It’s official; the Central Coast is home to the state’s top employer and top employee, with two locals taking major awards at the 2022 NSW Business Awards, announced on November 17.
Director and Founder of LEP Digital, Laura Prael, was named Outstanding Business Leader and Hayley Shute of Forresters Beach won the Outstanding Employee category for her work as Conservation Manager at Aussie Ark, the sister charity of The Australian Reptile Park.
Run by Business NSW, the annual awards recognise the top businesses in NSW metropolitan and regional areas for their excellence over the past year.
Prael said her win came as “a huge shock”.
She started LEP Digital in 2015 and now leads a team of six, including her husband, at the digital content marketing agency.
“I had always worked for large and global organisations in the digital communications sector and I came to a point in my career where I felt the skills I had gathered working in different areas needed to be applied to small and medium sized businesses,” she said.
“I felt there was a gap in the content marketing sector and with my experience, coupled with my studies in copywriting, arts journalism and PR I felt I could fill that gap.
“Alongside that I also wanted flexibility.
“Like a lot of people I had family living overseas and needed the flexibility to visit my dad in the US and work remotely.”
Prael said LEP Digital offered a full service in digital content marketing.
“We work with businesses from the start, coming up with a strategy for them and then implementing that strategy,” she said.
“It might mean building a website and creating content, blogs, white papers and fact sheets to promote them; it’s all about social media marketing.
“We also do search marketing and other advertising facets – we cover a broad spectrum and the only thing we don’t do is PR.
“We have also been increasing our content production arm.
“We had previously outsourced photography and videography but we’ve worked hard over the past 18 months to bring that back in house so we can really offer everything.”
As an employer, Prael said she was intent on providing technical career opportunities for women where opportunities are limited.
“We’ve created an inclusive, diverse, flexible, and psychologically safe workplace that puts employee needs first,” she said.
Hayley Shute began her association with The Australian Reptile Park while doing work experience there as a Year 10 schoolgirl.
“I would work weekends there while I was at school and the at 17 I was employed as a casual,” she said.
“I worked there for a year or two before getting a full-time job elsewhere – but I soon came back to the Reptile Park and have been there for more than 10 years.”
Shute found her niche as a mammal and bird keeper.
“I understand them even though they can’t talk to me; I can work out what they need,” she said.
“I then moved on to welfare and husbandry and that became my area of expertise.”
When the Reptile Park directors started Aussie Ark at Barrington Tops, Shute became an obvious choice to join the new enterprise.
“Our breeding program for Tasmanian devils was very successful – we soon had sufficient numbers that if they went extinct in the wild, we would be able to release them,” she said.
“Luckily they haven’t yet gone extinct – but if they do we are ready.”
The program was so successful that the same model is now being used on 14 flagship species including Eastern quolls and small macropods, turtles and frogs, all of which are at risk in the wild.
“They’re in a lot of trouble because of foxes and cats,” she said.
“Of course habitat destruction is also a factor, but foxes and cats are the biggest killers and unless we put these species in sanctuaries they will not survive.”
Shute, who splits her time between the Reptile Park and Aussie Ark, said she sees the work as more of a responsibility than a job and winning the award was “very humbling”.
“I want my children to see koalas and other animals in the wild,” she said.
“The Aussie Ark team is very passionate.
“We are on the ground; whether it’s snowing or there’s a drought, we are out there pulling platypus out of trouble, relocating turtles, bringing animals into care until the crisis is over.
“We fight for our wildlife every single day and I sleep well knowing we are doing all we can to care for them.”
Shute said her own three children, along with the children of the directors, were very much part of what Aussie Ark does, working alongside their parents.
“We have to make the next generation fall in love with wildlife so they have an investment in it,” she said.
Terry Collins