This week on the Ways to Wealth Podcast, Charlie speaks to Dr. Shalini Divya, CEO and founder of TasmanIon, a Wellington deep-tech company building rechargeable aluminium-ion batteries, batteries designed to be cheap, made from abundant materials, and crucially, unable to catch fire.

The headline is simple: a Tesla Powerwall costs somewhere between nine and twelve thousand US dollars. Shalini is building something that delivers the same energy storage for around $4,500, aimed first at the millions of households in India, Asia, and beyond who could never afford a Powerwall in the first place. For Shalini, this is personal. She grew up in energy poverty herself, and her ultimate goal is to see a safe, affordable battery in every home like the one she came from.

What makes her approach so refreshing is how clear-eyed she is about the endgame. She doesn't want to build the next Tesla or Samsung. She wants one of them to acquire TasmanIon, because they already have the distribution and the R&D budgets to take the technology further and faster than she ever could alone. As she puts it, a billion dollars is just a number, what she really wants is for the tech to reach everyone.

After nine years, from a PhD in a Wellington lab to validated prototypes and an open seed round, Shalini is honest about the hard truths of deep tech: that the hardest part isn't inventing the battery, it's the years of commercialisation, safety testing, and timing that come after, and why, through all of it, the biggest lesson she's learned is to be bold.

Watch every episode of the Ways to Wealth Podcast here: www.eccuity.com/podcasts

Learn more about Shalini here: https://www.linkedin.com/in/shalini-divya/

Learn more about Shalini's company here: https://www.tasmanion.com/

#waystowealth #batteries #cleanenergy #deeptech #startup #energystorage #tasmanion #entrepreneurship #nzbusiness #innovation #sustainability #powerwall #womenintech #wealthbuilding

This week on the Ways to Wealth Podcast, Charlie speaks to Craig McAlpine, founder of MyCareerBrand, a career coaching and outplacement business operating in around ten countries, and Pitch, a tech startup rethinking how people sell themselves into their next role.

Craig's big idea will change how you think about applying for a job. He came from a background writing professional bids and proposals, and he realised that when a company advertises a role, it's really issuing a request for proposal, an invitation to prove you can solve their problem. Yet here's the mismatch: a business bidding for a hundred-thousand-dollar contract will happily spend a whole week on its proposal, while a job seeker chasing a role worth a quarter of a million dollars over a few years thinks putting in a single day is a big effort.

So Craig flips the whole approach. Instead of listing what you technically do, you lead with the value you create, the problems you solve, and the gold you'd leave on the table if they don't hire you. His tools even let you design the ideal role you want, then go to market with the evidence that you can deliver it.

This is a conversation about treating your career like the business it actually is, why he bootstrapped his own product rather than chase easy money, and the hard-won advice he'd give any founder: understand the problem before you build, back yourself completely, but always be willing to walk away.

Watch every episode of the Ways to Wealth Podcast here: www.eccuity.com/podcasts

Learn more about Craig here: https://www.linkedin.com/in/craigmcalpine/

Learn more about Craig's company here: https://mycareerbrand.net/

#waystowealth #careers #jobsearch #careercoaching #recruitment #personalbranding #entrepreneurship #nzbusiness #jobhunting #cv #linkedin #startup #mycareerbrand #wealthbuilding

This week on the Ways to Wealth Podcast, Charlie speaks to Jam Mayer, founder of two companies, the AI automation consultancy Conversologie and Divergity, a learning platform built for neurodivergent minds.

Jam is neurodivergent, with ADHD and dyscalculia, and she's open about how that shapes the way she works and builds. She makes a compelling case for something the data backs up: a strikingly high number of founders and creatives are neurodivergent, and it's often not because they set out to be entrepreneurs. It's because the traditional workplace, the nine-to-five, the rigid systems, the one-size-fits-all expectations, simply isn't built for the way their brains work. As she puts it, the goal isn't to work around neurodivergent people. It's to work with them.

A recurring idea in this conversation is what Jam calls a personal operating system: a way of designing your work around how you actually think, then using delegation and AI to offload the things that drain you, so your energy goes to what you're genuinely good at. It's the philosophy behind Divergity, which throws out the rigid step-one, step-two model of learning in favour of something adaptive enough to meet very different minds where they are.

This is a conversation about building a business, and a life, that fits the way you're wired, rather than forcing yourself to fit someone else's system, and about why understanding that difference isn't a limitation, but often a genuine advantage.

Watch every episode of the Ways to Wealth Podcast here: www.eccuity.com/podcasts

Learn more about Jam here: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jammayer/

Learn more about Jam's company here: https://www.divergity.co/

#waystowealth #neurodivergent #adhd #entrepreneurship #neurodiversity #founders #ai #automation #nzbusiness #divergity #futureofwork #productivity #learning #wealthbuilding

This week on the Ways to Wealth Podcast, Charlie speaks to Tim Doyle, founder of Doyle Accountants and one of New Zealand's go-to specialists in cryptocurrency tax, who has filed more than 2,500 crypto tax returns and has been consulting with the IRD on digital assets since 2017.

