Business owners across Carlow and Kikenny are being urged to apply for the “Cheltenham of awards” by one prominent local man.
Nominations to become EY Entrepreneur of The Year 2021 are being accepted until the 16th March.
Anyone who makes it to the shortlist of finalists will be awarded a week-long virtual CEO Retreat.
David Walsh was among those to walk the contest path and he says “I’ve often thought over the years that all businesses should enter business awards in any event because they are a fantastic way of strategically positioning your company the way your want to be positioned but I think of all the awards we won, and we won a number when I was CEO of Netwatch we won a number of awards, but I think the EY Entrepreneur of the Year is probably the Cheltenham of awards in that it’s not just an event, an award night, it’s a process that goes on before the award ceremony itself for months, but most importantly even after that”.
The founder and former CEO of Netwatch, Mr Walsh now heads up Halocare and is encouraging people to apply for the contest, telling KCLR News “If you get an opportunity and lucky enough to win an award then all the stakeholders in the organisation are conscious of it, particularly your staff and I think for existing staff for us it was confirmation that we were on the right direction that the strategy was right but probably more importantly than that in terms of attracting new staff into the organisation, people want to join a winning team and to be seen to be winning awards is very important, equally for our customers, our customers saw what we were doing over the years in terms of winning awards”.
He adds says both Carlow and Kilkenny have a history of performing well in the awards, noting “I think it’s never been more relevant, so I would encourage anybody out there who’s thinking of entering awards to go ahead, there’ve been some fantastic finalists before from the Carlow Kilkenny areas, the likes of Rachel Doyle in Arboretum, Seamus O’Hara last year, Billy Holmes was there before from Burnside but then Kilkenny had the likes of Michael Hoyne who’s an outstanding entrepreneur, Paul Young from the Cartoon Saloon and of course the overall winner a couple of years ago came from Kilkenny Terry Clune of TaxBack.com”.
