Entrepreneurial migration to NZ

Our Prime Minister encourages rich people to move here; our immigration authorities make it easy too.

Kiwi tech entrepreneur Lance Wiggs provides some advice for potential migrants. His advice is targeted at Kiwis coming home but is more broadly applicable:

Coming back to New Zealand is often difficult after a heady career dealing, say, in billions of dollars. The economy and industry tiny here, our domestic industries are often sleepy versus their foreign peers, and many don't seem to understand offshore experiences.

So for those coming back after a senior career offshore, a word of advice: don't look for a job. Look instead to enter the really dynamic part of our economy by starting something new. As Prof. Paul Callaghan is fond of saying, we are very good in New Zealand at doing everything else.

Not for us the big dirty industries, nor the global consumer goods we all own, but instead the quiet conquering of global niches, such as online accounting or frequency control. There are plenty of people and tools to help, and New Zealand is a wonderfully easy place to start and run a business.

So if you are considering leaving, then make sure you come back bursting with ideas and energy to start something. And if you are considering a return, then now is the hour. New Zealand is doing reasonably well during this global recession, and it's time to get going and do something about addressing the markets in our enormous trade free zone.

Forbes today listed NZ as second overall among best countries for business. [Note: they seem to be using Heritage's rankings on trade freedom. I don't buy Heritage's rankings on trade freedom.]

We get top rankings in lack of red tape, investor protection, lack of corruption, and personal freedoms. The last one I find most important, but Forbes used a very broad brush in marking the personal freedom category. Most OECD countries wind up getting a rank of 1.

Personal liberties are a bundle of a whole lot of different things. For the bundle of freedoms about which I care most, NZ comes out on top. But I suppose that somebody who puts lots of weight on firearm ownership rights relative to not being subject to arbitrary exercise of police power could rank the US higher than NZ.

I also put reasonable weight on that, flying domestically in NZ, there's often not even a metal detector, never mind this sort of thing:

I continue to be amazed at how few American libertarians emigrate.

Green shoots

Enough. Time to stop being depressed while looking at downtown Christchurch. Look instead east to Woolston where Alasdair Cassels and his family are getting stuff done.

They started brewing excellent beer under the Cassels & Sons label a few years ago; we bought from them at the Lyttelton Farmers Market. Pre-quake, they started work converting an old brick tannery and industrial buildings in Woolston into a brewpub. The September and February quakes set things back a bit:

The tannery complex itself took a bashing during the earthquake. Alasdair has been restoring the buildings since he bought the 7000sqm site 17 years ago, but, since the earthquake, the cost of the project has skyrocketed. 

"All the bricks have to be taken down and put back up again. It's a big job, a huge job" - one that comes with a $10-million bill, which Alasdair is prepared to pay. He has big plans for the area, including a brew pub - The Brewery.

The brew pub's construction was in full swing before the quake, in the 1870s building that was once the tannery's drying room. Well-known chefs were to create magic using wood-fired stoves, in full view of restaurant patrons, with a pint of Cassels & Sons beer in hand. The old English pub was to open on to a large beer garden, a replica of the one shown on the site's original plans. However, the building did not fare well in the February earthquake and the project was shifted. The Brewery has been rebuilt inside a 1970s building at the Garlands Rd end of the development, which luckily had not yet been cleared for the garden.

They opened a couple of weeks after the June earthquake with some of the best beer in town and the best fries I've had since moving to New Zealand... honestly, the only fries that come close are the ones the women in the kitchen at the Hutterite Colony near our old family farm would hand us kids when we'd come round to buy milk.

And now they're developing the rest of the site for retail - an Arts Centre for the east side of town.

"We were always going to take this next step, but having this hospitality business here underwrites that the area can attract people," he said.

"I think retail will go well, there's very little around here and we've already had interest from tenants."

At over a third of a hectare, the shopping centre will be the size of Merivale Mall, minus the supermarket and Quinns store. Cassels hopes the first shops will be open by June.

He believed the increased need for suburban venues after the earthquakes helped the project get council consent

The September and February quakes damaged an 1870s tannery building Cassels had just restored for a new English pub on the site, destroyed the brewing plant and closed all the outlets stocking its beer.

