Tag Archives: HB Chamber

Hawke’s Bay Breeding Brilliant Youth in Business

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A team from Woodford House has won this year’s Young Enterprise Scheme for their product – an environmentally friendly fruit label.

Sarah Wixon, Rylie Bensemann, Zoe Rookes and Maggie Peacock featured in the previous issue of The Profit and took out the top award for their water soluable sticker that aims to reduce waste and encourage consumers to wash their fruit.

65 Hawke’s Bay YES (Young Enterprise Scheme) teams started up a business this year with each team coming up with an idea of a product or service and then undertaking market research to see if their great idea would sell and then took it to market.

The teams came from 15 Hawke’s Bay secondary schools and were either year 12 or 13 (6th & 7th form). Over the course of eight months students completed three YES challenges which determined the top six teams in the region. These top six teams competed in the YES finals on 24 October at EIT.

The top six Hawke’s Bay teams were;

  • Empressa Central Central Hawke’s Bay College
  • MyTapp Woodford House
  • Poncho Me Iona
  • Project Rangatahi EIT Business Enterprise Unit
  • Bayuble Woodford House
  • Lightning Lock Hastings Christian School

The competition was fierce, and the judge’s decision was a tough one as the team results were so close.  “We didn’t know who the Hawke’s Bay Champion was until the last moment as the judges were torn and therefore had many discussions before a winner was chosen” says Karla Lee, Hawke’s Bay YES Regional Coordinator.  However, there could be only one winner and the team who took the overall title was Bayuble from Woodford House.

Bayuble have created an alternative label to stickers for fruit.  The team impressed the judges with their strong presentation, innovative product and commitment to research.  Bayuble will now be offered the opportunity to pitch at the Pan Pac Hawke’s Bay Business Awards on Friday 16th November to fine tune their delivery before heading to Wellington to represent Hawke’s Bay on Thursday 6th December where they will compete against 20 other New Zealand regions.

Hawke’s Bay also have two teams that won National Excellence Awards.  The teams were not told which award they have won but they are both invited to Wellington in December to accept their respective award.  These teams are;

  • George St Johns College
  • Letz Lead Hawke’s Bay Prison

The finals and awards are a celebration for YES teams “the awards evening highlights the brilliant work of our youth in Hawke’s Bay and what the future holds.  It takes courage and hard work to achieve the results these teams have accomplished and I couldn’t be more proud of these amazing young entrepreneurs” says Karla Lee.

If you were unable to see the evening in person, you have the opportunity to see it on the Hawke’s Bay Chamber of Commerce facebook page  https://www.facebook.com/hawkesbaychamber/

You can also see Bayuble pitch at the Pan Pac Hawke’s Bay Business Awards that are open to the public.  For tickets please go to https://www.hawkesbaychamber.co.nz/

User experience spurs buying the business

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Just like Victor Kiam of Remington Razors fame, Ray Burr and Donna Campbell liked the product so much they bought the company.

Ray and Donna were dairy farmers from Aria in the King Country who, like many other farmers across New Zealand, relied on using urea to increase productivity. They started out with 360 cows, which over time grew to 520.

“Our system was relying on the increasing use of urea – from 50 kilograms of urea/hectare/year up to 150 kilograms of urea/ hectare/year – but production wasn’t increasing and we were facing major animal health issues: downer cows; Rotovirus; a large numbers of lame cows; an increased reliance on CIDRs [controlled internal drug releases] to get cows in calf; induction to try and maintain an acceptable calving spread; and more,” says Ray.

The breakdown in their system led to a lack of net cash profit and they could see the harsh impact of urea on the farm.

“As a farmer you always try to do your best using the knowledge that you have available, but it wasn’t working on our farm. We were actually going backwards not forwards, and we could see that our farming practices were impacting on the environment and the health of our animals.

“You have a thought in the back of your mind that you are actually producing food for humans and if your animals aren’t performing too good and they’re suffering or not healthy, what are you doing? We needed to look for the technology that would help us farm the way we wanted to farm – sustainably.

“That meant having healthy pastures, healthy animals and a really healthy cashflow, and we achieved all of that within a few years using these programmes. Increased production starts with healthy soil.”

Ray and Donna went in search of support and after seeking advice from several highly regarded experts in agriculture who gave no satisfactory answers, they decided to look outside the square.

The rest, they say, is history. Not only did the farm come back to life but productivity soared (more about this shortly).

So, what was the secret? They found a small business in Waipawa owned by Peter and Daphne Lester that used advanced, science- based systems focusing on the three key elements – soil, plant and animal nutrition.

What farmers and horticulturists need to know is that standard fertiliser has only four of the sixteen elements soil requires to be healthy. When the same four ingredients get dumped on the soil year after year, there is a saturation of those four elements with none of the other twelve soil essential elements being monitored and replaced if necessary.

“This was an exciting time in our farming career as we observed a complete turnaround not only in our farming operation but also in the farm environment. Improvements were taking place every year, we couldn’t wait for calving to start and the new season to unfold; farming for us became an absolute pleasure,” says Ray.

