President’s Corner – February 2024

Welcome to 2024!! I was lucky enough over the holiday break to do a fair amount of driving around, from Wellington to Auckland, then Napier for Christmas, then to Picton, Christchurch, Central Otago, and back to Wellington via the beautiful West Coast of the South Island. It was a great opportunity to have some time out and be reminded of how beautiful this country is. I also noticed that there were still installations happening. I saw a team installing a large sign on a new supermarket, some fascia’s being replaced, and saw a lot of signage that I have done around the country over many years. It was a great reminder of how much fun this industry can be, creating signage that we keep seeing, and saying “I did that’.

The start of the year is always challenging trying to get back into the rhythm of working, especially when much of the country has short weeks straight after returning to work from the holidays. Wellington anniversary, then Auckland / Nelson / Waikato anniversaries, then this year the Tuesday off for Waitangi Day, making Monday a very quiet day that week. I hope everyone is now back on track.

At the end of last year, we had to make a very tough decision to cease the dedicated role we had running the Signee program. This came down to simply running out of money to be able to continue. Laura was doing an outstanding job working with school leavers and people wanting to try their hand at working in this industry before fully committing. The decision was made that much harder by losing someone that had the skills and ability to bring Signwriting to the forefront of schools as an option, and Laura will be greatly missed. The NZSDA does still have considerable IP from the Signee program, including workbooks and an online program that will greatly assist onboarding new staff. We are still deciding how best to utilize this material, but the current thought process is to have this material for members to use, either for a low cost, or a donation to help go towards to costs of Signee over the years. We will update you all once we get an understanding of how best to work with this material.

This year we have a very active year on getting out and about around the country, and meeting more members on a one on one basis, as well as in group functions. Mikayla is working through a timeline on when and where we will be going. We will also be presenting recognition certificates to companies who have been members for 10 years or more, to say a huge thank you for your support, and to acknowledge how important your membership is to the association. We also know that it is tough to be a business owner during these times of higher interest rates and staff shortages, so we have worked on bringing support in the Human Resources (HR) aspect as that can get very complicated, very quickly. Ways to access this assistance will be mentioned on future E-News, or please reach out to us to find out more.

Until next time,

 

Kind regards,

Shae Goom

Signwise Wellington Ltd

021 80 80 56