That Guy: Future's brighter offshore for free-range rats

Colin's out of here. Photo / Supplied

Opinion

Many financial experts believe we have come through the recession but why are some small businesses still finding moving overseas a sensible and attractive option?

Well-known pet store Colin's Pets, which was formerly halfway down Dominion Rd, has relocated to Chicago, Illinois, due to financial pressures.

Colin became a household name when a reality TV show followed his daily routine in the hit show The Hamsterman From Amsterdam.

I talked to Colin over the phone about his reasons for leaving New Zealand, his new store and his plans for the future. Colin claims that the recession hit him particularly hard because of the "nature of his operation".

When I asked him to expand on that he couldn't, but said for most people the "big crash" began a couple of years ago with the global meltdown, but for him it began in 1990 when he opened his first pet store, Colin's Discount Pets.

Colin's Discount Pets later rebranded itself as Colin's Cheap Pets, but he had to change it back again when he discovered there was a pet store specialising in birds called Cheep Pets. He then simplified it to Colin's Pets, but most people just knew it as "Colin's", thanks largely to Colin being such a personality in the store, and the "Pets" part of the sign falling off six weeks after he opened.

So why Chicago? Why has yet another successful New Zealand business found it necessary to base itself offshore? Well, in Colin's case the answer is simple: it wasn't a successful business and it never was.

The other reason is the fact that he was shut down by the SPCA for repeated infringements, and attempting to bribe a female SPCA inspector with sex, but more on that a little later.

Financial records reveal that Colin was operating in the wrong financial year since his records began and that was only last year.

Forensic accountant Jeremy Woods says that Colin's case is the most complex paper trail he has ever investigated. "I have never seen anything like it," said Woods, from Woods and Associates Forensic Accountants.

"He was operating a very complicated system, and it doesn't help that pretty much all his receipts and invoices have been shredded and used as bedding in hamster cages - you try and piece that together!"

Clearly Colin wasn't selling enough pets, even with the increased publicity from the reality TV show and, to make matters worse, often he didn't have any pets to sell.

Thanks to poor record-keeping and stocktaking, Colin often had more cages than he did birds, but this could be off-set just a few weeks later when he would have to store birds in fish tanks as often he would have sold all his extra cages in some sort of bird-cage promotion along the lines of "buy one cage, get four free".

As a reality TV star, Colin was never far from the public eye, and more often than not the publicity was bad. Take for example the incident in 2006 when a young Asian lady wanted to buy a Siamese kitten from Colin.

Playing up to the cameras Colin asked her if she wanted to "have it here or to take away". Colin's unfortunate attempt at humour was captured on camera and aired on his reality show.

Colin's drinking was also a factor that probably played a part in the financial downfall of the business.

Eager to keep the business afloat he took on a second job as a taxi driver, but had to employ the services of Dial-a-Driver full-time to help him do his pick-ups and drop-offs. It wasn't a very sound business model and Colin was forced to focus solely on running the pet store into the ground.

Colin had numerous visits from the SPCA for violations ranging from uncaged birds flying into unguarded electric fans through to rats roaming around the store in a free-range fashion.

But it was his attempt to silence the SPCA officer with sexual favours that saw his business fined $35,000.

Colin is now set up and open for business in his new store in Chicago, and is just awaiting the arrival of his pets from New Zealand.

"I am a little concerned as to how the pets will adapt to their new environment as many of them are territorial, but the tropical fish will be all right as they are in their same old tanks so they aren't really going overseas."