Vero Excellence in Business support Awards

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Press Release courtesy of Jane Parlane.

Recycling business wins sustainable award

An organisation that employs disabled people in recycling enterprises has won the 2009 Vero Excellence in Business Support Sustainable Development in Business award.

The winner, Southland Enterprises Ltd, markets to Southland, New Zealand and the world with products as diverse as operating a respirator servicing team at Rio Tinto’s Aluminium Smelter at Tiwai Point, to producing dog kennels, coffins, cleaning road brushes, enveloping brochures and letters, bagging door handles and delivering kindling produced from recycling pallets. Recycling bale wrap from the farming community shipped to China in partnership with 43 Invercargill schools has returned $14m to Southland.

The Vero Excellence in Business Support Awards were founded by business support specialist, Sarah Trotman of Fast50 company Bizzone, and sponsored by Vero, the National Business Review and BDO Spicers. The awards are a key event of the Bizzone Business Expo – New Zealand’s largest event for business - with the Supreme Award presented to Ministry of Economic Development - Insolvency & Trustee Service by Prime Minister Hon John Key at a Black Tie Gala Dinner held on 28 May in Auckland. Our small and medium businesses play a critical part in our economy, “he said. “They provide Kiwis with the essential goods and services they need. They help drive innovation across our economy. And they can become – with good leadership and support – our large businesses of tomorrow.”

Established in Invercargill in 1974 as an industrial work training unit for disabled people, the lifeblood of Southland Enterprises is now recycling. Whether it’s wooden pallets they dismantle and turn into firewood and kindling (plus selling the nails to scrap metal dealers) or processing kerbside collection items, the organisation strives to ensure that products that are of minimal value to anyone else become their ‘gold’. They also collect products for recycling from commercial businesses and recycle plastic products not included in kerbside collections.

 “My business was unable to engage in recycling of paper and plastics without active help and support from Southland Enterprises,” Neville Cook, from Reading Cinemas, Invercargill said. “They have provided an opportunity that has saved a significant amount of rubbish going to landfill in a cost-effective service.”

In its award application Southland Enterprises said they do not accept second best and set high ethical standards in their working environment.

Excellence in business is more important than anything else Roger Bell, Chief Executive of Vero Insurance, the Foundation Sponsor of the awards, said. “The point of these awards is that our winners don’t end up just being excellent on one aspect of business – it goes right across the business – across leadership, strategy, people, processes and the results from all of those things. So it’s not just narrowly defined.”

BDO Spicers’ National Chair Judith Stanway said the Vero awards recognise businesses that are striving, and succeeding. “In doing so they give businesses great role models to aspire to follow,” she says. “In the current environment, when so many aspects of our working lives are uncertain, it’s important to do a good job and to do it right first time,” she says. “No one has the capacity or time to have to go back and re-do things at present: striving for excellence is therefore beneficial to the bottom line, not just the top one.”

“Excellence delivered to a well targeted audience equals guaranteed success!” NBR’s Todd Scott, sponsor said. “Whether it’s excellence in editorial content and commentary or excellence in advertising creative, in today’s economic environment nothing short of excellence is acceptable when so many people have a stake in the outcome. That’s why The National Business Review supports Vero in its recognition of excellence in the 2009 Vero Excellence in Business Support Awards.”

Awards‘ organiser Bizzone has grown to become one of New Zealand’s Fast50 high growth companies and global franchise plans are currently being implemented in Australia. Bizzone has recently created an Online Business Expo and Community being populated from its database of over 35,000 business owners which will go live in mid-August 2009.