Jet Ski Hire in Auckland: A Business Story with Dr. Jürgen Kolb; Episode 2 (Part 1)

Bernard:   [00:00:00] Welcome to Go Beyond Busy,

the podcast for small business owners who are ready to slow down, breathe,

and bring calm clarity to the way they work and grow their business.

Each episode offers grounded insights and practical strategies

to help you move from chaos to calm,

and build a business that truly supports your life.

Here’s your host, Christine Abela.

Christine: Welcome to Go Beyond Busy, the show for business owners who want to fall in love with their business all over again. I’m Christine Abela, a business consultant and tech strategist, and today I’m joined by Dr Jürgen Kolb, who is based in New Zealand like me, and he runs a jet ski hire business in Auckland. So how are you today Jürgen?

Jürgen: Splendid.

Christine: Splendid. Wonderful. So how long have you been running the jet ski hire business for?

Jürgen: Just about one and a half years. So I’m going into the second season. I bought this business. I swore myself never to buy a [00:01:00] business, but actually there are some benefits to doing that.

Christine: I’m looking forward to hearing that story. What’s something that you’ve learned about running a business that you wish you’d known earlier?

Jürgen: Oh dear. Where do I start? Let’s start with the most important one. That it’s not, your customers are always right. But your customers really tell you what they want. Now that can either be directly or indirectly.

This famous thing, you have two ears to listen more than one mouth to talk. Yes. But it’s active listening. You have to read between the lines and very often it’s a body language. So it is for a jetski hire business, very similar to any other hospitality or activity that people wonder whether that’s for them. And once they get there, they might have a concept, an idea, but they’re not a hundred percent sure. Okay, mini golf, for example, you know exactly what you get. If you go out for Chinese food, you know exactly what you get, but there might be slight variances. Now with jet skis, it’s a [00:02:00] bit more complex. There is the initial hesitation of “Oh dear. I’m gonna be out there by myself on a boat. Do I really want to do that? What if something goes wrong?” So this intrinsic fear of trying something new and not being a hundred percent sure about it, that’s one key element where people hesitate.

So that’s the initial hesitation to book. But even when they’re booked and decided, yep, I’m going to push myself and go out the comfort zone and try something new and exciting because it obviously looks fun. Then they are still a little bit hesitant once they get to the beach. I had several people say “Can I just cancel?”

And I’m like, “Would you want to do that? You’re here now don’t you want to give it a go? And if you don’t like it, come back and fine. I’ll give you money back.” So you have to ease people in. Even when people have previous boat experience. A lot of New Zealanders do have boats. Traditionally more than these days, obviously. So they might have grown up with mum and [00:03:00] dad having a boat, but they don’t have a boat. But now they have kids and it’s do I risk going on a jet ski?

And that’s exactly it. If you want to go on a boat and if you want to be safe about it yeah, you want to go with a commercial operator. That’s exactly the point. So the safety feature on this is quite all encompassing really. It’s that you get a safety briefing. A lot of people comment on that because they didn’t expect it to be that intense or that long.

But yeah, safety is absolute priority. And then I, you explain what not to do in particular with jet skis. They are powerful boats and they move like a motorbike very quickly. That’s the whole fun, that’s the whole point. But they’re extremely easy to actually commandeer. So once you sit on a boat, you are officially in maritime law.

And it’s quite hilarious actually. The master of the vessel. Yes, it’s an 11 foot little tinny, but it moves a bit faster. You’re responsible for your own action, for the boat and your passengers and cargo. I don’t know the bottle of beer that you’re not supposed to [00:04:00] drink.

Yeah, probably the most precious cargo is your mobile phone. A lot of people have come I’ve got pouches where people can put their phones in. They’re swim and they’re watertight, but yeah it’s not quite the same.

So the reaction time on the touch pad isn’t the same or people have wet fingers and that doesn’t quite work. I explain that, but nevermind. And then take it out, and then they drive and they lose their telephone. And it’s yeah, that’s your cargo. Just mind I do tell people a lot about how unexpected waves can creep in, and just this little roll movement just might be, oh.

