Dillon Williams

Dillon Williams is the assistant manager at Flex Fitness New Zealand, a company he's happily worked for ever since graduating from the University of Waikato.

He started out as the marketing manager and after demonstrating his business smarts, was promoted to his current role in 2018.

“One of the highlights for me in this job is the people factor - I love working with business owners as I learn a lot from them,” says Dillon. "I enjoy the challenges and learning opportunities this role brings and find myself constantly developing cost-effective marketing solutions for branding and franchising."

The role of marketing manager was offered to him at the end of a five-month internship at Flex Fitness, which he undertook in the fourth year of his Bachelor of Management Studies with Honours degree.

“This helped me to get my foot in the door and prove myself," says Dillon. "For my internship I started out conducting industry research and competitor analysis for Flex Fitness using all the business models and knowledge they teach you in the BMS. It got to a point where we identified that Flex needed to help their six franchise owners market their own businesses more effectively, so I provided strategic recommendations on how to improve their positioning and product offering.”

Dillon says he always knew he wanted to study business “and I’d heard that Waikato was the best place to be. Marketing grabbed my interest and it just developed from there.”

“The whole BMS(Hons) degree is structured exceptionally well. The opportunities where you get to apply theories and models to real-life business cases are extremely valuable.”

In his job, Dillon regularly has to present and back up his marketing ideas to his employers, and he says the strategic management paper STMGT303 Applied Strategy gave him the confidence to do that.

“That paper gave me the opportunity to learn how to think critically and be able to back myself on the strategic business decisions I make. That was a massive learning curve for me and a great skill that I’ve taken with me into this role.”