All Kinds of Entrepreneurs
She didn’t mean to start a bug repellent company.
Snapshot of an entrepreneur 25 years ago, January 1999, Kawarau River, Queenstown. Smile for the camera for the delight and adventure of life on the river (although her guests weren't looking too happy about it.
She’s just got turned down for New Zealand Residency, because, quietly, NZ didn’t really want her type. Vagabond raft guide, just a little rough, definitely no money. Instead of shared leases and bank accounts, she and John (lovely Kiwi man she met while guiding in Nepal), documented their romance by synchronised passport stamps and photos over three years and multiple continents, both working as river guides all over the world. At this point she’s been an outdoor guide for 14 years, and life is big.
It’s before the New Zealand Residency appeal comes through (friends and family wrote letters in support), and then later, citizenship. Before husband. Kids still in a ‘maybe someday’ basket. Before business. She is 33 years old.
She’s recently finished a qualification as a massage therapist and fallen in love with plant oils. She doesn’t know it yet, but in a year’s time, she’ll be married, running a growing clinic and will have formulated 25 natural products for her clients. Oils, scrubs, salts and honey, botanicals collected from the area hills, carefully dried and added. Her favourite product is a massage oil called No Worries because as an American, she loves this Kiwi phrase most.
This is the year she moves to part-time as a river guide to keep the funds flowing to build a massage therapy practice. The worlds are mixing. Time in the massage clinic, mixed with time on the river with sandflies. Overseas guests are not only physically hassled, but mentally disturbed over the small menace of a bug.
She wonders if the oils can do something to help and makes up three formulations to test on the river. The other guides get involved, and each day over summer, guests get to test and feedback. Which one works? Which one smells good? This is the year that they choose what Goodbye SANDFLY will be. This experience will form the basis of extensive field testing every single product from now on.
Twenty-five years later, with Goodbye SANDFLY the only product still in production from the original group, she is me, and we have grown together through many adventures, laughs and tears.
Not all entrepreneurs are born to be business people. And yet, the world needs these kinds of entrepreneurs as much as the biz folk. We are the adventurers and dreamers who unwittingly become the changemakers.
I’m in a unique position now. Experience earned, and heart grown stronger for it, I’m still making products, deeply in the conversation of stewardship, and ever on the journey of enlightenment. Over the next few months, I’m called to get some of our stories shared. Because stories connect hearts, and that’s what I wish for our world. Connected hearts.
