By CASEY NEILL
DANIELS, HM GEM Engines and Jayco made the top four in the guest-voted Premier Regional Business Award.
Hilton Manufacturing took out the top prize at the Greater Dandenong Chamber of Commerce event on Wednesday 13 April.
Entrepreneur Dan Daniels founded Daniels Health, more commonly known as SteriHealth, in 1986 during the HIV epidemic.
Health providers were destroying sharps containers along with the needles inside and Mr Daniels thought this was a real waste.
He and microbiologist Alan Perceval forged a partnership that led to the company’s flagship Sharpsmart system.
Since their introduction to Australia in 2000, Sharspsmarts have saved an estimated 20,000 healthcare workers from sustaining a sharps injury.
SteriHealth employs 350 people in Australia, including 155 in Dandenong, and is the number two company in the sector in the US.
“The Australians are really taking it up to the big King Kongs over there,” manager Caleb McGuire said.
The business also has a strong foothold in the UK and New Zealand, with Argentina and Malaysia likely to be future markets.
“We’re getting calls from Asia to go there,” Mr McGuire said.
MC Jamie Sturgess asked: “In five years’ time, you’re on Mars, solving needle stick problems there?”
Dandenong-based family company HM GEM Engines started in a small garage in 1969 and now has 14 branches throughout Australia’s east coast.
Ten years ago, passenger car engine re-manufacturing generated 85 per cent of its business.
“We could see that engine re-manufacturing was going to be a sunset industry,” managing director Bruce Parker said.
The remaining 15 per cent was in specialist machining.
“We thought there was going to be growth in that,” he said.
The ratio today is 25 per cent exchange engines and cylinder heads and 75 per cent specialist engine component servicing/machining.
HM GEM Engines currently employs 106 people, 26 who have more than 20 years’ service, four with 15 years-plus and 19 with more than 10 years’ service.
The company has 14 apprentices under training and has taken on about 460 over the years.
It has also employed more than 350 people with disabilities.
Jayco pays a $65 million wages bill each year to 1000 employees making it the largest private employer in the region by a considerable way.
CEO Carl Bizon said he relished “injecting spending power into people’s lives”.
Under founder Gerry Ryan, Jayco developed its first prototype product in the winter of 1975 and production started in January 1976.
Today the company is an iconic Australian brand, with 49 per cent share in the RV market.
It opened a purpose-built 60,000 square metre manufacturing complex on a 50-hectare site at 1 Jayco Drive, Dandenong, in 2007.
It is the largest RV manufacturing complex in the southern hemisphere.
