The morning after the night before

To say I am feeling a bit fragile today, would be an understatement. Last night was slightly surreal, it felt a bit like a dream but the headache I have this morning is keeping me grounded in reality. It was a night beyond my expectations, one of the real high points of my career to date, at a fantastic event. I want to share with you the journey that I have been on over the past year that culminated in last night’s amazing recognition.

Before I joined Maximise IT a year ago, I was given a mini showcase of some of the great solutions the company had been developing. I was excited by what I saw and could see the potential straight away. Once I formally joined the company, I began working with the team and a visionary customer who also had seen the potential of what we could offer.

One of the elements of my role is to raise the company profile, so I began looking at awards we could enter, Maximise IT has previously had awards success winning the Financial Services Innovation award in 2014.

I had been a BCS member in a previous role so I targeted the UK IT Industry Awards due to their prestige. I felt they offered Maximise IT an opportunity to showcase their talents to a wider audience. I realised the timeline of the awards, entry submission, shortlisting, judging day and awards dinner, would allow us to use the case study of the visionary customer we had been working with.

I began pulling the first drafts together, working from home to do some of this so I could focus 100%. My son, who I’ve mentioned in another blog post, deemed this skiving and “not real work”. As a smaller company you do have to think about the opportunity cost of competing in these awards as you need make sure you do the entries justice and it was certainly a team effort. Of course there was a last minute flurry of activity to make sure we were able to get the awards submissions in on time.

We were thrilled to find out in September that we had been shortlisted in two of the three award categories we had entered. The next stage was the judging day, delivering a presentation for each award with a Q & A session. The day seemed to go well, with some lovely feedback received from the judges but we had no idea of how we had compared against our fellow finalists. So we booked our table for the ceremony and I sorted out a dress.

Last night I attended the awards in Battersea Park, London along with tableful of my colleagues from Maximise IT. I was ‘nervcited’, a word my daughter uses when she is both nervous and excited. My husband was full of confidence, telling me not to text him when we won, as he needed an early night. We had been shortlisted in two categories, Business IT Innovation of the Year (for our SmartFlow solution) and Small Supplier of the Year.

I am thrilled to say not only did we win Small Supplier of the Year but we also got highly commended in Business IT Innovation of the Year! Of course we celebrated with much drinking and dancing, with a bit of tweeting along the way! It was a great occasion to reward our efforts and today as I reflect, eating the last of the pick and mix sweets I got on the way out, I wonder how we are going to top it!