Rob McLean is a boat builder whose Hamilton factory is busy turning out chase boats for the America's Cup in Auckland in 2021. After the Cup is over, 26 boats will be distributed to Coastguard units throughout the country, thanks to a grant from the Lottery Fund.
As well as boating, Rob is a passionate hunter and camper, and that's fed into another part of his business, building camper trailers for utes and heli-huts for hunters.
Rob tells Kathryn Ryan the boats are used for everything from the media to crowd control and umpiring America's Cup events. Aside from that, they are favoured by Police and Coast Guard because of their strong, fibreglass build.
"They are stable, they are buoyant, they are heavy, they are New Zealand made. We have some very clever people here in New Zealand who are involved in the boating industry. The last thing you want to do when you’re in trouble in perhaps a Coast Guard type scenario is having the people who come out to rescue you be in trouble.
"So they are very rigid and built to do that job very safely."
Rob says he got into boat-building when he was 16. He asked his woodworking teacher if he could build a wooden dinghy and spent his sixth-form year putting it together. He still has it today.
When he got to the end of that year, the local boat builder in Hamilton was looking for an apprentice to start at the end of 1987.
"My little wooden dinghy was certainly a good model for a business interview, so from there: away we went."
Boats being a luxury good, the industry ebbs and flows with the general economy - so when the global financial crisis hit, Rob's business fell on hard times.
Prior to the global financial crisis, his business had 32 staff members on board, a few years later it was down to 12.
"It didn’t get us straight away, we didn’t really realise it until about 2009. The reason for that was a lot of the contracts we had for boats being built had already been signed and the deal done.
"The leisure market for boats just stopped immediately. It... but when you’ve got no work, you can’t actually afford to pay 25 guys who are earning the top income that you pay. Some hard calls had to be made pretty quickly.
"Failure was not an option for me. That team of 32 progressively got down to 25, then 20, then 18, then all of a sudden there was only 12 guys floating around. It was tough."
Rob says he got through it by diversifying the range of fibreglass products he manufactured and sold. Today, he makes fibreglass huts that can be towed on trailers or even lifted by helicopters and used as accommodation by hunters, DOC workers and tourists.
While he’s tempted to take on investment and scale up, he’s also ambivalent about changing up the way things are now.
"How much hard work is it going to be to take on an even bigger workshop - I’m just average Joe Bloggs New Zealander, how much do you need in your life?
"There’s no point making all these awesome products that we make without being the guy that’s got the privilege of going and using them."
