Looking at the website visitor statistics for www.lostchristchurch.co.nz it would seem that earthquakes were very much the topic of interest. Our post on the history of quakes in Christchurch received 4000 visits over the Christmas period.

It is great to see that Christchurch’s “World Buskers’ Festival“, which played out for many years around us when we were located in the City Mall, is still going ahead – this time in Hagley Park. What a wonderful space for it.

Facing the inbox and the Christchurch Startup Weekend

One of the downsides of returning to work is going through your inbox. I’d managed to clear mine twice during the break but there were still 153 waiting for me! Most went quickly into the trash, but one that caught my eye was for the Christchurch Startup Weekend. This event, to be held at the Westpac Business and Community Hub on the 22-26 February, is described by organisers as “54-hour events where developers, designers, marketers, product managers and startup enthusiasts come together to share ideas, form teams, build products, and launch startups!”

It’s hosted by a not-for-profit organisation and helps kick start new ideas in a weekend. Ideas are pitched, worked on and judged at the end of the event. They’ve been held all around the world, with Auckland and Wellington holding their events last year. It looks like it will be a great way to kick off the business year and inspire loads of new ideas. For more information, check out the Christchurch StartupWeekend website.

Successful Campaign to provide Christmas Gifts for Women’s Refuge

In the lead up to Christmas Hot PJ, along with budding young social entrepreneurs ‘Crafty Kids’ and the ‘Craft Collective’, banded together to provide Christmas gifts and cards to some of the families supported by Women’s Refuge. We were thrilled to receive the generous support of the following individuals and organisations that enabled us to deliver 12 Soft Toy Kits and 10 Cardmaking Kits.

• Jane Sherriff
• Sharon McIver
• Valerie Wright-St Clair, New Zealand Association of Gerontology
• Newhaven Perendales
• Search Engine College
• Hot Pyjama Productions

Thank you so much to these kind people for their support. Pictured are the Crafty Kits team delivering the gifts to Julie McCloy from Christchurch Women’s Refuge.

Hot PJ, in association with the Craft Collective and Crafty Kids, have put their heads together to come up with a plan… but we need your help.

For just $20, you can purchase a Crafty Kids Sock Monkey or Giraffe Kit which will go to a Women’s Refuge parent to give to their child at Christmas.

And because we can’t forget the Mums, for just $4.50 you can add a Xmas Card Kit for a child to make up and give to their mother, parent, grandparent or sibling.

The craft kits have been made by Crafty Kids, and are especially designed for children, by children. They don’t just provide an activity, but help develop essential fine motor, cognitive and problem solving skills, as well as building self confidence.

Your gift will be delivered directly to Women’s Refuge on Wednesday 21. We’ll also make sure that the Women’s Refuge know that the gift has come from you.

We have 20 Cuddly Companions to find new homes for, and heaps of Christmas Card Kits. The Kit prices have been kept to a minimum to just cover costs whilst making them a quality affordable gift.

Women’s Refuge Christmas Gift Pledges:

• Hot Pyjama Productions: 4 x Sock Companion Kits and 4 x Card Kits
• Search Engine College: 2 x Sock Companion Kits.
• Sharon McIver: 1 x Sock Companion Kit and 1 x Card Kit.
• Valerie Wright-St Clair, New Zealand Association of Gerontology: 2 x Sock Companion Kits and 2 x Card Kits.
• Jane Sherriff, 1 x Sock Companion Kit and 1 x Card Kit.
• Newhaven Perendales, 2 x Sock Companion Kits and 2 x Card Kits.

Thank you so much everyone!

Only 8 Kits to go, but still heaps of card kits at only $4.50 each.

Many companies are cutting back on print advertising and questioning the return on investment for print directories, with more and more searches being performed online. Search Engine experts, Optymise, are offering Christchurch website owners a special online marketing package to help them through these difficult times.

Hot PJ have worked with Optymise before so we know the quality of their work. Their offer will save you $1499 on the initial set up – that’s the work they need do to make your site search friendly in the first instance. You’ll only pay for monthly site maintenance, which is from $300 per month, depending on the size of your website, the industry sector you operate in and the amount of competition.

