The first car she can remember was her mother’s old Humber 90.
“I have to say the driver’s seat was propped up with newspapers because it really was falling apart,” she says.
“In all sincerity, my first memory of the AA was when we were in the Humber 90 coming back from our first big trip away to the snow in Oakune and the gearbox fell out on the way up the Bombay Hills.
“The AA came and he literally duct-taped it back in place to get us home.”
Tereora grew up in Torbay on Auckland’s North Shore.
“My parents split up when I was 7 and so we didn’t have a lot of money,” she says.
“So, my first memory of money was a paper round because my mum didn’t have the extra cash to give us pocket money.”
Tereora says she has strong memories of that time around the divorce.
“I remember we had to move quite quickly and we moved in with my grandparents and that was a very stark reminder of our situation, particularly in terms of not having ready cash and then having to figure out my own way of making some money.
“It really was no pocket money. I didn’t have that privilege, unfortunately, and I certainly had plenty of jobs.”
Tereora says she remembers moving with her mother into their first unit.
“We literally had one couch. We had no beds and our staple dinners were sausages basically.
“So that was probably the poorest I’ve ever felt,” she says.
Her mother was a hairdresser and Tereora credits her with instilling a sharp focus on budgeting.
“She was actually quite smart. She worked for a hairdressing brand and a shop but she also created her own side hustle where she’d go into rest homes and do hair.
“There’s a lot of people in rest homes, so she was able to, over time, leave her shop job and she created her own business.
“She was an incredible budgeter,” Tereora says.
“Mum would sit at the dining room table at night and you could see the enormous weight of worry on her shoulders. She had a little grid book and she’d be sitting there literally writing down, to the last cent, where every single piece of her paycheck or benefit was going.
“To this day, I just can’t get my head around how she managed,” she says.
It definitely rubbed off and Tereora describes herself as a “prolific planner”.
“Even now I sit down once a month and go through our budget at home and I’m really aware of where everything goes.”
Tereora says that has influenced her business management style.
“I know my numbers. My CFOs [chief financial officers] over the years really appreciate the fact that I can spot a number that doesn’t look right a mile off.”
On a personal (or adult) level Tereora says the poorest she has ever been was – like many Kiwi leaders – at university.
While childhood poverty is tough, she sees some value in being forced to penny-pinch as a young adult.
“It’s the making of you, I reckon,” she says.
“You really have to make some good choices financially. And I think you [learn to] do that real fast when you don’t have much.”
Tereora had been a strong artist at school and nearly headed down that path, looking at Auckland’s Elam Arts School for a time.
“But, it became abundantly clear to me that I wasn’t at that level, so I had to think differently about how I was going to make some money,” she says.
She still loves art and has collected works by New Zealand artists since she got her first well-paying job. She also has a degree in interior design which she did in later life for love, rather than any ambition to change career.
When it came to choosing what to study, Tereora decided she needed a business degree.
She went on to specialise in the insurance industry.
“That wasn’t the plan. I think I just fell into it really. And that was actually a result of the fact I needed to earn some money, I wasn’t fortunate in the sense of having, a strong financial background from a family perspective.
She joined Sovereign, then a start-up, which went on to great success and offered Tereora a strong career path for 14 years.
Tereora’s advice for others seeking career success is to focus on getting into an area they truly love and enjoy.
“I know it sounds a bit trite, but if you really love what you do, success follows that, and that’s success both in getting fulfilment out of what you’re doing, but also a monetary sense.
“I have this saying that I’ve lived by for years, which is: ‘Work hard in silence and let success be your noise’. I think young people can learn a lot from that because if you truly believe in what you’re doing and you work hard at it, success will be your noise.”
Asked, as all Money Talks guests are, what she’d target if we could make her Prime Minister for the day, Tereora says she’d like to see more funding for roading and road safety generally.
“Obviously, I’m passionate about road safety and it’s a big part of what we advocate for at the AA, she says.
“Road safety is everything from wearing seat belts and driver distraction through to our roading infrastructure.
“One of the things I would do if I was prime minister for the day is de-politicise infrastructure investment in New Zealand so that in terms of governments coming and going, it doesn’t become that political football, it is just part of the budget that has to be allocated to infrastructure.
“I think if, if I could pull that off, that would certainly get us on a better, stable journey to regular investment in our infrastructure right across the country... not changing every six or nine years.”
On the future for cars (and the AA), Tereora is expecting a slow, steady transition towards electric vehicles.
“Do I think that EVs are the total answer? No, I don’t. I think we’re going to have a mixed fleet approach,” she says.
“That’s down to the fact that there’s, there’s so much innovation happening in the sector at the moment. EVs are kind of the big rage for some people.
“I think that’s already starting to taper off a bit because people are looking at other fuel sources and seeing the innovation coming through the car manufacturing brands. I think we’ll see quite a hybrid fleet.”
She sees the AA playing an ongoing role in motoring but notes that the business has become more diverse in the past decades.
“AA’s hero product is roadside rescue, absolutely, but we do so much more than cars.
“We’re in the travel business, we’re in the money business, we’re in the insurance business, we are in the battery business.”
Listen to the full episode to hear more from Tereora on her career, what else she learned from her childhood, and the changing face of the motor and insurance industries.
Money Talks is a podcast run by the NZ Herald. It isn’t about personal finance and isn’t about economics - it’s just well-known New Zealanders talking about money and sharing some stories about the impact it’s had on their lives and how it has shaped them.
The series is hosted by Liam Dann, business editor-at-large for the Herald. He is a senior writer and columnist, and also presents and produces videos and podcasts. He joined the Herald in 2003.
Money Talks is available on iHeartRadio, Spotify, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
