Herefordshire Business Awards 2017
Things have been going really well recently here at The DM Lab.
Wow! Herefordshire Business Awards! What an achievement for us to be a part of!
Back in the summer we began looking to relocate to a new premises at Rotherwas. We also began recruiting but we are yet to find THE person so the search continues. We have taken on a host of new clients from all over the UK. In addition, we have retained our current ones.
The Awards Night
Last night, Friday 29th September saw the first Herefordshire Business Awards ceremony held at the Three Counties Hotel. A great venue for what proved to be a very successful, well organised evening!
We don’t shout about what we do. We work hard and a lot of our work is referrals from whoever we are working with. As a marketing agency we, shamefully, do very little marketing of our own – because of kind words from clients. It doesn’t matter what your business does, we’ll take the time to market it, and market it well.
We feel we are lucky to be working with any of our clients, but luck has nothing to do with it! Even being nominated for the Herefordshire Business Awards was an achievement, then we were shortlisted as a finalist! Incredible!
We’ve continued to do what we do this year, no different to last year or the year before that.
The only thing that changes is we get better at what we do and we pass this on to the clients we work with. Helping them grow is our job, which is why when Rich from Herefordshire Means Business notified us that we had been nominated for Growing Business of the Year at the Herefordshire Business Awards came as a surprise – a great surprise!
Turns out Mel from Caplor Energy kindly nominated us, for which we are ever so grateful for! We have been working with Caplor Energy for a while now, a really exciting company to be working with because they are both local, passionate about what they do and really embrace what we offer and what we do for them.
A New Experience
Being our first ever event like this, we bought suits, got excited, bought a table, invited members of the Caplor team as a thankyou, only realising that they were up for an award themselves and would already be there anyway! It was unfortunate that our guest of honour was 1st XV Luctonians captain Alex Smith was unable to make it – Smithy – just to make you feel bad see below! Just joking – we understand mate, best of luck today against Blaydon but we did miss you!
We grabbed you a goody bag though, so beat Blaydon today and celebrate with a few of these!
The evening started brilliantly as we chatted to host Matt Teale, who has a vested interest in his home county. It was great talking about the crossovers in what we do as marketers and what he does as a broadcaster. The challenges they face now that audiences have news readily available anywhere anytime at their fingertips. Mr. Teale – we’re happy to lend our expertise to yourself and Central News anytime!
It was great speaking to you and meeting you in person!
The buzz of being in a room full of great local business – some we know of, some we work with and some that were completely new to us was something else. Just to enjoy the evening and what it was all about instead of worrying about networking. The evening was there to be enjoyed – and we definitely enjoyed ourselves!
Table 17
Turns out 17 was ours and Caplor’s lucky number – and it was our table number! We both won awards, ours for Growing Business of the year where we were pitted against two great local business in Julu Ltd and the Solar Panel Cleaning Company Ltd and Calpor won Eco-Friendly Business of the Year and were up against equally stiff and great opposition in Say It With Wood and the Swan Brewery. Well done Caplor and well done to our fellow finalists as well. Just keep doing what you’re doing because you’re great!
The Festivities
As the awards night concluded, celebrations were in full swing. It was great to let our hair down as everybody else did and continue to enjoy the evening. We met some amazing people last night with and honourable mention of the guys from The Send (congratulations on your win too!) and Lanyon Bowdler’s team at the awards – what a fantastic bunch you guys are! Was brilliant to be able to meet the people we interact with so much on social media. We wish we could be at more events you guys put on and we are going to try and get involved more where we can if last night was anything to go by!
Anyway, that’s enough from me, I need to rest my sore head, but we will end with this, a BIG thank you to all our clients, people who’ve helped and supported us on our journey since 2010, friends and family, they know that sometimes we have to make social sacrifices to make sure the business does what it needs to, a thank you to Caplor for nominating us and making all this happen for us (plus anyone else who may have also, if you di, please let us know so we can thankyou!). Also the judges for recognising what we do and allowed us the privilege and honour of being Hereford’s Growing Business of the Year 2017.
