The business also received the Manufacturing Excellence award. Definium Technologies chief executive Mike Cruse said the accolades came as a big surprise.

"The Manufacturing Excellence award was quite good, we feel quite privileged about that because what we do is unusual for the state, we're the only company that does what we do here," he said.

"I didn't think we'd have much of a chance of it, but we thought we should put in for this one.

"The Business of the Year award was a complete shock, we had no clue that was going to happen, and we feel pretty humble about that."

Mr Cruse described Definium as a business that "solves people's problems".

"By inventing new electronics and hardware, writing all the software, putting together a device that solves a problem, and in particular we like making things that interface in some way with the real world, and hopefully as a byproduct have a positive impact on the environment," he said.

"It's important to me that people know we can do this sort of stuff here, that we can actually make things here, and it's really important to do more here in Tasmania and be self sufficient.

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"I think because we do everything here we can adapt, so we're very agile. People that work here also have to be really flexible to adapt what they're doing, so that was also very important."

Mr Cruse said 2020 was a challenging year for the business, recipients of the JobKeeper payment.

"That actually enabled us to get through unscathed, and enabled us to get a major national contract, if we hadn't had JobKeeper we wouldn't have been in as good a place to get that contract," he said.

"Towards the end of last year, that caused us to grow by 25 per cent, so my way of paying back having the benefit of JobKeeper is to employ as many people as I can.

"We train everybody on site, so everybody learns what they do here - we don't necessarily need to find people with the exact set of skills we need, we need people that have the ability to learn.

"We're probably going to be at 20 people by the end of this financial year."

The business is forging full steam ahead for 2021, with production ramping up for local,. national and international clients.

"The next challenge is to grow the company again, we have to double our production capacity pretty much," he said.

"That's a really good thing because we're getting up a bit of momentum right now.

"It's going to be a good year."

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