Another Recommended Book: Become an Award Winning Company
Become an Award Winning Company: 7 Steps to Unlock The Million Dollar Secret Every Entrepreneur Needs to Know, by Matt Shoup (Shoup Consulting, 2012)
It sounds like a thin premise for a marketing book: go out and win some awards. After all, I cover the subject in just a few pages in some of my own books on marketing. In one of my books, winning awards shares a chapter on credibility building with getting endorsements and reviews.
But breaking a process down step by step is often a worthy endeavor, and in this case Shoup provides good food for thought.
The bulk of the book is devoted to the good things that can happen to an award-winning company that understands how to leverage and market those awards (including a bunch of interviews with CEOs of award-winning companies about the specific ways their achievement helped their business). A smallish section at the end goes through the how-to of actually winning awards. I might have reversed both placement and proportion, but maybe that’s because I do have a very clear understanding of the benefits already (and have won quite a few awards over the years).
Shoup himself sums up the case for winning awards nicely and succinctly on page 171: “As an award-winning company, you are going to be able to go out and attain massive success, exposure, credibility, free PR, and more business.” And a lot of the book shows how he and the CEOs he profiles have done just that.
More than the specifics, where this book really shines is in three consistent approaches to the success mindset:
1. To win awards, you must achieve excellence: base your company in high integrity, wow your customers, and establish a culture that drives the best people to join your staff and succeed with you.
2. This excellence allows you to thrive in economic downturns (he has a great rant on this) and to set and achieve goals a lot more easily.
3. Success doesn’t just happen to you; you go out and make it happen, and that means when you do win awards, it’s up to you to extract the maximum possible benefit from them in your marketing.
That last is important. Used properly, awards let you de-commoditize your business, get away from the tire-kickers and bargain hunters, and establish the value of working with an excellent company and being wiling to pay for it.
One thing that puzzles me: Shoup apparently gave no thought to becoming an award-winning *author.* The cover and interior design are amateurish, and the book would have benefited from one more edit (with someone who understands when a phrase like “award winning” should or should not take a hyphen). It would have been easy enough to spend a few hundred bucks more on a better production and then enter some good awards for the book, especially if he wants to build up the coaching and speaking parts of his own business (his primary line of work is running a house painting company).
