Entering awards is all about winning. It is as simple as that. Successful companies and individuals are seeking recognition for their achievement – and there’s no better way than to receive the plaudits of their peers.
Everyone wants to say “I’m the best” and that is what winning an award, especially a really prestigious one, means.
At a business level, it also sets your company or organisation apart from others and is third-party validation that you do a good job, indeed an excellent job.
A case in point is Competitive Socialising, trading as Swingers. They run innovative and immaculately designed city centre cocktail venues based around the seaside pastime of crazy golf.
The long shot that paid off
Some people thought that opening entertainment and hospitality venues around mini golf was a long shot that would not take off.
However, co-founders and co-Chief Executives Matt Grech-Smith and Jeremy Simmonds have proved that their concept of “competitive socialising” is well above par for the course.
Starting with a pop-up venue in East London to test out their idea, they now operate four permanent Swingers clubs with ambitious plans to open many more over the next few years.
The first permanent venue to open was a 16,000 sq ft location next to The Gherkin in the City. It offers two nine-hole crazy golf courses, three top-notch street food vendors and five outstanding cocktail bars, all under one roof. The venue capitalised on the corporate market in the financial district of London as well as providing one of the most sought-after venues for nights or days out with friends or dates.
Two years later, Matt and Jeremy opened Swingers West End, an even larger venue almost a tee-shot from Oxford Circus, in the heart of the West End.
The entrepreneurs are nothing if not ambitious and their next move was to take their highly successful innovation in hospitality to the American market. They launched a Swingers venue in Washington DC in 2021, followed by their biggest location in New York City in 2022.
In their sights now are new locations across the US including Las Vegas and expansion into the Middle East – not bad from starting out as a pop-up in Shoreditch!
Picking the right awards to enter
Early in 2023, Matt approached us about winning some awards. Working closely with him, we worked out a series of award programmes to enter over the course of the year – some recognising the achievements of Matt and Jeremy and others recognising the success of the company as a whole.
Generally there are two types of award programmes – sector-specific awards for a particular industry or sector of the economy, and more general business awards that attract entries from a variety of businesses across many different sectors.
We identified a selection of general business awards and some sector-specific awards for the hospitality and leisure industry, and set about compiling the entries.
What judges look for
A crucial part of any entry is to demonstrate commercial success as judges always like to see evidence that the business venture, no matter however radical, is making money and has a sustainable future.
For most award programmes, the judges also like to see an indication that the company is making a wider contribution to society – this can be in the form of helping to transform an industry and take it to a new level, or providing rewarding employment where people have a good career prospects, and/or undertaking worthwhile corporate social responsibility initiatives.
Fortunately, Swingers meets all of those criteria and by the close of 2023 the company had clocked up an impressive series of wins in a good mix of awards including the prestigious Hospitality Eagles Awards, the Best Business Awards and the Stevies, or International business Awards.
Outcomes
For our part, it was a great pleasure working with such an innovative and visionary company that is helping to revive the hospitality sector internationally and provides world-class entertainment venues for many thousands of people.
For Swingers, the result is a bulging trophy cabinet. Matt says: “Awards Intelligence provided a great service in getting to know us as a company, identifying the right combination of awards to enter and taking care of every aspect of the entry process.
“The writing was always top-quality and their designer produced some appealing submission documents that really did justice to our venues and demonstrated what we are about with great use of pictures, feedback from customers and examples of media coverage.
“We are hugely proud of our award wins – they are something the whole team can celebrate.”