If the number of nominations the Airdrie Chamber of Commerce received for the 2018 Airdrie Business Awards are any indication, there is no shortage of excellent businesses in the city.

Nominations for the awards, which will be presented October 18th during a gala at the Bert Church Theatre, closed this week.  Chamber Executive Director Marie Lauer took off her shoes and socks (actually, she got out her calculator) to come up with the number of unique businesses that received award nominations.

"The biggest category is always the Emerging Business Category and in that category, we have 36 unique nominations.  Several of them have multiple nominations, but it's 36 unique businesses.  In the category of Business of the Year, we have 19 unique nominations.  In the Legacy Award Category, we have nine unique nominations.  Business Leader we have eight unique nominations, Franchise, 11 unique nominations, and Employer Excellence nine unique nominations."

Lauer says there were some businesses which were nominated that aren't eligible for the awards, most of them because they don't have a City of Airdrie Business License,  She also points out that, not only are the businesses in Airdrie doing a good job, many are extremely humble about it and actually decline their nominations.  

"Most of those are in the Business Leader Category.  People often are reticent to take credit for what they do in the communities, especially the leaders.  They firmly believe that it's a team effort, the reason their business is so successful or that they're able to do so much in the community so rather than take the spotlight themselves, they decline to do that because they really believe that the team deserves all the credit." 

Lauer explains the process that takes place next saying, "We ask each business that was nominated to complete a Google Doc survey, asking for more details in their category about the business.  Then we pull those out of our database, take any identifiers out such as business name or person's name and send that to our third party adjudicators which is MNP and they determine the finalists and they determine the winners based on a ranking of each criteria from the survey."

Lauer says the Chamber is excited to give credit where credit is due to the businesses nominated.  "I've said it before and I'll say it again, I believe that the bravest people I know are business owners and entrepreneurs.  Small business adds everything to our economy and our community.  They support sports teams, they support the charitable sector, they provide jobs.  They just add so much vibrancy to our community and we're just thrilled to tell them how much we appreciate them and show them how wonderful they are."

The finalists will be announced in early September.  The gala will be held October 18th during Small Business Week which runs this year from October 14th through 20th.  

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