Tim got into crypto the same way most people did: chasing the upside. He made a lot of money, lost it all, and ended up buried in CSV files with a tax problem he couldn't solve, and he's a chartered accountant. That realization became a business. Now he works with around 200 clients who each hold over a million dollars in crypto, and he's watched closely enough to know exactly who wins and who doesn't.

Here's what he'll tell you: almost nobody gets rich trading crypto. He compares it to quitting your job to chase an NBA contract when you're five foot eight. His wealthiest clients did the opposite of trading, they bought a handful of tokens years ago and never touched them. No stress, no tax nightmares, no risk, because they never sold.

Tim and Charlie also get into why the IRD is now cracking down hard on crypto, the real mechanics of how the wealthy structure their money to legally pay less tax, and why he believes the whole game is shifting, away from farmland and tractors and towards digital, movable assets that let people quite literally vote with their feet on where they pay tax at all.

Watch every episode of the Ways to Wealth Podcast here: www.eccuity.com/podcasts

Learn more about Tim here: https://www.linkedin.com/in/timbdoyle/

Learn more about Tim's company here: https://www.doyleaccountants.co.nz/

#waystowealth #crypto #cryptocurrency #tax #bitcoin #investing #nzbusiness #accounting #ird #wealthbuilding #dubai #digitalassets #entrepreneurship #doyleaccountants

This week on the Ways to Wealth Podcast, Charlie speaks to Fernanda Da Silva Tatley, the founder of natural skincare company Azurlis, and a woman who describes herself as an artist in her heart, a scientist by training, and a Reiki master in her soul.

Early in her journey, a group of overseas investors offered Fernanda the money she badly needed. Just sign here, they said, and don't worry about what we want in return, we'll decide that later. She was bootstrapping, stretched thin, and desperate for the funding. And she said no. She couldn't move forward on something that wasn't in black and white and didn't align with her values, and she's convinced it was the right call, even though it made her road far harder.

Fernanda holds a PhD in medical microbiology and once helped a university win tens of millions in research funding, yet she's spent fifteen years quietly bootstrapping her skincare company, working her day job to fund it and building it after hours and on weekends. She's remarkably honest about where that's left her. When Charlie asks what those years have produced, she admits the business hasn't transformed the way she hoped, but she has. It changed her.

This is a conversation about staying true to your values when money is on the line, why she refuses to sell anyone hype, and a hard-won redefinition of success, where a chance conversation on a bus can matter just as much as winning the lottery.

Watch every episode of the Ways to Wealth Podcast here: www.eccuity.com/podcasts

Learn more about Fernanda here: https://www.linkedin.com/in/fernanda-da-silva-tatley-phd-mentr-08a09b4/

Learn more about Fernanda's company here: https://azurlis.co.nz/

#waystowealth #skincare #entrepreneurship #bootstrapping #values #naturalskincare #nzbusiness #science #founders #womeninbusiness #vegan #azurlis #mindset #wealthbuilding

This week on the Ways to Wealth Podcast, Charlie speaks to Matthew Cutts, who spent nearly thirty years performing lead roles in some of London's biggest West End musicals, Cats, Starlight Express, Mamma Mia, Jersey Boys, before trading the stage for the boardroom.

When Matthew moved back to New Zealand, he expected people to be impressed. Instead, his CV meant nothing, nobody knew who he was, and he had no network and no qualifications to show for a glittering career. As he puts it, the world had moved on and no one really gave a damn. Someone later told him he should have treated himself like an immigrant arriving in a new country, rather than a star coming home. So at an age when most people are settled, he went back to school and earned the first qualification of his life.

What he's built since is a business helping companies say what needs to be said. And the insights he's carried over from three decades on stage are quietly brilliant: why the best storyteller in the room is actually the best listener, why telling a great story is only half the job if you can't back it up, and the career truth it took him years to understand, that he stopped getting the big roles because he was the best, and started getting them because of everything else he brought.

This is a conversation about reinvention, communication, and why the language of the stage might explain business better than business does.

Watch every episode of the Ways to Wealth Podcast here: www.eccuity.com/podcasts

Learn more about Matthew here: https://www.linkedin.com/in/matthewcutts/

Learn more about Matthew's company here: https://www.matthewcutts.com/

#waystowealth #storytelling #communication #leadership #reinvention #westend #theatre #entrepreneurship #nzbusiness #presentation #careerchange #publicspeaking #matthewcutts #wealthbuilding

This week on the Ways to Wealth Podcast, Charlie speaks to Sarah Laurie, founder of Take a Breath, whose breathing software has been tested at scale inside companies like Microsoft, Spark, and The Warehouse Group.

Here's the claim that reframes everything: breathing isn't about relaxation. It's a performance mechanism. When you breathe properly, the part of your brain responsible for decisions, focus, and managing your emotions switches fully on. When you breathe shallow, into your chest, the way more than nine out of ten of us now do, that part of your brain switches off and your stress response takes over. You haven't become less capable. Your brain is quietly running in the wrong mode.

