A Partial List of Australian Business Awards that You Could Aim to Win
To Build Your Preeminence and Positioning Within Your Industry…
SYDNEY, 7 June, 2010 – Exponential Programs announces the winners of its inaugural 2010 Exponential Entrepreneur Awards presented to entrepreneurs and business people who have demonstrated excellence deploying exponential strategies in their business by profitably creating exceptional value for their clients in a manner that is both measurable and sustainable.
The winners were presented their awards at a series of Exponential Extravaganza events held in Brisbane, Melbourne and Sydney in 2010. For more detailed insights on what they did to win their Entrepreneur Awards, <-click here!
Bree Robbins – Paddington Pups Category: Queensland Service Industry
Gavin Buckett – The Gourmet Guardian Category: Victoria Service Industry
Ray Keefe – Successful Endeavours Category: Engineering Consultant
David Conroy – The Lone Drainer And Pronto! Category: New South Wales Service Industry
Sam Kritsotakis – Eskae Jeweller Category: New South Wales Start Up
ADDITIONAL AUSTRALIAN BUSINESS AWARDS
YOU CAN CONSIDER APPLYING FOR:
This list was originally compiled by giving the project to a www.Guru.com professional for $25 to PROVE it can be done QUICKLY, EFFICIENTLY and ECONOMICALLY. Since then, several clients have gone on to win some of these awards! For Australian Web Awards <- click here.
If you come across other awards that might be of interest to our members, please forward them to me at your convenience by making a comment on this blog.
If you would like to improve your chances of actually WINNING an award, look into our business coaching programs – they have produced in excess of 500 awards, including multiple BRW FAST 100 winners!
- ANZ Awards
- Australian business awards
- Telstra business Awards
- Australian Business Excellence Awards
- Telstra Business Womens Awards
- Australian Home Business Awards
- Australian Achiever Customer Service Awards
- ACT Business Awards
- Ethnic business awards
- Deloitte Fast 50 Awards
- Awards Australia
- AIMIA Awards
- Australian Marketing Institute Awards
- The Website Awards
- Gold Website Award
- FindLaw Australia Website Awards
- NetGuide Australian Web Awards
- Australian Web Industry Association
- Australian International Design Awards
- BRW Fast 100 Award
- AIM Young Manager of the Year
- National Work Life Balance Awards
- 2009 EDN Innovation Awards
- Engineering Excellence Awards
- Sydney Business Awards
- Young Manager Of The Year Award
- The Next Big Thing Award
- Casey Business Awards
- The Electronics News Future Awards
- The New Inventors
- Electronics News Awards
- BRW Fast Starters
- BRW Entrepreneur Of The Year
- Sir Charles McGrath Award
- Certified Practising Marketerof the Year
- BRW Most Innovative Companies
- 100 Women of influence
- Online Retail Industry Awards
BRW RETAILER OF THE YEAR AWARDS
Successful Retail Marketing Campaign of the Year
Multi-channel Retailer of the Year
Outstanding Retailer of the Year
Internet Awards
How To Exponentially Leverage A Business Award
This step-by-step process was documented by Ray Keefe of Successful Endeavours, to show you how to exponentially leverage a business award for maximum PR value and exposure.
First of all, Ray had won previous business awards that he did not leverage. The lesson here is self-evident, but still priceless. You can’t leverage something that is kept secret. With an Exponential Mindset, you want to uncover all your accomplishments, awards and other certifications and accreditations so that your clients and prospects can find them quickly and easily. For online benefit, you want to maximise Search Engine Optimization so prospects find you automatically.
Prior awards Ray didn’t leverage (until he realised this potential value!) All the hyperlinks take you to the original posting and or source of information.
2006 Mediseus win a Innovic Next Big Thing award for their Epidural Training Simulator. We developed a core technology component for the device and helped them get the project up and running in its early days. We didn’t tell anybody.
2008 SafeTurn win their heat and the people’s choice of The New Inventors and are finalists in the Innovic Next Big Thing that year. We did all the electronics design and embedded software for the device. Again we told nobody. A link to
After joining Exponential Program‘s legendary Platinum Program… This is just some of what we did in chronological order.
