Most of my writing is about the paperwork side of moving across the world. Visas, job checks, timelines, the small print. But every so often I meet someone whose life is a good answer to a question people ask me all the time: what does it actually look like once you are on the other side, building something?

So this one is a story, not a guide.

Who is Dave?

Dave Maguire is English. He grew up a long way from the Southern Ocean, built a career in international sports broadcasting, and then did the thing a lot of people only talk about over a second glass of wine. He moved to the far side of the world and started again on his own terms.

Today he runs FanCast Productions, a video production company that describes itself, fairly, as Australia and New Zealand’s bespoke video agency. Branded content, corporate films, event coverage, podcasts, and the kind of drone footage of Queenstown that makes people who have never been suddenly start googling flights.

What caught my eye is not the showreel, good as it is. It is the shape of the life behind it.

Two countries, one business

FanCast is not based in a city. It is based between two, Melbourne and Queenstown, which happen to sit on opposite sides of the Tasman Sea. Dave works across both, as a registered video production company in each country, with real people and real gear on the ground in both places.

If you have ever moved abroad, you will know how unusual that is. Most of us arrive somewhere new and spend the first few years just trying to belong to one place. Learn the roads. Find the dentist. Work out which supermarket is the good one. The idea of belonging to two countries at once, and building a business that lives in both, sounds exhausting when you are still finding your feet.

And yet, once you are settled, it can become the most natural thing in the world. Australia and New Zealand are close in the way that matters. A short flight. A shared rhythm. Enough overlap that you can feel at home in both, and enough difference that neither one gets boring.

Why his story stuck with me

I meet a lot of people at the very beginning of the journey, when everything is still a question. Will I get the visa. Will I find work. Will I regret it. Will my kids settle. It is a heavy, uncertain time, and I do not pretend otherwise.

Dave’s story is a small piece of evidence for the other side of that fear. He is proof that an outsider, someone who arrived without a local surname or a local network, can not only settle here but build something that other businesses trust with their reputation. He came for one kind of life and ended up with a wider one, stretched comfortably across two countries he now knows well.

I am not going to pretend his path was frictionless. Nobody’s is. Starting a company in a new country asks a lot of you, and doing it in two asks more. But the person on the other side of that effort is not tired and regretful. He is doing work he loves, in places most people save up to visit.

The quiet point underneath

When people ask me whether it is worth it, I usually talk about visas, because that is my job and because the practical side genuinely matters. But the honest answer lives in stories like this one.

It is worth it when the new country stops being a place you are trying to get into, and starts being a place you are building from.

If you want to see what Dave and the team make, their work is here. And if you are the one still at the beginning, still weighing it up, I am always happy to talk through what your version of the move might look like.

Suzanne