Roger’s and his wife Anne’s intention was simply to have a go on their own.
Three decades later Hill Laboratories is the largest privately owned testing laboratory in New Zealand.
“When Anne and I established Hill Laboratories all we wanted was to create an equal income to what we had in my previous job.
“To our surprise, we achieved this in the first 12 months,” Roger said.
“Since then Hill Laboratories has gone from being a solely agriculture-focused laboratory with two full-time staff in Hamilton to an internationally recognised laboratory with three major testing divisions and about 330 staff nationwide.
“Never in our wildest dreams could we have predicted this success,” he said.
For the first two years following its inception, Hill Laboratories remained solely focused on agricultural testing.
In 1986 it branched into environmental testing and in 2000 into food and bioanalytical testing.
“Hill Laboratories is unique from most overseas laboratories in that we cover three different markets.
“Testing in all three areas, agriculture, environmental, and food and bioanalytical, has contributed hugely to the success of the business,” he says.
The company now has four sites in Hamilton, one in Christchurch, and one in Blenheim. It also has an office in Japan for overseas samples.
They primarily do routine testing for domestic and international markets. However, every now and then emergency testing is also required.
“Now that Hill Laboratories has reached such a size, we are not only engaging in routine testing, we are also agile and able to respond to unforeseen emergencies,” he says.
“For instance, when the Psa crisis occurred in the kiwifruit industry there was initially only one government lab involved in testing.
“We soon became the first commercial lab to come alongside the government and set up testing in that area.
“Since then there have been a handful of other emergencies, including testing for the Rena, where we have had our staff working seven days a week to get the results our clients need,” he says.
Over the years the success of Hill Laboratories has attracted ownership interest from international parties but Roger intends to keep the business local.
“We enjoy being an independent, privately owned business. We first involved employees in ownership in 1990 and to this day we are we are 100% owned by people working here. We anticipate remaining this way,” he says.
In 2010 Hill Laboratories attained the Enviro-Mark Diamond certification for its Hamilton lab, the Deloitte Fast 50 award for fastest growing mature business in the Central North Island and the Westpac Waikato Business of the Year Supreme Award.
