Bay ticked all boxes for globetrotter

Beppe Holm. Photo/File

BEPPE Holm returned to her birthplace in Tauranga in 2009 after a 24-year career with oil giant BP that had taken her from Asia to the UK and then to a final post in Angola, a resource-rich West African country still recovering from decades of civil war devastation.

Since her return, she has become a major contributor to the local hi-tech and start-up business sectors.

"When I was in that phase of deciding where to settle, I was looking all over the world for the perfect lifestyle and environment, but I hadn't been considering New Zealand," said Ms Holm, who chairs hi-tech 3D manufacturing company Rapid Advanced Manufacturing, and is a director of new Tauranga business incubator WNT Ventures Management.

"It was purely family that brought me back," said Ms Holm, who returned to help her sister take care of her ailing mother. "I now see Tauranga ticks all the boxes for the perfect lifestyle, and wonder how I could have been so blind not to see that when I was on the other side of the world."

Ms Holm grew up in Tauranga, attending Otumoetai Primary and college, then went on to complete a Bachelor of Social Sciences with a double major in psychology and German language and literature at Waikato University, followed by a masters in German languages and literature at Auckland University.

Her degrees were completed within five years, despite her marrying and then in her second year of university having a son, said Ms Holm, who had been determined to prove it was possible to achieve top academic qualifications while helping raise a child.

However, an initial dream of joining the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Trade and having a career overseas had to be put on hold as she and her then husband, who worked shift work in TV, juggled child care. She ended up doing an additional year's training and became a primary school teacher for two and a half years.

But seeking a more stimulating role, she got a job at the Department of Labour in Auckland working as a vocational guidance counsellor in the late 1970s. She moved to Wellington, where a two year secondment saw her working in a social policy role with the prime minister's department as Robert Muldoon was coming to the end of a long career that saw him lose power after calling for an early election in 1984.

"It was a tremendous opportunity to work in a completely different realm," she said.

And a after a brief and frustrating stint with the Department of Social Welfare, Ms Holm's experience in the prime minister's department secured her a job as a government relations officer with BP as the oil industry began to grapple with deregulation of the sector.

The role progressed to the point where she became BP's public affairs manager, taking on government, media and external relations during a period that saw her deal with a number of pricing and environmental issues, including major public scrutiny of the industry over issues arising from the transition to unleaded petrol.

Her long-awaited move abroad eventually came when, after 14 years in New Zealand, she was posted to Tokyo for a year and a half to develop human resources and communications capabilities for BP in Japan. The company had embarked on what in the end proved to be an unsuccessful attempt to develop a network of large scale high volume service stations in major cities.

The Tokyo posting was followed by a year in London working on a global project team to establish a human resources performance process that could be used across the BP group.

"It was an interesting and different experience because I got to combine project management with my communications skills," she said.

In 2001 she was appointed human resources manager, upstream Asia for BP Exploration and Production, Asia Pacific, based in Singapore. There for two years, she supported the development of local human resources teams and national staff in Indonesia and Vietnam and provided human resources consultancy support to BP's exploration and production business across the Asia Pacific Region.

But her most challenging post came when she moved in 2003 to the former Portuguese colony of Angola, which after winning independence in 1975 following a protracted liberation war, was divided for decades by a civil war that only ended in 2002.

"It had been caught up in cold war politics," said Ms Holm.

BP had been retained by the Angolan government to develop Angola's rich oil reserves, especially its offshore resources, and get them into production, with a brief from the government to recruit and train as many Angolans as possible.

"It was part and parcel of the country rebuilding itself," said Ms Holm who served as human resources organisation capability manager for almost six years, developing the local human resources team.

"It was a very challenging process to develop workforce capabilities to support the business," she said.

"The work was stimulating and it was an incredibly interesting environment, though very constrained from a security and safety point of view in the early days," she said.

"It was a job where I could see I was making a difference and I could see the development of the people I had coached and mentored."

With the new human resources team established, Ms Holm's role came to an end, and with her father recently passing, her mother ailing, and her only sister living in Tauranga, it was time to come back home.

She soon found a new role as business development manager for the Bay of Plenty Polytechnic at Windermere, where she served for four years and was first introduced to TiDA (Titanium Industry Association) and its commercial arm Rapid Advanced Manufacturing, which she now chairs and has a stakeholding in.

Ms Holm is also an active investor in a number of start-up companies through the Enterprises Angels group.

As a result of the TiDA association, she also got involved in what eventually became a collaboration between TiDA, Newnham Park innovation centre and Wharf42, which saw their combined entity WNTVentures Management becoming the only regional group to win support from Callaghan Innovation for one of the government's new business technology incubators. Ms Holm is an investor and director of WNTVentures.

"Tauranga has some amazing stuff going on, and some fantastically talented people with brilliant ideas," she said. "It is such a nice environment to be part of."

Warwick Downing, chief executive of TiDA and Rapid Advanced Manufacturing, said Ms Holm had a strong sense of community.

"She brings a wealth of strategy and the ability to think things through and is really good to work with," he said. "And she's a great people person who's able to just talk things through and come out with solutions."

By David Porter