22 July 2009 – with the agreement of our client Borgtech Pty Ltd, I submitted the development project we undertook for them for an EDN Innovation Award
14 August 2009, we received notification that we were finalists in 2 categories. A jubilant day.
15 August 2009 I contacted all 3 local newspapers via their web news submission process. I tried ringing but no one answered. The Journal responded and decided to run the story that we were finalists. The story ran on 31 August. By the way, they recently rebranded and all the old links went dead so we picked up on this and refreshed them with new ones on our site. You can’t take link permanence for granted!)
We received an invite to the awards ceremony and we invited our client to join us.
August 17 2009 I published a blog post on our being finalists and let all our clients, suppliers and prospects know that we had been nominated. Here is a quote back from a new client “That is really good news. Thank you for the information. It makes me feel good as I would like to think that you are a good supplier and even being nominated is enough to prove your skills. Well done and all the best. ”. We received 2 blog comments which as we know improves the SEO value of that particular post and its associated KEYWORDS and TAGS.
1 September 2009 I published another blog post on how to keep momentum up which received one comment.
27 September 2009 we won awards in both categories. 2 of the 15 awards on offer were ours. We SMS’d select members, family and friends and also asked the photographer to take shots not just of us but of us with our client. Took 2 trophies home – a fun night to say the least!
28 September 2009 we published a blog post on winning two innovation awards, contacted all 3 newspapers again and sent emails out to clients, suppliers and prospects. We got comments on the blog congratulating us.
The Journal again interviewed us and after a couple of visits and a lot of dialogue published an article on us as an electronics firm on 5 October 2009, nearly a month later
I encouraged our client to try the same strategy with their local newspaper and they also got an article published on winning the innovation awards 30 September 2009
I also asked Borgtech for a testimonial which they eventually provided in 2 forms. One is on our awards page and also our testimonials page and the other is online on the client’s site which you can access by clicking on their name, is a particularly good testimonial. The “hidden” exponential strategy here is that we now have hard links between our site and our client’s site. For search engines, it means that our content is more relevant for our future prospects which has already manifested itself with higher (free) organic rankings in Google. The best part of this type of Exponential Marketing Strategy is that as we and our client’s sites improve, our mutual rankings will rise automatically and systematically. Best of all, it’s effortless.
One of our contacts worked for the City Of Casey and passed our details onto their economic development office, a position I didn’t even know existed. As a result, they visited us and ran a story in the March edition of their In Business magazine on us with distribution to 4500 businesses in our district. I also published a blog post on our National Award Win to add to this. As you can see, Exponential Marketing is about little things that add up.
When we were doing our testimonials page I decided to ask SafeTurn for a testimonial and they also provided one for us. 2 Years after the event. It is also on our awards page and also our testimonials page. The lesson here is even though we forgot to leverage these awards – we can leverage them now. It’s never too late to uncover hidden potential within your business. Clients and prospects want to know that you’re not a flash in the pan or one trick pony.
As part of the Platinum Program I received an Exponential Entrepreneur of the Year Award on 19 July 2010 and published a blog post about winning an award that on 21 July 2010. I also let our clients, prospects and suppliers know that produced a whopping 16 blog comments. Which as you know is additional weight for SEO optimisation. The Exponential Entrepreneur of the Year Award had been previously announced so I had the post ready to go including links to the PR Web release and Marc’s blog. After providing content of the awards site, I cross-linked it to my blog post once it was available. This means I was able to leverage on the page (link’s) heightened visibility and exposure due to the thousands of people that were made aware of it via the online PR campaign.
In late July 2010 we filled in an application in the Casey Business Awards and on 4 August we found out that we were finalists in 2 categories. I blogged about it and also let Marc know who published a blog post with a focus on an engineer winning a business award as well, this is one of the things that happens – people will help you grow your business for free. You just need to give them a reason and make it easy.
I contacted all the local newspapers again and The Journal ran a print story (no online version) on us as finalists which we also blogged about with a theme of being an electronics design business being in the news. That gives us a much more dynamic presence in the marketplace – something that’s important to our prospective clients.
