Image: Caroline with husband Tim Duffett and son Chester.
Caroline Boot, the founder of the NZ Procurement Institute, talks with LG magazine contributor Jane Warwick about the woman behind a successfully busy career.
Some stories snap in from all directions like a Cat’s Cradle string game but played with a hundred rubber bands instead of one long piece of yarn, and by a person who has 10 fingers on each hand.
This time, such a story would be that of Caroline Boot.
With a mother who worked in the Dutch resistance and spent WWII in and out of jail, and a father who gave up more than anyone realises for love, you could say grit, determination, and passion run deep in their daughter.
Caroline would call that genetic double helix the reason for a love of teaching and a compulsion to improve efficiency, but both of those traits come with a passion and a deep sense of character that cannot be so airily dismissed.
Everyone in Caroline’s family is in the medical profession one way or another, and there was a time it seemed she might follow them. Yet her path took what would later be recognised as a very individual Caroline-type swerve, and early commercial ventures into coaching maths and biology at school turned into a teaching career spanning more than a decade.
She taught country kids at Taumarunui High School, boys at Hato Petera in Auckland, Catholic girls at Carmel College, Protestant girls at St Cuthberts College, and pupils at the racially and culturally diverse Kristin School.
Navigating the ‘what-the-heck-way-is-up’ hormonal teenage angst of even the nicest of kids is surely one of the best ways to prepare yourself for just about anything – and Caroline has.
Between and within those placements, she discovered and honed her entrepreneurial skills. That story is longer than the page but suffice it to say she wound her way – both with and without pupils in tow – through working as a ski instructor in Austria, starting a windsurfing school in France, leading students into Nepalese villages, and shipping second-hand computers and teaching English presentation skills to businesses and universities in Cambodia.
Caroline also developed award-winning contextual teaching methods in mathematics and headed up school-wide curriculum development for International Baccalaureate programmes. Somehow, she also found time to earn an MBA with Distinction, including a research report titled Breaking the Constraints for Start-Up Consultancies.
That study became a blueprint for her next venture, which began when a friend asked her to help him write a tender response. Together, with help from Caroline’s husband Tim Duffett who is skilled in international marketing, they put together the proposal – and won.
The exercise revealed a niche in the business market for sharp writing skills, particularly those needed for tender evaluation.
From that, Plan A, a tender specialist company was born. It proved to be a great move quite quickly but also revealed a marked lack of motivated researchers who could analyse and write compelling technical marketing content. Driven by that determined DNA gene, Caroline found a cache – corporate refugees.
These were clever, well-educated young mums, sportspeople and almost-retirees who were flexible and free from the constraints of formal office environments.
Plan A was a great success and where there are leaders, there are, of course, followers, and Caroline quickly realised that – to stay at the front of the tender writing space – she had to come up with something extra.
Being Caroline, she found it, and connected with bureaux such as the NZTA, the Contractors Federation (and now CCNZ), Roading New Zealand (merged into the CCNZ), ACENZ, IPWEA and other agencies who required, or lacked, procurement skills.
The NZTA did have a Procurement Manual – an excellent one in fact, says Caroline but, in practice, very few pages within it were turned.
So, she launched the Clever Buying procurement training course, which was an immediate hit, not only teaching best-practice procurement theory but also drawing on her passion for learning through ‘doing’.
That was 15 years ago, and not to say there mightn’t have been challenging times and, to use another games analogy, that Caroline might have felt she was involved in a frustrating Whack-a-Mole bout with a very large mallet.
Clever Buying is now a launching pad for updating the NZQA Level 6 Qualification required by the NZTA. The programme is continuously updated, using input from industry groups, NZQA, NZ Government Procurement and OAG.
“Finally,” she tells me. “We were making a difference on the client side of the procurement fence, with more consistent practices that ticked the boxes for all three government departments (NZTA, MBIE, OAG).”
From that, NZ Procurement and Probity Services emerged as separate companies. She also founded the NZ Procurement Institute as an umbrella organisation designed to support all forms of procurement practice and professional development.
The cushions on the chairs in Caroline’s home must be pristine, because – does she ever sit down?
Somehow, she also found the years to look after her elderly parents; renew her marriage vows in Las Vegas and, while there, find the opportunity to invest in bank-seized housing just a few blocks from the famous Strip, remodelling and providing rental homes for some of the USA’s post-GFC dispossessed.
She and her family spent the C-19 lockdowns at their historic Kawau Zoo property on Kawau Island in Auckland’s Hauraki Gulf and are still helping to restore the country’s largest private palm collection on the island.
Caroline has supported new community housing models for seniors in Rotorua; completed postgraduate qualifications in education and assessment theory; and mentored several aspiring entrepreneurs. And those are just some of her projects.
Einstein’s Theory of Relativity says that time and space are flexible; time bends and shapes; time is what you make it. Albert would have loved Caroline, and maybe even learnt from her.