Would you like to raise the profile of your business and differentiate it from the competition? Watch this to find out how entering awards, and not necessarily winning them, could do exactly that!

Transcript:

Hi, and welcome to another episode of BaranovTV, designed to demystify the world of accounts and tax and to help your business grow.

Now, we’re quite excited as I record this, which is actually quite late on in the day. It’s just about half past six in one evening. We’re quite excited because we’ve just heard that we have been announced as finalists in the first two awards that we’ve entered as this business.

We went into those awards because we’re very conscious of our positioning and our credibility. Within the industry of accountancy, there is no control over who can say that they’re an ‘accountant’ and who can’t. So although we’re accredited with the ACCA and they can come in and look at what we do and we have all of the right qualifications and things, someone could trade from an office two minutes down the road, say exactly what we do, and have none of that behind them. So for us to go into awards and to become an award-winning firm we hope will set us apart.

Now, at this stage we’re jumping the gun because we are only finalists. However, we thought it would be really worthwhile having an episode about awards, because they can make a real difference to your business and how you’re perceived.

We found with our last business we went in for an award which was the Accounting Excellence Awards, and we came in the top three firms in the country for our customer service, so that was a massive thing for us, and it made a real difference in how we were perceived. It was a huge surprise because we didn’t really expect it, but we were obviously really pleased to receive that award.

We also picked up a couple of others, which enabled us to differentiate ourselves from the competition.

And that’s the big thing with awards really, is that a lot of businesses don’t apply for awards, don’t enter awards, because they don’t find the awards that are relevant to their customers and they don’t put the effort in to actually writing the entries. To be honest, our entry this time wasn’t actually as thorough as it could have been, so we’re thrilled to bits to be finalists. But really you can enter awards and it can make a massive difference to you.

You can use them for PR. You can use them in your basic communications, obviously on your website, but also you can have them on your email signatures. There’s lots of different ways that you can use them, as I say, to differentiate your business from the competition around you.

A lot of your competition won’t bother to enter competitions. So if you can go for awards, then they can make a really difference.

As I say, they have to be relevant to your customers. So for us, we’ve just gone into ‘Best Business Enabler’, which is for businesses who help other businesses, which is absolutely what our focus is in helping business owners to achieve their original dream for their business which may have got lost in the day-to-day, so Business Enabler is absolutely right for us.

And the other one we’ve gone for is Best Business Growth, because in the last 12 months we’ve seen significant growth within our business, but that’s absolutely what we’re about. And if we can prove that we can do that for us, then obviously we’re proving that we can do that for other people. So it’s very much around finding the awards and the categories that are relevant and then making best use of them depending on how far you get.

So tonight I’m afraid it is a little bit of a ‘blow our own trumpet’, but hopefully for the right reasons, and hopefully that’s relevant to you. And I would suggest to you to go off and find some awards that could make a big difference to you.

We won’t know the results of our awards until the beginning of March. And if we’re lucky enough to progress, then we hopefully will get to meet Lord Sebastian Coe, which as a runner, for me, would be the most amazing thing! I know he did all of the Olympic bid, which was stunning, and I’m really looking forward to hearing about that, but for me it’s his running career that would massively appeal. So keep your fingers crossed for us!

We’ll keep you posted obviously on how we get on. But if you do decide to go in for some awards, and I know a lot of our clients have been very, very successful in the past, please do let us know how you get on, and we’ll see you all very soon!