Theresa Gattung: pioneering change from the top down
A regular fixture on Fortune’s most powerful women in international business lists, Theresa is no stranger to the challenges such females face. Now leading the New Zealand chapter of SheEO, she’s helping a global community make long-overdue change.
Spend any time looking into the life and times of Theresa Gattung and you’ll realise one thing very quickly: she’s not afraid to pioneer change. Arriving in the public eye at the age of 37, when she became the youngest ever and first female chief executive of Telecom (now Spark), she then went on to co-found My Food Bag, the home-delivered cooking-kit service that revolutionised the way thousands of New Zealanders approach mealtimes. She’s been recognised as one of the country’s leading philanthropists, working with charities such as the SPCA and Tauranga-based Cambodia Charitable Trust, and more recently launched the New Zealand arm of world-first female venture-capital fund SheEO.
Playing her part in an ambitious goal to see 10,000 women-led ventures funded through SheEO worldwide, Theresa’s knee-deep in what may be her most important quest for change yet. To put its significance into context and demonstrate the urgent need for organisations of SheEO’s kind, you need only to consider that worldwide just four percent of all available capital is currently invested in women-led ventures. Having spent decades holding prominent positions in the business world, Theresa’s quick to recognise that even in 2020, the playing field for women in business is still far from even. “You don't really have to walk very long as a woman in business to realise that it's still harder,” she says. “It's not as hard as it was 20 or 30 years ago, but it’s still hard.”
As the daughter of two entrepreneurial British migrants, it’s no surprise that Theresa grew up to be business-savvy, with a bent for challenging the status quo. Leaving behind their native London, her working-class parents, Marion and John, set sail for New Zealand in the 1960s. They were what Theresa affectionately calls, “ten-pound Poms”. “They paid £10, got the passage by ship and had to sign an agreement saying that they’d stay in New Zealand for at least two years,” she says. “And here they are, over 50 years later.”
Moving from their initial base in Wellington to settle in the Bay of Plenty, Marion and John set up a souvenir business in Rotorua. “My parents were entrepreneurs, in a small way,” says Theresa. “My father retired from the paid workforce in his forties after ill-health and had to support himself ever since, with property and other interests. So, yes, I come from a background of small business people.”
Breaking away from their established family tradition of taking the same career path as their parents before them, Theresa believes that her parents’ success in New Zealand is partly due to their adopted Kiwi mentality – simply getting stuck in and being willing to try something new. She also recognises her father’s progressive and supportive approach to parenting as a unique factor in shaping the person she became. “My father had only sisters and then he had four daughters,” she says. “He was always very encouraging of us reaching our full potential, and never had any particular gender stereotypes about what girls could do [or] boys could do, which was pretty unusual [at the time].”
On completing her schooling in Rotorua, Theresa studied a business degree at the University of Waikato, before moving to Wellington to complete a law degree. Even as a young adult, she understood that she would need to play her part in fighting for gender equality in the business world. At the time, there were no women running large companies in New Zealand, so she knew that achieving her dream of running a large company by the age of 40 would not be easy. “I've always understood that there are structural issues that can hold women back in society,” she says.
In the years that followed, Theresa began her corporate career climb through TVNZ, National Mutual, the Bank of New Zealand and telecommunications company Telecom. Originally joining the latter in 1994, she was appointed CEO in 1999. As its first female CEO, she was thrust into the public eye, at times facing challenges that her male counterparts would rarely experience (after being announced as chief executive at a press conference, the first question she was asked was if she intended to have children).
As she says in her memoir, Bird on a Wire, Theresa successfully led the company into an entirely new era of communication. “I joined Telecom in 1994 and I was given a cell phone that was really big; you almost needed a separate briefcase for the size of the cell phones!” she laughs. Two years later, returning from a conference in Europe in 1996, she began to realise just how big the internet was destined to become, and went on to lead Telecom’s transition into the age of IT. “When I was CEO, we bought a couple of large IT companies. We bought Gen-i and we bought Computer Land, and we put it together with Telecom’s IT division and we called it Gen-i. Then over that time, Telecom became the number-one provider of IT services.”
Stepping down from her role at Telecom in 2007, Theresa spent several years pursuing other business and philanthropic ventures, before co-founding My Food Bag in 2012 with Cecilia and James Robinson. “When Cecilia was on maternity [leave] with her son, Tom, she wrote up the business plan for My Food Bag and showed it to me,” she says. “I looked at it and I thought, ‘Yes, this is really gonna work’. I realised that something like that would fill such a need for women of every situation because ‘What are we going to have for dinner tonight?’ usually falls on the woman of the household.”
As chair of My Food Bag and a key investor, Theresa worked with the Robinsons, Nadia Lim and her husband Carlos Bagrie to swiftly get the business off the ground. “In the beginning it was just us and then we started hiring people, and we did have that philosophy that we're going to go for the best,” she says. “We had the best advisors, we got the best people and we always thought that it could be a bigger business. We never saw it just as a small business. We set it up, the systems and everything, to scale fast.”
