Guy Hughes - An entrepreneurial ‘Guy’

While he admits he comes close, having launched multiple businesses mostly with very little know-how, Guy Hughes insists he’s not “a serial entrepreneur”.

“I just love starting them up and handing them over,” he grins.

So far, he’s opened Queenstown’s first language school in 1993, another later in Christchurch, a Queenstown kayaking business and a Montessori kindergarten. “I couldn’t get my daughter into kindy so we opened one. That was a real labour of love. The locals got around us, I loved that business,” he says.

Queenstown Language School was also groundbreaking – foreign students from around the globe coming to Queenstown to learn English.

“I just love entrepreneurial challenges,” the 60-year-old father of three says. “Besides as a Japanese-speaking shepherd with a science degree I was not very employable,” he laughs.

While Guy certainly had his fair share of partying fun as a young man, he was showing entrepreneurial flair at a very young age, saving enough to buy his first house in St Albans, Christchurch, at just 22.

Canterbury-raised, he’d headed off on what turned out to be a three-and-a-half year OE, taking in the Munich Beerfest and Europe, before tending pub planter boxes all over London.

“I’d grown up reading Wilbur Smith novels and always wanted to travel through Africa but didn’t have enough money.” He headed to Japan to work and stay with a friend, studying Japanese and teaching English for nearly two years. “I taught English fulltime at a language school, part-time at the YMCA and tutoring a private student,” he says. “I saved heaps.

“I saw a whole different world there and I loved it.”

After travelling through Asia and trekking in the Himalayas he flew, then hitched home to surprise his parents for Christmas in Ashburton.

Guy’s was a typically wonderful South Island upbringing, his parents working hard to put their four kids through boarding school.

Early years at Christ’s College were tough but Guy was introduced to skiing at Mount Hutt.

His uncle, Brenton Vincent, Queenstown’s Fish and Game officer, had inspired a love of the outdoors. “We’d make the very long drive down, shingle all the way, and I’d go out on the boat with Uncle Brenton who soon had me hooked on fishing.” Hunting became another passion, and Guy found his ‘happy place” in his late teens working as a shepherd on Canterbury high country stations for three years – Dry Creek, Flagpole and The Dasher.

‘Hijinks’ in Queenstown with mates from Dunedin’s Knox College saw them waking up to ducks and tourists on Queenstown Bay beach or bunking down in the Park Street boat sheds where life jackets served as pillows.

Guy studied for a year at Lincoln before “refocusing” and doing a Bachelor of Science at Canterbury Uni. An ACC lump sum payout after a car accident injury gave him the deposit he needed for that first house, also working part time.

It wasn’t until he’d completed his travels that those early Queenstown seeds started to bloom while visiting friend Marty Davenport, whose dad owned Davenport’s Jewellers in the Mall.

“Marty’s dad asked what I’d been doing and said Queenstown needed a language school. I knew nothing about business, but I was very motivated with lots of enthusiasm. I thought what an amazing place to come and learn English!”

Ken Greenslade secured him Camp Street space where Bungalow Bar is now, previously a Christian bookstore.
Thousands of students from Japan to Brazil have graced his school classrooms since then, with many an expansion over the years, Guy securing property in Robins Road then O’Connells Shopping Centre.

Incredible homestay hosts, staff and teachers have made for a fantastic Queenstown experience. “The JTB (Japan Travel Bureau) said a couple of students coming needed homestays. Maureen Smith and Donna Baldey were my first two homestay hosts, then Dot and Hec Chisholm – a big part of the experience,” Guy says. “We brought homestay to Queenstown. We advertised on radio and in the newspaper. Very soon we had 50 families hosting and supplementing their mortgages.”

For 20 years Guy flew overseas connecting with agencies four times a year, blown away by an all-expenses paid trip to Thailand in 1996. He’d bluffed his way through when a Thai company rang asking to bring two classes of 30 students to his tiny, new school, managing to secure extra room at the Salvation Army across the road.

He’s seen the world numerous times – Japan, Korea, China, Vietnam, Europe, including Moscow, once living in Prague, even representing the Czech Republic at European social touch rugby championships.

He’s played veteran’s touch here for 20 years and managed kids’ teams, also on the Shaping Our Future board for seven years.

Romance struck in 2017 after second wife Gina, who’d worked in the industry in Japan for 18 years, arrived in Queenstown looking to buy a house for her students – the perfect match, “glued at the hip ever since”.

“I do love Queenstown. There’s nowhere I’d rather be. I love all the sub-cultures.”