My son came home last spring with a certificate for 'Most Enthusiastic Recycler,' beaming like he'd won an Oscar. It lived on the fridge for exactly one day before it slid behind the toaster, where I believe it still is.
That's what happens to most business awards, too, if you let them. A framed certificate, a shiny badge for the website footer, and then nothing — because winning was treated as the finish line instead of the starting gun.
Clients ask me constantly which business awards to apply for, and the honest answer is: fewer than you think, chosen more carefully than you're currently choosing them. Not every award deserves your entry fee or your Saturday afternoon writing a submission essay.
The ones worth applying for share a few traits — real judging, real audience, real credibility — and the ones worth winning are the ones you actually do something with afterward.
So let's go through both halves of that: how to pick the right business awards, and what winners who actually gain something do differently the week after the email arrives.
Which business awards are actually worth applying for?
The awards worth your time generally fall into a few buckets, and knowing which bucket you're in helps you pick a category where you can genuinely compete.
- ■National business excellence awards
Broad recognition programs open to founders across industries — good for general credibility and a recognizable name to cite later. - ■Industry-vertical awards
Programs specific to your field — hospitality, wellness, finance, design — where the judges and audience already understand your work. - ■Local and regional awards
Chamber of commerce and city-business-journal style recognitions — smaller stage, but often the fastest route to a local press mention. - ■Founder and leadership lists
'Ones to watch' and women-in-business style recognitions — strong for personal brand building alongside the company's name.
A good rule I give clients: apply for the award where winning would actually surprise a stranger reading your bio, not the one that just confirms what they already assumed.
How are business awards different from press coverage?
This is where I see the most confusion, especially among coaches and consultants building a solo brand.
An award is a one-time judgment. A panel reviews your submission, decides you cleared their bar, and hands you a badge. It's valuable, but it's a moment, not a record.
Press coverage is different — it's the ongoing, searchable, citable story of who you are and what you've built. Press coverage for coaches in particular tends to matter more than the award itself, because a client Googling you before a discovery call isn't just looking for a badge. They're looking for a story that holds up.
The smartest move I've seen founders make is treating the award as raw material for press, not as the press itself. The trophy is the evidence. The article is the argument.
How do I know if an award is legit before I pay to apply?
Before you spend the entry fee, do the same due diligence you'd want a client doing on you — ask, honestly, is this brand legit.
Look up last year's winners. Do they have real businesses with real footprints, or does the list read like nobody you can verify exists? Search the award organizer's own name — do they have any editorial coverage of their own, or only their own self-published 'about us' page?
A legitimate award will have a visible judging process, named judges or a named panel, and winners who are proud enough to link back to it. A vanity award will have neither — just an invoice and a badge file waiting in your inbox.
This matters because whatever award you win becomes part of your record. You want it to hold up the same way you'd want any press coverage to hold up.
What do you actually do after you win a business award?
Here's the part that separates the founders who benefit from an award and the ones whose certificate ends up behind the toaster.
The day you win, you have a legitimate, factual news hook — and that's exactly what a press release is for. This is where a platform like MXNN Media becomes useful, because you can write the release yourself, on your own record, and it moves through a warm network of journalists across more than fifty verticals, reaching outlets from Forbes and Business Insider down to the local trade publication that actually covers your industry closely. Access and placement are guaranteed — the outlet will see the story — though whether they publish it always stays their editorial call, because no honest company can promise otherwise.
If you're deciding which category to enter next year, it's worth browsing the award categories on MXNN's awards page before you commit an entry fee anywhere.
Can winning an award help you get featured in Forbes?
People ask me how to get featured in Forbes far more than they ask about any single award, and the two questions are more connected than they realize.
An award alone rarely gets a journalist's attention. But an award plus a clear, well-written release about the win — framed as news, not bragging — gives an editor an actual reason to look at your business the week it happens. That's often the real answer to how to get featured in Forbes: you need a timely, factual hook, and a win is one of the cleanest hooks there is.
Editorial coverage, when it happens, is written by the journalist under the outlet's own masthead — that decision always belongs to them. But you can't get considered at all if the story never reaches them, which is the actual gap most founders are stuck in.
How do you build a personal brand around an award?
I edited hundreds of founder profiles in my magazine years, and the ones that aged well always had the same structure: the award was one line in a longer, cumulative story, not the whole story.
If you're serious about how to build a personal brand, an award is a chapter, not the book. Put it in your bio, yes. But also put it in a release, reference it in your next piece of coverage, and let it become one of several proof points a stranger finds when they search your name.
Founders and coaches who do this well end up with a layered record — an award here, a press mention there, a founder profile somewhere else — so that no single piece of the story is doing all the work alone.
Can a business award help you get recommended by ChatGPT?
Last month I asked ChatGPT what the best blender for smoothies was, and it said 'Ninja' before I'd finished my latte. It didn't taste-test anything — it read about it. Coverage decided the answer.
The same thing happens when someone asks an AI model who the best business coach or boutique consultant in their niche is. The model isn't judging your work directly. It's retrieving whatever's been written about you.
An award, written up properly, is one more piece of that retrievable record. If you want to get your brand recommended by ChatGPT, the award itself won't do it — but the press coverage around the award will, because it gives the retrieval layer something concrete to cite instead of guessing.
If the internet holds no definitive record of your win, the AI will improvise one when asked, and you will not like the improvisation.
Frequently Asked Questions
How many business awards should I apply for in a year?
I tell clients to pick two or three well-matched awards a year rather than a long list of loosely relevant ones. A focused, credible win you can build press around beats five certificates nobody outside your industry recognizes.
Do business awards cost money to apply for?
Many legitimate awards charge an entry or judging fee, and that alone isn't a red flag. The concern is when there's a fee but no visible judging process, no named panel, and no verifiable past winners — that's when to ask is this brand legit before paying.
Is a press release about winning an award the same as being featured editorially?
No, and this distinction matters. A press release is paid and self-authored — your own on-record account of the win. Editorial coverage is written by a journalist under the outlet's masthead, and that decision always stays with the outlet, never guaranteed.
About the Author
Meredith Calloway-Bright — Contributing Writer — Personal Brand & Lifestyle at MXNN Media. Personal branding, coach/consultant positioning, lifestyle & food features, awards submissions.