OPINION: It might feel like Santa decided to mete out his judgement throughout the year in 2020 instead of on his traditional day of reckoning.
However, unlike the children who have sleepless nights worrying that they may wake up on Christmas morning to a stocking filled with coal, many New Zealand business owners have now lived that reality. With an equally implausible story, Covid-19 swept through the world with incredible speed, visiting every small village, every apartment building, house, cruise-ship and city. And the coal was shovelled by the ton.
If you are the owner of a New Zealand small or medium sized business, a better question than whether you have been naughty or nice is whether you have been lucky or not.
Regardless of how aggressively business owners responded to the unique challenges presented by the Covid-19 pandemic, some had a much bigger hill to climb, based not on poor business decisions or poor judgement, but rather on pure bad fortune.
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If you happened to own a souvenir shop in Rotorua, or an airport transfer business in Auckland, the brutal impact would have been incredibly difficult to navigate out of.
And the coal delivery didn’t stop there. New Zealand small and medium enterprises employee almost half of NZ’s workforce. So, when small New Zealand businesses catch a cold, half of the country gets sick. While there are some amazing stories of clever entrepreneurs finding ways to repurpose their manufacturing plants or retails stores, there has been a lot of pain too.
But we look to 2021 with renewed hope and cautious optimism. The economists were almost universally wrong about the impact of the pandemic in New Zealand (remember house prices were going to go down!) and thankfully their frightening predictions of mass unemployment did not materialise either.
What we have seen instead is dogged determination from business owners, strong government support, and interest levels on finance so low that investment in growth continues. Many Kiwi businesses are not entirely out of the woods yet, and most will be keen to see the end of 2020 and will be looking forward to next year with the kind of fearsome determination and focus that is reserved for New Zealand entrepreneurs.
To balance the ledger, we are lucky in so many ways too: an isolated island that is exceptionally easy to close, a determined government response, and a country that is now open for business internally.
While the rest of the world faces a withering winter attack from this virus, we can enjoy concerts, beaches, sports and festivities. While major European and US cities consider more lockdowns, we can plan weddings and parties, enjoy bars and restaurants, and plan and attend funerals to properly farewell our loved ones.
We have many reasons to be grateful, many more reasons to be optimistic and its clear from the activity levels we are seeing around the country that we are on a major rebound.
So this Christmas give thanks that we live in this special place, where Covid is kept from the door and where dreams are allowed to take flight again. And maybe spare a thought for our brothers and sisters in the Northern hemisphere who are bracing themselves for another onslaught, and they already know what will be in their Christmas stockings this year.
Thank goodness for this little green string of islands where hope and opportunity can flourish again. We can see Santa on the horizon and his sled is overflowing, and not a lump of coal in sight.
- Aaron Toresen is managing director of Link Business
