Greg Cross on the Beachheads Programme

GREG CROSS: 

Every time you get to work with New Zealander exporters and New Zealand companies going global it's exciting to sit in a room and hear about people's strategies, their passions, their dreams and actually to be able to be able to engage in a debate with them and help them on their way.
 
So that's - for me it's always been the real highlight of the program. If you're asking me to pick some really specific events a couple of years ago we ran the Beachhead weeks which really became the focal point for the program and driving a lot of interest in the program.
 
And we brought a lot of advisors together from off shore, we brought a lot of New Zealander exporters together in one place and they were just fantastic events in terms of the buzz and the energy that they created.
 
Internet and e-commerce is a huge opportunity for New Zealand businesses and I have to say it's one of the things we do so badly. It's a great way for us to make ourselves look like a local company, whether that's in Japan, whether it's in the United States, whether it's in Singapore.
 
It's a great platform for us to present ourselves as being bigger than we are and being more local than we really are, yet we just do it really, really badly in my opinion. There are so many ways that we could be using the internet and commerce to build communities and our market and actually even sell products but we just are at a 101 level to that.

Some of the most challenging things we saw were companies and I'd have seen 160 odd companies over six years. Some of the really challenging things for New Zealand companies learning how to pitch themselves really well. We still under-sell ourselves and we don't keep it simple enough when it comes to telling our story and telling our value proposition.

That's something we just need to get better and better at. So that to me is a really key capability that our business executives need to get better at. The other common elements that came up over and over again when we saw companies, making sure you've actually got the capital you need to go and execute your strategy on an off shore market.

Generally speaking it's going to take twice as long and cost twice as much and competing from a far market - far away market like New Zealand is hard enough when you're competing against well capitalised competitors and you just can't put it on the same basis.

So there's always challenges around the capital base that our companies have and I guess the one other thing I'd touch on would be governance. It's an area where our companies traditionally are weak. Getting strong independent boards and governance to help with the strategic planning and strategic decision making process. And if it's - that's another one of the - one of the things that I think we need to focus on and really lift our game if we want to do better internationally.

I became involved with the Beachheads program right at the outset when it was a technology focussed program, so helping tech set the companies. And so over the last six years really evolved to help a wide variety of companies across a wide variety of sectors. So it's been fantastic to work with really great people and people like Peter Lennox who have really believed in the program, believed in the advisor and helped us set up a program that actually works in the way that it has done.

But not just Peter, guys like Alan Crofts who came along a few years ago and helped us take the Beachhead to a whole new level as we expand into a lot of new international markets and indeed all the account managers that we work with and who prepare the companies and bring them forward to Beachheads.
 
This program doesn't work unless it's a really strong partnership between the NZTE people and the folks in NZTE who work with these companies on a day to day basis and the private sector advisors that are making themselves available to help at a strategic and a network level.