Taking it on the chin

The commercial chapter of George Bettle’s career was over the day he shaved off his beard.

The founding guru of Hamilton advertising agency Bettle and Associates had his bushy grey beard and blue glasses on in the morning of Friday December 1 but then turned up for his retirement event later that night without them both.

The 52-year-old chuckles at the reaction while sitting in his 15^th floor Wellington apartment, where he and wife Emma now live, having sold their Maungakawa property near Cambridge a couple of years ago.

“We’ve got a view right down the barrel of the harbour,” he says as he turns to look at it and then comments on the Dick Frizzell print of the Four Square man on the wall which hung in Bettle’s office for years.

Bettle is now non-executive chair of Bettle and Associates, the advertising agency he founded in 2002.

Then he had been working for Walker Advertising in Auckland and was headhunted to work with former Hamilton mayor Michael Redman at Grey Advertising heading the fledgling digital division.

Grey had branches in Auckland, Wellington and Hamilton and Bettle was seconded to Hamilton to work on the Economic Development Forum’s strategy on how to attract businesses to the Waikato.

“I came down to give them a hand and started to believe my own copy and thought ‘this is a pretty good little economy’.”

When Redman left the agency so too did many of his Hamilton clients, so Bettle’s options were to either move with the multinational to Sydney or Singapore.

Then when Grey decided to shut the doors in Hamilton, Bettle offered to buy the agency agreeing a delayed deal on April 1, 2001.

“I said to them ‘You send me down for six months as general manager of Hamilton, if I like what I see I agree to pay the price we just agreed, not whatever I turn it into in the six months, I’m there, you don’t get a double hit’. It was an awesome deal for me.”

Bettle turned the agency around and 10 years later he went “mental” trying to take on the world, setting up an office in Australia.

“It wasn’t very much fun, and it wasn’t very profitable.”

Bettle found himself managing people instead of writing strategy, which is what he loved.

“We got quite big. We had big national clients, but the agency model is when you lose one, you lose a lot of people. And I didn’t like that boom and bust.”

Flying under the radar was Bettle’s community and philanthropic partnerships from K’aute Pasifika to Hospice Waikato but in his private life, he was often an anonymous donor.

He put in a succession plan in place appointing Will Peart, who had worked for Bettle as account director on the Ihug account but then gone to Australia to work at agencies.

Adam Lurman, who Bettle employed years earlier on a scholarship straight out of Wintec’s third year and who then left to go to Tauranga, came back as creative director.

Both returned as Bettle had moved into the Riverbank Lane offices in Hamilton the agency still works out of today where it employs 17 people and maintains a healthy client base.

“Probably one of the most rewarding things is actually having young guys with lots of talent go away and see the world and then come back.”

In 2020, as part of an exit strategy, Bettle sold them a shareholding in the business and told them he wanted to ease out within five years.

“I said ‘Let’s make it not about me, let’s make it about Will and Adam’. I was quite happy in the background and there was an ownership model going through that didn’t rely on me.”

One of Bettle’s clients was Swedish farm machinery and equipment company DeLaval. The Hamilton company had been DeLaval’s global agency for nearly a decade and he had the opportunity to redo its 10 year strategy.

“It was a fantastic opportunity and an awesome project. I wanted to get that done, get it implemented, lock it away. It was really rewarding, really challenging. It felt very much like a full stop. That’s about as good as it gets. I don’t think I could surpass that.”

Bettle finished that work on November 1 and left the agency a month later where he turned up to his farewell dinner beardless.

“I thought I better mark this and so I shaved it off for the first time in 10 years. It was terrifying, my dad started appearing in the mirror.”

Reaction from his family was mixed. Wife Emily, who is the co-founder of School Kit, a Hamilton-based education company that offers resource kits and learning experiences to teachers, had lobbied hard for him to keep it.

Daughters Maggie, 25, and Sam, 22, were on opposite sides.

In Wellington, Bettle takes turns picking up his six-year-old nephew from school and a friend’s child from daycare, getting out on his e-bike – cycling is so easy in the capital, he says – and swimming in the harbour where he recently got out as far as the Baring Head lighthouse.

“It will be just a gross admission and a lack of imagination from me if I can’t find something to do.

“I’m sure I will be full of plans and things, but I just want to give myself a little time to chill out.

“I think genuinely the commercial chapter of my life is over. I’ve proved to myself I can do it, I can front globally with the best of them. It’s a challenge I feel I’ve met, and I don’t feel I need to do it again.”

Time will tell.

See: Bettle and D3 partnership, the next level.

See: Associates rise at Bettle