• To find out more, contact the Optymise team on 377-0803 or visit their website.

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The rules for access had changed again, and after the different permissions had been granted, I joined a small convoy back in to City Mall. This time the street looked must like it must have been in the early days of the city. Where paving stones and tram tracks had been visible, there was now a thick dirt track made from the ground rubble packed over the paving and tracks. The plantings and seating areas had also been encased in wooden boxing. I was glad to see ratepayers’ investments were being protected.

This time we accessed the building via the loading area next to Murray’s Chemist, climbing over abandoned boxes of stock and taking care not to skate on magazines that had formed into sludge where they lay. We made our way into the centre of the Whitcoulls store, where I saw that June’s major shake had brought down bricks through the roof from our old office next door in the Weekly Press Building. It didn’t feel a particularly safe place to hang about in.

I wondered what the ghost of Bertie Whitcombe, former Managing Director, would be thinking about all this? He is alleged by staff to still occupy the building.

It was still a mission to find our office again, but this time we succeeded, but not without ending up in the wrong places all over again. Our equpment was covered in thick plaster dust but fortunately very little had fallen over and been damaged. Actually damaged or not, it didn’t really matter as the whole lot would be demolished in the coming days.

With the help of the two engineers who accompanied me, I was able to take out some files, a bit of equipment and our precious collection of retro orange glassware.

Now, nothing but memories remain of that iconic Edwardian building and its Victorian neighbours. I wonder where Bertie has gone?

These events have been a catalyst for the big questions, forcing many of us in business to examine what it is we do, why and how we do it…  and if we want to continue doing it.

I was talking this week with a psychologist who, as part of an agreement with the Ministry of Social Development, provides councelling for quake effected Cantabrians. It would seem that many keenly feel the loss of control that has come about as a by-product of the quakes. For business owners in particular, being the master of their own destiny was a key factor in setting up their own business.

Business owners tend to be strong minded by nature – we have to be to survive in business, and seeking advise can be seen as a personal failing. However the real strength is knowing what your limitations are, seeking out and utilising the skills of others to fill that gap. Talking to someone who is trained to understand and support is one way to regain that feeling of control over your life and business direction.

On the subject of business adaptability…

On one of my now rare forays into the inner city, I noticed a fellow CBD refugee, the Caffeine Laboritory, formally in The Shades Arcade, had set up in the car park on the corner of Montreal & Walker Streets. On a less than tropical day, I admired his tenacity as he sat perched on a stool outside his new ‘premises’, a small 2.4 metre shipping container!

Does Christchurch still need a CBD?

As the City Council have launched their draft plan for the inner city, I feel the question has to be asked, do we still need a CBD? Business has already moved out into suburban hubs and will have settled and built their businesses in those areas over the long months/years until they are able to return to the inner city. By that stage the need for a return will have deminished.

There has been comment about Christchurch developing into a donut city, with no centre… but  so what? This implies that a city can only have business at its centre.

Our central city was already starting to flourish again as a place for leisure and entertainment activites. Large suburban malls had sucked business away from the centre. I do hope that out of this awful series of events will come the long term revitalisation of suburban business and shopping areas. The heart of Christchurch doesn’t need to be business, perhaps a CRD instead – Central Recreation District.

We drove in convoy down Kilmore St and turned onto Manchester, passed gapping buildings that we had only until now seen on TV. As awful as it is to see on TV, seeing them up close for myself was still an enormous shock.

City Mall looked much as it does from all the photos I had seen, however the Whitcoulls Building, where we have an office on the top floor facing towards Hereford St, is in worse shape than the pictures reveal. Cracks segment the facade in many places – that is all we can see at this stage. The team escorting us comment somberly that the building is in a bad way, as are many in Cashel, Hereford and Kilmore Streets.

We’ve been warned not to stand close to building facades and to always look up, as the biggest danger is from falling masonry. I ask if I can go and look at our office next door in the Old Weekly Press Building, or what is left of it as it is now a gapping hole. I wasn’t prepared for the wave of shock and sentiment that came over me as I stood looking straight in to the place where we had sat, worked, laughed and complained for over seven years. I notice that the ceiling of the shop space underneath has collapsed. Again I thank all my lucky stars that we were not there on the 22nd of February.

