It's got to be good enough for Mum, and Dad!
In 1983, Kevin Hickman walked into a fire-damaged old villa to investigate how the fire had started. The building was a resthome (aged-care facility), and Kevin didn’t like what he saw.
“There were four people to a room with shared toilets down the corridor. The people running the resthome were nice and did a good job in as much as they were expected to. But to me, it was crazy. The standards were so poor. But that’s how resthomes were in those days.”
It started Kevin thinking about what the standard should be. “I thought, what would I want for Mum? I’d want a single room with an ensuite, for a start.”
Finding the perfect business
Kevin and his business partner, accountant John Ryder, had met a few years earlier. Kevin had left the police to set up his own private investigation business and needed an accountant. Kevin says the partnership worked because they had complementary skills.
The pair were on the look-out for a business opportunity. After Kevin’s experience with the fire-damaged resthome, they knew they’d found what they were looking for. They could start a business that would improve the way older people lived and how they were cared for. It was a business they could feel good about and believe in completely.
They soon found a block of 14 two-bedroom flats in Christchurch, New Zealand, which they would convert into their first resthome.
And with that, Ryman – formed from combining Ryder and Hickman – was born
The resthome was renamed Riverside and was a great success. Ryman was soon in the market for a second property.
A motel complex in Christchurch became their next development. “Because we didn’t have much money, I lived there while we rebuilt it,” Kevin says.
Kevin and John believed in reinvesting to grow the company. Profits were reinvested to lay the foundations for future earnings so that the value of the investment was always compounding.
The Ryman recipe was to buy the right site in a well-established suburb, use working capital to build the first stage of the village, sell that, and use the capital to fund the next stage. They’d then build a care wing and operate the village using home-grown staff trained in Ryman systems.
A belief in growing in-house talent
Kevin calls the current leaders ‘the Ryman kids’ – and ‘kids’ pretty much describes what they were when they started.
Both Kevin and John believed in bringing young, talented people through the ranks to top roles. People had to have the Ryman way of working in their DNA to become Rymanians. They had to have care at the heart of everything they did.
Ryman’s ethos hasn’t changed
Three decades on, Kevin says Ryman’s ethos hasn’t changed. “Everything we do must be good enough for Mum – and Dad.”
