Your Local Advisor
Meet Mark
Hi, I’m Mark Forster — Business Advisor, small business owner, and trusted partner to leaders who want to grow, simplify, or unlock value in their businesses.
With over 40 years of hands-on experience in industrial distribution — from the shop floor to senior executive roles — I’ve had the privilege to lead businesses through significant growth, transformation, and ownership transitions. As Executive General Manager at Motion New Zealand, I helped reshape and triple the size of the New Zealand business, achieving market-leading employee and customer engagement.
Across my career, I’ve developed and delivered strategies within owner-operated, family-run, and corporate environments — always focused on sustainable performance and long-term value. I’ve acquired and integrated businesses, and just as importantly, walked away from deals that didn’t stack up. Those experiences taught me that many great businesses are only a few smart decisions away from becoming scalable, sale-ready assets.
Now, as part of the Trusted Advisor Network, I work with New Zealand SMEs to improve profitability, build leadership capability, and prepare for growth, succession, or sale. I bring a practical, people-first approach — combining structure, strategic clarity, and commercial insight with real-world experience you can trust.
I’m also a small business owner myself, working alongside my wife to grow State of Bloom, our boutique flower farm — so I understand the day-to-day realities of ownership as well as the big picture.
Whether you’re ready to grow, regain control, or step back from the day-to-day, I’d love to help you build a business that works for you — not the other way around.
Business Advisor
Working with clients on a Return-On-Investment (ROI) basis.
This means the income made by clients as a result of working with us must be at least a 5 times ROI. We believe fee structures should be transparent and accountable. For this reason we have proprietary software to ensure both client and advisor have an ROI “fit” before starting a program.
The objective of a client partnership is to meet agreed performance standards to:
Maximise client income…
Rationalise client effort…
Optimise client scale…
Promoting Locals
Every one of our consultants lives in a local community and drives past hundreds of businesses every day.
Every one of our consultants lives in a local community and drives past hundreds of businesses every day.
Since TAN was established in 2014 we have met, promoted and helped thousands of local businesses with this program. Help has taken many forms from Free PR where businesses are promoted on our social media platforms through to assessing businesses for profit potential. Often business owners will simply want a few pointers from an outside perspective.
All our consultants do this on a voluntary basis as their contribution to building business success.
Planning Sessions
Quarterly Planning
- Every business owner needs to step away from the day-to-day running of their business to think about longer-term issues and opportunities.
- Often the best environment for this is with other business owners who are faced with the same challenge of balancing their operational role with their longer-term role of leading and managing their business towards its goals.
- Quarterly Planning Sessions make this easy where business owners are provided with a structured format to build their plan.
- All planning sessions feature our signature 1-Page Plan that lists out 3 core projects for the upcoming quarter and a scoreboard for monitoring results over the period being planned for.
- Business Owners are provided with a workbook and planning guide to ensure they walk out clear, focused and ready to achieve the projects they have set.
Free Guide Book
If you want to find the easiest way to generate success in your business using the best techniques to get there, then the Guidebook will show you how.
Trusted Advisor Network
Mark is part of a dedicated team across Australia & New Zealand.
Our past 18 years in the advisory space has been the catalyst for developing our break-through approach.
Our programs are only offered to clients on an ROI basis after businesses have been analysed to determine the upside available to the business owner. Businesses must demonstrate a 500% ROI to be eligible for a program. This approach has been developed after years of in-field experience of being consultants, coaches, trainers and presenters.
Most importantly, over the last 12 years TAN has developed a deep understanding of working with business owners from every industry imaginable.
It has allowed us to continually develop leading methodologies, systems and intellectual property that makes up our program material. The synergy of working in partnership with our team along with such diverse clients has given us a collaborative culture that has become the most valuable part of the way we operate as a network.
