The 2024 Judging Days

We started the month with Best Small Family Business at sponsor Ward Recycling with judges Donald Ward, Rachael van Oudheusden from Big Old House, Liz Slocombe from DGS and marketing partner James Pinchbeck of People's  Choice sponsor Streets Chartered Accountants.

We then headed to BioCty in Nottingham for Property & Construction Excellence. Our judges included James Coppinger from category sponsor Buckles, Simon Phillips of awards main sponsor The Wilson Organisation and Bethan Dillon, Procurement Director at CR Civil Engineering who’ve had success in previous awards years.

Next we were over to the West Midlands to start the first ever double judging day! The judging was hosted at PwC in Birmingham, where we got to meet the finalists in both the Fastest Growing Family Business category, sponsored by PwC, and Best Digital Tech Innovation.

The Fastest Growing panel included  Dan Packwood, Sarah Knight from PwC, Sharan Kaur of JK Foods and Sally Lowther from The Wilson Organisation - they had tough decisions to make as they heard some excellent presentations from our category finalists.

Sponsored by Family Business Futures, the Best Digital Tech Innovation category judging panel including Greg Bloor of Distinction, Amy Johnson from PwC, Stuart Bungay from Larwood Advisors and Richard Harrison of Xpertise Recruitment had a challenging time choosing a Winner too!

The Awards team from  The Wilson Organisation then headed back to BioCity in Nottingham for another busy double judging day, to hear from our Employer of the Year and the Young Director of the Year category finalists. For Employer of the Year, sponsored by The Wilson Organisation, judges Parveen Mehta of MWW, Natalie Jackson from Wilsons and Ewan Carr of Shakespeare Martineau met the finalists.

Our Young Directors of the Year, sponsored by Shakespeare Martineau, is the only category for individuals. Our amazing young directors were met by Lucy Field-Richards of the Wilsons, Matthew Lymn Rose from A.W. Lymn, a previous winner of this category, and Duncan James of category sponsor Shakespeare Martineau - they had some tough decisions to make after hearing from the inspirational young director finalists.

The final double judging day of 2024 was a hot one, and we were glad of the air conditioning at BioCity - although it may not have been that appropriate as alongside Service Excellence we were judging the Sustainability category!

The Service Excellence category,  sponsored by Premier Community, was judged by Phil Hall of Hallmark Consumer Services, Sally Lowther of Wilsons and Sam Bowles of STENCIL. With seven finalists to judge in this category, and such a high standard of entries, they had a very long and tough day.

Decisions were no easier in The Handy Family Company's Sustainability category - and despite having less finalists to interview, the lengthy deliberations between sponsor judges Guy and Anna Baker, Jamie Myatt of Aim Technnologies and Anna Wooster-Mann of Greenio meant they were the last to leave BioCity that day!

Finally, we concluded the judging with the headline Family Business of the Year finalists at sponsor MHR's headquarters in Ruddington, Nottingham. It seemed so fitting that the the current titleholder wo had been in the same position as our finalists last year would meet their successor at some point during the day. The panel included Jessica Mills from MHR, Annabel Jackson Prow of Wilsons, Daniel Isterling of Premier Community and Karen Sandhu of Buckles.  In addition to being interviewed by the panel, the Finallists also had a short interview filmed at MHR's in-house studio which we're looking orward to sharing at the Awards Ceremony.

A HUGE thank you to all our sponsors and the judges that supported us by joining the judging panels this year, Charlotte and Natalie of Wilsons for meeting and greeting our fantastic finalists and Ped for organising the judging days. And, of course, thank you to our fantastic finalists that met with the judging panels - some of them had to do it twice!

We look forward to seeing you all again at the Awards Ceremony & Dinner on 3 October at Athena in Leicester.