Telstra Awards

It’s now 11 years since Natural Maths won the Telstra Business Award for a micro-business (a business with less than 5 employees). This week we were invited as alumni to the Queensland Awards night and what a brilliant evening it turned out to be. It was great to be reminded of the fact that to run any business is hard but rewarding work and that valuing the people that you work with and for is a key part of making and keeping your enterprise a success.

Thanks to all of you who have been part of our endeavour and to Telstra for supporting the annual Business Awards event for 21 years. It was great to be part of the excitement.

Back in 2001, when we first entered Natural Maths for an award, we were a very different business. All of our materials were photocopied and mailed out by us alone. We had just started the Naturally Mathematical competition which was our first venture into using technology – teams were encouraged to email their solutions rather than hand-write them. Now, 12 years later, we are moving towards being a paperless venture and have great hopes for the role of devices such as the iPad to bring fresh ideas to the teaching of mathematics. And we sometimes wonder what it will be like in 10 years’ time … all we can be sure of is that it will be different!