Dec. 1 marked a first for Junior Achievement of New Mexico. Four individuals and one entire family became the first laureates to be inducted into Junior Achievement's New Mexico Business Hall of Fame: Bob Wertheim, chairman of Charter Bank-Mortgage-Insurance; Roland Johnson, governor of Laguna Pueblo; Agnes Noonan, executive director of Women's Economic Self-Sufficiency Team Corporation (WESST Corp.); Bob Hoffman, founder and director of the Economic Forum; and the Baca family of Bueno Foods.

Junior Achievement drives economic development in New Mexico through its youth entrepreneurship programs, which help young people become more successful at the "economics of life." The organization's mission is to ensure that every child in the state has the fundamental understanding of the free enterprise system necessary to achieve financial literacy and success in a global economy. Junior Achievement uses hundreds of volunteer role models from the business community to teach practical hands-on lessons about business, the importance of staying in school, work-force preparedness and entrepreneurship to kindergarten through 12th-grade students. Each year, Junior Achievement reaches 17,000 students through its multiple operations across the state and has a 10.2 percent national market penetration at the elementary school level through its 142 offices across the United States.

This first year Hall of Fame inductees is quite a team. Bob Wertheim is a native New Mexican from the Fort Sumner area who was paid in ice cream cones for his first job sweeping the family dry goods store at age 7. Wertheim went on to gain mortgage experience in Minneapolis before purchasing a small mortgage company of his own in 1976 with seven employees. From that humble beginning, Wertheim and his family have grown Charter Bank-Mortgage-Insurance into a financial tour de force that now employs more than 270 people.

Roland Johnson is the other "Governor Johnson" of New Mexico. He has served an unprecedented seven terms as the governor of the Pueblo of Laguna. The Pueblo under Johnson's leadership has become a brilliant portrait of entrepreneurial progress, highlighted by the numerous business entities, including Laguna Construction Company, Laguna Industries and the Rainbow Corporation.

I remember meeting Agnes Noonan 15 years ago, and to this day she still exudes the same level of excitement about WESST Corp. as she did in 1990. Since then, Noonan has facilitated the startups of more than 950 New Mexico companies, 70 percent of which were owned by low-income individuals and 47 percent of which were owned by minority women.

What else can you say about Bob Hoffman - the only governor of New Mexico who has never been governor of New Mexico. That's how I affectionately refer to Hoffman, whom I have also known for 15 years. My favorite Hoffman story is the one about him telling the managers of a Portales manufacturing plant to pay everyone with $2 bills so the rest of the town could see the impact of the plant's payroll circulating throughout the community.

And then there is the Baca family, matriarch Marie and the four members of the second Bueno Foods generation: Jackie, Gene, Ana and Catherine. Two of the Baca siblings are products of Harvard University, one from Stanford and another from UNM. Bueno foods grew out of a small grocery store 56 years ago into one of the Southwest's premier producers of New Mexican foods.

Everything these honorees stand for and have accomplished through their business endeavors exemplifies and echoes the mission, purpose and values of Junior Achievement. The quality of the inaugural Hall of Fame inductees has set a high bar for future business leaders.

J.D. Bullington is senior policy adviser and director of New Mexico government relations for the Brownstein, Hyatt & Farber law firm. He writes this column weekly.