And the winners are...

“I just want to scream and yell – I can’t believe our good fortune!” said Annabel Smail, Director and Marketing Manager of Smail & Co, when we told her they’d won the New Zealand prize in Greentree GAME ON.

“I’m over the moon,” said Garry Herbert, Chief Financial Officer for the Kimberley Accommodation Group, winner of the Australian prize. “It will be an absolutely huge weight off my shoulders.”

Each company takes away a $250k Greentree software package, including implementation and two years of cloud hosting, having beaten 18 other finalists in putting their case for why the deserve the ultimate business painkiller and multivitamin.

“WE’RE IN THE DUNNY!”

Smail & Co both makes and imports bathroom furniture, and is facing a huge challenge: helping to rebuild homes and offices wrecked by Christchurch’s earthquakes. With their old system (archaic accounting, spreadsheets, and an erratic paper trail of orders) they’d have been hard pressed to cope with the expected flurry of work. But with Greentree handling their accounts, job costing, production planning and manufacturing, Annabel says, “I don’t think we’ll recognise ourselves!”

Smail & Co wants to break into the export market as well, and Greentree will help them realise that dream. “Our factory people will be over the moon,” says Annabel. “I also love the idea of our retailers being able to check their orders themselves, online. That will put us ahead of all the competition.”

The GAME ON judges were especially impressed by Annabel’s presentation, which compared their present system to a long-drop dunny in the age of the en-suite, and also affectionately took the mickey out of her father. She said that with a proper system, they could effectively put him out to pasture. “I loved the irreverent and anarchic view that Annabel had taken regarding her father,” says judge Mike Hutcheson. “It was a very mature and very funny approach. I loved the bare-faced cheek of it.”

Smail & Co’s implementation will be done by the Christchurch office of Greentree partner Endeavour Solutions, whose Christchurch Director, Tim Ryley, said the win would be “an enormous transformation for Smail’s business”.

“They realise they have shortcomings, and they need to build a platform to support the growth that they will achieve both from having a system but also from the rebuild of Christchurch in particular,” Tim says. “I just think it’s a massive injection of capability for this business that they probably wouldn’t have been able to do on their own, so it sets them up for a fantastic few years coming, really.”

“GIVE ME BACK MY LIFE!”

It was Garry Herbert who put together Kimberley’s presentation for GAME ON, telling the sad story of a man without a life, working horrendous hours to keep the books straight and produce the reports.

The Kimberley region of Western Australia is a scenic wonderland of immense historic and ecological value. Kimberley Accommodation helps ensure that the thousands of tourists who flock there from May till August are bedded down, fed and watered. However, managing a business whose facilities are separated by hundreds of kilometres, is owned by a complex structure of family trusts, and which has significant downtime during the wet season, is no picnic – especially with antiquated accounting systems.

“I was told we’d won GAME ON as I was heading into a board meeting to present our quarterly financial results,” Garry says. “That report took me over 40 man-hours to produce. With Greentree I’ll be able to run that consolidated report straight from the system at the push of a button – that’s a week a month given back to me, straight away.”

“I fell in love with Kimberley’s story because it showed a pioneering spirit and a challenge to make the most out of a fairly difficult set of circumstances,” says GAME ON judge Chris Alp. “That’s a very Australian attitude.”

Kimberley’s implementation will be done by Perth-based Addax Business Solutions, which has 15 years of experience, and prides itself in “being proactive, innovative and flexible in creating genuine solutions”.

“Running GAME ON has been a joy because it gave us the opportunity to connect with real businesses that are inspiring in what they’re trying to achieve,” says Greentree’s CEO, Peter Dickinson. “Both winners are fantastic examples of the mid-sized companies that are the heart of business on both sides of the Tasman.”

For more information on Grentree GAME ON go here.

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