By ANDREA FOX - BusinessDay.co.nz

Claire Mitchell, aka "the pocket rocket", bursts through the cafe door, beaming and hobbit-sized, even in kick-ass heels, apologising for being late.

She's not actually, and as she's agreed to squeeze in this chat between technology company Imarda's board meeting and a strategy session with its founder and chief executive, serial entrepreneur Selwyn Pallett, and major shareholder Neil Richardson, it would be churlish to mind if she was.

Mitchell is Imarda's chief financial officer and chief operating officer and an emerging serial entrepreneur in her own right.

It's easy to see why Pallett, co- founder of UK AIM-listed technology company Endace, where Mitchell was finance director, calls her "my pocket rocket".

Bristling with energy and with a beaming smile, the 38-year-old Queenslander is muscled and toned from surfing "boot camps" and dawn surfs when she goes home to Australia from Auckland to work every second week.

In the middle of helping restructure Imarda, a fleet management and tracking technology solutions export company, to ensure it survived the recession, Mitchell found time last year to buy Natalie Group, a "tired" 20-year- old Australian skincare and essential oils products company. She has rebranded and relaunched its products as "Nat."

The company supplies professional salons and spas and through a new distribution deal is now exporting to New Zealand. It has also expanded recently into Hong Kong retail outlets. Mitchell intends the Hong Kong venture to be her stepping stone to exporting Nat. to the huge China market.

She won't discuss the company's revenues but says she bought it for a song and with a recent private capital raising of "less than a $1 million", it is moving from "teeny to a small to medium business".

Manufacture of Natalie Group's range of aromatherapy oils and natural skin and body care products is outsourced but the buying, supply chain management and marketing is all done in-house by Mitchell and her handful of staff.

She is forecasting 150 per cent growth next financial year due to the new distribution deal. Her aim is to develop the business to the stage where it becomes attractive to a buyer, without losing its identity. She cites the recent Ecoya buyout of Trilogy skincare as an example of her goal.

Meanwhile the former Endace and Prolificx director, now finance director for Imarda, continues to rack up trans-Tasman airpoints working with Pallett, who she says is a "visionary" and her mentor. (He threw her resume in the bin when she first applied to work for him commercialising Endace back in 2002, she recalls. "I didn't present myself as well as I could have." She "bullied" him for another chance.)

THEIR admiration is mutual. Pallett recalls Mitchell's tenacity and energy in the gruelling job of listing electronics company Endace on the UK AIM market in 2005, the first New Zealand company to do so.

"I've seen her jump on a plane for 24 hours, spend 24 hours in London, and get back on the plane for another 24 hours, working all the time. She was unbelievable."

But is she any good at number crunching?

"Hell, yes," says Pallett.

"Conservative financial managers are OK. Frivolous managers are a disaster. Investors manage risk and reward. If the rewards are high and the risks are medium, Claire will do it."

Pallett says Mitchell, who is a qualified accountant with a commerce degree, is unusual in that she has a solid background in finance but has quickly seen the need for operational excellence and sales and marketing to grow a business.

"She started in the nuts and bolts of the business, looking backwards, but realised you've got to have sales and marketing. A lot of financial people tell you what you can't do. She rapidly moved through Endace to sit in the middle. She was driving the engineers to get the product out the door. She linked it all together when most finance people are telling you to cut costs and to not hire."

PricewaterhouseCoopers partner Brendan Catchpole has also worked with Mitchell on Endace and Imarda.

"She's interesting. She has a much broader commercial perspective than a lot of chief financial officers . . . she very much thinks about the commercial drivers. 'Pocket rocket' is absolutely right. She's relentless in figuring out the objectives and how to get there."

Commercial banker Craig Ashton at HSBC says he's worked with Mitchell since 2003 and she is "incredibly hard-working and focused on achieving goals".

Mitchell, who divides her time between a townhouse in Parnell, Auckland and her Gold Coast beach home with daughter Chelsea, 11, and a Weimaraner dog, attributes her skills mix of numbers and entrepreneurial nous to a passion for managing business, particularly high growth, global technology companies and startups.

But she says a year ago, as second in charge to Pallett, she wouldn't have believed she could be an entrepreneur herself.

"It's very different when it's your risk and your money. The decision stops with you."

She now has shareholdings and directorships in small-to-medium- sized organisations in Australasia, the US, Singapore and Britain.

Mitchell says it is a "hard" time to be an entrepreneur but the recession was good for business.

"A lot of businesses had to get back to grassroots, to make sound decisions again. It has made us more focused. There had been bad decisions, sloppy decisions, a lot of waste. I don't like wasteful. We have a responsibility to look after shareholders' money, to treat it as if it were our own."

Mitchell speaks like a true entrepreneur - "I'm always looking for something else" - but ask her where she wants to be in 10 years and the work-life balance she has worked hard to achieve in the last two years shows through.

"I'd like to be an excellent surfer."

Mitchell pays tribute to the "courage" of New Zealand businesses and entrepreneurs who she says have to "be better than everyone else because they have to get out there into the world" but she's no slouch in that department herself.

She started surfing two years ago despite being "terrified of waves". To overcome her fear she has put herself through surf "boot camps" and "learned a lot about myself".

Now she's hooked.

"At dawn I'm out there, two minutes from home, and there are dolphins and the water is 20 degrees. It can't get better than that. Every time I'm out there I realise how lucky I am."

She does weight training and yoga which helps her keep on top of a relentless work pace.

"You have to be alert and sharp at all times. You can't have off days. And I've also got the travelling."

This week Mitchell is at surf camp in Australia with women from all over the world who are attending "for all sorts of reasons".

While Mitchell says she is competitive, she appreciates the difference between the female surfing culture in which "women help each other" and co-operate so everyone enjoys themselves, while men are macho and all for themselves on the water.

And for a budding entrepreneur the discovery that through surfing she can combine business and pleasure has been sweet.

She recently won a women's surfboard through a competition in the Australasian women's surf and snow magazine Curl.

Now the magazine and her Nat. skincare business are talking about collaborating, she says.

That's what you call mixing business with pleasure.

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