Overview

Richard brings a rare ability to simplify complexity, align teams, and make change stick. He’s led high-performing teams in both the public and private sectors, scaled national innovation programmes, and helped hundreds of organisations sharpen their commercialisation, culture, and strategic focus.

His experience spans startups to enterprise, government to industry — with deep functional knowledge across sales, marketing, product and service design, product management, procurement, leadership, strategy and innovation. (He even had a spell as an assistant accountant.)

In 2025, he finally decided what he wants to be when he grows up and launched Reqlarity: a practice dedicated to helping organisations cut through the corporate nonsense and build strategies that create clarity, foster collective ownership, and drive real momentum.

Expertise

• Strategy design

• Leadership and team alignment to strategy

• Storytelling and strategy-aligned narrative development

• Facilitation

• Coaching

• Critical thinking

Special Interests

• Human communication

• Human behaviour

• Helping leaders create clarity and alignment in service of your strategy 

• Optimistic empirical scepticism

See more about Reqlarity here.

A Few Highlights

Richard once led a government innovation challenge that was described by one participant as “the most effective collection of support and services I’ve seen in 20+ years.”  

He also delivered NZ’s first SaaS marketplace while at Spark, delivered multi-award winning digital services while at MetService, led several firsts for NZ banking including real-time txt/email alerts while at Westpac, was judged one of NZ’s top twelve B2B salespeople in 1995, and he still carries the emotional scars of having to officiate, at the ripe old age of 20, the opening of NZ’s first unmanned fuelling station when the actual officials were unable to land in Timaru.

Most recently, Richard spent almost 10 years at Callaghan Innovation, New Zealand's innovation agency, including three years leading the Commercialisation Group - this group worked closely with many hundreds of New Zealand's most ambitious founders and teams, advising, coaching and building commercial capability (an awesome team, some of whom you will find on this website).