Entrepreneurs Monte (Shan Long) Gisborne and Daniela Luo are moving their five-tonne Chinese junk, the Hai Long, over land from Prince Edward Island to British Columbia’s Victoria Harbour in a bid to save their business.
Their company, Long Run Enterprises, relied heavily on traffic from cruise lines. In a typical year, international tourists made up 60 per cent of the passengers taking Ming dynasty-themed tours on the Hai Long.
When the global pandemic hit, that traffic came to a standstill. Gisborne and Luo had to make a tough call.
They cancelled their season, left the Hai Long, which means Sea Dragon in Chinese, in storage and put it up for sale. After four seasons taking tourists and locals out for a Chinese cultural and boating experience, and finally breaking even in 2019, the bottom had fallen out of their market.
Their asking price for the Hai Long was $179,995.
On the Tripadvisor website, where customers can post reviews, the Hai Long boat tour has five out of five stars. That boat tour is now a thing of the past in Atlantic Canada.
"This 3 hour sailing includes a fascinating story of the boat, the family, and some world history presented in an engaging manner. You will not be disappointed."
- One five star review from Tripadvisor (100 of 105 reviews were five star.)
The pandemic hit this entrepreneurial couple harder than most. Not only did it shut down their business but it also wreaked havoc with their personal life.
While the Hai Long was in storage after the season, Gisborne took a job in electric vehicle sales in Coquitlam, a suburb of Vancouver. His 40-year-old wife then took their nine-year-old daughter, Dominica, to her hometown for the Chinese New Year celebrations and got stranded there.
In Wuhan
The capital of the central Chinese province of Hubei, Wuhan is the location of the first outbreak of COVID-19. When that hit, China quarantined the residents. The mother and daughter were stuck there, unable to return to Canada until much later than planned.
When Luo and her daughter made it back to Canada, the couple had to decide what to do about the family business.
He’s a serial entrepreneur and an expert in electric vehicles and power trains. She’s a career counselor, human resources manager and graduate of Wuhan University with a master’s in business administration.
Her father created the menu for the Hai Long boat tours. Dominica sang and danced for guests. She is currently learning how to play the guzheng, a 21-string Chinese instrument.
With all their financial investment and personal commitment to the business, the couple racked their brains to find a solution that would allow them to save it. In September, they came up with what they think will be the winning formula.
The couple decided to move the Hai Long to Vancouver Island to have access to a much bigger local market that can support their business in the absence of international tourists.
“It’s purely a numbers game and the proximity to Asia”
With its tiny population of about 157,000, Prince Edward Island simply cannot provide as much of a market. That British Columbian island has a population of about 870,000, more than five times that of Prince Edward Island.
“It’s purely a numbers game and the proximity to Asia,” said Gisborne.
“We’ve got a far better shot on Vancouver Island than Prince Edward Island when COVID-19 hits again.”
Hauling the five-tonne, 12-metre wooden boat across Canada, though, won’t be cheap or easy. It’s considered to be a wide load on Canadian roads.
“You have to have a vehicle ahead of it and a vehicle behind it and only drive it during certain hours,” said Gisborne.
He pegs the cost of transporting the Hai Long overland from one coast to the other at about $20,000. Add to that the extra costs for the family to relocate and make changes to the business’s incorporation and website, rejig the tour packages and everything else involved in the move and the total comes to about $50,000, said Gisborne.
That means more debt for the company.
“We will be carrying about 50 per cent more financing,” he said.
Pre-pandemic
In Atlantic Canada, roughly 5,000 passengers came aboard the Hai Long last year to take two-hour tours, get a taste of Chinese cuisine and experience a bit of Ming dynasty history.
Before the pandemic, the tour company Experience PEI would sell tickets for the Hai Long tour to cruise lines that would then sell them to their passengers. The 15 to 20 per cent commission Experience PEI would take for this service was more than made up by the increase in the volume of customers, said Gisborne.
Now, the entrepreneurs are facing the prospect of rebuilding their business in a new location in a market unfamiliar with the Hai Long and with none of the carefully cultivated business relationships.
“We’re re-examining our marketing plan and our offerings,” said Gisborne.
Strangely enough, this isn’t the first time the 57-year-old entrepreneur has moved a junk clear across the country.
After the couple met while he was working in China, Gisborne, an electric vehicle expert, got a job on Prince Edward Island to develop the power train for a boat. On his return to Canada, he found a junk for sale in Comox, B.C., bought it and hauled it across Canada with a propane-powered truck to the Island.
But that boat was what he calls a fake Chinese junk, a fibreglass model made to look like a historic junk. It was only when he arrived in Atlantic Canada in 2016 that Gisborne discovered through a friend that there was a junk for sale, stored in a barn in Chester. He went to see it, snapped it up at a bargain price and then spent about 600 hours and thousands of dollars fixing it up.
“I put in about six months of work and then got the commercial certification for it.”
Now with a captain’s certification, he operates the Hai Long with his wife as first mate and another crew member.
The Pivot is a regular business feature about an Atlantic Canadian company adapting to new market realities with innovative products, services or strategies. To suggest a business, email: [email protected].