Sarah explains how our breathing has changed at a population level over the last two decades, why she believes so many high performers are secretly operating well below their capacity, and why the constant pull of our phones and short-form content is making it worse. The results from her corporate programmes are hard to ignore: she's measured 96% of people reducing their anxiety, 76% sleeping better, and 82% with more energy, without anyone stopping work to do it.

This is a conversation about the one thing you do around twenty thousand times a day without thinking, why you're almost certainly doing it wrong, and how quickly that can change.

Watch every episode of the Ways to Wealth Podcast here: www.eccuity.com/podcasts

Learn more about Sarah here: https://www.linkedin.com/in/sarah-laurie-8711a67/

Learn more about Sarah's company here: https://www.takeabreath.world/

#waystowealth #breathing #health #performance #anxiety #sleep #wellbeing #stress #entrepreneurship #nzbusiness #healthtech #productivity #takeabreath #wealthbuilding

This week on the Ways to Wealth Podcast, Charlie speaks to John Ballinger, a tech entrepreneur and software developer who once built the first iPhone heart monitor app, an app that featured in an Apple ad and detected a user's heart condition.

But this conversation is really about how John invests, and it breaks almost every rule you've been taught. He holds 99% of his portfolio in a single stock: Rocket Lab. Not a fund, not a basket, one company. His logic is simple: find an extraordinary founder taking a business somewhere huge, buy in, and ride their coattails through every gut-wrenching dip, no matter how far it falls. He watched that stock slide from ten dollars to three and calls it the best buying opportunity he'd ever seen.

John and Charlie get into why concentrating everything in one bet can make more sense than spreading it thin, why John ran the numbers and found that buying the S&P has crushed buying property in almost every scenario over the last seventy years, and why he believes most established companies are now the Titanic heading straight for the iceberg in the age of AI.

This is a conversation about conviction, riding your winners, and thinking in decades when everyone else is thinking in months.

Watch every episode of the Ways to Wealth Podcast here: www.eccuity.com/podcasts

Learn more about John here: https://www.linkedin.com/in/john-ballinger-119903aa/

Learn more about John's company here: https://applyhere.co.nz/

#waystowealth #investing #stocks #rocketlab #ai #entrepreneurship #nzbusiness #stockmarket #property #wealthbuilding #tech #founders #longterm #conviction

This week on the Ways to Wealth Podcast, Charlie speaks to Natasa Rasic, co-founder of ProBizBalance, a business support and bookkeeping company she runs with her own daughter.

Natasa built an accounting firm in Serbia and ran it for twenty years. When she decided to leave it all behind and move to the other side of the world for her daughter's future, she didn't just close the business or sell it to the highest bidder. She sold it to her own staff, the people she'd worked alongside for up to two decades, so that every one of them would walk away with their own stability.

That word, stability, comes up again and again. Natasa arrived in New Zealand six years ago with her daughter and two suitcases, retrained for a master's degree to get her visa, and slowly rebuilt from nothing. Now the two of them are building something together, and when Charlie asks her what wealth actually means, her answer isn't money. It's peace. The freedom to not worry about the rent, and the time to spend with the person she crossed the world for.

This is a conversation about starting over, the quiet discipline behind the admin most business owners avoid, and building something to hand down to the next generation.

Watch every episode of the Ways to Wealth Podcast here: www.eccuity.com/podcasts

Learn more about Natasa here: https://www.linkedin.com/in/natasa-rasic-45a99b194/

Learn more about Natasa's company here: https://www.probizbalance.co.nz/

#waystowealth #bookkeeping #smallbusiness #entrepreneurship #nzbusiness #familybusiness #immigrant #accounting #intergenerationalwealth #stability #serbia #womeninbusiness #startingover #wealthbuilding

This week on the Ways to Wealth Podcast, Charlie speaks to Sarah Clearwater, founder and CEO of Reframer, a customer experience consultancy, and the person who built New Zealand's largest community of customer experience professionals.

Here's a number that should worry any business owner: in a typical B2B sale, seven to ten people have to say yes before you ever sign a contract, and at least five different departments touch that customer along the way. Sarah's whole job is finding where that journey quietly breaks, and she argues most deals don't fall apart at the negotiating table. They fall apart in the silent gap after someone has already said yes.

A social scientist who grew up in Berlin to East German and Egyptian parents, Sarah came from a long line of entrepreneurs and swore she'd never become one. When she finally cracked, she gave herself a six-month runway and just three months to land a client. She's refreshingly blunt about the conversations she has with the businesses she works with, the ones where she asks "why, and who for, and to what end?" and the room goes quiet.

This is a conversation about why most companies are flying blind with their customers, why chasing the next trendy demographic can quietly wreck the business you already have, and why, in Sarah's words, good business is never done in your comfort zone.

Watch every episode of the Ways to Wealth Podcast here: www.eccuity.com/podcasts

Learn more about Sarah here: https://www.linkedin.com/in/sarahclearwater/

Learn more about Sarah's company here: https://www.reframr.co.nz/

#waystowealth #customerexperience #cx #b2b #sales #businessgrowth #entrepreneurship #nzbusiness #consulting #marketing #strategy #founders #customerjourney #wealthbuilding