Mavis Mullins is the first woman to hold the position of chair for the Atihau Whanganui Incorporation. When former chair Dana Blackburn announced his imminent retirement from the board in January, she was elected unopposed.
Chronicle journalist Merania Karauria discovered a woman who has many distinctions from a lifelong career in the wool industry that started when she worked as a woolhandler with her fourth-generation shearing whanau
I really enjoy governance. I am excited for the chance to add my efforts to those past efforts. Mavis Mullins
MAVIS Mullins first came to national attention when she won the Golden Shears open woolhandling championship in 1987 and 1990.
Since then her business prowess has gone from strength to strength, and now she can add "first woman to hold the position of chair for the Atihau Whanganui Incorporation" to her impressive curriculum vitae.
Not one to speak of her success - as in the Maori whakatauki, "kaore te kumara he korero, mo tona reka" (a kumara never speaks about how sweet it is) - Mrs Mullins says her approach is about balance.
She views her new position heading the AWHI with humility and pride and with a certain amount of nervousness.
"I really enjoy governance. I am excited for the chance to add my efforts to those past efforts."
Mrs Mullins stepped up from being a director (since 2007) on the incorporation board and took the governance reins when former chair Dana Blackburn announced his imminent retirement in January. She was nominated unopposed.
"As a board, we have worked on strategic direction a lot; He taonga tuku iho: toitu te whenua, toitu te tangata - productive lands, prosperous peoples - so it will be business as usual, with a lick of that something different that I bring."
That "lick of something different" is the challenge to knit together a "highly effective team of people to not just achieve but hopefully over-achieve".
"Our role is to do our job and do it well and to let our results do the talking, not necessarily our words. One way of achieving this is through benchmarking, and that often means getting out into the greater community."
AWHI recently launched an agri-training initiative to help uri build their capability to work on their lands.
Mrs Mullins said the board tried it once before, has learned the lessons and was now looking at effective solutions, adding: "We don't give up."
She is no stranger to business excellence or benchmarking.
She went back to Massey University in the mid 1990s and studied for a Masters in Business Administration (MBA).
"This saw us do a lot of things differently and got us into that benchmarking mode. We were pleasantly surprised."
Mrs Mullins and husband Koro are Paewai Mullins Shearing Ltd, and the MBA was the catalyst for the way the couple viewed their business.
Paewai Mullins Shearing became the first in the world to obtain an ISO 9002 shearing certification in 1996, which was reflected in a name change to Paewai Mullins Systems Ltd.
"All of this brought great pride and profile to the business, our workers, clients and the whanau - it was an important time of self-analysis."
Although born and bred in Dannevirke, Mrs Mullins' whakapapa link to the lands is through her mother, Josephine Whanarere of Ngapaerangi, Kaiwhaiki.
She says her greatest influence was her parents, but special mention is for her dad, Punga Paewai of Ngati Pakapaka of Rangitane.
Her family are fourth-generation shearing contractors, so her whanau all had to go to work out in the shearing sheds.
"I enjoyed it and studied for my wool classing diploma."
It's easy to see why she says she loves wool and why she moved up through the ranks to be appointed New Zealand manager and took the woolhandling team to the 2005 World Championships in Australia, where their whanaunga Joanne Kumeroa, from Parikino on the Whanganui River, won the world title that year.
That year Mrs Mullins was named Sports Administrator of the Year in the Maori Sports Awards and she won again in 2012 for her role with Golden Shears New Zealand which hosted the World Championships in Masterton. Mrs Mullins is in her fifth year as president of Golden Shears.
In 1995 she won the Maori Business Women's Award and was runner-up in the Maori Business Women's Award overall excellence.
In 1998 Mrs Mullins was appointed the New Zealand woolhandling judge to the World Shearing and Woolhandling Championships in Ireland.
And in 2001 she was made a Member of the Order of Merit for New Zealand for her services to the wool industry.
For the past 15 years, Mrs Mullins has been a member of the Apec Women's Leaders Network and spoke in Thailand about Maori women in export.
She is also a member of Global Women NZ, a professional women's network, where she says she has a chance to reinvigorate and re-energise.