Our Team
School-links is brought to you by Solvam Corporation Limited. We are a small company based in Christchurch, New Zealand that has have been providing innovative solutions to schools and organisations since 2005. We have a team spread across the country, including sales, support and development staff. In addition to our staff, we are lucky to have a very experienced and capable board of directors.
Andrew Balfour - Executive Director
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Andrew sits on the board as an Executive Director. Andrew has over 30 years’ experience in the retail, wholesale, importing, marketing and design sectors. He is the General Manager and Sales Director of Solvam Corporation. His attention to detail for all facets of business operations helps make School-links a world-class software application. Andrew is a hands-on director who drives product development, challenging design assumptions to ensure his solution makes everyone’s lives easier, keeps students safer, and families better informed. He is readily available to all clients and you'll often see him around at conferences.
Kim Hetherington - Customer Service Manager
A natural at building and maintaining strong and long lasting relationships with schools, Kim has spent the last twenty supporting schools to make the most of the data management and digital communication tools at their fingertips. She understands exactly the data management intricacies of the education sector, having cut her teeth as an Executive Officer for a large primary school.
Kim identifies and assesses each school’s needs and ensures the timely and successful delivery of an appropriate solution. She is adept at delivering online training, is a consistent and approachable point of contact, and ensures that any queries are dealt with efficiently and to a client’s complete satisfaction.
Mary-Ann Colenbrander - Sales & Business Development
Mary-Anne is the backbone of School-links and the first point of contact for prospective clients, or existing clients with administrative queries. Mary-Anne has overseen the growth of School-links to over five hundred schools and early childhood centres, plus private training providers. Mary-Anne is dedicated to developing and maintaining excellent business relationships with clients across a broad spectrum of sectors, including government agencies, corporates, schools, and community organisations. She enjoys meeting potential clients, particularly face-to-face where circumstances allow. She aims to truly understand a school’s needs and to provide solutions that resolve their issues, be it keeping children safe in emergencies, simplifying attendance management, or improving home-school communication.
Keith Humm - Technical Manager
Keith Humm is our lead software engineer based in Christchurch. Keith has a background in Computer Science, with a first class honours degree from the University of Canterbury, specialising in Human-Computer Interaction. Keith has managed the technical aspects of School-links for over a decade, prioritising quality assurance and data protection processes.
Robyn Balfour - Sales & Accounts
Robyn brought to School-links insights into school-parent communication borne of thirty years at the coalface, running her own very successful dance school. Robyn initially worked in a sales and support role, developing close relationships with schools across the country, before moving into an office-based sales and accounting role.
Board of Directors
For a small company, as Solvam is, our directors and boardroom run with the best. Our board of trustees includes:
Graham Shaw – Chairman
Graham is a professional director with involvement in several public and private companies as well as not-for-profit boards and has extensive SaaS governance experience from being on the board of Xero for eight years and more recently Gentrack, and Chairperson of PushPay.
Andrew Balfour - Executive Director
Andrew sits on the board as Executive Director.
Daniel Dawson – Director/Chief Technology Officer
Daniel uses his entrepreneurial, business, and technical skills to partner with companies of all sizes to achieve success. He works across a company, from developers to board members, bringing alignment, introducing agile business practices, and delivering positive results. Over the last fifteen years he has worked alongside a diverse range of companies scaling up start-ups, pitching to investors, managing change, developing technical business and product solutions, bringing projects back on track and generating increased revenue. Darren joined the Schoolzine team in 2019 and School-links following our partnership in 2022. Daniel is embedding agile development processes, working alongside the internal and external software teams to deliver a SaaS platform in line with our growth strategies.
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Dion Guthrie – Director/Head of Global Sales
Dion joined school e-newsletter start-up Schoolzine in 2012, quickly assuming a sales role. Over the following decade Dion grew the client base from eighty-six clients across Queensland, New South Wales and Western Australia to one thousand six hundred schools across twelve countries, including New Zealand. Identifying opportunities in the market place, Dion contributed to the expansion of Schoolzine’s product offering to include a school app, live news stream, website solution, parent-teacher interview booking system, and a single control centre. He gradually moved into a leadership role which he still retains. Dion utilises his propensity for aligning product, market needs and regulatory requirements to lead the team, guide product development, and create sales opportunities across his well-established networks.
