Meet the Team Lisa Mandic Lisa Mandic is the founder of River Empowerment. Her business background includes extensive experience in the corporate environment where she held roles in senior management, contract management and finance throughout Australia and New Zealand for over a decade. In 1997, Lisa moved to training and consulting to SME’s. This is where she built on her passion for helping managers new to management. In 2004 she founded River Empowerment. Her mission is to develop exceptional managers to facilitate her vision of healthy, effective organisations. Currently Lisa provides management tools, training and consulting services to medium and large sized organisations. She has been a trainer for the Employers and Manufacturers Association and Massey University since 1997. Lisa is also a regular presenter and writer. Lisa enjoys seeing people succeed in their organisation. Growing up in a family with a small business, and now having one herself, she understands, first hand, the challenges of creating a successful business.   Our Support Team Deb Horwood is our Marketing and Office Administrator.  Deb brings over twenty years of marketing and administration experience within New Zealand, Hong Kong, Australia and the United Kingdom to her role at River Empowerment.  She has worked in marketing and public relations roles in the key utility industries of health, power, finance and education.  Deb is responsible for delivering and implementing the overall lead generation and strategic marketing plan for the company and also manages administration. Tania ensures our office runs smoothly, from answering our phones, to greeting our visitors, to important behind the scenes work. Her professional, but fun nature makes our office a great place to work.   Our Associates River Empowerment has a number of associates who are experts in the following areas.   Marketing and Sales  Rosina Webb Rosina is lead marketing consultant at energise. She is also founder and managing director. Before establishing energise Rosina spent many years working in senior marketing roles in a wide range of organisations including Sky City, Westfield, Telecom, AUT and Auckland City Council and consultancies. Her passion for motivating individuals, teams and organisations to strategically grow, compete and achieve their goals and marketing objectives has made her a formidable facilitator and an effective change manager. These are the skills that enable Rosina to deliver on her promise to energise and mobilise individuals, teams and businesses. Rosina holds a Diploma in Teaching (DipTch), a Postgraduate Diploma in Business (Marketing) from the University of Auckland and recently a Certificate in Facilitation and Group Leadership. She is also a Fellow of the Marketing Association of NZ.   Communications Management Anna Radford Anna Radford specialises in communication and has more than two decades' experience in public relations, strategic and internal communications roles in New Zealand and the UK. This experience has been gained in both the profit and not-for-profit sectors.   She is a Fellow and accredited member of the Public Relations Institute of New Zealand (PRINZ), and a past winner of the Communication Management division in the IABC's Kiwi Quill awards.   Anna believes developing a relationship based on mutual goals and understanding is a key element in a successful consultant/client relationship.   Her services enable clients to clarify their messages and communicate to and with broad and varied audiences. One of the advantages of working with her is that she personally provides end-to-end communications solutions from planning through to implementation.     Process Improvement Moya Bowden   Moya has 29 years of consulting experience, both internal and external. From her initial work in New Zealand and PNG as a field geologist through working in business systems improvement within a multinational mining company, then to running her own business in Chile after completing her MBA as a Sloan Fellow at Massachusetts Institute of technology in Boston.     Since returning to New Zealand, She has specialised in business process analysis and mapping. Companies as diverse as ADT Armourguard, Noel Leeming Group and Mighty River Power are among those companies who have made use of her services.     She works at facilitating the knowledge in the business, and leaving the process improvement with those closest to the processes in each business.   Human Resources Juliette Smale – Aureum Juliette is a Human Resource Consultant, with a strong employee relations and people development background. She is tertiary qualified in Finance and Human Resources; and certified by Herrmann International Asia and Results Coaching Systems. Her 12 years experience in human resources and management, includes five years in senior human resource management roles.     Juliette’s experience working with individuals and organisations ranges from entrepreneurial exporters through to large New Zealand organisations in both the public and private sectors; and spans a number of industries including finance, scientific, education, local government, horticulture, health, aviation, engineering, advertising, tourism, and legal.     She provides employment legislation compliance and employee relations advice. Along with training needs analysis, in-house training programme design, and training facilitation. Her professional focus is on helping develop high performing employees, managers, and teams.   Recruitment and Search Rob Young Rob Young specialises in senior management recruitment. His comprehensive business experience has equipped him to confidently assess an individual's specific and broader abilities and how those skills and attributes can best be applied to the benefit of both clients and candidates. Rob has an accounting and management background, primarily with large multinationals in the USA, UK, Australia and New Zealand. In recent years he has worked in human resource consulting, with public sector organisations and medium to large corporates. He has also owned and operated McDonald's restaurants at Auckland Airport, and established his own consulting practice prior to joining Saturn Group.     Change Management Jane Judd Jane Judd is an experienced and skilled strategic change facilitator and practitioner. She is passionate about business change and the need to develop people strategies alongside change initiatives to ensure the change is sustainable and delivers the required business value. With her experience, she is able to support leaders navigate change initiatives in their business.   Jane has worked in the field for 20 years across many industries in New Zealand and the UK, in both the public and private sector.   Jane’s combination of Organisational Development and Business Consulting expertise provide her with the depth of skills and experience required to facilitate and support a multitude of business change situations from business transformation and strategy execution to culture change and capability development. Jane holds a BA (Hons) in Humanities, specialising in English, French and History. She also completed a Postgraduate certificate in Training and Human Resource Management. Jane was awarded Franklin Covey International Facilitator of the Year in 1998, following her extensive work with Covey’s leadership programmes. She is certified in Cultural Transformation Tools (Barrett Values Centre) and is an accredited practitioner of Prosci’s change management methodology.     Leadership Development Geoff Wake Geoff Wake is principal for Amalgam Consulting and has been helping businesses lift the performance of their people since 1996. He provides strategic advice, inspirational seminars and motivational coaching to help businesses and their people to operate at their highest and best. Geoff has extensive management experience predominantly in the hospitality and tourism industries. He works with teams and individuals who are ready for change, ready to take things to the next level and with a desire to be the best they can be. At the foundation of Geoff’s transformational work is Neuro-Semantics (NS). This multi-disciplinary field stems from studying successful people and organisations and how they are motivated, change, develop and grow. NS models provide teams and their leaders with greater clarity and purpose so they can operate with increased intention and focus; learning how to blow out excuses and be more resourceful and resilient to unleash their full potential. Geoff resides in Auckland, NZ, he is a Certified Behavioural and Values Analyst, certified in the TTI TriMetrix System and is a NLP-NS Master Practitioner and Certifying Trainer through the International Society of Neuro-Semantics, Colarado, USA. Geoff is also a certified Meta-Coach in good standing with the Meta-Coach Foundation, Sydney, Australia.           Return to top   To see photos of us in action click here