The region’s business community celebrated excellence at last night’s glamourous 2022 IMB Bank Illawarra Business Awards dinner at the WIN Entertainment Centre in Wollongong.
This year’s awards ceremony followed the theme, “La Dolce Vita – the sweet life”, and recognised the inspiring businesses that have surged ahead following a torrid couple of years of interruptions and restrictions due to fires, floods and the global pandemic.
New and emerging tech industry businesses were also recognised separately for the first time with the inclusion of a new award category ‘Excellence in Tech’.
“Our local businesses have shown the Illawarra community again this year how fortunate we all are to have such a talented pool of individuals driving the fortunes of our local economy forward,” said Business Illawarra Executive Director, Adam Zarth.
“Moreso than ever before, the region’s prospects across an expanding range of sectors – and in small and medium enterprise particularly – are thriving, and tonight’s winners are a showcase of the many businesses grasping those opportunities.”
Local fintech company Scalapay was crowned the 2022 IMB Bank Illawarra Business of the Year and were winners of the ‘Excellence in Import & Export’ and ‘Excellence in Tech’ categories.
Scalapay’s passion to use their success story and ‘tech unicorn status’ to raise Wollongong’s profile globally as a City of Innovation was a defining feature of their submissions and lead the judges to award them the top honour. They are rightly proud of their local roots and believe that the Illawarra has everything it needs to develop and support world class, industry-leading technology.
In the individual award categories, Renee Knight, Executive Officer at CareSouth, was announced as the region’s Outstanding Business Leader for 2022.
Luke Attenborough from the Housing Trust was announced as our 2022 Outstanding Employee, with Brett Wright from Peoplecare Health Cover taking out the Outstanding Young Business Leader Award.er
A full list of category winners and category sponsors can be found here.