Blog

Business Profiles
Pro Q & A with Mark Warren
Mark Warren, a farmer from Central Hawke’s Bay, has become a top-selling author on his first attempt. Mark has written about how he took over Waipari Station when the impacts of Rogernomics were about to be deeply felt. Not only did he survive but he’s thrived and has been entrepreneurial in his approach to working the land. He’s sold bottled...
Pro Features
How YES crosses the business boundaries
Today’s high school students face a world where technological change makes it much harder to plot out a career path. That’s one reason Woodford House has embraced the Young Enterprise Scheme. Woodford House is one of 15 schools across Hawke’s Bay participating in the Young Enterprise Scheme (YES) this year and has five teams competing in the challenge. Woodford’s head...
Pro Features
Teens building a business from behind bars – Young enterprise
As the Young Enterprise Scheme grows in popularity across Hawke’s Bay, a team with a difference has taken up the challenge of learning to run a business from inside the region’s prison. The walls of the training room inside the youth unit at Hawke’s Bay Regional Prison are plastered with colourful sketches and handwritten rap lyrics. Notes and business strategies...
News
Real estate: Bay asking prices almost as high as Wellington
  A shortage of listings in the Bay has fuelled the expectations of people wanting to sell property here. They’re now asking almost as much for their homes as sellers in Wellington. According to the latest Trade Me Property Price Index, Hawke’s Bay vendors are asking an average price of $545,100 for their properties, up a "staggering” 23.2 per cent...
Pro Primary
HB Young Fruit Grower of the Year Makes History
Ask Hawke’s Bay Young Fruit Grower of the Year Lisa Arnold what the future holds for both her and the region and the first word that springs to mind is – Wairoa! At 27 years old, Lisa is about to invest in her own small plot of land to build “tiny” houses in a district, which she sees as being...
Pro Features
Roosters: 2 decades of brewing at the red shed
From a business perspective, craft beer and coffee have a lot in common, says Chris Jarvis. As the long-time owner of Hawke’s Bay’s Bay Espresso cafés and now also the proprietor of landmark Hastings brewpub Roosters, he should know. Chris and his wife Jonelle bought the Roosters business – on the industrial fringes of Omahu Road, where it’s been brewing...
Pro Features
Hawke’s Bay Brewing Co: from beer tankers to boutique bottles
Craft beer wasn’t a big thing when Hawke’s Bay Brewing Co started out way back in 1996. In fact, the company’s CEO Greg Forrest jokes that in those days, “craft” was probably a homebrew beer and drinkers didn’t even know how to spell the word. It was a time when the brewing industry was all about volume production of a...
Pro Features
EIT Hastings – a huge hit with students
Tailored to meet student needs, EIT’s newly-located Hastings Regional Learning Centre has become a drawcard for learners since opening ahead of the academic year’s second term. Light-filled, spacious and welcoming, the new centre exudes inclusiveness, which is encouraging students of all ages and backgrounds to engage in tertiary education. The relocation to a single-storey building on Heretaunga Street West has...
Pro Features
Bursting onto the global scene
When disaster strikes, a growing number of air-borne emergency responders around the globe are fighting fires with helicopter fire buckets designed and built in Napier. Fourteen years after starting a Hawke’s Bay engineering company with a $20,000 loan, Richard Lane now runs a specialist helicopter equipment business with a growing list of international customers. “In 2004 I started off with...
Pro Features
Getting our share of the Provincial Growth Fund lolly scramble
The government has a billion dollars a year to dish out for regional development initiatives, so will this region get in on the action? Hawke’s Bay is in line for tens, or possibly even hundreds, of millions of dollars’ worth of funding through the government’s $3 billion Provincial Growth Fund (PGF). Local councils and other backers of several large projects...