Profile speaks to
Christine Genocchio about how she continues to do it all.
Christine Genocchio is the leading lady you want on your side when it comes to setting up and running your business the right way. Specialising in finance, human resources and compliance, Christine is an expert in her field and has a 100 percent retention rate with all of her clients. She says this comes down to the care she takes with each and every client.
“The personal connection and being able to help them with a variety of things is my point of difference. I treat them as if they were friends and family,” she says.
Christine adds that bookwork, compliance and HR factors are relatively generic across industries, meaning she works with mining companies, hairdressers and everyone in between. But the difference with Imperium Corporate Services, she says, is modifying the work to each business and getting to know the client’s business inside and out.
With such a wide range of offerings, it makes you wonder how Christine does it all on her own. But with such a vast amount of experience behind her, she says everything she offers goes hand-in-hand, so getting one person to take care of all that for you makes sense.
“I offer a broad range, but it all ties together. Bookwork and HR goes hand in hand. Making sure you’re compliant with ATO and Fair Work ties in with HR and how to look after and retain your people, ” she explains.
So, how did this savvy businesswoman acquire so much knowledge across such a broad range of business services?
Christine grew up in Mt Isa and Innisfail, where she loved accounting at school. Once she completed Year 12 and studied hospitality at TAFE, she moved to Townsville and worked her way around bars and casinos. After a casino stint in Melbourne, she returned to Townsville and went to university to study physical education and English secondary teaching. Christine worked as a teacher in London, and then returned to Australia to have her two children Flynn and Bella. Later down the track, Christine went on to study a Masters of Human Resources, but that wasn’t before she acquired her own mining company.
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Christine Genocchio[/caption]
In 2003, Christine, her brother and another business partner bought out a drill and blast mining company. That was where her passion for business practices really flourished.
With 180 employees, Christine began putting new systems and procedures in place for the company. She introduced an employee collective agreement and started looking closely at the workplace health and safety (WHS) required for compliance within the mining industry.
“We had to be compliant with WHS and environment to be in the running for lucrative contracts,” she says.
This led to the creation of policies, procedures and systems for an integrated management system and got the company ISO accredited for environment, quality and safety management.
At the end of 2015, Christine moved to the Sunshine Coast with her two children to give them the opportunity to pursue their talents in sport. She was working remotely for the company and loving life on the Coast.
Unfortunately, it was a year where the global financial crisis slowed the business down and eventually saw the demise of her company.
“We were only a small contractor compared to your BHPs who could afford to ride the wave,” she says.
“It was a pretty heartbreaking decision to let go of long term employees who were like family. It was a definite feeling of failure.”
Christine did everything by the book and ensured all parties ended on good terms.
“In October 2016 we shut the doors and it pretty much broke me,” she says.
In December that year, Christine was at a low point, but resilience kicked in and she decided to try her hand at starting another business.
“I really like working with people, I’m pretty good with numbers and I know a lot about compliance. So I thought maybe I can help small businesses on the Sunshine Coast,” Christine explains.
Even though she already had a master’s in HR, she still needed the paperwork to be BAS registered. The lifelong learner quickly did a certificate IV in bookkeeping and accounting to acquire all that was needed. “I just love learning. I think there’s always something to learn and the day you stop learning is the day you stop living,” she says.
“You don’t have to stick to one pathway in life. You can change direction as you get older and it’s just as important to experience life as it is to go to uni.”
Christine divides her time between her clients, teaching at TAFE and schools, looking after her children and her household, taking them to sport everyday of the week, and finding a few moments in the day for herself, which includes a 3.30am wake up call for her much loved fitness classes. She also dabbles in modelling on the side and says she simply just says yes to any opportunity that could push her out of her comfort zone or teach her new skills.
“As working mums know, this is just what you do because it has to be done,” she says.
Christine is instilling amazing qualities in her two children and providing them with the inspiration needed to achieve whatever they want in life.
“My kids have seen me in tears, they’ve seen me happy. They need to know that life is not always about getting what you want and you have to work hard to obtain goals,” she says.
Recently she attended a mother/son breakfast at her son’s school where they had to write down something they admired about each other.
Her son wrote, “You’re very determined. You had to shut your business but now you’re working really hard to get this business going,” which moved Christine and inspired her to keep going. Today, Christine is determined to educate small business owners so they know what to do from the beginning before something could potentially arise to damage their dream. She wants business owners to look at things from a broad perspective and not get caught out by external parties doing something incorrectly without even knowing it.
“If you do things right from the start, it may cost you a little bit more, but it will save you later down the track,” she says.
