Awards transcend the ages

The Westpac 2008 Northland Business Excellence Awards were extraordinary for several reasons, not least the 101 years difference in age between the oldest and the youngest guests.
Tom McKay, 101, was inducted as the inaugural member of the Northland Chamber of Commerce's new Business Hall of Fame. Three-month-old Brianna Osborne came with her parents, Jodi and Mark Osborne. Both put in impeccable performances.
The Osbornes' tiny Mangonui business, Doubtless Beauty (three full-time therapists), shared a starring role with supreme winner the New Zealand Refining Company, another stunning contrast. Vastly different in size, the two companies shared the ACC Workplace Safety award for exactly the same pro-active commitment to safety and well-being of staff.
They were also the only businesses to win two categories.
Doubtless Beauty also won Business Coaching NZ Best Emerging Business award, and the refinery won the O'Brien Life Insurance Excellence In Business award before being named supreme winner.
Tom McKay was honoured for his business achievements and his tireless support for people in the business and wider community. The firm he founded in 1937 now works nationally and internationally and is involved in advanced electronic services.
Back in Dargaville, Tom McKay still puts in several hours a day sending meter boxes around New Zealand. Brian Roberts of Destination Northland, who carried out the induction ceremony, made the point that 101-year-old includes promotional material about Northland with every meter box.
National Party leader John Key was a surprise guest. His party wanted to make sure New Zealand lived up to its promise, especially playing to its competitive advantages in food production.
"Baaaa!" shouted a member of the audience. "Quite," said the politician, unfazed, "sheep are part of that. We have the land and we also have the water - the fourth largest water mass in the world, 16 times the size of our land mass. If any country is going to succeed in aquaculture it is New Zealand."
Whangarei Mayor Stan Semenoff was more political than the politician, calling him "the man many of us hope will be prime minister after next weekend."
Northland would be blue from Helensville to the Cape, he said. These high hopes were tagged with expectations of help for the North, which included a four-lane highway between Auckland and Whangarei, and other road improvements. As well, he would be suggesting Northland should be the place "where your government trials anything it wishes to experiment with, say, in sewerage and health". Several category winners had entered previously and acted on judges' suggestions for improvements to systems to score top places this year.
Fiona Shepherd of Arohanui & Harinui Childcare of Kerikeri (22 staff, 67 children), winner of the Absolute Recruitment Northland Excellence In Professional Services award, said the fine-tuning of systems in her business had been "an awful lot of hard work but absolutely beneficial".
Trevor Griffiths, a director of Griffiths & Associates, winners of the Golden Bay Excellence in Building/Construction award, said the firm had started planning for the win three years ago, after winning the 2005 emerging business award. "It's bloody hard yards but we would like to challenge every other business to adopt the same approach."
Brothers Jasper and Perry van Gaalen of the Mid-North Motor Inn won Northland Regional Council Sustainable Business award by doing what comes naturally.
Sustainability permeates the whole operation, from the energy-saving light bulbs, to solar panels, on-site recycling, a no-waste policy, and a large vegetable garden which supplies all the hotel's needs.
A major development for Northland tertiary students was announced by NorthTec chief executive Terry Barnett, when he presented the NorthTec award for Excellence in Technology/Innovation. He said the polytechnic had signed an agreement with an international company giving access to state-of-the-art 3D modelling tools. Full details are to be announced early this week.
Presenting the supreme award, Westpac regional manager Greg Byrne said enthusiasm for excellent business practice had been evident in everyone the judges spoke to at the refinery, from front-line staff to the CEO.
Refinery chief executive Ken Rivers said that when he came to New Zealand a year ago he had found "great people doing great things but nobody talked about their successes".
He said the Marsden Pt refinery was one of the world's most reliable refineries, able to compete with the best.
"But what excites me is that we can do even better and that's what we are aiming to do, sustainably and in an environmentally friendly way for Northland and New Zealand," he said.