Some are born to work
with their hands.
They just need someone to see it, and to give them the chance.
When I work on a surface, I look for its intention: the way its maker meant it to be. A traffic light on a busy street, or the finest architectural joinery. My work is to find the way to protect it before time and contamination take it, and to bring it back when they already have. To win it.
I have come to see people the same way. Each of us has an intention too, a person we are meant to become, and it can be protected, or lost if nobody leads us at the right time.
For most, that time is around sixteen. So many are about to step onto the wrong path. Not because they lack something, but because nobody showed them a trade they could master, nobody saw the spark in them, and nobody gave them a craft to pour it into. I am a mother of five, and I know there is nothing more important than helping a young person find themselves before that moment passes.
I have met people who came to the craft much later. Someone whose career ended before they were ready. Someone who spent years in work they never enjoyed, going in each morning and waiting for the day to be over. And now machines and software are taking the jobs people counted on, while a surface still has to be judged by the person standing in front of it. When one of them works on a real surface for the first time, I see exactly what I see in a sixteen-year-old.
I know that spark. I built a business, but what I love most is still the craft itself: the knowledge, the hands, the moment a surface finally looks the way it was meant to. It is hard. It is not easy. But done right, people look at what they own differently. They take pride in it again, and there is nothing better than that.
But there is only so much of it I can do myself. It became a mission: to build a house where knowledge, optimisation, care and high standards sit under one roof, and where people become competent at what they do.
I believe there is not one person who could not one day become someone. A girl who tints a car or wraps it in vinyl. A boy who restores and coats a commercial generator. And in time, either of them ready to build a business of their own, because they know the craft behind it and they have learned how to run it.
My team and I will give everything we have, our energy, our knowledge and our experience, to anyone who raises their hand from the heart, so that this house keeps giving people a future. I know our graduates will find their place here, whether someone hires them or they go out on their own. The industry is here. What it needs is the trade to match it. My heart is set on building that.
New Zealand tells its young people the same thing: go to university, get a degree, that is the only way. But what about the ones who learn by doing? The ones who are brilliant with their hands? The ones who just need someone to give them a chance?
Right now we lose them, to unemployment, to dead-end jobs, or overseas. Meanwhile businesses across the country are desperate for skilled people, so we import tradespeople instead of training our own. On one side, people who want to work. On the other, businesses that need them. In the middle, a gap where training and pathways should be.
Surface care is a real industry. Every asset needs it, from a family car to a superyacht to an aircraft to a building. It does not need a degree. It needs skill, precision, pride and attention to detail. That is something we can teach, and something a young person can build a life on.
From 2027 we are opening a small number of sponsored places at the Academy, for people aged 16 to 20. The next page explains how a place works, what it leads to, and how to ask for one.