Chris Ellison has travelled most of the world as a professional snow boarder and a corporate suit. When Chile exploded in riots and with COVID he and his Chilean wife and children came back to the safe haven of New Zealand.
“I ended up living over the back fence of Long Bay College where I had been to school a couple of decades ago,” Chris says. “While familiar, the culture shock of coming back to New Zealand has been huge for both Fran and me.”
Chris’ B:HIVE business partner Chaz Savage grew up in Gisborne. But he too has been away home for nearly a decade. After finishing uni, he left a promising rugby career and hightailed it to Australia where he worked for Telstra. That’s where he first met Chris. Then when Chaz went to work for Multichoice, a pay TV company that was ripping through Africa, as Chief Customer Officer he naturally nominated his old workmate as head of the marketing department.
The pair were based in Dubai but saw little of it as they travelled through Kenya, Nigeria, Uganda, Malawi, Mozambique and 20 other African countries empowering local teams to set up prepay TV for their customers. “I travelled so much that I earned 3x platinum status on Emirates,” Chris laughs.
Chaz eventually headed home to the family business, Scarpa Shoes, but was quickly wooed to become Chief Revenue Officer of Sky TV.
Meanwhile, Chris continued on his travels adding digital banking to his many talents as he worked through South America.
Once back in New Zealand, the pair teamed up again on a contract advising a Canadian company, Certn, that does employment and criminal checks. Certn has just finished a Series B capital raise that will value it at about NZ$720 million.
Chris and Chaz tag-team on Certn’s marketing and consumer business and decided to join the B:HIVE so they could work the project more efficiently.
“In reality while we could both work from home, we missed the workplace camaraderie and we have certainly found that around where we are on Level One,” Chris says. “We both have other businesses and we have been able to build connections with other people and their companies to help us with those too.”
“It could also be true that we enjoy the few beers that our level one team pull out from time to time. It’s relaxing and talking, that we discovered there are also lots of people around us who have worked or had their own businesses overseas. So they are very familiar with the ex-pat feeling.”