Starting Your Dream Business Abroad
We all have dreams of life in a tropical Shangri-La, but most of us never act on them. Meet some British Columbians who took the plunge and set up shop closer to the equator – only to be met with a dose of reality
Barry Robbins and Jane Walker wake up every morning in a paradise 1,300 metres above sea level. In the hills of Panama, surrounded by coffee plants, orange trees and dense rainforest, the former British Columbians have spent the past decade tending to the needs of their plantation – and to those of visitors to this picturesque setting who pay $130 a night to stay at their high-end Coffee Estate Inn.
For 10 years, this life was but a dream. Most people let that common get-away-from-it-all dream stew much longer than that and never act on it. They might feel a tug while on a tropical all-inclusive holiday, but the reality of the displacement, hard work and cultural challenges causes the dream to fade faster than the margarita memories. For Walker and Robbins, the dream refused to wane.
They’d debate it on their weekend escapes to Cortes Island, B.C., and dreamily envision it while on longer vacations in Costa Rica. “What if we ditched the rat race, the 12-hour days and the six-day work weeks, and never went home?” Robbins remembers asking Walker.
In 1994, the recipe for change was at hand. Robbins, 46, suspected he was about to be downsized out of his job as a research officer for the Greater Vancouver Regional District. Coincidentally, 45-year-old Walker was then working as a consultant in personnel efficiencies, suggesting to organizations very much like her husband’s that they should be cutting employees like him loose.
The couple decided relocating to Cortes Island would be a good change of pace. To ease the transition, they sold their heritage home on 5th Street in New Westminster and rented a small condo in Westminster Quay. “We just wanted to take a year and refuel,” Walker recalls fondly. They had little holding them to Vancouver (no kids, no jobs, no homeowners’ responsibilities) and departed for Central America with packs on their backs and no particular travel plans.
When Robbins and Walker were passing through Belize, the owner of an inn suggested to the couple there was a real need for inn-sitters, as inn-keepers were rarely able to take a vacation. In Costa Rica, Walker and Robbins followed her advice and placed an ad in a local paper, promptly landing themselves a six-week stint managing a small vacation property. It was a short stay, but it satisfied their curiosity about running a business and, as Walker recalls, “It was a confirmation that running an inn is mostly about managing expectations and delivering what you say you can deliver – and more.”
The couple discovered they had what it took: “We are ser¬vice oriented, organized, well trained in business and we have good marketing and social skills. We cook well and Barry can read the manual on anything and fix it,” says Walker.
After meeting two British travellers who regaled them with enticing stories of a recent visit to Panama, Robbins and Walker determined to make it the next destination on their Central American tour. The country lived up to its glowing recommendation: the beaches stretched out into the Caribbean, and the crown-like mountains looked down over lush jungles where flocks of coloured birds chattered. The people were welcoming and warm and were eager to forge a new national identity just five years after the fall of General Manuel Noriega. A year after setting out on their journey, Walker and Robbins found themselves in the mountainous Boquete region and knew they were home. They had no business plan, no market testing, no proof of success, just an old-fashioned gut feeling that this was where they would build a new life and business.
They shelved the Cortes Island plan and, in the hills above the village of Jaramillo Arriba, rented a small cabin from a family of landowners. On inspecting the hillside property, they found mature coffee plants, healthy orange trees and a small forest. For $250,000, they bought the land and built the home and three guest bungalows now known as the Coffee Estate Inn. The locals called them the crazy Canadians building on the side of a mountain, but they worked quickly and opened their doors in 1996.
The venture generated revenue fairly quickly. Word spread that their high-end accommodations provided a cool respite some 1,300 metres above sea level. In the beginning, the clientele was made up mostly of locals on spur-of-the-moment trips from David, the closest city, and Panama City (a six-hour drive away), enjoying newly unobstructed access to the region. As the inn began receiving positive write-ups in South American travel guides and on tourist websites, its clientele evolved. Today, about 90 per cent of the inn’s guests are foreigners who book well in advance.
Walker and Robbins reinvest most of their profits into their meticulously manicured gardens and have started a few side businesses. Over the decade, they have moved from selling their coffee beans as ripe fruit to having it milled and stored locally until they are ready to roast it in a small machine in their kitchen. They now sell 1,800 kilograms of premium java annually. Their most recent venture is a coffee liqueur called Barubica – “baru” after the volcano that shades their farm, and “arabica” for the variety of coffee – which was formerly limited to a post-dinner treat for guests. In this, their inaugural year, they expect to produce 400 to 500 bottles of the concoction, created from a recipe closely held by Robbins. A decade after arriving in Panama, these B.C. transplants are as deeply rooted on this hillside as they once were on the slopes of New Westminster. And the weather is nicer.
Walker and Robbins are not alone in their quest to drop the nine-to-five and follow the dream to run a resort in paradise.
Escapeartist.com a website for those wanting to restart their lives overseas, claims to have more than 350,000 North American subscribers to its newsletter. The classified section provides concrete numbers for dreamers: a B & B in Chihuahua, Mexico, is listed for US$80,000, while a vineyard in Australia is going for close to US$1.8 million. The Caribbean seems to be a popular location, with more than a dozen listings of inns or hotels for sale. Compared to Vancouver’s real-estate market – a resort on 30 hectares of rainforest in Costa Rica costs less than a fixer-upper in Vancouver’s West Side – these overseas properties look very tempting.
As attractive as the prospect of escaping to a new land might seem, for every success story, there are also some tough lessons learned along the way. One example: Robbins’s and Walker’s early enthusiasm meant that they overpaid for their idyllic piece of paradise. They refer to it as the “gringo price,” or the asking price given to any North American, which, at the time, was about twice as much as a local resident would have paid. To them, however, it was still a good deal and one of the easier pills to swallow as they set up business in Panama.
For former Victoria residents Sandra Neumann and her husband Andrew Vlassie, starting a restaurant in Bucerias, Mexico, hasn’t been any easier. The couple were regular visitors from Victoria to Bucerias, just north of Puerto Vallarta, for years. Vlassie’s parents had vacationed there since the 1980s, and he and Neumann often discussed the possibility of relocating to this small fishing village. Their resumés were filled with various positions in the tourism and food-services industries. Like many tourist-driven businesses, the espresso cart they ran in Victoria was only functional during the summer, which left them a perfect opportunity to start a seasonal business in Mexico.
It was 2001, and tourists were just starting to crave an Internet fix as much as their caffeine. The couple saw their chance and opened a Web café in Bucerias. Unfortunately, several other entrepreneurs had the same idea at the same time but chose locations closer to the tourist centre, a natural gathering spot for visitors.
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