BusinessDesk CEO Index, driven by Range Rover, has returned for its second year. Our newsroom and a panel of independent judges have hand-picked 24 New Zealand chief executives and business leaders making a real impact in their sectors and beyond. This profile features one of 2026’s finalists.
Having an employee ownership structure is a key reason why professional services company Beca is able to look forward to another 100 years or more ahead in business, its group chief executive, Amelia Linzey, says.
“I think one of the reasons I’m passionate about this role and being the leader here is because our employee ownership survives by having employees that want to become owners in the future,” Linzey says.
Around 42% of Beca staff are owners of the business.
“We are a team of multi-generational thinkers who are building for the next 20, 50, 100 years for the benefit of countries and communities.”
‘Areas of greatest urgency’
Beca, founded in Auckland in 1920, is one of the Asia Pacific region’s largest independent advisory, design and engineering consultancies with more than 4,300 staff.
From 25 offices around the world, the firm delivers projects including roads, bridges, energy transition, iconic buildings, water management, urban planning and climate resilience planning in New Zealand, Australia, Asia and the Pacific Islands.
With infrastructure and energy a key topic of conversation among CEO Index finalists, the Beca group CEO is keen to see progress.
“The areas of greatest urgency are developing New Zealand’s abundant water and renewable energy resources in the mission to decarbonise and to electrify our transport, industrial and agricultural systems,” Linzey says.
“This is a decade-long endeavour, and it’s imperative that we get going at scale and with speed rather than taking incremental steps.
Linzey, who has a master’s in geography, has been heartened by the uptake in the use of AI tools to help design the long-term critical assets of Beca’s clients.
“I don’t see it as a headcount issue. I see it as an opportunity for us to actually tackle some of the scale and complexity of problems we’ve got in front of us, using the tools to help us do that.”
Linzey is a finalist in this year’s BusinessDesk’s CEO Index presented by Range Rover in the professional services category. An independent panel of judges, experienced across business and government, as well as senior BusinessDesk journalists, have ranked all the finalists against five values: vision, impact, innovation, resilience and influence.
These criteria allowed the judges to evaluate the attributes that make a leader genuinely great and an example to others.
Vision
Beca’s vision is “creative people together transforming the world”.
It reflects our culture and our aspiration to help solve problems that matter to our clients and communities.
Our mission is to balance the tensions of recognising the proud history we have in all the geographies we work in while ensuring that we are looking at continuous improvement and wider innovation to push ourselves to change and solve the new and emerging challenges our clients and communities we serve are facing.
The company’s values are partnership, tenacity, enjoyment, and care.
What most of our people, including me, take pride in is the projects we can show our families that make cities work, communities thrive, and economies prosper.
Impact
For me, there are three things: leaving the business with more choices and opportunities ahead for its future leaders, and ensuring that, as an employee-owned business, our people have the opportunity to work on rewarding projects that will grow their careers.
Then ultimately, I want to enable our business to make a meaningful, positive impact for our clients and communities where we live.
As the leader of a professional services firm, we’re a people business, and so our people are our core asset and differentiator.
Our retention rates are high, and we have one of the largest intern and graduate programmes in NZ.
Innovation
Our approach is to be intentional, measured and considered.
Beca started machine learning about 15 years ago, used AI tools to support the business more than a decade ago, and conversational AI seven years ago.
Today, we run AI in about 100 different ways across the organisation from digital engineering and client projects to communications, procurement and systems.
Another example of Beca’s innovation is BTune, a service developed and commercialised within Beca over seven years, that addresses building operations which account for 27% of annual global emissions.
BTune was born with a “bold belief” that the world’s existing building stock can achieve net zero through continuous optimisation of existing systems, not demolition, extensive upgrades or capital-intensive overhauls.
Last year, we started the process to spin out this innovation product and set up a startup to enable us to grow at scale and operate in new geographies like the US.
Resilience
In October 2023, I was appointed Group CEO of Beca – at the same time as the election and as the hangover from Covid was really starting to grip.
Many NZ infrastructure projects were put into review, and the market across planning, design, engineering and construction services stalled.
Importantly, we had options that spread our exposure – a 55-year-old business and a good reputation for designing long-term critical assets largely in Victoria and NSW.
We studied the infrastructure needs over there and found water, energy and defence were three sectors with the most potential for Beca.
We also needed to make decisions on investment changes in systems and platforms for the growth we needed, which required a deep breath of courage and tenacity.
We learned that options are critical. Having a strong Plan B that can become your Plan A – and so for us that’s where our breadth geographically and in the markets we serve is a big advantage.
Beca has made two acquisitions in Australia, and grown to 1000 people, and YoY revenue has increased 25%.
Influence
The role of the leader is to be calm, confident and clear.
You need to listen and then be decisive and act with speed, often with incomplete information.
I’m a leader of leaders. Beca’s senior tiers comprise a large number of highly qualified experts who are owners and have been with the business for two, three and even four decades.
They are leaders and experts in their fields, and my role is to align, collaborate, communicate and motivate positive ambition.
My remit is to set and drive the agreed strategy and to communicate internally and externally. Reputation is central to professional services firms, and communication builds reputational capital.
A book/film/documentary/podcast
Philosophize This! is ideal for exercising the elasticity of my brain, but with a good dose of positive drive.
A screen-free day
Karioitahi Beach is a rugged, windswept black sand beach on the west coast, not far from Waiuku.
Famous for its dramatic sandstone cliffs and powerful surf, the walk is literally a blow-out, and the bike ride a delight.
It’s an election year – any key critical policies you would like to see discussed in the upcoming election that would positively affect your business?
NZ’s opportunity is to move from being a country with good renewable resources to a country that deliberately uses those resources as a competitive advantage.
That means electrifying everything we can, investing in energy as part of our economic infrastructure and investing in how we advance energy options like biomass and geothermal.
Government doesn’t need to fund everything, but it does need to create the conditions for capital to move: clear policy, faster consenting, coordinated planning and funding models that don’t leave the first mover carrying all the cost.
More information and articles on BusinessDesk’s CEO Index can be found here.