International Business Awards Offers Entrepreneurs Chance to Benchmark Against the World’s Best
It’s hard to start a business. It’s even harder to make it successful. In order to honor the courage and ingenuity of entrepreneurs around the world, the prestigious International Business Awards award this year have introduced four Startup of the Year categories. There is no cost for startups of all kinds to nominate themselves to win a Stevie® Award trophy.
As founder and president of the Stevie Awards Michael Gallagher knows about the challenges entrepreneurs face when starting their businesses: “Founders must overcome many obstacles in order to succeed. Therefore, we at the Stevie Awards want to help remove one of those obstacles by providing the world’s best startup companies with a platform on which to generate national and international brand recognition.”
All organizations worldwide -- public and private, for-profit and non-profit, large and small -- may submit nominations to The International Business Awards. Small organizations have just as much chance to win a Stevie as big companies do. Every year, household-name companies such as Hyundai, Procter & Gamble, and Unilever are joined in the winners' circle by small and medium-size organizations that are still building their brands. Entering the IBAs is a cost-effective way to thank and honor a firm‘s valued employees and to build or burnish a corporate brand.
Young companies can only benefit from nominating themselves in The International Business Awards, explains Gallagher. In addition to the increased media awareness gained by winning a Stevie Award, winning entrepreneurs can use their entries for international benchmarking. “The individual entries are examined and evaluated by an international jury of more than 200 business experts. It doesn’t matter to the judges whether a startup company operates regionally, nationally or internationally. What counts is the extraordinary dedication of the entrepreneurs, the outstanding implementation of ideas and a special corporate culture. The jury is also interested to see how the company has dealt with challenges or crises,” says Gallagher.
The most important part of a startup’s nomination to The International Business Awards is an essay of up to 650 words about the company’s recent achievements (since the beginning of 2014, for the 2015 IBAs). “The short format provides the jury with an insight into the company and gives the organization the opportunity to precisely focus on their performance highlights. The process of preparing its own success story allows a firm to fine-tune its public profile and isolate its strengths and weaknesses. So the very act of preparing a nomination for The International Business Awards is in itself valuable.”
Lea Lange, founder and CEO of JUNIQE, a Stevie Award winner in Berlin, Germany, confirms this: “The Stevie Awards’ entry process was a good opportunity for self-reflection and to review our last year. In the entry essays we had to focus on what our company means to us and what makes it so special. It is very motivating to see that we had achieved putting our values into practice and then get this confirmed by winning multiple awards.” The young company won a Gold Stevie Award as “Start-up of the Year” in this year’s German Stevie Awards program.
Eligible to enter the IBA’s Startup of the Year categories are companies and entrepreneurs that began operations since the beginning of 2013. The final entry deadline for the International Business Awards is June 10, 2015. The entry kit and complete details on the competition are available at http://www.StevieAwards.com/IBA.
