We won!!

How awesome it that – we won the Nottingham Post New Business of the Year 2010!! It was an absolutely fantastic evening. Not just because we won our category, but because so much effort was channeled into the event. It was an incredible atmosphere.

Aware Monitoring’s Nick Barker & Simon Oxley accepting the New Enterprise Award
Source: Nottingham Post & Nottingham University Business School

We were greeted with a champagne reception at the wonderful historic council house in Nottingham and then enjoyed a marvelous meal. All the finalists had short video’s shown on their companies before the winners were announced. The winners and finalists were:

• Bunches Florapost scooped Nottinghamshire Company of the Year with runners-up Icon Polymer, Source BioScience and St Tropez Group.
• Nottinghamshire Small Business of the Year went to our friends Chris Scarth and David Francis from Prime Principle.  Finalists were Betterlanguages.com and Phoenix CNC Engineering.
• James Smith founding managing director of T&S Group won Nottinghamshire Young Businessperson of the Year award with runners-up Hall-Fast Industrial Supplies founder Malcolm Hall and Columbus IT managing director Mary Hunter.
• We won New Enterprise of the Year with runners-up A Star Media and Cherry Professional.
• The Business Innovation Award went to Upper Cut Productions with Challenge Consulting and Peelable Posters following through.
• Finally, John Pye & Sons won the Best use of IT and Communications beating Betterlanguages.com and Heart Internet.

Well done to the winners and finalist for all the blood, sweat and tears put into their companies. For me the event shows the outstanding innovative companies we have in the area. It was especially great to see so many web and IT related companies in the finals.  It ‘s also  interesting that companies like  Bunches Florapost are maximizing the Internet with 70% of their revenues coming through the web.

We need to thank all sponsors and British Business Awards Association for making the event happen and the Nottingham Post for pulling together the awards for the last 26 years.

In the end, my evening went onto the wee hours in the morning celebrating!!

Going for Business & Tech Awards

There’s lots of local, regional and international Business /Tech awards around (Ernst & Young, Red Herring, TechCrunch50, UK IT Industry Awards, etc). Some cost alot to enter and some only a little. But are they worth winning? And how do you win ’em..

If you not heard my startup Aware Monitoring is through to the final of a local Award competition – Nottingham Post New Enterprise of the Year 2010 Award. We’ll know this week if we’ve won.

Simon & I in the papers (click here for full article)
Source: Nottingham Post & Nottingham University Business School

I recently met David Atherton, the founder of Dabs.com, an ecommerce IT retailer. Dabs  went for a whooping 800 awards and won 200 of them! Dave said ‘they were a great low-cost form of PR and marketing.’ Most people I’ve spoken to who’ve won awards say they are worth winning because they bring:

1. Immediate press attention – The awards organisers and sponsors tend to promote the finalists and winners to the press. Its great free PR.
2. Knock-on press attention – Other publications will take attention if your company wins an award. They’ll want to write about you too!
3. Confidence – The feel good factor is extremely valuable for the founders and  employees moral. Everyone is recognised for  their hard efforts.
4. Success – Everyone wants to be a success. To be finalist or a winner shows your company is succesful, even if it’s not aways the case.
5. Credibility – Prospects and customers want to feel they can trust their suppliers. Awards seems to bring confidence in companies.

In a talk by Doug Ashby he felt that the Awards got in the way of selling to prospects and customers. Doug has won several awards before exciting well from his Mainframe hardware maintenance business. Doug felt the awards bloated the winners ego to the extent where they take their eye (focus) of their business.

A friend of mine, Adam Harris, won the IoD (Institute of Directors) Entrepreneur of the Year Award in 2008. Adam said ‘that you have to put the time and effort into the application to win.’ Sounds obvious, but Adam said ‘most people leave completing the application until the last-minute and rush it.’ Like an important proposal  take your time and get the  applications right. Of course, you need a great story, a business with some strong successes and good writing skills to be noticed.

I took Dave & Adam’s advice and we’re through to  a local award final. Whether we win and it then goes to our heads (ego) is yet to be seen 😉

UPDATE:

We won! Amazing!! It was a truly fantastic evening. We did well to win our category against stiff competition. For our ‘Aware Monitoring wins Award’ company post on the win, click here and for the full Nottingham Post write-up click here.