From sleeping outside an airport to $500m business: Zuru founder's small beginnings

Nick Mowbray looks back and laughs at how his journey into business started.

Moving overseas with big brother Matt, Mowbray said the pair spent their first two nights sleeping in bushes outside a Chinese airport.

The company, Zuru, is now an almost half billion dollar business with double digit growth for the past four years.

"It sounds crazy but we were trying so hard not to spend. We were saving every dollar we had," he told an audience at this morning's PwC Herald Talks event at Sky City Theatre.

Mowbray has come a long way since this point - and learnt a few lessons about being a global company along the way.

He has a few more tales to tell of life early on in the business but says they all come back to perseverance.

"You have to be absolutely persistent to succeed and be really hungry. Especially in those early years," he said.

Thinking big and using social media as a platform to market to consumers globally has also helped the business, with Mowbray saying it's now possible to get to consumers easier and more cheaply than ever before.

Despite New Zealand having a good reputation internationally, director of New Zealand Story Group Rebecca Smith said we need to be more confident to succeed.

"We're seen as a trusting country with great, friendly people which is positive, but the flipside is that sometimes they're confused by us," Smith said.

"We have this humble and she'll be right attitude and we often wing it but we need to go into meetings prepared and confident," she said.

"We need to get better at telling our story."

Understanding your competitors and what you can offer that is better was also a key point, said Mowbray.

For Fonterra's director of digital transformation Dominic Quin, a growing aspect of the international market was traceability and having a line of sight on where exactly products have come from.

Technology was helping the company with this. For example Fonterra has been using QSR codes for products so customers could view exactly which milk vat their products had come from.

"It's been great but we're undercooking our tech exports," Quin said. "We're doing amazing things and we need to talk about it more."

Global versus Local was the topic of the morning's session.