Staying ahead of the pack

This year I have travelled round the world five times. It’s travel with a purpose.

I visit trade shows, get feedback on what’s going on and who’s who, and meet with our business partners. My first question is usually, “What can we do better?”

It shows we care and we end up with a better organisation and product. We fully own eight companies and I also review them when I travel.

This is very much a people business. We have distribution partners in more than 50 countries across the globe and I was personally responsible for setting up many of those relationships, some of which date back 30 years.

These are long-term multi-generational relationships with integrity on both sides. That’s critical. If everything isn’t straight, a relationship will blow apart quickly. The most important criteria is honesty, second is hard work and third you need to be reasonably smart.

Product research and development is essential to our continued sales growth and we routinely and proactively seek feedback from end users, dealers and distributors which is incorporated into the new product design process.

Almost 90 of our 600-strong New Zealand workforce work in R&D. We are always trying to take a product to the next step, which requires a big investment.

For example, the software that sits behind our Cardax Access Control systems cost over $40 million to develop – that’s heavy duty, but it opens a gap between us and our competitors.

R&D is a very risky game and it doesn’t always pay off. But we are sensible; if a project is not working we move the resources into another one. We always have 20 to 30 projects running in parallel.

To protect our IP we have 100 to 200 patents worldwide. I see these as booby traps for our followers. They are never totally waterproof, but they do slow the competition down. If anyone does try to copy us, which they frequently do, we make life interesting for them legally.

Currency ups and downs are a difficult aspect of doing business internationally.

With 70 per cent of our business offshore, we are very dependent on foreign currency and when the New Zealand dollar strengthens and heads north, one of our biggest challenges is how to make a profit.

I’m very proud that we just had our all-time record for profit and turnover at the same time our two major competitors - one in the US and one in New Zealand - both had serious losses.