Why I moved to New Zealand

Roman Kudiyarov
Nov 1 · 2 min read

I’m often asked why I moved to a country at the edge of the Earth. I came as part of the development of our business: more precisely, to learn more about our customers. I was a co-founder of Crystalnix based in Omsk, Siberia, and we served customers from English-speaking countries, e.g., the USA, Australia, UK and New Zealand. My business partner and I had no business experience. Moreover, culturally Siberia was a pretty distant place from all those countries, so we could not learn from friends or relatives. In the beginning, communication was the most difficult bit; text chats were the only way to communicate, no spoken communication. It was absolutely clear to me that the key to the success of this business was in good customer relationships, which are hard to build without a deep understanding of the customers’ language and culture.
Two of my classmates were studying in the UK at that time and they got pretty fluent in English after just a few years. I realised that the key to solving the communication problem was to spend enough time in an English-speaking country. It was impossible to do the same trick as my classmates who studied in the UK because the business needed constant attention as we already had a team of ten people. I started to look for an English-speaking country with an appropriate business visa so I could open a branch of Crystalnix in that country. New Zealand and Canada were two main candidates. Canada has no business hours that overlap with Omsk, which means pretty hard communication with the team there. New Zealand has some overlap with USA, Australia and, most importantly, Omsk. That is what I was looking for! I didn’t really care too much about the nature, views, etc. What I only cared about was the business environment, and the final point was an article in Forbes saying that New Zealand was the #1 country in the global ranking of ease to starting a business.

Roman Kudiyarov

Entrepreneur, Dad, Expat

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