Piloting His Own Course

Sky TV entrepreneur Craig Heatley believes it’s easier than ever for Kiwi business creators – as long as they can overcome NZ’s inferiority complex.

- Joanne Black

On the phone from Dallas, Texas, Craig Heatley apologises for sounding tired. He is on an intense course to get ratings to fly the latest corporate jet that he and a business partner have acquired. He has had ownership interests in several jets over the past 20 years and has flown them all. The process of getting to airline transport pilot level, he says, “is like having a firehose down your throat”.

Anyone who can afford a commercial jet can afford a pilot to go with it, and Heatley does employ fulltime commercial pilots. But he not only enjoys flying, he also likes the intellectual challenge of mastering a new aircraft. Also, whether it is a plane or a company, it is not in his nature to sit down the back. He likes being in control, particularly of his family’s assets.

It has been that way since the early 1980s when he and business partners John Sheffield, Margaret Tapper and Margaret George transformed a clutch of mini-golf sites into a successful leisure business. New Zealand’s first theme park, Rainbow’s End, became the centrepiece of their company. In May 1984, they floated Rainbow Corporation, with Heatley as managing director. He was 27 and, on the day of the float, he became a millionaire – at least on paper.

He thinks that while owning your own business is never easy, conditions now are more conducive for Kiwi entrepreneurs than when he started.

Capital has never been more freely available, he says. Nor has information. “That first step seems, for lots of reasons, to be a little bit easier than it once was. When the first step is easier, and the second step is easier, then the path is a little more open than it previously was.

“Having said that, competition has never been greater, either. That’s the flip side.”