As we wait for the engineer to arrive, we chat to the owner of a business whose building on the corner of Colombo and Cashel is undamaged. Like many in his situation, it would have been better if the building had suffered permanent damage. Once the cordon is lifted then business interruption insurance payments will stop regardless of the fact that there will be a major reduction in the number of people in town to patronise his business. He is preparing for lean times ahead.

We are escorted inside the building through the Whitcoulls store. The shelves are mostly empty but products still lie about – ‘The Game of Life’, a large book on the ‘Earth’, and strangely out-of-season, a Christmas Tree greets us at the entrance. For the first time I look up and notice a lovely atrium-like ceiling of glass letting in the only light. None of the glass appears to be broken.

As we are lead into the bowels of the building and the natural light disappears, the engineer points out hazards and we proceed by torch light. We emerge near a suite of offices, dropping off one of the group to recover what he can from his office space. As we proceed, winding through back offices, a board room, past a fish tank, children’s toys on the floor, I feel uncomfortable treading through other people’s offices, through the remnants of their work lives. I don’t recognise any part of the building we are in, we are no where near our office, so we retrace our steps and reassess outside.

The engineer shines his torch through the main access door and gestures us over to see for ourselves why he won’t let us in through this way. The ceiling has collapsed, leaving only a crawl space not big enough to allow anyone in and out to recover property. Another engineer appears in the window of the first floor over our side of the building, but he is a floor below ours and we decide it is just too difficult to proceed further.

We drive slowly out of City Mall unsure when or if we would be able to return, past the remains of Hanafins at the intersection of High, Colombo and Hereford, past the Cathedral (is that a mangled wheel chair amongst the mountain of rubble?), turn on to Gloucester and make our way out. Stopping to thank the engineer, his parting recommendation is ‘if you can live without out, then best just leave it where it is’.

It was a gathering that lacked co-ordination and direction, gaining momentum as time went by and no one from Civil Defence fronted up to hear their concerns. Those vocal enough gave vent to the media, who were mingling in and out of the gathered protesters, showing more interest in their concerns than Civil Defence.

By this account, you might rightly conclude that I was there too.

Last week I arrived home from a short break in the North Island to discover our premises in the Old Weekly Press Building, unbeknown to us, had been demolished. Abbie, our designer, had posted footage on her Facebook page that had been shot by Civil Defence and shown at the memorial service in Hagley Park the previous Friday.

The extracted photos shown were taken of our office after the quake, before and after demolition.

Weeks ago I had rung and registered on the Recover Canterbury website as businesses had been advised to do. I had been receiving email undates from the Canterbury Business Recovery Group and Colliers, our Property Management Company. But that had dried up after the 7th March (Recovery Group) and 12 March (Colliers). It was evident, from comment supplied to the Press by Colliers Managing Director, Warren Glassey, that they were aware of the demolition, and despite their responsibility to advise tenants when a building is being demolished, had said to the Press that he didn’t have a problem with the situation.

As I said during an interview with Jim Mora on Radio New Zealand, I don’t dispute the need to demolish our office, distressing as it is, but what really wound me up was that no one had thought it necessary to tell tenants about it. Tenants with leases and property in the building. In not carrying out their legal duties, they hold up tenants’ ability to move forward with insurance claims, which in our case have hung in limbo since Boxing Day. If I hadn’t seen the video I would still be none the wiser.

Whilst attending the protest I decided to join a short queue of other business owners outside two tents beside the Art Gallery. I had no idea what I was queueing for and neither did the business owner in front of me. The only evidence of anything related to business owners was a scribbled sign saying ‘business owners’ with an arrow pointing down, attached to the outside.  When my turn came, I was asked where my business is located and to fill in a form with the same details I had already supplied on the Recover Canterbury site. Pointless, I thought, but this time I received a call about 30 minutes later from a CCC rep inside the Art Gallery building, who said they were waiting to receive an engineering report from our landlord and I should contact him.

So I did, and to my surprise he replied very quickly. The engineering report had been supplied to the council. It was his engineer’s view that the buildings are too dangerous and will need to be demolished. However this report had to be ‘peer reviewed’ by the insurance company’s engineers and the City Council. So whilst video shows our section of office has been demolished in the Old Weekly Press Building, the bulk of our contents remain in limbo in the neighbouring Whitcoulls Building.

