New Zealand Update 28th April 2008

A week is a long time in the world of The Chefs Toolbox, so here's more New Zealand News.

Corporate Launch
On Wednesday the 30th April we will be celebrating our launch in New Zealand at the Langham Hotel in Auckland.
We have invited all our New Zealand Consultants to join us for the Celebration together with the people who have assisted us with our start in New Zealand. This is a milestone for Chefs Toolbox as it represents the start of a new era as TCT goes International.

Website
We are very close to having our New Zealand website up and running and in fact we hope to by the 1st May which will mean our first Party orders can be processed. Consultants will also be able to use their Credit Cards to pay for their orders. We will let you know the day the site goes live.

Consultant Training
A big thank you to Dannielle Briggs who took 3 days out of her busy schedule to go to New Zealand, while she was their she spent time with three of our new Consultants in a training session in Auckland, Dannielle was very impressed with the enthusiasm and motivation the new Consultant showed during training.
Julie Griffen will be running a Team Leader training session in Auckland on Thursday 1st May 2008. Invitations have been sent to all of our New Zealand Consultants so encourage your Consultants to attend, this is an opportunity not t be missed.
We now have 5 Consultants in Christchurch which will enable us to put together a training session there as soon as possible.


NZ Netball
Dannielle Briggs cooked Lunch for Lyn Bradley and her Centre Managers and staff from Netball Waikitere, they were all very impressed with Dannielle's cooking skills and certainly enjoyed the rissotto and the sticky date puddings which were all prepared in approx 30 minutes. Excellent work Dannielle.
More Regional Netball meetings have been conducted with:
Netball North
Bay of Plenty
Netball Counties Manakua
Netball Western
All of theses Regions will be organising group meetings for May and June. We already have 3 meeting in for the week of the 12th May 2008. Net ball Counties Manakua have booked 1 group meeting for last week of May.Monday 16th and Monday 23rd June are dates for Netball Wellington, as you can see the bookings are starting to flow as the Regions start to roll out the opportunity.

Parent Centres NZ
The Ageement should be signed by the 29th April. We will be starting with a 2 page spread in their monthly magazine, Links on their webite, collateral to their members and the start of organising group meetings for their centres.
They have 52 Centres throughout NZ and are very keen to be a part of The Chefs Toolbox start in New Zealand.

Womenz
The links from and to the Womenz website should be in place by the end of this week. Katrina Winn the Director of Womenz was previously a Senior Director with Nutrimetics for 20 years and had over 1000 Consultants in her Team, as a result of her success there she is a great supporter for the Direct Selling Industry and would like to have an association with Chefs Toolbox. I will be meeting Katrina this week to explore some more opportunities with her.

Kiwi families
We should have the website links in place this week and the commencement of more activities with this group to start first week of May.

Savour New Zealand
Savour kicks off this week and we have asked Catherine Jetter and Rhonda Ross to assist us for the 5 days it will run. They are very excited by the opportunity to be sharing this event with us. They will also get to attend the Corporate Launch on the 30th April, some would say lucky Ladies and they are but, they are in for some hard work over the days that Savour will be running. Good luck with the recruiting Ladies.
Samantha attended the Sponsors meeting in NZ last week and will have more to report on that after Savour is completed.

Operations
We have encountered our first difficulties with NZ Customs this last week and did have a couple of kits held up for a few days. We have sorted out the problem and future shipments should be straight forward without any hold ups. We had already shipped at least 50 kits into New Zealand prior to this so we are actually pleased the issue came up now and not when we are into full swing.
Thank you to NZ Post for their help with this. Our relationship with NZ Post continues to strenthen.

Other News

There will be a group from Head Office in New Zealand this week for the Corporate Launch so we will update you with pictures etc next week.
More Netball meetings are scheduled to take place over the next week or so. we will keep you posted.
More paries have been booked and held so thing are moving along.


Aside from New Zealand, TCT Australia has had a fabulous month of recruitng in April, my congratulations to all the Field group who have contributed to such a fantastic result.

