As a hands-on Queenstown adventure tour operator, Kevin Hey would be among the few who have survived 20 years in business.

Since taking his first customer on November 1, 2006, he has escorted tens of thousands of visitors on mainly one- and two-hour trips through his guiding business, Segway on Q.

He actually conceived the idea in ’94 on a field trip in Queenstown while studying tourism at Bay of Plenty Polytechnic.

Moving here, he took on various tourism jobs before starting his business, but during his first two years also worked as a dealer in a local casino at night to make ends meet.

“My first summer, it was very challenging because it was dead — Queenstown wasn’t but my business was.

“I’d invested everything into it, customers were loving it, but it’s like, ‘why haven’t I got any?’”

A mentor asked him what would happen if he doubled his marketing expenditure, he says. 

“I said, ‘I think it would go up a lot’.

“He said, ‘well, do it’, so I did, and then I think I doubled it again.”

He says he benefited when changing his fleet to second-generation Segways, which he now has 16 of — “they were a lot more natural to control which meant we could end up going further and in the right areas we could go faster”.

Hey also got consents and licences so he could operate on reserves like the Gardens.

The first downturn he noticed came in the wake of the Christchurch earthquake before, of course, Covid-19 came along and killed off tourism.

He worked for the government’s ‘Jobs for Nature’ for about two years but still kept his business rolling.

Though he cannot compete with the big boys’ marketing spend, he says “we tend to outdo them in reviews”.

What he enjoys most is seeing timid customers overcome their fears — “that transformation is one of the things I really love about the job”.

As for the future, “I’ve never considered selling it, but I’m now considering looking for a business partner — someone that can keep the business open when I’m on holiday, help me through the peak period and ideally offer something like digital marketing experience”.

scoop@scene.co.nz