Jill Farrimond - A Biography

Jill Farrimond is one of the longest-serving Zeald E-Business Consultants and has relished the challenge of helping her clients take their business on-line.

Jill Farrimond is one of the longest-serving Zeald E-Business Consultants and has relished the challenge of helping her clients take their business on-line. Jill brings a wide range of experience to the Zeald team including a long stint of ‘OE’.

This started when Jill lived in the UK and Canada as a child and Denmark as a teenager. That experience persuaded Jill to apply for an A.F.S scholarship. She was successful and spent a year in Chile in 1982. Jill went on to study Spanish at University and has taught Spanish in NZ schools. Jill was lured back to South America in 1987 and spent a few months travelling around that continent. That trip included a period spent living in the jungle of Peru with Amazonian Indians. Jill says that was an interesting learning experience – not unlike starting a new career in IT!

Jill’s business career started with Sales and Customer service roles for Qantas Airways. During a stint of ten years with Qantas, Jill worked in several different roles including the Reservations Dept for a year or so and later, Agency Sales - the area dealing with travel agents and wholesalers. During this time with Qantas, Jill travelled widely including trips to Africa, Asia, Pacific Islands & the U.S.  Her favourite region is South America because Jill loves the culture and the people there.

After a period spent working from home doing contract work for Qantas while having her first child, Jill then bought a small business. This was a retail operation selling and hiring baby gear and specialising in car seat safety products. The business was rather run down (Jill describes it as being “run into the ground actually”) and a lot of hard work was needed to turn it around. Jill ran this business for two years and grew it to the point where she needed to hire staff and open branches. The other option was to sell the business. Jill chose to split the company into three businesses and sold them all.

Looking around for a new business opportunity, Jill discovered Zeald and quickly signed up as an E-Business Consultant. Jill found that establishing her own business as a Zeald E-Business consultant was very rewarding and an amazing learning experience.  “Because of the fact that we work with a myriad of different businesses, from large corporate entities to small start-up businesses and everything in between, I have been privileged to both contribute to and learn from each of these organisations in the process”.

After a very successful stint as an E-Business Consultant, Jill was snapped up by Zeald to become the National Sales Manager to train and manage all the other consultants on board. Jill was very successful in sharing her astute understanding of small businesses and how to address their online needs with the rest of the team.

After three and a half years of significant contribution to this role, Jill decided to return to her passion of helping businesses achieve results and has now joined the team back again as an E-Business Consultant.

Apart from her business credentials, Jill’s qualifications include a degree majoring in Psychology with law, education and sociology also being studied. While she was at Qantas, she completed half of a law degree in her lunch hours and after work – typical of Jill’s work ethic.

Jill loves spending time with her family – two daughters aged 18 and 16 and an 12 year old son. The family enjoys camping at beaches and this gives Jill time for relaxation, swimming, kayaking, tramping and socialising with friends and family. Jill still has the urge to travel more to the many places in the world she has yet to see. Jill’s husband has recently given up his teaching job to pursue a full-time career as a Surreal-Expressionist artist.