2024 Small Business Awards Shortlist

There’s absolutely nothing to pay! Only entries that subsequently win the award within their category will be charged. Finalist (runners up) awards are offered for each category free of charge.

We encourage companies from all over the world to enter our awards, but you must do a significant amount of business with USA-based companies to qualify. If we need to ask you any questions during judging, we’ll contact you via email to confirm the above.

There is no official limit on the amount of awards or award categories you can enter. Our recommendation: Increase your chances of winning by applying for multiple awards and award categories.

In order to reduce bias on our part, we don’t run awards in areas / sectors in which we may have a commercial interest. 

Our private and public judging panel is composed of internal staff, guest/external industry experts. All judges need to declare any possible conflict of interest.

We follow a stringent scoring process which has been carefully designed to ensure entries are judged fairly and consistently within each category.

We are constantly reviewing our practices and procedures to further strengthen the process.

We score entries on a number of areas but the key criteria is how different you are from others in your sector. We also check if an example/review/testimonial/case study is provided, quality of example provided and validity.

The best way to stand out is to be as succinct as possible while providing enough detail, with a specific example related to category.

If you win an award we’ll send you a private email (ahead of the official announcement) congratulating you on your accolade.

You will receive a link to an Award Acceptance Form where you can accept or decline your awards and select trophies.

We can only announce you as a winner if you accept the award and agree to be invoiced for your Award Acceptance Fee.

We will send a NET 30 invoice as standard. The invoice includes our bank details and a link to pay via PayPal or Stripe. We also have the PayPal Pay in 3 option available by request. 

We have a 10% early payment discount for invoices paid within the first 24 hours of receipt. We do not have any further discounts on offer in order to keep our programme fair to all. Any sector specific, sponsor related or seasonal offers will be communicated to you privately.

The applications deadline will be announced and when this is reached, no additional applications will be accepted.

In most cases, the awards will be announced 30 days after the final deadline date.

We frequently launch new awards across additional sectors. The deadlines and scheduling may be different depending on the award so please visit the relevant award page or Shortlist page for more information, or shoot us an email message!

Trophies: We ship all trophies FREE to USA addresses within 2 – 4 weeks of received payment. We are unable to ship any trophies until full payment of the invoice has been received. This is to prevent fraudulent use of the trophy and award. Any errors will be responded to within 24hrs of receipt of complaint, and trophies will be remade/resent (at our cost) should a trophy be received in error. Please note: remanufacture and redelivery can take up to 7 days.

You’ll only get an award if you deserve it (after all entries have been assessed and compared against our scoring matrix).

Even if you’re the only entry in a particular award category, we won’t automatically give you the award – we’d invite additional entries instead.

We’ll never accept any money or offer of payment upfront (before you are offered the award).

The prices displayed on the website exclude the standard 6% sales tax. This will be added to your invoice and charged at the point of payment.

We consulted leading accountants in our network, and the general consensus is YES – you can claim business awards as a deductible marketing expense!