Unlike many businesses, I hope that this is a small step out of insurance ‘no mans land’, but we could well be moving from one hopeless process to another.

What we are seeing now is businesses being slowly choked to death because Civil Defence or insurance companies are simply not communicating as they should with business owners or moving fast enough. The problem is quickly becoming one of lack of cashflow. Many SMEs don’t have large chunks of money sitting around in case an earthquake cripples their business. There are those, like businesses in our neighbouring building in the Shades, whose buildings are OK, yet they are unable to enter to recover equipment and records that would enable them to continue. Their tenancy agreement or insurance often doesn’t cover this situation. Unless they have a sympathetic landlord, they are still liable to pay their rents, and they still must pay their employees and creditors.  For those businesses outside the CBD cordon, not much business is being done as the inner city resembles a ghost town. The latest government package looks like it won’t cover them for loss of trade so we are looking at a case of RIP CBD SMEs!

The Minister of Civil Defence says we must ‘exercise patience’. Some small businesses have been experiencing a slow death since the first earthquake in September 2010. For how much longer are we expected to ‘exercise patient’? We are not children to be scolded (nor celebrities commanding red zone guided tours), but mature business people who have responsibility for the livelihoods of our families and our employees.

Our small and close knit team at Hot PJ are all well and lucky to be alive. We can’t help but dwell on the ‘what ifs’. What if we had been in our new office in the Whitcoulls building? What if the buildings hadn’t been empty due to the Boxing Day quake? What if we had been in town that day?

As you all will know, the CBD, because of its high number of historic brick buildings and high rise offices, has been hit hard. But there are also businesses spread throughout the city that have suffered badly, not to mention the thousands of homes.

On that fateful day, I was working from home, having just completed a WordPress training session with a client, my cat snoozing on my desk in the filing tray. Like everyone else in Christchurch who has become used to aftershocks, when another comes along you don’t move until you are sure it will be worth the effort. When this one continued for more than the initial second or two, and I could hear the sound of falling and smashing items, I grabbed the cat and headed underneath my heavy desk.

At the same time Abbie was enjoying her Tuesday off, at the start of a busy week preparing for her stall at the weekend’s Lyttelton Festival market. She was browsing through racks of children’s clothes in a large store when the quake struck, and was pinned between the racks. We are so thankful she was not injured. However her house in Linwood sustained a lot of internal damage, including her work computers, and her street had some new ‘installations’ in the form of partially submerged cars.

Across town, in Halswell, my home came through with much less damage than the first quake; a small and bad smelling beach reappeared in our drive, and all our foundation and paving cracks got that much wider. Because we have brick tiles on our roof, every aftershock sounded like rocks in a tumble drier.

We all spent several frightening hours trying to locate family and friends. Whilst we were receiving calls from overseas and in other parts of NZ, it was proving difficult to get in touch with others in Christchurch. All our immediate families were scattered around Canterbury, from Kaiapoi to Le Bons Bay, and it wasn’t until Wednesday that we had them all back again.

The rest has been well covered in the media, and continuing to dwell on it, at this stage, does nothing for the recovery of our mental health.

What remains unknown is the fate of our city office/s. We were in the last stages of moving equipment from the Old Weekly Press Building to the Whitcoulls Building when both were ‘red stickered’ after the Boxing Day Quake. We have now about three quarters of our equipment spread between both offices (including my extensive orange glassware collection, which survived the September quake and was carefully packed away for the move). But is it only equipment, it can be replaced if necessary, not like lives.

Our hearts go out to our clients who have lost valued and loved members of their teams or customers and clients.  No business would have a ‘plan’ for dealing with such an event as that. Words can not express the horror and pain they must be feeling.

Whilst we all wait an uncertain future, we will continue to support our business clients as best we can. We have new phone numbers and addresses. Also our PO Box is located within the CBD cordon so our mail will be trapped there for some time. Please see our website for our latest contact details.

Kia Kaha Ōtautahi!