Hesitation, short moment of panic, and you actually just grab by instinct something to hold on, which is your handlebar, your steering bar. And then yeah, your telephone falls down, if you’re lucky at the footwell. If not, it goes plop.

Back to the importance of safety. Taking the away the hesitation or the fear. If you can’t swim, for example. We are in New Zealand so traditionally everyone here grows up with the [00:05:00] water, but we do have Auckland City and there is a lot of organizations, so people don’t necessarily do that anymore.

There’s also different ethnic groups now that are not so keen on water activities. It’s quite interesting to see, but it’s just the way the cultural background is different. And there’s nothing wrong with that, and I found it extremely positive to see that when they rent a jet ski that they actually want to give it a go.

And over here everyone else does it. We’ll join in. We don’t traditionally do it. Mum and dad never had a boat. They didn’t live by the water, but we do. So let’s give it a crack. And some of them, there’s even a language barrier. So you need to speak very slowly. And then sometimes even the kids help mum and dad to actually understand.

Which makes the safety brief longer, but once you know that they understood, that’s the on, that’s the off button. That’s basically all this, and this is forward, and that’s it. It’s quite simple, so you can even do it without language, really. So once they understood that, once you explain the [00:06:00] rules, that’s a more complicated part, which takes a bit longer.

But they are all GPS tracked, so my boats can’t actually break the rule as such. But you can as master of the vessel basically overrule the machine, which is a safety feature, if the machine makes a mistakes, so to say. The GPS track that is a small device inside which has throttle control.

So what the GPS tracker does is help you not break the rule. And the number one rule is 200 metres from the coastline, anywhere in New Zealand it’s supposed to be five knots. So nice and slow.

It’s about eight kilometres an hour or something. A fast walk. And in order to make that possible for people to judge because two hundred metres is actually pretty long distance , it’s tracked. So it’s basically like with the Google map the machine knows where it is and then throttles down to basically five knots.

And a lot of people call and say the machine just broke. No, the machine hasn’t broke. You’re breaking the law and the machine just saved your butt. [00:07:00] Like you’re too close to the coastline. Please just go out into the deep blue or the deeper blue. That’s where the playground is. That’s where you have the fun.

And that’s the thing, people have fun and then they don’t pay attention, and then they get too close to the coastline. And it’s not just nuisance and protecting about sea life and swimmers or close to shore activities. But it’s also a lot of reefs in New Zealand don’t go necessarily further than 200 metres from the coastline. So most of the time you are in safe distance, if you are 200 metres away. It’s not everywhere, but it’s quite often the case. In, in my area in particular, there are a lot of reefs which appear at low tide. At mid tide, you would just basically ground your boat.

That depends on whether the tide goes up or down. You might be stuck there for six hours, plus have a hefty fine to pay for all that damage. So we try and avoid that. And it works very nicely with this GPS tracker. So it avoids accidents, it avoids trouble and it keeps the experience fun and literally safe.

Christine: [00:08:00] What have you learned about how to get people to come to your business? To come to try it out for the first time?

Jürgen: Ah. Lead generation. Yeah, good question. Really tricky. Because you are competing with all sorts of other activities who are easier, more accessible or even cheaper. But, and that’s a positive. Because of that, there’s a very few options if you want to rent a boat. If you actually want to drive it yourself. You can boat charter anywhere.

Fishing in particular. Of course that’s an attractive proposition. You pay a lot less. You have a whole day out. You can drink as much alcohol as you like, and you probably get fish because skipper knows where to go. Plus burley bags and they’ve got all sorts of different jigs and baits.

But that’s not everyone’s cup of tea. I had several people who went out with me for a fishing trip and they specifically looked for a self-drive boat because they did two of those chartered trips and they didn’t enjoy it. Let’s leave it at that point. [00:09:00] Yeah, it’s price of course. But it’s also what you get.

