Six businesses from Wairarapa were selected as finalists in The 25th Wellington Gold Awards [TWGA] at last week’s Te Wharewaka o Pōneke on Wellington’s Waterfront.
Among the 52 finalists selected for the TWGA were our very own Palliser Estate Wines of Martinborough Ltd, Milky-Way.Kiwi Ltd, Featherston Booktown Trust, Wairarapa Wines Harvest Festival, KTM Silviculture and Juken New Zealand Ltd.
The 11 categories included – Creative Gold, Technology Gold, Emerging Gold Products, Vibrant Gold, Emerging Gold Services, ACC Workplace Safety Gold, Global Gold, Green Gold, Innovation Gold, Team Gold and Supporting Gold.
In order for each business to be considered, they had to fill out an online entry form in stage one, answering 15 easy questions covering their business, the last 12 months in particular and their goals.
TWGA Event Manager, Gayle Page, told the Times-Age that the 25 judges pick the top five in each category and then allocate points to each business.
“They are then collated across the 25 judges to choose the finalists and then ultimately the winner.
“We don’t do visits; we don’t do meetings or anything like that because everyone is so busy it’s just a simple exercise of weighing up each business and how it compares to the others.
“It’s about which ones are obviously the most innovative and stand out and have the most potential – that’s what they’re looking for,” Page said.
TWGA cover the Wellington region including: Wairarapa, Kāpiti Coast, Porirua, Upper Hutt, Lower Hutt, and Wellington City, with Horowhenua entering for the first time.
Meanwhile, all finalists in stage two are given the opportunity to elaborate on their stage one application.
Finalists are given a 2–3 week deadline to provide a six-page document telling the judges about “all the wonderful things about them,” Page said.
“We’ve kept it to six pages because in years gone by we’d get 40-page documents, so we would like to keep it tight.
“This gives them a chance to show their business personality and to tell us a lot more than we find out in round one,” Page said.
Stage two applications will then be sent out to the judges, who will add up individual scores to determine each category’s final winner.
“The ‘Supreme Winner’ is top secret until the night; there’s only one person who knows who the winners are. That is the judge’s convenor, and he puts their name in an envelope and seals it, and it gets opened on the night,” Page said.
The winners will be announced at the Embassy Theatre in Wellington on August 23 while also celebrating Wellington’s businesspeople, their organisations, teams and stakeholders.
The Wairarapa finalist to make TWGA will be featured in upcoming Times-Age issues.