After using Quantum for six years, the Burr’s got a phone call from Peter to see if they were interested in buying the business.

They had already sold the farm and had been having a well-deserved break while contemplating their next move.

“We had 18 years of milking 520 cows, so we were enjoying having a few sleep-ins and taking a year off,” says Ray.

“In 2008 we went from being share milkers to shareholders, buying a 50 percent shareholding in Quantum with the opportunity to buy the business in full.”

In 2016 the Burr’s took over full ownership. To further develop the business and add credibility to their farming system programme, they invited a highly respected vet and animal nutritionist to come out from the US, and he lived with them for about three months while they absorbed all the expertise and wisdom he offered.

“It was a real eye opener and made us realise how far New Zealand had to go and where we needed to be to keep up with the rest of the world.”

Farming practices and their impact on the environment have been some of the hottest and most scrutinized issues, both in local and national politics.

“Farmers are now under a lot of pressure because of rules and regulations about what they can and can’t do. This system encourages farming the farm as an ecological entity, looking at the soil fertility as well as what animals are eating.

“At every step in the food chain we can look at efficiencies and how farmers can get the right efficiencies without going overboard and having a detrimental effect on the environment. Believe it or not, if you do that properly, profits follow.

“That’s been going on for 50 to 60 years. There’s always been enough scientists and people farming under these types of systems that sooner or later sustainable food production would be achieved using the right methods; otherwise when you get it wrong, you have a detrimental effect on soil and animal health,” Ray says.

Donna says moving from the farm into an agribusiness wasn’t an easy transition.

“It was quite a struggle actually, from dealing with 520 cows a day to suddenly dealing with people and selling your wares, but it did help that we had used this system and could personally verify the results.”

Since taking over full ownership, the Burrs have rebranded the business from Quantum to Qlabs and given their science a brand name – Fallian.

Fallian is Scottish Gaelic for healthy and healthy encompasses what the coordinated soil–plant–animal nutrition programmes achieve.

Healthy soil equals Healthy plants equals healthy animals equals healthy environment equals healthy bank balance.

They have also recently been granted a patent for their Ruminant Nitrogen Utilisation Efficiency (RNUE).

Ray says RNUE is one of the most proactive advancements available in New Zealand pastoral agriculture. Basically, by scientifically evaluating farmers’ pastures in the laboratory, Qlabs can determine how much urinary nitrogen and milk urea nitrogen an animal will produce when it comes time to graze that pasture. This is a powerful management tool.

“Farmers who have worked with us to develop this programme have enjoyed shifting their thinking in kg/DM/Ha to asking themselves, ‘what is the true value for my livestock and the environment?”

“This enables farmers to work proactively to gain greater pasture- to-animal production efficiency while reducing their environmental footprint. For me, there is no satisfaction in agriculture than witnessing the enjoyment farmers get out of farming successfully.”

Ray is also strong to point out that while they saw success in using Quantum for dairy farming, Qlabs now has clients across the primary sector spectrum, both conventional and organic producers.

They work with viticulturalists, horticulturalists and agriculture producers, all of whom have had significant success in increased productivity while enhancing their land.

“We test soil here in our lab in Waipawa to determine what essential nutrients are missing, and then we provide the client with a treatment plan to fix all those problems,” says Donna.

“First we improve farm soil health, which is quickly followed by animal health, and then last but not least, the farmer’s health improves as the stress goes down when the costs go down and the profits go up.

“In dairy we have seen production rise by 3,500 kilograms/MS. The farm moved from non-compliance to full compliance, meeting all obligations required by Environment Canterbury in the Red Zone, and profitability increased at the same time, without using any surplus nitrogen at all. That means savings in the region of $60,000 a year because the farmer is not paying for excess artificial nitrogen anymore.”

In growing their business The Burr’s have become members of the Hawke’s Bay Chamber’s Business Development Group. They are now also getting one-on-one support from Roger Smith, the director of the programme.

Members of the Business Development Group meet fortnightly to identify and solve a $20,000 problem in every member’s business every month.

Roger says already this year the Group has helped each other discover and address $2 million worth of issues.

“As we like to say that is $2 million in the back pocket and not out the back door” he says.

Roger says 1-1 clients also have access to the Programme’s purpose- built diagnostic ‘Business Optimiser’ software that is used to discover the full and immediate profit potential of their business.

“That analysis then allows us to build a longer term growth plan for each individual business to help the owner achieve their work and lifestyle goals” he says.

Here is some feedback from clients on the Group Programme…

  • “We now know how to take our customers from $300 a year spend to over $3,000 a year!”
  • “Our new value-add ideas have increased our price to our customers by 50% and they thanked us for it!”
  •  “Our new sales system is getting us in front of customers that would never have seen us just six months ago!”
  • “We have learned ways to increase our turnover by around $5,000 a week!”
  • “Our new sales script has increased our sales by 20%!”

