Kiwis want more than ‘boat, bach and Beemer’

New Zealand businesses are aiming higher than ever and shrugging off the perception of being happy to settle for “a boat, a bach and a BMW,” in new research commissioned by ASB.

Nearly three quarters of medium-sized businesses say they aren’t happy to settle, a marked change from the classic view of business.

ASB asked 450 medium-size businesses with revenues of $5m to $25m for their views on what it means to be ambitious as part of its new Ambition campaign and ASB’s Executive General Manager Corporate, Commercial and Rural, Steve Jurkovich, says the results show New Zealand has a vibrant business community with global aspirations.

“We believe New Zealand businesses are truly ambitious but we wanted to validate that and understand what ‘ambition’ means to them,” says Steve.

“We’re an ambitious organisation ourselves, and we thought that value would resonate with New Zealand business owners. This research was done to take the pulse of the level of New Zealand’s ambitions, and we were pleasantly surprised by the results. There’s no doubt that New Zealand business owners have enormous ambition – but the nature of that ambition is incredibly varied.”

In 2009 NZTE conducted a study that showed while New Zealand businesses were one of the most entrepreneurial in the world, we lagged at the back of the pack in terms of execution.

“Business owners don’t want to settle for selling their products and services in their local neighbourhood any longer. They want to grow, to become the best in their field, to enter new markets and to take their companies onto the world stage,” says Steve.

The NZTE research showed that most business owners were happy to call it a day when the business reached a certain size. A number of successful New Zealand companies were sold to offshore interests in the early 2000s in large part because taking the company to the next level was seen as being too difficult.

That’s all gone, with 66% of respondents saying they wanted to build a business with national or international ambitions.

“The challenge for business is how to grow beyond that $5m revenue mark, and how to keep their early momentum going. NZ has a strong culture around helping start-ups, but what happens to a company once it starts to really grow? Owners said that they get little support, little guidance and all too often the opportunity is squandered. The risk is that the company can stagnate and productivity declines,” says Steve.

“ASB wants to help connect Kiwi businesses with their ambition. We want to see New Zealand businesses succeed because that’s good for all of us. ASB’s campaign is all about connecting business owners with funding, advice, knowledge, and like-minded pioneers,” says Steve.

JUCY rentals is a family-owned business that has global ambitions with a presence in New Zealand, Australia and the US. Chief JUCYFIER Tim Alpe doesn’t want to stop there.

“JUCY is a business that is driven by an ambitious, adventurous and contagious attitude to take on the world. We believe in living a life less ordinary and have an ambition to paint the world green and purple”

Another ambitious New Zealander is Rod Drury, founder of Xero.

“When we started Xero we wanted to build a globally admired company. We wanted to flip the 3 B's from ‘boat, bach and BMW’ to ‘Building Billion dollar businesses from the Beach’.”

Rod’s certainly doing that – Xero now has a market capitalisation of well over $4bn and shows no sign of stopping any time soon.

As part of ASB’s campaign to drive ambitious New Zealand businesses, ASB is helping bring Arianna Huffington to New Zealand for the first time.

One of the world’s most influential speakers and thought leaders, Huffington will attend a series of exclusive, invite-only events, including an evening dinner and a keynote address in Auckland on Friday 12 September.

Huffington is Chair, President, and Editor-in-Chief of the Huffington Post Media Group and author of more than a dozen books. In May 2005, she launched The Huffington Post, a news and blog site that has quickly become one of the most widely read, linked to, and frequently cited media brands on the internet, winning its first Pulitzer Prize for reporting in 2012.