise got you here, but it won't get you to the next level. 

Business should be joyful - not a source of 3am anxiety.

Shh don’t tell the advisors, but I don’t think you need more advice right now. What you need is a fractional business manager. Someone who gets it, can see what's going on & helps you focus on what will actually make a difference. 

Yay, you found me! (And like many of my amazing clients, you might not have realised that such a partnership existed!) Think: your commercial sounding board who actually does stuff, not just gives advice. Not just a spare set of hands, I’m an external plan, with a brain, that gently keeps the progress going in the right places. 

While VAs handle admin tasks, I bring strategic thinking AND execution to help brilliant consultants like you master the bit that's actually hard (managing the business), because you're already great at doing the work.

What this looks like:
I work alongside you for 90 days to see clearly what’s going on (and getting pushed to the side), what can be removed or changed, delegated or automated. We'll create a plan to get it done together. We can integrate AI, overhaul (or tweak!) your business model, or put check out the ways we can put better processes in place to protect your mojo. The work we do together is designed to do whatever your business needs to bring your je ne sais quoi to the front and centre and turn down the noise of the other stuff.

Most business advice assumes you have unlimited time OR resources. 

I know better. 

I work with your reality: the mental load of running everything, the challenge of letting go, the fact that you're still doing while improving, oh and LIFE will keep life-ing! 

My approach is very hands on, because humans take time to shift our habits.  

Results my clients see:
"After the first conversation there was a glimmer. The next week I had a solid, tangible plan & progress like I hadn't made in 18 months."

"Everyone needs an Alana in their life! She's been game-changing for my business."

Ready to infuse your business with joy (and some solid AF commercial outcomes, too?)
Join my free Monday office hours (12-1pm) where business owners swap ideas & get feedback
Book a virtual cuppa to explore working together
Visit www.alanaswain.com for more details
Not ready yet? Follow me for practical insights, energy & overuse of weird analogies

My life is complete! 

Lizzie Davidson used the word Petrichor in a real life sentence in her email the other day. 

Petrichor is a word that makes me happy to be a full bodies, 5 senses experiencing, human. 

Do you know what petrichor is?

The smell of the earth once it's rained (there's some nuance in there about after a dry patch, so soggy spring doesn't count) 

If you pay attention, you'll notice it. 

My senses all tingle when I get to experience a petrichor moment. It's grounding AF and so darned nice. 

You can't un-know petrichor. 

A bit like Lizzie, you can't un-know her. 

Which is why you should go check out her Become Inimitable November programme. 

The women delivers the goods

And she's as good to have in your life as knowing there's petrichor, sonder or even tsundoku (thanks Daria Williamson for that recent gem) 

I love words, so does Lizzie, she does inimitable stuff with them. 

PS there's no kick back, just some full throttle advocacy for her awesome. Go check it out, future you will be glad you did. 

PPS she did give me a code for a discount, but you should pay full price because you won't regret it!

PPPS anyone else here an etymology nerd too?!?!

Alana Swain

Can you describe where you want to be in 12 months time?

I can

SMUG, ugh, I know

BUT hear me out. 

It’s been made super easy by the fact that I have a regular walk to the new section we are building on. It’s going to be epic.

So I'm going to be here, hanging out in my big new lawn, probably playing in the trees, looking to the hills for inspiration. 

This image is keeping me grounded in what I’m doing this for - impact, for my kids, for my clients, and time to do what’s great thanks to being walkable to school and daycare. 

So, when planning out my 2026, I started there, with that really easy visual.

Then that dropped into goals around income, time to work in the business (hours of capacity) which then realigned service focus and the subsequent “peddling my wares” needed to book those services out. I know exactly what my banked income needs to be to service the new lending for our new home and have space to deck & landscape the heck out of the backyard. 

Now, that all sounds simple AF when I just plop it into one easy sentence ay?

But it’s not

Planning is as much art as it is science, and then, of course, there’s the pesky reality of Working The Plan (the bit where we often trip ourselves up, spin needlessly at procrastination station or in overthinking overanalysis land)

Thanks to the nod from my friend Kathryn McGarvey, I’m going to be hosting a 2026 planning workshop on zoom. Then, as ever, my office hours will continue to be weekly (and free!) so you can come in to keep the accountability alive with some friendly faces from others in business.

So that I don’t overthink the sales process, can you give me a heads up below if this would be helpful to you? From there, I'll get a page up with session times and details. 

I’m guessing there’s a good signal for you in how easily you can answer that question at the top of this post “Can you describe where you want to be in 12 months time?”


Let me know below!

#planning

👋🏻 here to help with the how of making your business more joyful

Selfie style photo from within the tree line. Alana smiles at the camera wearing a bright blue hoodie, in the background are vines, tree trunks and a 5 year old wearing a brightly coloured puffer vest and yellow bike helmet. 

Apparently babies laugh up to 400 times a day.

How good is that?

But, alas, human fallibility being what it is, our rate of laughter drops dramatically as we age.

It gets even worse as hi ho,hi ho, off to work we go !

How much do you laugh at work?

Studies* show that humour helps build trust, boost engagement and create greater performance within teams. It helps with the effectiveness of leaders as a result. I also know from lived experience that humour just makes it more fun and enjoyable to come to work, and in turn, we all do better when that happens.

One very distinct warning that comes with working with me is that I laugh.

A lot.

Far too loudly.

(Sometimes, I even snort, and make it even funnier!)

The best reason you should choose to work with me?

