Yoke Har Lee: Aquatic expertise spawns sales

Ian Mellsop started with Kelly Tarlton's and now owns Marinescape with his wife and business partner Kay Arnold. Photo / Paul Estcourt

Ian Mellsop knows how to build a good aquarium. In fact, he's got it down to a fine art, having traipsed around many countries over the past 20 years, installing acrylic tunnels and pouring millions of litres of water into tanks teeming with ocean life.

The founder and managing director of Marinescape can't build aquariums fast enough. Every day he gets emails asking him to give interested foreign parties sole agency to represent Marinescape abroad.

However Marinescape's focus is on managing the job itself, operating as a turnkey design-and-build company.

Bring an owner-entrepreneur comes with a huge cost. Mellsop is on the road perhaps every month, for two to three weeks each time, before coming home to recuperate. Even at home he keeps global hours, Skyping or answering emails at hours when most people are asleep. "Sometimes, I think my family don't really notice if I am not there."

The constant travel, he says, is the biggest hardship any would-be entrepreneur must endure.

For Marinescape, success is about delivering a project to a reasonable budget and on time. "There is a lot of logistics involved, of course, when you are working in a foreign city. We have to go in there, live with the people and observe their culture. Putting a complex building in a foreign country - that's the easy part. There are two other overriding issues: doing it to the budget, and delivering on time."

Mellsop fondly remembers his early years in the aquarium business. He and the late Kelly Tarlton were two men with complementary skills. Tarlton had years of salvage experience, while Mellsop was a civil engineer.

"At that stage, we were in our 40s, we did a bit of research and decided we could build an aquarium using acrylic panels, sit at the till and collect money as a lifestyle job. We literally built an oven in Westfield, and made our own material."

They planned to turn over $250,000 in the first year but sales hit $750,000 in year one. "We paid off our loans pretty quick. We suddenly understood we had an international business in the making," Mellsop says. The art of handling acrylic has been the making of the company, which has built 22 aquariums worldwide, and is owned by Mellsop and his wife Kay Arnold. Acrylic can withstand immense pressure, making it an ideal material, and a designer's dream.

After Kelly Tarlton's success, Mellsop went to bid for work in Manly, Sydney. In 1986 he won work for Singapore's aquarium on Sentosa Island which then became a benchmark for many other aquariums.

From Singapore, work spread around the world, from Xiamen in China, to Scotland, Manchester, Michigan and Ohio. The company has just completed a €17 million ($30 million) project in the basement of a mega-mall in Istanbul. The showpiece is a 90m long tunnel, shaped using a curving acrylic wall, which gives the visitor a sense "that you are in the middle of the sea".

The Export Credit Office helped provide a financial guarantee for the company, enabling it to raise money from banks to finance the project. Three more projects are on the cards in Turkey, one of them already signed up.

Russia was not such a good experience. Mellsop says some outstanding payment remains from a job in that country, which he says will be hard to collect.

New Zealand contractors are among the most sought-after in the world, Mellsop says, because "our price per square metre is half the price of everybody else's".

Apart from Kelly Tarlton's and a Napier project, all of Marinescape's work has been outside New Zealand.

Working as a company which is 100 per cent export focused demands nerve, requiring not only determination and a "belief we can take on the world", but sound judgment in selecting key people, Mellsop says.The rest of the skills are to be found in selecting the right local contractors to work with, flying in key personnel, and costing a project.

Operating outside the country can also present currency management nightmares, as Mellsop has found. Marinescape manages the mercurial movement of the New Zealand dollar by placing overseas receipts into a foreign currency account which can be repatriated only when the rate is favourable.

"We have had a case when we started a project, the New Zealand dollar was at 42c [US]. By the time we finished, it was over 70c [US]."

Mellsop's long-cherished dream is building an underwater tunnel in the sea. He thinks he has found the perfect spot, in Hainan Island, China. But first, he wants to upstage competitors, including a French contender, to win the job of building a tunnel which would take visitors underwater to view sunken wrecks off Alexandria in Egypt.