Lynette, known as Polly to her friends, is a vibrant Maori woman successfully operating several Harcourts real estate offices in the Christchurch area.  A working class background hasn’t stopped her from becoming one of Christchurch’s hottest businesswomen.  Not content with her own success, she shares her positive energy with all around her, inspiring others to succeed and grow into whatever they wish to become.

I come from a family background that is absolutely not business aware.  My family doesn’t have a single business brain among them.  My parents are very traditional Maori, working class folks.  They are very loving but traditional role models.  Mum was at home looking after the kids, while Dad went out to work.  They had us when they were about twenty, so they were quite young and carefree, and probably didn’t really settle until they were much older.  By that time I was about twenty and needed some guidance a bit earlier than that.  I had a real issue with achieving but looking back I think I was just trying to get my parents to notice me.  They were just drifting along in life and I wanted more, I never wanted to drift.

I was very driven at school.  With the absence of role models I wasn’t really sure where I was going, so I went nursing after I finished school.  I did really well in my school exams and retrospectively I would have preferred law, but that just seemed far too outrageous to even be considered.  It probably still would be quite unheard of for someone from our family to do law.  So I went nursing, which was deemed very good and special.  I enjoyed my nursing and made some special friends but eventually I got tired of it.  After twelve years of nursing, I was away with my husband and said to him “I don’t wish to go back nursing.  I wish to do something else”.  We’d been married ten years and had our first son, Harry.  He thought I’d be good at real estate.  We’d always bought and sold properties, done them up as investments.  It seemed like a natural progression.

It was 1994 when I started to sell real estate.  Harry was only little, he wasn’t even walking or talking, and I was deciding to work fulltime.  In my first year in real estate, I was among the top Canterbury salespeople and had a six figure income.  I also had a change of office in my first year, which didn’t really work out.  I looked across the road and thought I saw something better, but it wasn’t, so I had to go back to my old boss with my tail between my legs, and he kindly took me back.  I had a couple of years of good sales and then John, my husband, decided he was sick of plumbing and he wanted to join me in real estate.  He came and worked with me for a while which was really hard because I was used to doing my own thing, and had been for a couple of years.  I had systems and routines established and he was coming in and mucking it all up.  He’d constantly be asking me what I was doing and where I was going.  It was pretty tough initially, until he got on his feet, which he did quite quickly, thankfully!

After three years selling, I reached a point where I was dissatisfied.  I felt there was something lacking in the business we were working in.  I guess I got to a point where I felt I could do it better, and I felt my boss was taking me for granted.  I left and so did my husband and two colleagues.  We left our businesses, the people we were working for, which was huge for them because big agents walking out the door is tough on a business.

We bought a business that was vacant, the Papanui Harcourts office.  It was vacant because the previous owner had killed himself, and the owner before that had run it down.  We inherited a business that was very rough around the edges but we believed we could make a go of it.  It was difficult and extraordinarily expensive.  It took every last resource we had.  We bought the office and walked into a meeting with about ten sales people.  Three of those got up and left.  We’d paid hundreds of thousands of dollars for this office with a history where someone had just killed himself, three of the staff just walked out the door, and a total of seventeen listings.  What had we done?  I remember going into my office and crying, thinking we’d made a dreadful mistake.

Excerpt from Lynette “Polly” McFadden’s story

Go Girl Go! – Real Stories of New Zealand Women in Business

By Jacqui Thomas

Published 2001, JT Publishing Ltd