Most success stories get tidied up in the telling. The gear, the team, the breakthrough. What actually happens looks a lot less polished. It usually starts with someone doing the thing badly, in a truck on a lunch break, on a gaming headset, with nothing to lose.
Te Wehi is one of those stories.
Behind the name is Liam Richards and his partner Cheyne. I met them back in 2019 when they first came to Calc. Their daughter had just been born and they were trying to figure out how to carve out more time together. Cheyne had a stable four on four off role. Liam was about to go out on his own as a fencer. The plan was pretty simple. One of them takes the steady income, the other takes the flexibility, and somewhere in the middle they get to see their kid.
That was the plan. The reality looked different.
The part before anyone was listening
Liam had always been the guy who picked up the guitar at the end of the night. A party trick, as Cheyne puts it. He had never been in a band, never recorded anything, never studied music. He started properly in his late twenties, which in music terms is already late.
The first setup was a gaming headset and a laptop. The early recordings sounded, in Cheyne’s words, like he was underwater. It was, objectively, terrible. Then his mate Brad Kora saw what he was trying to do and passed on an old pair of speakers. Small lift, big difference.
He kept going anyway.
On fencing jobs, he would sit in the truck on his lunch break and post little clips of himself singing. Snippets. A melody, a verse, nothing finished. People started asking if there was a full version. There was not. So he would drive home, write the rest, and put it up.
That loop, post something rough, listen to what people wanted more of, go and finish it, is how Te Wehi grew. Five hundred monthly listeners felt huge at first. Then four thousand. Now he is sitting at around 400,000 monthly listeners and more than 3 million streams a month, with fans in countries he has never been to.
None of that was in the plan.
Start with terrible headphones
The line from Cheyne that stuck with me most during our chat was this. People do not start because they think they need to have everything before they begin. But it is better to just start and learn as you go.
I hear this one all the time from business owners. The website is not ready. The systems are not tidy. The branding is not final. The product needs one more feature. The quote template is not quite right. So the thing sits, and nothing ships.
Liam started with a headset that made him sound like he was underwater. He got told it sounded terrible. He kept posting. Brad Kora gave him some speakers. He got a bit better. Then a bit better again. If you go back and listen to his first track and then the most recent one, you can hear the progression in real time. Twenty-odd songs of getting better in public.
That is the bit most people skip. They want to arrive at song twenty without releasing songs one through nineteen. It does not work like that, in music or in business.
When the thing on the side becomes the thing
For about two years, fencing and music ran in parallel. The fencing was feast or famine. Big jobs would land, then nothing for weeks. Liam was trying to answer the phone, quote, invoice, and build the fence all at once. It was not his forte, and it was eating him.
Then the timing shifted. Around 2023, the fencing market in Whakātane went quiet. A lot of contractors he knew went from flat out to nothing almost overnight. At the same time, the music royalties started to add up. Small at first, then about the same as a fencing week, then more.
The call to stop fencing was not dramatic. It was practical. One income stream was shrinking, the other was growing, and the growing one actually suited him better. Last November, Cheyne left her job too. He was earning enough that she could step out of a fifty-hour week and be home with their daughter, help on the family farm, and travel with him when he tours.
What I liked about the way they tell it is there is no hero moment. No burning the boats. Just a series of small, sensible calls, made at the right time, because they had quietly built something real in the background.
That is usually how it goes for the businesses I work with too. The pivot rarely looks brave from the inside. It looks obvious. The brave part was showing up on the lunch breaks for two years when nobody was watching.
Staying independent on purpose
As Te Wehi grew, the phone calls started coming. Labels, small ones and bigger ones, offering deals. Liam said no to all of them.
He and Cheyne had heard enough of the Hollywood horror stories. Artists losing their masters. Signing multi-album contracts that lock you in for a decade. Being told what to write, when to release, and how often. They had built the whole thing independently. The thought of handing the steering wheel to someone else made no sense.
What they did take up was distribution. Early on he used an overseas platform called DistroKid, which pays out 100% of royalties but only collects what is automatically flagged. Then a New Zealand crew called Precise Digital got in touch. They take 20%, but they actively chase every royalty you are entitled to, and most artists who move across end up with more in their pocket, not less.
The relationship grew from there. Precise now also manages him, books his shows, handles ticketing, liaises with promoters like Live Nation, and connects him into the crew who shoot his music videos. The first summer of live shows, he barely got paid. But it was proof he could pull a crowd. This winter he has twelve shows booked across New Zealand and Australia, proper theatres, 1,600 to 2,000 people a night.
The commercial lesson is worth pulling out. Liam still owns everything. His masters, his catalogue, his decisions. He pays for specific services, on specific terms, from people who grow with him rather than own him.
That distinction matters. In business terms, he has chosen contractors and partners over shareholders. He gives up a margin, not control. A lot of SME owners would do well to think about the difference before they sign the next agreement that lands in their inbox.
Why the lack of pressure is the point
One of the things I asked Liam directly was whether it felt stressful now. He said no. Things come out of nowhere, Cheyne gets stressed so he does not have to, and mostly he just does what he wants to do.
That lack of pressure is not an accident. It is the direct result of staying independent. Nobody is telling him he owes an album by March. Nobody is dictating a release schedule. He writes when he has something to say, usually pulled from his own life or stories he has been told, and he puts it out when it is ready. When he does want to kick ideas around Cheyne is the first set of ears on every set of lyrics.
There is a pattern here I see across good businesses too. The artists, founders, and operators who stay in the game long term tend to be the ones who protected their autonomy early, even when it cost them in the short term. The ones who traded control for a bigger upfront cheque often end up burned out, boxed in, or both.
What sits beyond the numbers
Sitting at their kitchen table, with their seven-year-old running around and their daughter’s room currently doubling as a studio because Liam’s gear needs somewhere to live, none of this looked like a music industry success story. It looked like a family who made a series of small, honest calls and kept going.
The headset. The lunch-break clips. Saying no to the labels. Saying yes to the right distributor. Leaving the fencing when the timing lined up. Leaving the nine-to-five when the maths said it was time. Writing what he wants, releasing when he wants, touring on his own terms.
Beyond the numbers, what really stood out was this. Cheyne said something near the end that I keep thinking about. If you are good at something and you are valuable to the people around you, the world tends to look after you. You do not have to chase it. You just have to keep showing up with something worth paying attention to.
That is true for musicians. It is also true for businesses.
If you are sitting on something you have been meaning to start, or a pivot you have been putting off until everything is ready, there is probably a version of this for you. Start with the gear you have. Release the rough version. Let the feedback tell you what to finish.
Curious how any of this applies to what you are building? Let us have a chat. At Calc, we work with people all over the show, fencers, farmers, founders, and yes, the occasional musician, to turn the thing on the side into something structured, sustainable, and built to last.
Ps if you to follow Te Wehi
Spotify: Te Wehi
YouTube: @te-wehi
Insta: @tewehi_
TikTok: @tewehi.music
Facebook: Te Wehi
