About

Rich Bennetts

Identity-First Brand Strategist

The short version: I help people who are great at what they do become visible for it. The long version is below.

Rich Bennetts

Origin story

I didn't set out to do this work. Nobody does. You don't wake up one morning and decide to help solopreneurs find their identity inside their businesses. You arrive there through a series of detours that only make sense in reverse.

I started working young. Retail, trades, the kind of jobs where you learn how people actually operate by standing next to them. I was good with people and I moved up. Over the years I worked my way into senior roles inside organisations. Leadership, people, operations. The kind of work where you're responsible for how a system holds the humans inside it.

Then it stopped.

Major depressive disorder presenting with psychomotor retardation. The clinical language is precise. The experience was not. Everything I'd built, everything I thought I understood about myself, came apart. And the only honest response was to try to understand why.

20+

years inside organisations

  1. Psychology

    That's what sent me to study psychology. Not a career change. A survival mechanism that turned into something deeper. Part-time, while working full-time. I went back to retail to pay the bills while I studied. Started with the undergraduate, kept going.

  2. Disability sector

    During my Masters I got a role in the disability sector. Started as a service coordinator, moved to service manager, ended up running operations under one of those titles the sector invents to describe someone doing five jobs at once. That work changed how I thought about systems. Disability services will teach you very quickly what happens when organisations say they care about people but aren't built to hold them.

  3. Admin Army

    After that, my wife Irene and I started Admin Army. A bookkeeping and virtual assistance business. She was the expert. I brought the operational and strategic thinking. We built it into something real, and it got acquired by Streamline Business Group. I stayed through the transition, then left to figure out what was next. Irene and I have since bought Admin Army back. It's ours again.

  4. mentokc v1

    What came next was mentokc. Version one was a leadership and culture consultancy. It made sense on paper. I'd done senior organisational work, I had the psychology, I understood how systems shape people. So I built the thing I thought I was supposed to build.

    It wasn't wrong. But it wasn't quite me either. It was a version of a business I'd assembled from credentials and experience rather than from who I actually am. The kind of thing that looks right from the outside but feels slightly off from the inside. Sound familiar?

  5. mentokc 3.0
    mentokc 3.0 is what happened when I finally did for myself what I now help clients do. I stopped performing a version of the business I thought I was supposed to have and started building the one that actually fits.

    The work I kept coming back to, the work that lit me up, was helping people see themselves clearly inside their businesses and then making that visible. Not consulting frameworks. Not culture audits. Identity work that produces something real. A website, a voice, a way of talking about what you do that actually sounds like you.

    The irony isn't lost on me. The entire arc of mentokc is me figuring out my own identity in business and finally becoming comfortable expressing it. Which is exactly the work I now do with clients.

    Jung called it the chemical reaction. Two substances meet and both are changed.

    I'm the content matter expert. They're the context matter expert. What comes out of the collision is something neither of us could have produced alone.

v3.0

the version that actually fits

The friction thing

I should be upfront about something.

mentokc doesn't work the way most services work.

The Brand Mirror asks you hard questions and sends you to do the looking yourself. The Clarity Session costs money before we've ever spoken, because the research happens first. The survey you fill in before the session isn't quick or easy.

This is deliberate.

We live in a world that's been engineered to remove effort from everything. One-click. Swipe. Automate. And the result is that people have stopped sitting with hard questions long enough for the easy answers to fall away.

The most valuable things I've seen happen in this work come from friction. From the discomfort of answering "why did you really start this?" honestly. From the moment someone sees their own website through fresh eyes and realises it could belong to anyone. From the struggle of finding words for something they've never been able to articulate.

That struggle is where the gold is. I'm not going to engineer it out of the process. I'm going to hold space for it.

If you already know what you're saying and you just need a website built, that's a different conversation and it's free. If the friction sounds like exactly the kind of work that might actually change something, we should talk.

Three platforms, one enquiry

The thinking doesn't live in one place.

It lives across three platforms, each approaching the same fundamental questions from a different angle.

3

platforms, one enquiry

These three aren't separate businesses. They're the same enquiry expressed in different registers. The depth in Fractured Self informs the methodology of The Fractured Lens, which grounds the applied work of mentokc.

The boring but relevant bits

This isn't intuition dressed up as expertise.

The experience came first. Years of working inside organisations, watching how they shape people and how people shape them back. The psychology came after, because I needed to understand what I'd already lived through. Theory and practice arrived in the wrong order, which turned out to be exactly the right order.

  • Masters of Science, Psychology
  • Bachelor of Applied Science, Psychology
  • Certificate in Health and Wellbeing
  • 20+ years across leadership, operations, and organisational roles
  • National Certificate in Meat Retailing with strands in Boning

I mention the psychology not because it makes me a psychologist. It doesn't. But I went looking for it because something in my own life demanded better answers than I had. What I found was a framework for understanding how people construct meaning, how identity forms, and what happens when the story someone tells about themselves stops matching the life they're living. I'd already watched that play out in organisations for years. The study gave me the language. That knowledge runs through everything mentokc does.

The personal bit

I live in Hastings, Hawke's Bay, New Zealand with my wife Irene and our German Shepherd Husky cross, Gryff. Irene is a globally recognised expert in bookkeeping and virtual assistance and the founder of Admin Army. Where I work in the thinking, she works in the doing. That combination runs through more than just mentokc. Gryff is the road boss, chief wellbeing officer, a treatie-seeking machine, and an all round good boy.

I talked about the depression earlier because it's not backstory. It's the foundation. It gave me a lived understanding of what happens when you lose the thread of who you are. It's why I take identity work seriously rather than treating it as a branding exercise. And it's why I believe that how you treat people is the only leadership metric that matters in the long run.

Rich Bennetts

Just a Guy