So if you just want to do that once, most people don’t go on a charter boat every weekend. You do want to make that experience count. So it’s a very intentional search. Jet ski hire isn’t, oh, I’ll think I’ll do this and give it a go. No, not at all. It is literally the idea is. I want to do something different.

I’ll Google it, I’ll find what I can do, and then I basically decide what of these options I take. So once people look for jet ski hire and fishing, they won’t get past me. Any search parameter, especially on AI engines, it will lead you to Hibiscus Jet Ski Hire and Tours. And look at that, they do jet ski fishing with two different jet skis and they’ve got fish finders and boxes and the whole rig, all you have to do is book it and show up. Done. And that whole package is a very attractive proposition. So the lead generation for fishing, for example, was to put [00:10:00] myself out there as the option in the northern part of Auckland.

Or actually Auckland as such because the other operators aren’t officially allowed to let you go fishing. You need a license for that. Not for the fishing, but for operating a jet ski hire with a fishing option as an add-on. Pretty complicated thing. Red tape. Wellington takes it serious when it comes to safety.

Anyway, so that’s the part of fishing. Now the lead generation for anyone else is topical. So I started to put ideas out there, like you can do a stag or hen do. You can go a corporate function, you can do team building . So the idea was to offer different kind of products or services that aren’t on the market yet, or that aren’t actually tapped or promoted well. And one of them is group activities on jet skis or boats and team building with entire groups as well as just generally fishing and seeing islands. Going to different destinations.

I keep saying that I’m not a jet ski operator. Yes, I am, but [00:11:00] I’m a lot more than that. So a jet ski operator basically means you get there, you jump on the jet ski for a half an hour or two hour, whatever time you want to do, you zip zoom voom in the bay or around the corner, and you come back to the beach.

And then maybe you have a spouse and you take turns. You can do that on the water by the way as well, very easily. So if you take an hour for example, and you come as a couple normally she drives first to be honest, and then there’s a swap while they’re out there for him to have a go.

They come back after an hour beaming saying, that was amazing. What a great fun activity. But next time we’ll take longer and we’ll go and see that island over there. Ah, here we go. No more lead generation needed. You just repeat the business for someone else to do something else. And that’s exactly it.

So most people don’t realize that when you start a business, you think, okay, I’ve got friends, I’ve got a great product. Easy sell. People will come to me. A certain amount of people will, I have that as well. Intentional search. I want this problem solved what I do with my family on the [00:12:00] weekend. But it is a lot cheaper to just have repeat customers.

So I think the statistic is five or six, seven times cheaper when it comes to advertisement expenses. So it is extremely easy to have someone go out who had a fantastic experience, but next time do something else which is more expensive. So an upsell for next time. So they come for one hour and then they come back next time for a four or five hour island trip, which is half a day basically.

And you go up to Kawau Island, you jump through all the different islands on the way. And people book for four and come back after five because you’re never on time when you’re back, it’s just too amazing. It really is. That’s one of the things which I’m really trying to push this year, is this ecotourism and adventure.

Basically that’s what it is. Adventure is planned, but you don’t know exactly what’s the wildlife today, what do you see in the different bays? But you have a vague idea or you can either do guided, or self guided of what you’re going to see, so you know what to expect. So you come to the beach not just [00:13:00] for zoom, zoom that as well, of course, but you come also to go somewhere.

So once you have your little fun and the novelty wears off, it’s like a new toy. You’ve done it, that’s cool. But what else can I now do with my jet ski or with my time? And that’s exactly it. So the lead generation initially is one thing, but then the repeat customers and the upsell for the repeat business, that’s absolute key.

Bernard: Thanks for joining us. This was part 1 of the interview with Dr Jürgen Kolb from Hibiscus Jet Ski Hire in Auckland, New Zealand. In the next episode, part 2, Jürgen talks about how to promote your business online, as well as some really exciting developments he is working on for his business.

Bernard: Thanks for tuning into Go Beyond Busy. Helping you to fall in love with your business all over again.