Western Australian trailer builder, Bruce Rock Engineering, and Pingelly-based Whitney Consulting were joint winners of the major award at the Wheatbelt Business Excellence Awards (WBEA) organised by the Wheatbelt Business Network (WBN).
In celebration of the organisation’s 10th year, the WBEA awards night was held on 17 October at Cummins Theatre in Merredin.
Winners of the various Awards categories included:
- Start-up Business – Family Access Services, Northam
- Owner Operator – 14k Brewery, Muchea
- One to Four Employees – Whitney Consulting, Pingelly
- Five to 10 Employees – Pingelly Transport, Pingelly
- 11-Plus Employees – Bruce Rock Engineering, Bruce Rock
- People’s Choice Award – Bedford Arms Hotel, Brookton
- Innovation Award – York Community Resource Centre, York
- Business of the Year – Equally awarded to Bruce Rock Engineering and Whitney Consulting
The finalists were narrowed down from over 50 entries and according to WBN CEO, Caroline Robinson, the judges did an excellent job of collaborating to choose the winners.
“Interestingly, one of the judges – Cathy Wood from Stumpy’s Roadhouse at Brookton – said that when the judges all got together, they were very much aligned in their thinking and each had the same top three businesses in each category, and their orders were all the same,” said Robinson.
The WBN was founded at Merredin in 2010 and subsequently relocated to Narembeen with a primary purpose of bringing businesses together to network, as well as to give them a voice and enable useful information to be disseminated.
“We decided to celebrate our 10th anniversary in Merredin because that’s the town where we started and there are a number of fantastic businesses there that helped me when we kicked off and that are still members today,” said Robinson.
“Hopefully we will be celebrating our 20th year in another decade’s time,” she said.