If you have a humour bone, I'll find it, and I'll make it work while we work, and it means the results we get together will be even better because of it.

( I have no studies to prove it, but, I can get someone to confirm that I do snort out loud, in workplaces, far too often, if you need me to give you proof 🤣)

If you’d like to add some laughter to your week, join me for my free weekly office hours at 12 noon where you can come and ask me anything or just have a natter, a laugh and some great company in a zoom room to start the week with snorts, cackles and perhaps some swearsies.

📷 credit Arna Taani from our youngest newborn photo shoot which is now over 3 years ago! WOW - this one has a fun story about the 2 year old peeling garlic. 

Honestly, it’s the smallest things in life!!

* studies here refers to the fact that I've found some articles and now can't put my hands on them to reference for this post, come join office hours and watch me try prove it with evidence if you're so inclined!!

A black and white photo of Alana throwing her head back in laughter while holding a newborn baby. 

If you don't know why you are doing it, then, why are you doing it?

One of the Very Best Bits of being ex-corporate is choosing what to say yes and no to in my business.

Barefoot grass moments, football in the longer evening sun after dinner, with a truly switched off Mum who is all there, that's why.

I have a busy brain.
I will never run out of ideas.
There may be a tomorrow.
Who knows how long we each have to make our impact.
There is absolutely a today.
And our daily decisions can have long shadows, so choose wisely as often as possible! 

Building a business while building a family and infusing those values into lifestyle and strategic decisions is 💯 not easy, but worth doing? 

Feck yes!

And, it's often the smallest moments that will show us whether we are making the right decisions.

Do you agree? 

What needs to give or have space made for it right now in your business? 

📷 of 3 year old wisdom to live in the moment, pick the clover, walk barefoot and to just be. 



👋 here to help with the very human art of building a business with joy as strategy, to make space for the moments in life that most matter.

A photograph of a young child walking barefoot in the grass beside a footpath, holding clover flowers.

How's the view today in your biz?

(And that's not asked in a “hey how great is your laptop lifestyle?” way)

Business and life often have this mucky way of pulling us into the weeds, into hamster wheel tactics, fire fighting mode or ye old procrastination station

None of which do sweet FA for business performance.

In micro ways, where our notebooks stay filled with goals & ideas (but are empty of those mundane middle steps) or in the macro “what the heck am I even doing with this thing?”: perspective refreshes our performance

And, it's one of the key benefits clients find when they work with me:, the chance to chuck all that mental load out, sift through, get a bunch of things clarified, and then, get that view clear on what’s needed, when, and the all important how.

Because while the messy middle between vision and execution feels infinitely less compelling than the destination itself, I’m really great at the how of making progress on that messy stuff.

So, if the view from your business isn’t that clear right now, let’s chat, and see whether my planning workshop next week could be smart use to make sure that view’s one you want to check out!



📷 Photo from my mid winter break to Rarotonga earlier this year. Best inspo for a good view post I could find at short notice 😂😎

Selfie photo of Alana on the beach during a mid winter holiday in Rarotonga. She wears a wide brimmed straw hat and colourful green dress

Being tempted by shiny squirrels of new ideas is ongoing.

In business, there will never be a shortage of new ideas.

(there is, however, often a shortage of capacity for All The Ideas)

Knowing what to say no to, what to keep going with, and what gets matched or sequence with which bits, is an art form.

Sometimes, we need to pen those shiny squirrelly ideas in, and give them a space and place to see which are great ideas and should be explored, and which should be paused.

And, sometimes, it’s the right time for them to come out! Yay for that!

How do you store and control your shiny squirrels of new ideas??


(probably could have used AI to generate a pic of a shiny squirrel but you can dream one up in your mind instead this way!) 

#toomanyideas
👋🏻 here to help with the how of taking ideas and making them work in your business in the real world

Got to play with Lego last week and it was work #winning

My kids were rapt to help me pick the set out

The client rapt with how perfect my "Alana Sprinkles of Magic" to start their team building / planning / and learning day was for setting the scene. 

The team warmed up & energised by starting their day with play. 

Joy ain't just child's play - where could you bring the play to your planning, work or business to create more magic this week?

#lego #play #teambuilding 

👋🏻 Needing to bring the joy to fuel your business in 2026? I'm the person you never knew you needed until now!

A series of photos showing lego in use in a work setting. A screen shot of a complimentary text message from the client to Alana sharing how well it was received by the team. 

When it looks, feels and sounds like you = that's when the magic of data mets the brilliance of your planning. 

It's amazing what an on brand change to colours will do to leadership & team engagement! 

When it comes to "custom built" BI , we really mean custom, and we really mean co-creation. 

Currently booking for 2026 projects, I'd love to hear from you if you'd like to chat about what your business needs to move from befuddled excel to something this slick!

Speedos, speed to start and on brand colours.

We’re in the tweaking stage now this custom built BI performance dashboard has been rolled out to the team. This is for a client who’s denting (pun intended) her Paint & Panel industry over in Tasmania & we've loved creating it for Kate and her leadership team. 

Smart business owners knows numbers matter.

Smarter business owners turn checking them into a ritual.

And, in our book, it helps when it all feels like it fits, feels and is yours.

That’s where the magic of numbers and the art of great management rhythms will take you to places you never knew you could go.

What would it take for your business management routines to feel more like a rhythm that you knew the beat to?

#businessinsights #betterbusiness

Four dark navy speedo signs snipped from a Power BI report show not quite and non target performance for Gross Profit, Invoiced Revenue, Time to invoice and speed to start. 

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