Q&A: 2024 Horowhenua Mayoral Hall of Fame laureate Wayne Bishop

Horowhenua mayor Bernie Wanden with Wayne Bishop.

Wayne Bishop was named the 2024 Mayoral Hall of Fame laureate for Horowhenua at the recent Electra Business and Innovation Awards. Reporter Grace Odlum caught up with him to find out more.

How did it feel to get inducted into the Horowhenua Hall of Fame?

I was quite chuffed. It was certainly an honour and unexpected.

How did you get into the building industry?

I always had a passion to be a builder as a kid, and the day I left school was the day I started my building apprenticeship locally. I finished my apprenticeship and started my own company in 1992 and the rest is history.

What have been some of the highlights of your career?

There are many – like seeing your vision come to reality through the support of the public who ultimately end up occupying these dreams. That’s a really important thing. It’s given my wife and my family a really cool career very close to home. We’ve seen many, many young guys come through our company and gain a qualification that sets them up for an exciting career ahead. The success of our developments has given us the ability to dream a little bigger and maybe push the boundaries with some of the stuff we want to do, but it’s also given us the resources to be able to do that. The next 15 years are very exciting. Another highlight was being recognised nationally in the Deloitte Fast 50 as one of the 50 fastest growing companies in New Zealand. That was a pretty cool badge. And also to appear on the list of the 10 busiest residential building companies in New Zealand. Which is phenomenal really when you consider one was G J Gardner, two was Fletcher Homes, and 10 was Wayne Bishop Group out of Ōhau. It’s just incredible to think that we are having such an impact. Like those big companies have an impact nationally, but man, we must be changing the dials here.

What does the Wayne Bishop Group consist of?

The Wayne Bishop Group is essentially a building company, but it’s now a lot more than that because it’s sort of vertically integrated with a whole lot of other subsidiary companies that all row the boat the same way in delivering development. So we have a planning team which has got architects and draftsmen. We’ve got an officer who does our resource and building consents. We’ve got a building company in amongst that which has got all sorts of different things, like transportable homes, a concrete division, scaffolding, roofing, flooring, plumbing, kitchen joinery, frame and truss, painters, stoppers and painters. So we’ve built a company out of local staff. We’ve built a company which we needed to have at a scale to be able to support the pace in which we were travelling. We are setting up a finance company – so we can finance people into homes too now.

What do you love about Horowhenua?

Well, it’s home. I’ve travelled a whole lot, around not just the country, but the world, and we probably don’t stop often enough and take stock of what is on offer in our district. We’ve got all we need and all the stuff we want isn’t very far away. I don’t plan to go anywhere because this is home.