Kaha Tahi is a company. We invoice, we pay tax, we have to cover our costs like anyone else. What makes us a social enterprise isn’t a tax status or a certificate on the wall — it’s what we’re for.
The gap we keep seeing
Around Palmerston North there are a lot of people who can’t get basic work done. Not because they don’t care about their house or their car or their kids’ schooling, but because the one-off price of a tradesperson, a mechanic, or a tutor is out of reach — so the lawn gets away on them, the car limps from one breakdown to the next, the maths homework stays hard. It builds up until it’s a crisis, and a crisis costs far more to fix than the upkeep would have.
At the same time, the people who actually do that work — the ones on the tools, mowing, under the bonnet, at the whiteboard — are often not paid well for it, and the margin goes somewhere else.
We think both of those problems have the same answer.
What we’re trying to do
Lower the cost for the people paying. We run our services at cost, or sometimes at a small loss, on purpose. We buy parts and materials in bulk, we plan routes and schedules so crews aren’t driving around half-empty, and we move people onto predictable monthly memberships instead of unpredictable one-off bills. All of that takes real money out of the price.
Pay the people doing the work properly. A fair wage for skilled, reliable work isn’t a cost to apologise for — it’s the point. People who are paid well and treated well do better work and stay, and that’s what lets us make promises to a customer and keep them.
Put the rest back in. Any surplus doesn’t go out to shareholders. It goes into the Community Fund — shared tools and equipment, training, hardship support, and the longer-term work we want to do around housing.
This is a slow build
We’re not pretending we’ve solved anything yet. We’re a small crew doing lawns, maintenance, car servicing and tutoring, trying to prove that this model actually holds together. If it does, there’s a long way we want to take it — from maintenance into building, from building into housing that works for families, students and older people at the same time.
But it starts with doing the ordinary work well, for a fair price, this week.
If any of that is something you need, get in touch. We’ll work out a plan that’s actually worth your time.