March 10, 2014
Best City, Best Business Awards, the Missing Links
Last week I attended the Best City, Best Business awards evening, held at Liverpool Central Library. They'd asked me (along with Cllr Nick Small, and Christine Bulmer-Goodwin of Empower Funding) to give a brief talk before the awards, as a local entrepreneur (the second time in as many weeks that I was speaking at the library).
It was an informal talk, with no slides. Rather than talk about what I've done, I related some of my journey back to the city, mixed in with a call to give before you get and to look for ways to help each other rather than just compete. Building a business is a hard job, after all. I also related the story of Silicon Valley's open culture beating Boston's more insular approach, and finished with some pointers to the community and events we have at DoES Liverpool (particularly Liverpool Startup Club.
I fear it was as dis-jointed and scatter-gun as that sounds, but everyone was very polite about it...
Anyway, what was more interesting were the winning businesses. There were two categories: Best Business Start-Up and Best Women’s Start-Up; each with three prizes: second runner-up, runner-up and winner. There are some impressive businesses among them, making a real difference to people's lives. I had a real case of imposter-syndrome by the end of the evening.
The council website has published an article about the awards today, but it fails to link to any of the businesses. In this Internet-age, that's a disappointing oversight, but also in this Internet-age, I can publish things myself, and so wanted to fix that.
Best Business Start-Up
- Emlyn Jones of Family Court Help
- Second Skin Events
- English Rose Vapours
Best Women's Start-Up
- Kathy Lawrence of The Boudoir Book
- Impropriety Theatre
- The Original Cupcake Company (who I can't find online - not the most original name sadly...)
This blog post is on the personal blog of Adrian McEwen. If you want to explore the site a bit further, it might be worth having a look at the most recent entries or look through the archives or categories over on the left.
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