Growing with NZTE – part five video transcript

PRESENTER: Being a high-growth potential company, McKay was ideally placed to develop its offshore activities with the help of the Beachheads programme. In early 2007 McKay set their sights on the lucrative US market.

LINDSAY FAITHFUL (MCKAY): The challenge of, of being distant from your markets is that you're not well connected to the customers and with your future-customers and it's very hard to build those relationships that you need to do, and particularly in the marine, in the superyacht area those relationships are vital to, to establishing business.

ALAN CROFTS (BEACHHEADS DIRECTOR): The Beachhead programme is a programme designed for companies who really want to accelerate their international growth and they're going to put their people in the market rather than trying to do everything from New Zealand, and the programme provides the access to a network of highly influential and experienced business executives for those companies to leverage.

FAITHFUL: The process of actually being accepted into the Beachheads programme was, I guess, something a little bit new for us. We had to go and present our proposal to a board and as a small-to-medium family-owned private company, that's not something that we have to do very often. So that in itself was useful in terms of focusing the mind about what the key issues were.

CROFTS: McKay Electrical are a really good company for the Beachhead programme. A well structured company, very robust in New Zealand, good export experience, good product, really understood the opportunity offshore and went about it in a very structured and well thought out way. So, it makes it very easy for us to help them in the export market.

FAITHFUL: We decided we needed to open a- [sic], an office in the USA because from a relationship point of view unless we were there all the time and in contact with the market we just didn't see how we were going to progress with growing our business over there.

CROFTS: In order to really capitalise on a programme like the Beachheads a company really needs to be on the front-foot so they need to drive the relationship with their advisor. So, they need to put some, their people in the market, put their senior people in the market that can engage with their advisors, and they really need to drive that relationship and push the advisor to get them the results that they're looking for and access the networks that they're looking for.

FAITHFUL: I would recommend the Beachheads programme to other companies. There are some very, very significantly well connected people amongst the Beachhead advisors in the US and no matter what type of industry you're in I'm sure the company would find someone over there who'll be useful to you.

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