Andrew Miller is the youngest of five children who spent his early years moving between Patea in Taranaki, Kaitaia, and Feilding each time the ANZ Bank moved his father to a new branch. The family settled in Hamilton when he was eleven. Hamilton Boys High suited him well: structured, sport-heavy, a uniform to wear with some pride. He went to Waikato University, tried to break into HR, found the grad roles hard to get, and ended up in the ANZ National Bank graduate programme instead. Commercial banking for eleven years. When he started in 2005, conditions were almost embarrassingly easy: money flowed and first-year bonuses arrived without much earning them. Then the GFC rewrote the terms and the work became genuinely hard.

During the GFC he was shoulder-tapped to run a small online learning software company that built induction and compliance content for businesses. He was, by his own assessment, not good at it. His manager handled the exit in a way Andrew still talks about: a coffee on a Monday, a few careful questions, an admission that he had not set Andrew up to succeed, and then two options laid out with no pressure and no blame. Andrew went away for the weekend and came back knowing he had picked the wrong horse. They agreed a timeframe, shook hands, and he went back to banking, this time with BNZ. He ended up in Blenheim, which he loved, then in Greymouth on the West Coast.

Greymouth changed things. His regional manager at the time believed in coaching and paid for all the area managers to receive it. Andrew turned up sceptical: he wrote in the front of his journal, "Don't know about this coaching stuff. Janine seems like a nice lady with good professional credibility. We'll see." Six months of working with Janine Manning later, he told her he wanted her job. The coaching gave him a confidential space to work through leading people older than him, having conversations he had been avoiding, and stopping himself from taking the soft option every time something difficult came up. His eldest daughter was born in Greymouth and arrived with a surprise diagnosis of Down syndrome. He and his wife Hannah decided to move back to Hamilton for family support. Hannah had come into his life years earlier through Camp Quality, the camp for children with cancer: she had been working in Gisborne when her cousin, who was running the volunteer programme, called her last minute to fill in for someone who had pulled out sick.

He left banking with three paying coaching clients. The number he and Hannah had agreed on was five. He went six months after leaving without a new client coming in, carrying two kids, a mortgage, and a rental property. He journalled a lot and used it the way a coach would use a session. Then the Cancer Society asked if he would donate something to a fundraiser. He gave his time. Leonard Gardner from Fosters bought a six-month coaching programme. That relationship is still running ten years later. Raw Coaching marked its tenth year in April 2026. The stated purpose: develop leaders and environments where everyone thrives. The logic behind it is that if the people inside a business are doing well, everyone they touch benefits: they go home and are better partners and parents, they spend in the community, the effect moves outward from there.

He got into sports coaching by saying hello to a stranger on a plane. He had boarded intending to say nothing to anyone: it was the last night of a work trip to Sydney, he had been out with a mate, and he wanted the blanket and a movie. The flight was code-shared with no in-flight screens. An assistant coach from the NSW Swifts sat next to him. They talked the whole way home. He sent her the All Blacks book Legacy with a note in the front. She emailed him two hours before a game to say she had got it. The following season the Swifts head coach departed suddenly and she reached out asking if he could help form the team around a new coach. He arrived at Sydney Olympic Park overdressed and nervous. His opening exercise was a circle of chairs with two questions: what are you most proud of in your life, and what are you deeply passionate about? The first player opened up, and the room spent two hours in tears. That relationship has continued for eight or nine years. The Tonga Netball side took him to Cape Town for their 2023 World Cup campaign and arranged a visit to the Tongan king, which he nearly missed after cutting himself shaving and not being able to stop the bleeding. When he asked the Tongan players to interview a grandparent about what it means to represent their country, two things came back clearly from every conversation: work hard and have fun.

The lads groups started in a between-lockdowns window: Andrew and two mates, Pete Harris and Nathan Maisie, meeting every six weeks to share something good in business, something good personally, and a challenge they were working through. That first group has been running five years. A second has been going for two. Dave Wood and his team at Integrated Training took the group to Piha for a day of breathing work, sand dune runs, barefoot time out to the ocean, and an ice bath at the end. The thread running through the lads groups and the one-on-one sessions and the leadership workshops is the same: 70 percent of behaviour is dictated by environment, so the best organisations get deliberate about it; the questions you ask yourself shape the world you see; the gut knows before the whiteboard does; and being a good person tends, eventually, to return something.