The family picked up half a million bricks, got the brewery back in business, and built a restaurant and bar in a newer building to sell their product.

The project earned them a heritage award from the Christchurch Civic Trust in November.

To create the shopping centre Cassels will strengthen more of the old tannery buildings, renovating them in a Victorian style to make the most of original industrial features. Insurance proceeds will help fund the development.

The complex, to be known as The Tannery, will include an artists-in-residence studio for arts students, paid for by an anonymous North Island benefactor.

Cassels said the right mix of tenants would help attract patrons from across the city.

And they've now secured more tenants. I love seeing things like this coming up; it's a wonderful contrast to the flattening of downtown.

Cassels' milk stout is excellent but only available at the pub - it apparently doesn't hold up in bottles. Other favourites are Medicinal and The Alchemist.

Entrepreneurial Winnipeg

After smoking in public places was banned in 2004, happy hour crowds dwindled in bars across the province.

In a bid to woo customers back to his lounge, Ron Petryna, the owner of the Headingley Hotel, began running conventional Friday night bingo games.

"We started off giving away pretty tame stuff -- cases of pop or boxes of candy," Petryna says. Then he recalled a Ladies' Night promotion he'd witnessed south of the border -- one that climaxed with a few rounds of "naughty bingo" where female participants went home with vibrators and such.

"So we began to introduce adult toys into our own bingo games," says Petryna. "Next we added special martinis and cocktails named after the games. This all evolved from there."

"This all" refers to the fact that Manitoba has quietly become the undisputed erotic bingo capital of the world. Sure, you can find comparable goings-on in places like Toronto, Ont., Portland, Ore. and Orlando, Fla. But "dirty bingo" or "X-rated bingo" or however it's billed in those burgs isn't a standard occurrence. Not like it is at Dick's Dylan's, the Stock Exchange Hotel and the Riverside Inn, to name a few local nightspots that now host erotic bingo on a weekly basis.

This didn't exist when I lived in Winnipeg. In those days, Bingo was the exclusive domain of the bored elderly and others with ridiculously low opportunity costs of time. Whoever first recognized the potential market for the combination of Bingo and titillation should get the Kirzner award for the year. Entrepreneurial alertness extraordinaire.

HT: @CJSnowdon

Snow pro tips for Kiwis

A few things everybody from my part of the world knows, but you Kiwis may not:

• The slush on your driveway and sidewalk will freeze tonight into a slippery mess that will not melt until mid-day if you did not shovel it.
• If you postpone shoveling until the snow stops, that just makes the job harder later.
• Fresh snow falling on hard-frozen slushy muck makes things even worse.
• Cat litter and a shovel in the back of the car can be really helpful. Similarly, cat litter under tyres on an icy driveway also helps. A bucket of beach sand is just as good.
• If you're in a rear wheel drive, adding throttle on loss of traction rarely helps. And spinning your tyres is far worse than rocking back and forth.

One thing that I didn't see today that I ought to have: rosy-faced kids coming to the door offering to shovel the sidewalk and driveway for $20. I'd have paid it.

Despite 27.5% youth unemployment AND the schools closed for snow, no kids came round looking to work. And so I had to do it myself.

 I'll hazard a guess that this was due to lack of anticipated demand. If most Kiwis reckon that snow's not worth worrying about because it'll just melt, kids might well expect no demand, and so Say's Law holds: lack of demand means no supply is brought forth. When the 3-year old and I took a walk around the block, I counted no more than 4 driveways that had been shoveled; only two had also bothered to shovel the sidewalk.

I'll put that difference partially to differences in liability law. In Pittsburgh, for example, if you don't clear the sidewalk in reasonable time, you're liable for injuries incurred by pedestrians. Things vary across states, and even county to county. I wonder if anybody's done anything interesting playing around with differences in sidewalk liability regimes. Maybe you could use it as an instrument for entrepreneurship: kids in high liability regimes may expect to have clients and so will find returns to early entrepreneurship, setting them on the path to future greatness. But only in places where snow is infrequent enough that homeowners don't just contract with Mr. Plow.

Once Ira is 8 years old, if we're still here and if there's snow again, I'll send him out to test whether the problem is on the supply or the demand side....