No. We didn’t win Inter­na­tional Trader of the Year.

Not this year anyway.

We were a min­now amongst whales to be hon­est. When they showed the video foot­age of the final­ists, we winced when we saw vast factor­ies, indus­trial machinery, and a sea of staff behind desks or driv­ing lor­ries in logo-ed overalls.

And then there’s Coulson Macleod. Just the two of us. No staff and no fancy recep­tion area with pot­ted plants.

One of the com­pan­ies in our cat­egory went on to win Best Busi­ness with over 50 Employees.

Other busi­nesses up for awards last night included super­mar­ket giants Waitrose and Sainsbury’s. We spent all night say­ing to each other, “What are we doing here?”

Most of the tables of 12 were taken by entire com­pan­ies. Their staff enjoy­ing a night out with free-flowing wine.

And we enjoyed ourselves too. We were enter­tained by Simon Evans, the comedian/writer who hos­ted the even­ing. And it’s always fun get­ting dressed up. Even if you don’t come home car­ry­ing an award.

And if you hap­pen to be won­der­ing why on earth Coulson Macleod would be a final­ist for Inter­na­tional Trader of the Year, then per­haps this is part of the reason: we have shipped our prints to 21 coun­tries to date… Aus­tralia, Bel­gium, Canada, Fin­land, France, Ger­many, Greece, Hong Kong, India, Ire­land, Italy, New Zea­l­and, Nor­way, Poland, Singa­pore, South Africa, Spain, Sweden, The Neth­er­lands, United Arab Emir­ates, and the United States of America.

Related art­icles:

• Inter­na­tional Trader Of The Year
• Our Web­site Wins Gold

Tags: business awards, Coulson Macleod, Northamptonshire Business Excellence Awards 2010, Sainsbury's, Simon Evans, Waitrose

This entry was posted on Friday, November 19th, 2010 at 11:43 am and is filed under business awards. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.