After huge and rapid success, a majority share of My Food Bag was sold to Waterman Capital, freeing Theresa up to focus on building a name for SheEO in New Zealand. “When I heard [SheEO founder] Vicki Saunders speak a few years ago at a conference in America, she had just launched SheEO in Canada [in 2015] and I thought it was a brilliant idea,” she says. “Her idea was to completely change the paradigm.”
Simple yet hugely effective, SheEO operates on the principal of ‘radical generosity’, a belief that trust, collaboration and a strong female community is key to creating opportunities for more women-led ventures to succeed. Each year, an intake of local investors, called Activators, each contribute $1100 into a central funding pool. These women then work together to choose five women-led ventures to fund through five-year interest-free loans.
“[Vicki] had a couple of cycles [of funding] in Canada and I went up to her and said, ‘This would be fantastic in New Zealand,’” says Theresa. “I organised a conference and brought her down [to New Zealand] and she presented to a room full of 500 women who just loved the idea. We decided to launch in New Zealand, but then we hit a roadblock because in Canada [SheEO] is not a business or a charity. It's not tax-deductible and it doesn't want it to be a charity. We're trying to reframe what business is, and I believe the world will be more effectively changed through business than through charity. So we struggle because the law doesn't really have a category that's in between.”
“You don't really have to walk very long as a woman in business to realise that it's still harder.”
Having ironed out some teething problems and brought Westpac on board as a key supporter, the New Zealand chapter of SheEO has so far raised $700,000, which has been loaned to 10 local ventures over two cycles of funding. Worldwide, SheEO has so far raised more than US$4 million in loans through 4000 Activators, allowing 53 women-led ventures in five countries to gain vital funding. The opportunity to change the face of business seems almost limitless.
When it comes to selecting ventures to invest in, SheEO has unique criteria. They have to be at least 51 percent women-owned, be doing something good for the country, the world or the planet, meet revenue criteria and demonstrate an ability to scale. Among recent local ventures that have received funding from SheEO is Pure Peony Skincare, a Nelson-based business that uses the root of organic peonies to create natural products to soothe skin conditions such as eczema, psoriasis and rosacea.
Although SheEO has game-changing benefits for their selected ventures, the system isn’t all take. Through several nationwide and regional events, SheEO Activators have the opportunity to make invaluable business connections themselves through their involvement in the organisation. Every year, SheEO runs a launch event at which the supported ventures for the year are announced and Activators have the opportunity to gather on a national level. Along with networking opportunities, Activators also have the chance to participate in follow-on funding programmes with the ventures as and when they become available.
“The first benefit you get as an Activator is meeting all the other Activators,” says Theresa. “Vicki comes down from Canada and it’s amazing to spend a day and an evening with that group and to be so inspired. You really make linkages that will benefit your business.”
SheEO is unique in that the required investment is relatively minimal, allowing women of all ages and backgrounds to invest in the fund. Aiming to encourage a more diverse range of women to join as Activators, SheEO gives Activators the opportunity to split the yearly financial commitment across a monthly payment plan. This commitment to accessibility helps to ensure that SheEO not only continues to support women-led ventures, but also creates a chance for women who otherwise may not feel empowered to do so to become involved in investing.
It’s this sort of clever thinking that has contributed to the rapid growth of SheEO locally and internationally. The first ever SheEO Global Summit took place in Canada on March 9 and SheEO Magazine launched in New Zealand with the aim to help to further the SheEO’s reach and inspire Kiwi women.
Seeing SheEO in action, it’s obvious that the world needs more of its kind and Theresa is to be commended for having the foresight to see it could work in the New Zealand market. With a knack for knowing exactly what the world needs when, she says she allows both passion and logic to guide her when it comes to choosing what to take on. “I do what moves me at the heart level and the head level. I think, ‘I could make a difference to this and it would be a good use of my time. It’d have a big enough impact and I’d enjoy doing it.’”
Theresa knows better than anyone that New Zealand is a nation of risk-takers and innovators, but she insists we need to keep pushing for more and looking at how to solve the big issues in our society. When asked about what the world needs most right now, she puts a challenge to her fellow Kiwis. “We just need to keep being more of what we can be, because we can really mean something to the world,” she says. “We show what's possible. We have to make New Zealand the best she can be because we lead the world in many ways. We have to keep doing that, even though we're not perfect. New ways of thinking to deal with problems can flourish here. We have to become even more a part of the solution – that’s the mission of every person living in New Zealand
Theresa recommends: Inspiring reads
The Testaments by Margaret Atwood
A sequel to Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale, originally published in 1985 and now a TV series, this 2019 novel is set 15 years after the gripping and gruesome events of the first book. “I find it a complete reminder that [women] have to keep reclaiming our power and asserting our right to have our voices heard,” says Theresa.
Braiding Sweetgrass by Robin Wall Kimmerer
Written by a botanist and professor of biology, Braiding Sweetgrass explores our reciprocal relationship with the earth in connection to the widespread general awakening of ecological consciousness. “It’s a fantastic ode to nature and an inspirational read about the beauty of it,” says Theresa.