Rotorua Chamber of Commerce chief executive Bryce Heard. Photo / Andrew Warner
Rotorua Chamber of Commerce chief executive Bryce Heard. Photo / Andrew Warner
Bryce Heard eyes the tasty treats neatly displayed in the food cabinet and picks a custard square - no questions asked.
"That looks like a bit of me," he says.
Plus, the Rotorua farmer, forester and fisherman, informs me a custard square is "good dairy product".
He pairs the treatwith a hot cup of Earl Grey tea and the interview begins.
We have just 10 minutes on the clock as Heard needs to be at his next meeting. The first 20 minutes were spent waiting in line at a very popular cafe and casually chit-chatting over the custard square.
"We had about 2700 employees in New Zealand and Chile in the forest industry. That was part of the Fletcher Challenge group."
But Heard says in the early 1990s, the Fletcher Challenge group got into financial strife from some poor (non-forestry) acquisition decisions and approached him to sell his forests.
"So I left in a huff in 1996 because our forests were very profitable and Fletchers' other acquisitions were losing money big time."
Heard's next job was managing Scion from 1997 to 2005.
"When I took it over it was FRI when I left it was Scion. We made that conversion.
"My job there was to turn an old institute a very insular government-owned entity into a commercial CRI (Crown Research Institute).
Rotorua Chamber of Commerce chief executive Bryce Heard. Photo / Andrew Warner
"That was quite a challenge. The culture change was huge."
After completing eight years at Scion, Heard was headhunted to work for long-standing Rotorua business Lockwood Homes.
"I ran Lockwood Homes until 2012. That was a family-owned business again with a very strong traditional culture, which was deeply installed in the people."
Then, Heard moved to the Rotorua Chamber of Commerce where he was on the board for "a few years" before he offered to step into the role of chief executive temporarily over two years ago.
"But I'm still here and I'm loving it," he says.
"And the reason I am is because at my stage of life, you want to put a bit back into the community.
"It's not about money anymore, it's about helping people and using the accumulated knowledge you think you've got to help others. That altruistic aspect of it I find really rewarding actually.
"The chamber work is all in that zone it is all helping others."
The timer ticks to five minutes.
"That's me in a nutshell," he says wiping the sugar dust from the custard square off his face.
"Oh I retired about three times in the process," he says.
He retired before he started at FRI (Scion), again before he started at Lockwood and then again before starting at the Chamber of Commerce.
"And I'm still working," he laughs.
"Every time I tried, someone came and offered me another job. I kept taking them because I love doing stuff.
"I am at the age where I probably should be going fishing but fishing is good for a day. I'm not sure about a month."
Heard says there has been "some real highlights" over the years.
One of them was when he was chief of Tasman Forestry.
"During that time we undertook some huge projects."
One of them, he says, was during his time as President of the NZ Forest Owners Association, when they decided they would reform the New Zealand waterfront industry "because the exporters were getting ripped off at the wharf".
Heard says the "ripping off" happened because of a "feather-bedded National Waterside Workers Agreement" that (among other things) allowed two people to share one job.
"The cost of getting our produce over the wharf was killing the industry, not just logs. It was killing the whole primary sector."
So they teamed up with a Tauranga stevedore Les Dickson, to get rid of the National Agreement.
"We worked out a strategy and to cut a long story short we closed the waterfront industry down, us and the Federated Farmers, for several weeks with a national strike.
"At the end of it, we went back to work on the basis of individual port rights port agreements. Tauranga Port led it. It was the first one to do a port by port agreement.
"Those agreements are realistic agreements and you know what? They are half the cost of getting our product over the wharf."
As chairman of the Forest Owners Association at the time, Heard says he was "right in the thick of it".
Then there was the New Zealand Forest Accord.
"It's a page and a half long, signed by every major conservation group and forest industry group."
Back in the 1980s and 1990s, Heard says there was a "big fight" going on between the conservation movement and the foresters over land use.
"At that time the industry was cutting down native patches of designated bush that were generating native and pine trees."
Heard says the foresters made an agreement to save the native bush reserves across the country and to put them into trusts and the conservation groups agreed to support man-made plantation forests as replacement wood for native timber.
"It started off with me and a couple of guys from the Forest Owners Association (Peter Olsen and Ken Shirley) plus a couple of green representatives from Marua Society and Forest and Bird (Guy Salmon and Kevin Smith) and ended up with the whole industry and the whole green movement and it survives to this day.
"That was another highlight for me."
But, he says he has probably got more satisfaction out of the chamber than anything else because of the nature of the work.
"Those other jobs were huge national issues but the chamber is local. But it is very close to home. You're dealing with a lot of people that you know and you're using all your networks."
The timer ticks to 10 minutes.
There's just one last question. What does a man who has been in Rotorua since 1984 love about the city?
"I am a farmer. I am an active farmer, I own my own farm. I am also a fisherman and a forester.
"All those things are around Rotorua. So all that primary sector outdoor rural lifestyle. It's all a very comfortable fit for me."
