This year’s Business Excellence Awards in Quesnel have never drawn this much interest.
Kathy Somerville, the Manager of the Quesnel and District Chamber of Commerce, goes over the numbers.
“126 nominations this year, an outstanding amount. We’re up 19 over last year and last year I thought was a phenomenal amount of nominations. It is definitely a record amount.”
Somerville says it says a lot about these local businesses.
“I really think it does make a statement because it’s talking about the service that they’re receiving, these customers are receiving. It’s talking about the efforts that these businesses are doing to upgrade their businesses and make it look fresher, newer, more updated. New business, people are taking the challenge even during these hard times and making an effort to build new businesses, upgrade new businesses, start new businesses.”
Somerville says there is a new category this year.
“We have 11 categories. I’ve included now the Agricultural Excellence category just to encourage people to share their thoughts, and the amount of work that goes into the agricultural sector.”
The big ones are still Business of the Year for employees over 10 and for under 10, as well as Business Person of the Year.
Somerville says the nominations have now went out to the judges.
“Every year I change the judges so we have a real good diverse group of judges and they change within each year. So it’s very fair and they have to read the criteria of each one of the categories and they send that information back to me. And right now it’s out on survey monkey for the public to vote, and that is used for tie-breakers only.”
This year’s winners will be announced on October 21st at the Seniors’ Centre.
