On Monday morning, I headed off to the airport bound for Auckland – the final stop on our multi-city tour of Australia & New Zealand for the 2013 Storman Training Roadshow. After a fairly uneventful flight with Air New Zealand, I landed at around 5:30pm local time and headed to the nearby Jet Park Hotel for dinner & to check-in.
I decided to try the interestingly named “Kiwi Burger” for dinner at the hotel bar (and here I thought it was only us Aussies thateat our national fauna) – but it turns out it was made from cow, not Kiwi bird.
Tuesday rolled around and I was off to the Storman office (also near the airport). It was great to meet some of the newer members of the Storman team & I spent the day working with some on the guys on a few upcoming projects. It was also good to sit down with some of the team members to go through their ideas & see how they “did what they do best”.
Cong (head of our QA department), for example, has setup some excellent systems for software testing – I look forward to seeing some of the results in due course; as I’m sure you will, too.
Wednesday morning and I’d checked-out of my room & was on the way to the office thanks to another lift from Aaron. We stopped in at the local supermarket (called “Countdown” – but they had the same corporate colours and peeled-apple-W-logo as Australia’s “Woolworths“, so I figure it’s the same company) to pick up a few things for training.
We then headed into the office to meet up with some of the team from Levin Lockups, who had arrived for training. They were later joined by staff from Storage2U and Affordable Storage. We were also joined by some of the newer Support staff for the Advanced training course.
The training concluded at around 3pm – leaving enough time for some emails, a bit of work, a few more catch-ups then a short drive over to the airport for the 8:30pm flight home.
For me on a personal level, it was great to meet you all and put faces to names – and to see some of the fantastic businesses you run & cities you live in; some of which I’d never visited before! For Storman, the Training Roadshow concept was a successful one – and we’ve had great feedback from some of the people I’ve trained, so we’ll certainly be running them again in the future.
Thanks again to everyone who took part – I hope you enjoyed it as much as I did. See you in 2014 for another Roadshow!
