Great South’s incoming chief executive used to make plastic coat hangers.
Chami Abeysinghe, who will this month take the professional helm of Southland’s regional marketing agency, has a ready laugh and is just enough of a tease to enjoy the somewhat deceptive modesty of that description.
It would be a tad more informative to say that her role with one of Sri Lanka’s largest apparel exporters was to satisfy the insistence of a legion of different stores that they each to be sent garments with their own very particular versions of the right hangers already in place and ready to hang to maintain shop-floor uniformity.
So she can tell you more than you might want to know about injection moulding plastics and the disciplines of just-in-time manufacturing, but has the good judgment not to.
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She’ll also skip lightly over the bit where – already by this stage a strong believer in relationship building – she was headhunted to set up a sales and marketing team for a man who made his fortune making Bollywood films.
And working in Dubai before returning to Sri Lanka fashion to head a large team serving about 600 corporate clients across South East Asia, requiring the sort of strategic planning that meant you better not go into a quarterly board meeting without having produced a profit.
Come 2009 when Sri Lanka’s 30-year civil war was coming to an ungentle end, Chami and husband Asitha, with daughter Darika and son Achindra in mind, were determined to find a more family-friendly environment.
“So I came to Invercargill,’’ she smiles “Straight here. It was the first time I’d ever been to New Zealand.’’
In hindsight, her expectations about Invercargill were a tad too heavily influenced by past experience.
She’d spent much of her childhood in England, because her parents had wanted her to have a strong grounding in an English-speaking country.
“I’d lived in London, Dubai, Colombo – so how different could this be, really?’’
We all know the answer to that. Arriving in advance of her family, to gain a post-grad diploma in business enterprise at the Southern Institute of Technology, she had to get over an initial shock, and missing her family desperately.
But there’s a reason why, to this day, Chami Abeysinghe turns passionate when she speaks of the rewarding differences of life in Southland.
“Because it’s so different, the people are also very different.’’
For one thing she had real depth of support – “the SIT had some wonderful people” – and for another she kept noticing a largely unsung capacity for innovation.
She became the first Sri Lankan to graduate from the SIT, and with Asitha set up a small business – remember Box of Noodles in Dee St where the Black Shag now is? The late hours took too much family time to pursue it longer than three years, but she remains proud of that experiment, with its Sri Lankan-enhanced flavour range.
At the same time she was undertaking the start of what has developed into a series of rising roles at the SIT, helping set up a business course for international students, teaching on it, then becoming the institute’s marketing manager and, since 2016 its international director.
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Chami Abeysinghe: it’s our time to lead the way.
Her new role at Great South has come, she believes, at an ideal time.
“For Southland, it’s our time to change. Our time to lead the way in this country.’’
Her background in international marketing has taught her the crucial importance of developing trust by deserving it.
To market the south means to make sure we deliver on anything we promise or promote, to speak only the truth, to play to our advantages and address the disadvantages, she says.
On our productive-but-challenging climate: “Yes it’s cold. But we can help you adjust. – If I can do it, anybody can’’.
And without minimising the complicated impacts of climate change “I’ve been telling everybody that 20 years from now Southland is going to be the place to be because of global warming’’.
More than that, though, she’s adamant that southern innovation, from the SIT itself to the stories of Peter Beck’s Rocket Lab and Southland’s space programme to Blue River Dairy, are not isolated instances for what was so long labelled by political flatterers as the “solid, sensible south’’.
Add projects like the new data centres and a proposed hydrogen plant, and it’s a transformative time ahead, she says.
To innovate, adapt, get your message out there, and live up to all that you say is the path forward and one the south can confidently pursue
“Southland has welcomed my family and I with open arms and it’s my turn to pay it back. To do the best that I can for Southland. And that won’t be hard because we’ve got a great team at Great South. All I’ve got to do is lead them well.’’