As for Qlabs, Roger sees it as a genuine ‘challenger brand’.

Roger says a challenger brand usually starts as a small business with a big idea that attacks the ingrained assumptions about a category and the way the incumbents do business. A good example of a global challenger brand is Apple in its early days – with Steve Jobs at the helm. They took computers out of the basement and put them on every worker’s desk. It was an outrageous idea at the time but one that changed the world.

“Challenger brands change the world because they are the ones that have the courage to look at what we all take for granted and ask ‘why’?” Roger says.

“What Ray Burr and Donna Campbell have developed at ‘Qlabs’ is world leading technology that is now a profit making machine for every kind of farm in New Zealand. Ray and Donna are challenging some of NZ’s ingrained assumptions about how things are done – and proving them wrong. They have been so successful they can now guarantee every farmer or grower they work with an environmentally compliant future, greater animal health, much higher productivity and much greater profitability. This really is 21st century land management in action – and it is what New Zealand is crying out for right now. This is a story we should all be shouting about from the roof tops” Roger says.

Waipawa is no Silicon Valley – and it is an unlikely place to find New Zealand’s next technology superstar – but Ray and Donna have no desire to move their business to the big city.

“Our business is all about the ‘health’ and ‘heart’ of the country” Ray says. “We love being in and around the rural community and its people. We live on the land ourselves on a small lifestyle block – and nothing will move us away from here!” he says.

www.qlabs.co.nz

 

How YES crosses the business boundaries

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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 of business studies and director of innovation Toni Dunstan views the scheme as an exciting initiative and a vital component in the school’s mission to prepare its students for an evolving career environment.

This year Woodford House introduced a Level 3 (Year 13) business studies course – incorporating YES – into its curriculum. The course is aimed at providing students with experiential learning in a business context and Toni says she has been delighted by the positive elements YES is delivering.

“What I love about this course is the experiential learning and the interdisciplinary nature. It’s not just the silo of business studies,” she says.

“Take Bayuble for example [one of the Woodford YES teams profiled below]. They have spent just as much time in the science lab and in the food tech room developing their product and are going to enter it into the local science fair.

“That crossover of business and science is really exciting because in my personal view, that’s an example of the future of education – we have to break down silos and understand that learning is about crossing boundaries.

“The Young Enterprise Programme is a wonderful vehicle for business education because with elements such as its competitive nature, the deadlines and the outside audience, it puts a real-world scaffolding around what the girls are learning. It’s not just me setting an arbitrary date for an assignment, there are people outside the school who they are accountable to. I also love the interaction with their mentors, which brings the community into what we’re doing.”

MYTAPP: linking students and tutors

For their YES business, Sophie Svenson, Monique Way, Bridget de Latour and Francesca Arlidge are developing a web-based application designed to connect students with freelance tutors.

Users will sign up either as a tutor or a student, and they will then be connected with people in their local community to arrange tutoring sessions through the platform.

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The group got off to an excellent start in developing their business by successfully securing seed funding from EIT and Waikato University. They say they have benefited greatly by working closely with their mentor, Georgina Miller, the co-founder of local digital agency Mogul.

One of the lessons learnt in the early months of the project, they say, has been the importance of ensuring the service meets the needs of its target market. To do that, the group interviewed a range of people including parents, students and tutors to find how they thought current tutoring options could be improved to offer a better service.

“The message we got from that was that while a lot of web-based services only offer online tutoring – because it’s easy and accessible – students really want face-to-face tutoring, so that’s what we’re focusing on.”

They say their target market of high school students is likely to be exposed to the service through social media, so that will be a major focus for the project.

“Marketing, particularly through social media, will play a big part in drawing users to the platform.”

Bayuble: a better way to label fruit

Sarah Wixon, Rylie Bensemann, Zoe Rookes and Maggie Peacock have been hard at work in the lab working on the development of a water soluble, environmentally friendly fruit sticker that will reduce waste and encourage consumers to wash their fruit.

They hope their plastic-free, biodegradable sticker idea will revolutionise how fruit is labelled.

The make-up of their sticker material is a trade secret but it involves using a by- product of apples, and the concept was good enough to win seed funding from Waikato University.

“Europe has recently introduced a target to be rid of unnecessary plastic, and we see the fruit sticker as being in that category.”

The team’s mentor is Dean Prebble, a former New Zealand trade commissioner in Taiwan who recently set up the Hawke’s Bay Angels investment group. The students say Dean’s input and feedback has been priceless and he has provided them with valuable contacts as they have researched their project.

“We’ve built up a lot of connections in the industry through our research, which has included discovering there have been alternatives to fruit stickers, including a fruit tattoo (done through lasering). We looked into that and discovered that lasering the fruit can leave it blemished, which detracts from its visual appeal. In many markets, they want the ‘perfect apple’ and our stickers would allow the fruit to remain in top condition, whereas the current stickers can leave a bit of a sticky residue that can detract from the look of the fruit.”