William Meek
Chief Financial Officer, Mighty River Power
What was your first job?
An analyst in the power trading division at Mercury Energy. It was 1994 and I was 20. My salary was $30,500.
Mercury approached the economics department at Auckland University seeking a student to do
a study on power consumption and weather. I had just finished my honours degree and the holiday job morphed into a full-time role.
Did you enjoy it?
The Auckland Electric Power Board had been corporatised to form Mercury Energy. It was a time of significant change with the start-up of the wholesale market and deregulation. Everyone was learning new things, processes were evolving, it was a dynamic environment.
These changes brought their fair share of pain, too, with redundancies, and the 1998 CBD outage wasn't pretty.
What did you learn?
That strong teamwork delivers results and putting sufficient time in upfront planning and focusing on priorities rather than just jumping in makes life easier. It was good to apply theory learned at school.
How long did you stay?
This is the depressing part. I never left! The retail side of Mercury was bought by Mighty River Power and I'm still here today, albeit in a different role.
I suppose it's not such a bad thing to come through the ranks - you know the company, how it works and its people.
What was your boss like?
My first boss is still at the company as one of my peers. He's the philosopher type, always musing about how things work and what's wrong with everything. Then he'd ask me to fix it.
Any advice for someone starting out?
Don't take work too seriously. Do something you like because life's too short.