Rob

New Zealand update 18 April

Hi Everyone….. This is the first of a weekly update that we will get out to you to keep you in the loop with happenings in New Zealand.
The level of activity will start to pick up as we are start booking group meetings and other sponsoring activities into May and beyond.
Here are some of the highlights:-

Savour New Zealand

This is New Zealand’s premier event for food and wine lovers. This is an annual event held over 3 days in one of Auckland’s premier hotels The Langham.
Savour New Zealand is a powerful showcase of taste experiences, new ideas and techniques. It provides greater understanding of the essence of great wines and truly great cooking.
Food presenters and chefs from around the world will be showcasing their talents over three days of classes where invariably the attendees will show their delight whilst being immersed in the complete food and wine experience.
The Chefs Toolbox is providing product for all the demonstration kitchens. We are also setting up the cooking shop on site. The shop will be equipped with a Fisher and Paykel kitchen and we will be demonstrating our cookware throughout the 3 days of the event.
Recruiting, Product sales and Party bookings will also be made from the shop and we are expecting a high level of activity with the 1,500 attendees.
Cath Jetter and Rhonda Ross will be joining us in New Zealand for this event; I think they are going to be two very busy ladies.

Netball New Zealand
We are continuing our demonstrations with the Regional Managers of Netball NZ. There are 12 regions throughout NZ ( North & South Island’s) and each Region is responsible for a number of Netball centre’s ranging from 2 to approx12 per centre’s per Region, covering all 140,000 Netball Members.
We are setting up a variety of activities with each Region including Fund raising events where TCT will have the opportunity to recruit, sell product and take party bookings.
May is the peak fundraising time for this sport so it is anticipated May will be a big month for these events.
There are a variety of other activities in place such as coverage in their Website’s, Centre Magazines, Awards presentations, sponsoring recipe books etc.
We are looking forward to a win: win ongoing relationship with Netball NZ.

Parenting Centre New Zealand
We are almost home on negotiating an agreement with this group and anticipate completion before the end of this week.
They have 52 Centre’s throughout NZ with 8,000 Members nationwide. They are all our demographic ie. Mums with children under 5, the majority does not work or only work part time.
They will provide us again with recruiting opportunities, Product sale and Party booking opportunities.
Will keep you posted!

Still to go are:-
Rural Women of NZ
Business Women’s Network
Contours Women’s Gyms

Wanganui High School
We have booked a fund raiser event with this school for 100 people for the 15th May 2008; this event actually came from our sponsorship with Netball NZ

We are also about to sign on with:-
Womenz The premier online group in NZ
Kiwi Families A large online group with the perfect demographic for us

May is shaping up to be a busy month. As we schedule events we will advise you. We will give you as much notice as we can. I am there next week to lock down dates of events with several of the groups so we will start to arrange trips after the ANZAC week-end.

Operations
NZ Post is ready to go as soon as we are online. We had a visit today from the Senior NZ Post Manager responsible for Australia, Rachael Manson and her Team. They love our Products and were very impressed with our facility and the care we put into our shipments. This has developed into a very strong relationship and I must say NZ Post is bending over backwards to assist us with our startup.

Banking
The NAB has come through with our credit card facility, it will still take a little time to set up but by the time we are online we should be set to go.

Website
We are still probably a couple of weeks from “Online”, but we are certainly working toward the end of the month……we will keep you posted.

Up coming
Next week we will put together a schedule of events to let you know how we are tracking and to give you the upcoming dates for training events.
We are conducting Team Leader Training for potential team Leaders in NZ on the 1st May. We will advise the venue in the next few days and we will be issuing the invitation to all NZ Consultants before the end of the week.
Samantha Farham will be in New Zealand for the sponsors meeting for Savour NZ this Thursday & Friday. We will let you know the latest news on this event next week
I will be in NZ on Monday and Tuesday next week for more meetings with Netball NZ to set up fundraiser dates. I will let you all know how we go!
Till next week………….Keep up the great recruiting work!

Rob