5 minute read
KPMG
Flying high
When a young Rob Hill vowed he’d live in Tauranga one day, little did he know he’d also become one of the city’s key business players. Introducing KPMG’s newest partner.
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WORDS DANIEL DUNKLEY / PHOTOS SALINA GALVAN
Rob Hill has watched Tauranga grow up over the years. He first visited as a 13-year-old on a swimming meet and was blown away by the Mount’s beautiful main beach. He went home to Timaru and told his parents he’d live there one day.
“It was so much smaller,” he says. “There was no harbour bridge, and apart from the twin towers there were no high-rise buildings. But there was something I just loved about the place.”
What was once a holiday mecca is now also a thriving trade and business hub. And if anything epitomises the city’s transformation from the sleepy town of Rob’s youth to one of the country’s fastest-growing business centres, it’s the steel and glass ANZ building on Cameron Road that’s home to advisory firm KPMG.
While Tauranga has developed into a top business centre, Rob’s career has been taking off. A few decades on from his first visit, the 6’9” former swimmer and high-level rower is one of the city’s top business advisors. He’s just become one of KPMG’s latest partners – the first in Tauranga for five years. The blue-chip firm is known for helping companies balance their books, work on strategy, and handle the trickier elements that go into running a business.
M A K I N G I T A S A PA R T N E R AT A T O P F I R M L I K E K P M G I S A J O U R N E Y O F S E L F - I M P R O V E M E N T – A TEST OF METTLE AS WELL AS ABILITY.
Rob started his career in Wellington and worked for rival accounting firms before he was headhunted by KPMG in 2007. Although he’s a high-flyer now, his journey to the summit has been long. Making it as a partner at a top firm like KPMG is a painstaking journey of selfimprovement and self-discovery, a test of mettle as well as ability that’s designed to hand-pick the very best. It took Rob 13 years to achieve his goal.
“I wasn’t ready for many years,” he says. “I had to work on aspects that would make me a better adviser, from how I presented information to clients, to handling the team around me. There were psychologists’ tests, workshops and board interviews, so it was a whole lot of hard work, but with lots of upsides in terms of learning and self-development.”
ABOVE A gondola ride in Venice and a trip to the Leaning Tower of Pisa were among the activities on the itinerary during Rob’s family sabbatical.
Rob and his KPMG colleagues handle all forms of business advice, from tax, accounting and strategy, to merger and sale valuations. They work with small enterprises but also assist some of the Bay’s business giants, including Port of Tauranga, Zespri, Craigs and Ballance.
Rob also helps local iwi organise their business affairs. He describes this as one of the most rewarding parts of the job at KPMG – shaping the structure of iwi operations and safeguarding their financial future.
“This is a time where lots of redress is being made, so it’s so important to get that right,” he says. “The consequences of not getting it right are obvious, so we take a look at things like business structure, and making sure members are paying the right amount of tax.”
Boosting Tauranga’s business confidence is a demanding job, and Rob also has a taste for adventure. In April last year, he took the bold step of whisking his family away on a three-month OE. Taking an eight-year-old son and six-year-old daughter over land and sea through Asia and Europe is a logistical feat in itself. The world tour took the family through Singapore and Thailand, the UK, Italy, Spain, Germany and Austria, where they used trains and planes to discover new sights. Rob says it was all about stepping out of their comfort zone.
“We took a sabbatical to refresh, spend more time together and teach the kids a bit more about the world. It was a bit of a struggle in the first four weeks. We missed flights and trains along the way, and there were delays, but it was important for the kids to experience environments that are busier and different to New Zealand.”
Rob says getting out of the country helped his family step back and appreciate the world, and provided some valuable lessons to take back home. “One of the things was to manage your expectations,” he says. “Things can be very different in reality to how they are in your mind, so that can cloud your judgement. You also learn to appreciate the differences between each person and place.”
With that adventure behind them, Rob embarked on the next phase of his business journey. He officially became a partner in January, and with more than a decade of experience under his belt, he’s as enthusiastic as ever about Tauranga’s future.
“Despite all the great places we went to, we wouldn’t want to be anywhere else,” he says, pointing out the window towards the coast. “Where else in the world can you live a life like this?”
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