KEY POINTS:
Kerikeri avocado oil company Olivado had just opened a new plant in the outskirts of Nairobi when Gary Hannam took the early-morning call.
The murder of Julian Nathan, one of Olivado's New Zealand employees, in September last year, refuelled talks about how dangerous Kenya was and did nothing to promote the advantages to New Zealanders of moving business to the region.
But since the tragedy, Olivado has proved there is great potential in expanding business operations to the little travelled and understood territory.
The company's Nairobi site lost most of its New Zealand staff after Nathan's death, so Hannam had to learn the ropes of avocado oil processing as well as taking up the reins as chairman of the company.
He and his wife, Joy, live in Switzerland, an easy seven-and-a-half-hour direct flight from Kenya. They have made 13 trips there in the past two years and Hannam can see no reason why other businesses would not consider investing in the area, other than the fact that a flight from New Zealand involves multiple stops and hurdles.
He has never felt unsafe in Kenya: "I have never felt that someone looked at me in an aggressive, unfriendly way. We travel all around the country, there are areas we take care in, but to me it's not an unsafe country."
He says Nathan's death, the result of a robbery gone wrong, was random.
"These people don't intend to kill people. They gave him a tap with a machete; he was 70 years old. That's the context.
Hannam joined Olivado as an investor when it was set up in 2000.
As a former lecturer in international business marketing at Victoria University in Wellington, he has always been interested in starting up and investing in companies where he sees potential.
He is well-known in creative circles for his role in developing the New Zealand film industry and setting up international film funds.
The industry was relatively young when Hannam left lecturing and started working on securing finance for some of Wellington's burgeoning companies - the project was Roger Donaldson's Smash Palace in 1981. He later paid Donaldson to write the script for The World's Fastest Indian and after a stint in Germany, where he set up a European film fund, Hannam returned to New Zealand to finally bring the film to fruition in 2005.
The pair felt it was an important New Zealand story that needed to be told, and never envisaged it would sell a record number of DVDs.
"Films like that you do because you have a passion for it, not to make money. But we are very pleased that it has been New Zealand's most successful movie," Hannam says.
Be it in culture or business, Hannam has great enthusiasm for promoting New Zealand overseas - and also admits he has weakness for a challenge.
Having grown up in Maungakaramea, Northland, he saw international potential in local company Olivado which was "successfully combining health attributes with a really functional product", and jumped on board as an investor.
The product launched well in New Zealand and was swiftly introduced overseas. But a change in New Zealand's weather patterns meant the cyclic crop was not yielding enough avocados to meet orders.
Hannam's objective was to get avocado oil recognised not just as a boutique or a gourmet oil, but for it to have a valid place alongside olive oil in the mainstream oil section of the supermarket. To achieve this internationally, they had to move abroad.
It was Hannam who decided on Kenya: "We looked all around the world for a place to go - we considered South America - then I went to Africa and discovered Kenya," he says.
Nairobi is over 2000m above sea level so is never hotter than 30C during the day and is cool at night.
"The avocados like it," Hannam says. Reliable weather means the Kenyan plant now has the capacity to produce over four times what the Kerikeri plant can.
"In New Zealand if the climate is unkind your production goes down. To expand in Kenya is much more possible, you just need to make sure you have the international markets," Hannam says.
Olivado has been exporting for seven years and now sells to the United States, Canada, Taiwan, Japan, Australia, England, Ireland and Denmark.
Hannam predicts that of all the avocados sold in the world, Olivado would probably sell around 60 per cent.
The Kenyan operation is organic and fair trade. This is important when looking at European markets as it is one of the fastest-growing categories.
Hannam says the Kenyan business is like "running a small army".
Olivado started with 420 farmers in its programme and now has 620 - almost as many as it can manage.
The objective is to increase the production of those farmers from the 150kg that is expected this season to 500kg or more, Hannam says.
That increase will, of course, be reflected in their income - Olivado's philosophy is to take a market-driven approach to doing something that will be of benefit to the local economy, Hannam says.
Aid agencies argue the company should be helping more locals than it is but Hannam says it is important to remember aid is passive and is driven by helping the largest number of people.
"People come to us and ask why we aren't doing it for 20,000 farmers and we say, 'Well you can't actually effectively do something for 20,000 like this, you can do it for 600 and grow it to 2000 but it has to be related to making money,"' he says.
He has big plans for the company - aiming to increase the Kenyan production from this season's projected 150 to 200,000 litres up to 700 or 800,000 litres over the next four to five
years.
By contrast, New Zealand production has reached its upper limits at between 30,000 and 150,000 litres.
When he is satisfied with where Olivado is standing in the market, Hannam plans to hand over the reins and shift his focus to other interests in New Zealand film and television.
Two years ago he began working on a new project with Rena Owen to turn the novel Behind the Tattooed Face into a film.
He has also been asked to help a Chinese crew to develop a film fund.
And he has no plans to leave his lakeside abode near Lucerne, in Switzerland - modern technology allows for that.
Wherever we see Hannam next, it seems there will be a running theme - be it investing, producing or directing, he will be "taking creative ideas that were made out of New Zealand overseas'.'
BIOGRAPHY
Born: 1951, Whangarei.
Education: Whangarei Boys High School, Victoria University.
Lives: near Lucerne, Switzerland.
Career: Business lecturer, Victoria University; Film Commission, organising Export Market Development; started the Film Investment Corporation of NZ, funding films such as Smash Palace, Vigil, Lost Tribe; co-founded Swiss-based fund EuroAsset Partners, producing role on Roger Donaldson's film The World's Fastest Indian; founded Tanlay AG to finance, produce and sell new projects, chairman of Olivado.
