Toward the end of secondary school, my grandfather paid for me to go to Outward Bound. Twenty-one days that left an indelible mark — and four stitches above my left eye, but that's another story.
What I remember most wasn't the course. It was coming home.
People would ask what it was like. I'd tell them about the kayaking, the tramping, the sailing, and they'd nod along, genuinely interested. They understood the activities.
They saw the activities. They didn't get the experience, or how it had shaped me and the seven others in my watch — because there's no way to hand that over in a conversation. There is no shared experience without actually being there.
Finding your tribe
I think that's what a lot of us are still looking for, decades later, in a considerably less waterlogged way.
A community that knows you. Knows your business. Knows what you're actually up against, week to week — not because you explained it in a pitch, but because they've lived a version of it themselves. A room where people help each other because they've been in the water together, not because there's a return expected on it.
Why now
I kept hearing the same thing. Different owners, different rooms, different weeks — and they were all saying some version of the same sentence: it feels different in Auckland at the moment. Quieter. More disconnected than it's been in years.
Enough people said it, independently, that I stopped treating it as one person's mood and started treating it as a signal.
So we restarted Roosters.
You have to be a good rooster
There's one rule, and until this week nobody had actually written it down: you have to be a good rooster to come along!
Three things, really. Trusted — people would be comfortable being introduced by you. Non-sales — you can absolutely end up doing business with someone you meet there, that's most of the point, just don't work the room with a card in each hand while you're in it. And introduction-based — you give before anyone owes you anything back.
Break that, and nobody argues with you about it. You just quietly stop getting invited. I'm not sure what the second offence looks like, to be honest — nobody's tested it in front of me yet, and I'd quite like to keep it that way.
None of this happens without Brien Keegan, Gareth and Fleur, and the team at Sprout — they host the room, run the list, and do the actual work while I get to turn up and do the fun bit: the invites and the introductions. Thank you.
The bit that keeps nagging at me
I've been circling this for a few weeks now, in a few different ways, because it keeps turning up in the AI conversations I have with owners too.
In business, people can't help you if they don't know you, don't know your business, and don't know what will actually help. Three separate things. Miss any one of them and the advice — human or otherwise — is a well-meaning guess, or generalities dressed up as certainty.
And here's what that room reminded me of tonight: helping each other is a team sport. Nobody gets those three things from a form, filled in on their own, in an afternoon. It's built the slow way — same as my watch of teenagers on a boat, in the bush or falling out of a kayak (hence the scar), forty-odd years ago.
Where that leaves it
Which brings me to AI. It's confident, well-written, and often wrong about your actual business. So how would it ever know?
It can get close on the facts. It can get surprisingly close on your judgement, if you correct it often enough. But the thing that room does — learning about the person, learning about their business, learning what will shift the dial, sharing real work experience — how does it learn that?
Right — this is exactly the kind of thing I'm working through with a few clients at the moment. Not the facts part. The part of a business, and a business owner, that never shows up as data anywhere.
So here's where you can help: what's your version of the watch? The room, the crew, the community that actually gets it — and could you explain to someone outside it why?
Good luck out there. And don't forget to have fun!