Abbie Pickrill, who started her career as a graphic designer with Hot PJ in 1999, leaving us for 7 years to experience life on the other side of the world, returned to NZ and Hot PJ in 2009. She and husband Nathan are now looking forward to the birth of their first child in late June 2011. Congratulations Abbie and Nathan – you have six months to pack in as much sleep as you can!

Andrew Biddle, who has been more than a part-time member of the Hot PJ team for many years, running our accounts system and providing IT support (in between caring for two lively preteens), left us in September to take up full time employment again. However, because he has the disadvantage of being married to the boss, he’s also ‘married’ to the business so still keeps a firm hand on the accounts after hours.

An ideal time to move

We’ve been rattling around (more so since September!) in a large space overlooking City Mall for some time, enjoyed the views and suffering through many talentless buskers. Its now the ideal time to move, especially since our building is about to undergo post earthquake repairs. For the foreseeable future we’ll be relocating to our respective home offices in Linwood and Halswell, with a new city office/meeting space in the Whitcoulls Building, just next door to our previous space.

New contact details

Our contact phone number, emails and PO Box address will remain the same, with additional direct numbers for Abbie: 0226 208 668 and Wendy: (03) 322 1080.

As we’ll mostly be working from our home offices, if you need to meet, just call and we’ll arrange to visit you at your office until our new office meeting space is set up in the new year.

In addition to this, we’ve been working on some exciting new services which we’ll also be revealing in the new year.

If you’ve been game enough to venture into the worst effected business areas, you’ll have noticed that scaffolding and road works are still very much in evidence over three months after the event.

It is heartening to see that many businesses were able to relocate or get back to business very quickly, but there is still an immense cost to bear in doing so. There are others whose businesses have paid the ultimate price; Cross Brothers Butchery, a cornerstone Sydenham business since as long as I can remember, recently closed, a victim of a sharp downturn in trade post earthquake. Even having business interruption insurance wasn’t enough to save them and their employees.

This leads me to ask: Is the government doing enough for Canterbury businesses?

Like many things online, I’ve wasted a lot of time looking for answers. Phoning a government agency and the local Chamber of Commerce didn’t turn up anything new either. Perhaps this is because the earthquake is now considered ‘old news’.

To start with, it looked like things were heading in the right direction with the Work & Income ‘Earthquake Support Subsidy. But that’s now come and gone.

In its place is the “Unemployment Benefit – Canterbury Earthquake” or UBCE. This does not support businesses directly, but does provide support to employers personally if they can not work in their business as a result of the quake. Like the unemployment benefit, it is means tested, so there are still ‘hoops’ a business owner has to go through to be considered eligible. But it does not support the business.

Grants from the Canterbury Earthquake Appeal, administered by the Red Cross, are not available to businesses who have been displaced as a result of the earthquake.

There are free training workshops and business mentors – but these don’t pay the rent, outgoings or wages when a business is faced with a sudden significant downturn, on top of a cashflow sapping recession.

What has been funded?

• Earthquake Subsidy Scheme (ESS) to help businesses pay wages (funded by Work and Income up to $12.5 million);
• Recovery workshops to train business people in methods to help them recover from the effects of the earthquake (funded by NZTE up to $100,000);
• Business Mentors to work on a face-to-face basis with individual business owners (registration fee funded by NZTE);
• A report on the economic impact on key industries and sectors and potential growth scenarios (funded by NZTE up to $30,000);
• New measures:
  • Over half a million dollars for business support, including:
    • Two full-time and one part-time business recovery coordinators for Christchurch and Kaiapoi;
    • $100,000 shared funding for promotional and marketing campaigns for Christchurch and Kaiapoi;
    • Further support for business mentors.

There still remains no direct financial support for businesses who are still struggling to pay their outgoings post quake and to keep their staff employed.

Earthquake Recovery Minister Gerry Brownlee claims “This interim support will allow business to ride out the worst and be ready for the upside.”

As an inner city small business owner, I disagree. 3news Jeff Hampton’s  description of inner city businesses “suffering a long slow death” could be closer to the truth.

Small businesses are the life blood of the New Zealand economy, and yet not even an earthquake is enough to motivate Government to do more for small business than provide a bandaid over a gapping wound.