After 27 years at the helm, Arrowtown’s Edward Guy’s handed over the reins of Rationale.

Guy founded the independent advisory company in 1999 — in 2003 he hired his first employee, Tom Lucas, who’s now a director, along with Jimmy Sygrove, who joined the team almost eight years ago and Chris Bowie, who’s been with the business for six and a-half years.

Guy’s continuing as principal consultant — “[I’m] working on the work they want me to work on, and then just making sure that I’m here for that successful transition.”

“It’s just time for somebody else to have a go,” he says.

“These guys are up for it and the business will survive, and that’s important for me.”

Noting the Rationale team — 10 of whom work in Arrowtown with one each in Dunedin and Hamilton — works “in the hard places”, Guy says he’s most proud of the work they’ve done over almost three decades.

“We’ve done that by everyone digging deep — it takes a team of people to get this work sorted; we don’t do the easy stuff … and there’s never a book on how to do it.

“You’ve just got to dive in there and try to work it out.”

Projects at present include some head-scratchers, such as Local Water Done Well, asset management and infrastructure planning, public transport business cases and council amalgamation.

Of the latter, Guy says they’ve done some work on that in Canterbury, “staring down the barrel of what that actually involves”.

“If that goes through, that’s going to be huge.

“You look at how long water reform has taken and the amount of work we’re still doing in that space — this is everything except for water, and they want it done by 2028.”

Sygrove says for the new directors, the primary focus is to “keep doing what we’ve always done”.

“We don’t want our clients to see any change — keep delivering good work [and] keep the relationships going.

“Ed’s still here, he’s just not managing the business day-to-day.”

— TRACEY ROXBURGH