_edited.png)
Our
Story
The idea of developing internal Commercial Acumen workshops stemmed when our co-founder Nathan King was working at Synlait Milk in 2019.
​
Commercial Acumen was identified as a key capability area of people development. Nathan saw it as an opportunity to broaden his business knowledge enterprise-wide. He bundled these findings from working across the value chain into a one-day interactive workshop. He then had group facilitation training through Victoria University and delivered this workshop during his tenure in 2020 and 2021.
This workshop was then co-facilitated and continues in-house to this day.
​
Over the past 3 years, they have self-facilitated over 15 training sessions in-house for over 170 staff. These attendees have ranged from Business Graduates and Operations Staff (Manufacturing & Supply Chain) through to Senior Sales Managers and Project Directors. To summarise the feedback to date:
“This workshop has unlocked technical experts and people leaders’ understanding and appreciation of other departments’ challenges, enabling better collaboration and improved decision making.”
​
Our business model is to repeat this process but for your business. . .
OUR TEAM
Nathan King
CEO
Nathan co-founded Commercial Cornerstone to help increase the commercial capability of businesses’ workforce. He brings a set of practical tools and applies various frameworks to build your employees’ capability in informed decision making. He is passionate about ensuring companies capture their fair share of the value they create.
​
Nathan is a business person that happens to be a Chartered Management Accountant.
He has over 14 years of commercial experience working with non-finance stakeholders in both the UK and New Zealand. These have been Strategic, Senior Finance and Operational roles.
​
He has worked in a wide range of private and public companies: Such as Ceva Logistics, JCB and Fonterra. As well as lead teams of up to 35 staff. This experience has led him to partner with all parts of the value chain from procurement and manufacturing, through so logistics and sales. Learning critical skills to drive collaboration and results. This has become a passion and now is participating as a speaker in conferences on this topic as well as founding Commercial Cornerstone.
​
Nathan is responsible for developing all of our content and is the lead facilitator of our programs. Based in New Zealand and originally from England, he understands the need for businesses to want to raise commercial awareness across their organisation.