As I am sure you can see by now, this all gets easier, faster and more valuable as the little things stack up one on top of the other…
27 August 2010 we won the Business and Professional Services Award (joint winners) and took out the overall category of Casey Business Of The Year. 3 plaques, 2 trophies and 2 cheques. We posted it to our blog and also updated the same post as extra news came in. We also added it to our awards page which we also updated as extra material became available. The newspaper and online articles that followed were:
30 August Dandenong Weekly print and online article Electronics company wired for top award
30 August 2010 Casey Weekly Cranbourne print and online article Electronics company a multiple award winner
31 August 2010 Casey Weekly Berwick online and print article Electronics firm wins big prize
1 September AMTIL dis an online news release on our business award win.
2 September 2010 Cranbourne News covered us as an innovative business.
3 September 2010 City of Casey news release names us as business of the year
5 September 2010 The City of Casey added us to the official awards page
7 September 2010 Casey Weekly (formerly the Journal) ran a print article on us as winners (we updated our blog and awards pages)
30 September 2010 Manufacture Link published an online news release about our award win which we also blogged about with a focus on manufacturing.
5 October 2010 AMTIL print magazine released with a story on us and as well as an online version which we blogged about, again focusing on the manufacturing theme to get rankings in that category in addition to all the references we’ve had to electronics.
So there you have it, a play-by-play synthesis of what we’ve done to exponentially leverage the awards we’ve won. When all is said and done, this completely changes the game. Once you are an award winner and then a multi-award winner, you want to and do hold yourself and your team to a higher standard. For that reason alone, I recommend and encourage you to submit applications for any awards you can. The increase in self-esteem, preeminence and presence are all worth it. There is nothing better than winning.
When you have an Exponential Mindset, you know it’s about winning the hearts and minds of your prospects and clients – that is done over time and with perseverance. Awards just make it all easier, faster and more cost effective because you can’t win an award let alone multiple awards by being ordinary.
The Value Of Exponentially Leveraging A Business Award
Even though the economic value is not easy to directly quantify because it is essentially an intangible benefit, Ray Keefe can point to the following:
- One new client only decided to give us their most important project AFTER we were nominated for the EDN Innovation Award. This has been worth $100K in sales we would otherwise not have received and the potential for future work of at least another $20K that we already know about.
- Our most significant new prospect at the moment contacted us AFTER seeing the newspaper article on our award finalist status for the Casey Business Awards. They are now considering purchasing $40K of development services from us.
- In general, the combination of technical and business awards automatically overcomes several common objections prospects usually had when considering doing business with us in the past. Now that the primary objection or apprehension is gone, the process is smoother and even though I can’t prove it, dare I say a lot faster.
- BECAUSE we’ve won so many awards, it gives our clients more confidence referring us. Basically, there is no down side to winning awards.
As a business person/owner this means…
- Winning awards has improved my confidence in both presenting myself as well as our company and team.
- What I didn’t realise at first is that the awards are not about us. I had avoided what I saw as self promotion in the past because I wanted the outcomes to be about our client’s successes which is what our awards are all about.
- Our company name is Successful Endeavours because I wanted all our client projects to be successful. Because this often isn’t the case with product development, I now realise that winning awards is gives our clients and prospects confidence to buy from us to acquire the expertise, experience and knowledge they need to for THEIR project or product to be successful. So it really is about them. Once I got my head around that, then it was full steam ahead as far as awards and nominations go — the more the better!
- So as a business owner, I now see this as a core strategy for positioning us in our market place so we can get the opportunity to deliver the first class and now award winning Electronics Design and Embedded Software Development services that will most benefit our clients while also providing a good (well deserved!) return for us.
As an engineer this means…
- I spent a lot of time focusing on building, developing and improving my engineering technical capabilities thinking it would maximise our likelihood of project success. The thing I forgot was that without clients there are no projects! Not pursuing actively pursuing the development of business marketing and promotional strategies needed to get the business in the door opportunities with as much determination focus and attention well, honestly – that was a mistake. A mistake I was fortunate to catch soon enough.
- Now, I understand that I can’t succeed in business with just engineering technical skills alone even if they are the best. I have to also pursue developing and improving my business skills to create the opportunity to deliver cutting edge technical solutions that are often well, dare I say it? Award-winning!
- For me, engineering comes easy. It’s what I do with my eyes closed. Business, marketing, promotion, advertising… Well those come with a little trepidation, but because the results are there for all to see – I’m now convinced of the paramount importance of establishing a balance between wearing my technician’s analytic problem-solving hat and my CEO’s business owner hat that requires that I get clients and provide profitable projects to my clients.
- What has surprised me is that I actually enjoy doing all the business stuff – it’s new, exciting with a lot of variables to consider – perfect for an engineer who wants to figure it all out!
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