The Mike Hosking Breakfast
Sylvie Thrush Marsh: MyHR Spokesperson on the sectors recording increased restructuring activity
22 Jun 2026
Transcript generated automatically by AI and may contain errors.
Chapter 1: What are the recent trends in SME restructuring?
Turns out we've got a lot of SME restructuring going on. This comes to us from a MyHR report. First quarter of this year shows restructuring was at its highest level in two years. Hospo, 191% increase compared with Q4 of last year. What's going on there? Sylvie Thrush Marsh is with MyHR and is with us. Sylvie, morning. Kia ora, Mike. Thanks for having me. Not at all.
Chapter 2: Which sectors are experiencing the most restructuring activity?
Restructured to do what? Good or bad? Are they saving themselves or growing?
Yeah, it's a lot of saving themselves, unfortunately. It would be no surprise to anyone who's been following the news lately that small businesses are under a lot of financial pressure, and we're seeing that in the restructuring activity at the moment.
The variability you're seeing from sector to sector, is it vast? They can't all be at 191% like hospice, can they?
No, exactly. The impact's being felt really inconsistently right now, and that's part of what we were surprised when we looked at this data. So accommodation, food services, like you say, kind of record highs there. financial and insurance services, their highest level of restructuring in two years.
But on the other hand, wholesale trade, retail trade and administrative and support services are all down this quarter. So we're seeing pretty significant macroeconomic trends, but it's not being felt consistently across the country.
So what's happening in financial and insurance? What's going on there?
Yeah, it's a couple of different stories there. So when we're looking at what's happening in the insurance sector, there's a few different things. Consumers are experiencing a pretty well-documented cost of living crisis, and many of them are choosing to go with less insurance or fewer insurance policies, so pretty straightforward there.
Interestingly, on the business side of things, since 2019, there have been year-on-year increases in the number of businesses being taken off the company's register, and each one of those is a customer who is lost for insurance providers. And on top of that, you know, we've had, I mean, the phrase unprecedented times is pretty well worn right now.
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Chapter 3: How are businesses adapting to financial pressures?
There's been a lot of uncertainty for insurance providers to deal with. And so that's affecting kind of the insurance landscape as well.
How much of this is a wash up from what has been going on in the economy? Because if you look at the GDP, things were coming right. So is this the backwash of what went wrong and is coming right or not?
Yes, spot on. There tends to be a lag in this kind of data because businesses can absorb some shocks, right? It's not like one thing happens that goes wrong in February and in March we see this massive spike. And we've had really, really high interest rates for most of 2023 and 2024. We've had ongoing shocks with tariffs and with the documented closure of the Strait of Hormuz.
There's been a lot going wrong for quite a long time now, kind of going back to COVID times. And so many businesses have been able to hold on through a couple of those challenges. We had a couple of recessions a few years ago. But we're kind of coming to the crunch point where a lot of these employers just don't have any gas left in the tank to hold on.
So what are we doing? Are we killing hours? Are we killing headcount? What are we doing?
Yeah, it's a combination of those things. restructuring can result in redundancies where people are losing their jobs.
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Chapter 4: What creative strategies are businesses using to avoid redundancies?
But at the moment, a lot of the feedback we're getting from small employers is that they're actually looking to reduce costs and kind of hunker down as much as they can. So that might look like dropping a shift over the course of the week, It might look like cutting hours rather than trying to cut jobs.
And actually, about a month ago, we had a small employer who is a cafe owner who proposed to reduce her front of house staff from six employees to five employees. But her team came back and said, well, what if we all cut our hours a little bit? Does that mean we can avoid anyone? having to lose their job. And she went ahead with that proposal.
So we're seeing employers definitely trying to be creative in the ways that they're reducing costs. They aren't reaching for the lever to try and make their staff redundant as a first port of call.
Chapter 5: What needs to change for the term 'cost of living crisis' to be dropped?
Great insight. Nice to talk to you. Appreciate it very much. Sylvie Thrush Marsh, who's with MyHR. Quick question. When did we stop using the term cost of living crisis? In your mind, what needs to happen literally before you no longer call it a cost of living crisis? Probably about the same time we stopped using phrases like back in COVID times.