Twenty years ago, I asked David Irving, the former CEO of Watties, to review my first ever strategic plan as a manager in high performance sport. We’d never met but he generously gave me two hours in exchange for some sporting memorabilia. David was a wonderful servant of NZ business and his legacy is more apparent than you’d realise. However I was most struck by one of his side comments. “Before I started as CEO, I made sure to meet with Lady Wattie. You need to respect the history of a business and I needed her blessing.” At that point, Lady Wattie played no role in the business.
It struck me that every business starts from nothing. Most corporates today probably started out as an idea, a garage and some fierce tenacity. As we individually push for more pay, it’s worth reflecting on how lucky we are to ride the legacy created by our predecessors who probably received less.
Twelve years after meeting David, I was lucky to serve as an Intern Director on a health insurance company. It was a wonderful learning opportunity that breathed life into my governance career. That company was started by Dermott Martin with a vision to keep workers in the best possible health and with the support of some unions. It’s now one of New Zealand’s largest health insurance providers with a balance sheet that will comfortably withstand today’s economic challenges.
GreenHalo also has humble beginnings. The vision of its parent company, Ember Technology, is to do more than its fair share to make New Zealand a better place to live. We don’t publicise that nor the hardware, time and funds we’ve donated to others. I share it now because it gives context to GreenHalo’s birth. As owners we surf, ski, tramp, run, cycle and fish in the outdoors. Nature’s playground is core in our lives and has been a canvas for our kids’ plentiful self-discovery. For no other reason, we pursued net carbon zero in 2020.
Toitū Envirocare was (and still is) the main certifier so we signed up, paid our money, passed the audit and got the certificate. Second time around, I became a bit grumpy at how long the audit took. Our rapidly expanding IT business was tight on staff and we were looking for efficiencies.
At the same time, my less grumpy co-owner, Tom Cawood, arrived fresh and inspired from a governance conference as we hit the mountains for our six-monthly strategy retreat. He said carbon accounting was coming and perhaps we could use our experience to help others. The pain of carbon audits appeared to align with our vision but we never meant to start GreenHalo.
With no luck finding a suitable platform to automate our own audit, we decided to build our own. We gave our software development team one month. No more. If they couldn’t achieve success, the project would be shut down.
Then word of GreenHalo got out amongst Ember Technology’s corporate customers who were experiencing similar audit pain. They were very clear on the features they needed and encouraged us to keep building. Having delivered on their previous promise, we gave the devs another 10 weeks. No more. Or the project would get shut down.
The task we set the dev team was largely impossible. But, after unquantifiable hours and on the eve of Christmas, they fronted and they had ticked every box. It was a monstrous effort and a milestone moment for all of us. We were so proud of them, as they were of themselves. It set a culture within GreenHalo where we build for the customer and we achieve the impossible. It spurred us on to keep developing GreenHalo and that spirit endures today. I hope David Irving and Dermott Martin would approve.
Chris Bailey
GreenHalo Founder
