Q&A with Letitia Drury, Beca's new Southern Regional Manager - NZ

This month, Letitia Drury officially commenced as Beca's new Southern Regional Manager - New Zealand. We sat down with Letitia to talk about the new role, and what the future holds for Beca in New Zealand’s South Island.

What excites you about your new role?

For me this role is all about people. The southern New Zealand Beca team has so many awesome people with fantastic skills, innovative thinking and the ability to really bring value to the work they do every day.  It’s such an exciting challenge to be able to help continue to grow the next generation of leaders across our business. 

I’m also looking forward to engaging and being part of the wider business community. We have wonderful clients that we work closely with and I’m looking forward to meeting more of them across all our markets to understand how we continue making their everyday better! 

What’s the biggest challenge for the southern region in the next 3-5 years?

The southern region of New Zealand is such a geographically large area and correspondingly the challenges are diverse. For Queenstown and Selwyn, two of the fastest growing towns in the country, there are big infrastructure challenges. Water across the board is a challenge, be it drinking water quality, stormwater management, flood mitigation, river and lake water quality or irrigation requirements. This will continue to be an area that needs our focus.

Tourism in the South Island is another rapidly growing industry that is important to our economic growth. We’ll have to continue to enhance the experience for tourists in order to maintain and grow our tourism numbers. 

Underlying all of this is the population growth we are experiencing. With this growth, there is also the changing expectations of a new generation who have an appetite to address the challenges around sustainability, climate change and waste minimisation. 

The evolving use of technology in our everyday lives will also continue to increase and keeping up to speed with these changes will help support our success as a region. 

Where do you think Beca can have the most impact in the future?

Beca has always prided itself on working in partnership with our clients and really understanding how the their business works and how to bring greater value to that business – be it in technological advancements, process efficiencies, innovative designs or whole-of-life costs, we are always looking to improve the everyday for our clients.

As technology continues to evolve at a rapid rate and people become more and more mobile in their working arrangements, we will have to stay true to our value of partnership. The heart of our business will always be about relationships and taking the time to engage, listen and tailor solutions to what our client’s really want.  We are a people centric business, both inside and out – this is our strength, and it will be important to continue to have a positive impact in our communities. 

What will be your priorities over the next 3-6 months?

Priorities? People, people, people! It’s all about building and strengthening new and existing relationships across all facets of the business. Proactively working on our relationships with people in and outside the organisation from the outset is the best way to set our business up for success, so that’s the priority! 

Tell us something most people won’t know about you?

I swam my first mile when I was 7 years old!  That was the start of seven years of competitive swimming before turning to white water slalom kayaking, where I represented New Zealand.

Read more about Letitia Drury here.