27th Annual Excellence Awards: Call for Nominations

Nominations for the 2010 Excellence Awards Honoring the Region’s Small Businesses are now being accepted. Each year, the Chamber recognizes businesses with fewer than 100 employees for their outstanding performance, civic involvement, corporate responsibility and customer service.

Excellence Award winners fall into ten categories and are chosen by a panel of their peers.

Nominees must:

• Be located in the Chamber’s 11–county Greater Philadelphia footprint
• Have between one and 100 employees
• Have been in business at least three years
• Not have won an Excellence Award in the last five years

Nominations are due May 22, 2009.

For more information on all award criteria and entry categories, click here. To submit a nomination, click here.

Past winners: Promoting Excellence in Small Business

Two of the eleven winners of the Chamber’s 2009 Excellence Awards Honoring Small Businesses are featured in this issue: Manufacturer of the Year, Inteprod, and Non–Profit Organization of the Year, Philadelphia Youth Network. Be sure to look for additional winners in upcoming issues.

Manufacturer of the Year, Inteprod

Inteprod was founded by Rick and Suzanne Smethers in 2004. It is a full–service supplier of product design, development and contract manufacturing services for the medical device, medical diagnostics, and food safety diagnostics industries.

Rick Smethers has more than 25 years of experience working in the medical, food safety, and high technology industries. Prior to co–founding Inteprod, he held senior management and development positions for numerous companies including Chiron Corporation, Bayer Diagnostics, Somnus Medical, and Molecular Devices. Rick also has more than 60 patents worldwide for inventions specific to medical devices and diagnostics.

Inteprod was founded so that large and small businesses in the medical and food safety industries could connect with a full–service partner offering cutting–edge resources and deep rooted knowledge of, and adherence to quality assurance and regulatory issues. It has the resources to take any size company through the entire development process and regulatory requirements and into product manufacturing and commercialization.

Inteprod is unique in its service offerings because unlike many design companies, they design and develop all products for manufacturability, serviceability, maintainability, efficiency, and cost–effectiveness, with complete documentation. Everything the company does for their clients belongs to their clients. Inteprod’s vast experience and deep commitment to the success and satisfaction of their clients are key factors contributing to their continued rapid growth.

Inteprod considers their employees to be full partners in the creative process and cultivates a supportive and challenging environment in which they have the opportunity to excel. Inteprod actively participates in community service projects to help the local community, and also build team unity. The company also hires engineering students as interns to provide them with an opportunity to work in a business environment, and balance their classroom theory with practical experience in their chosen career field.

Non–profit Organization of the Year, Philadelphia Youth Network, Inc.

The Philadelphia Youth Network (PYN) was incorporated in 1999 to create a new approach to youth workforce development in Philadelphia. PYN creates and manages citywide campaigns that promote workforce preparation, dropout re–engagement and educational innovation.

PYN started with two full–time employees working in a hallway of the Philadelphia School District’s John F. Kennedy Skills Center. It has since grown into an organization of more than 60 professionals that manages more than $28 million in investments from government, foundations and businesses.

PYN’s vision is that the young men and women of Philadelphia take their rightful places as contributing members and leaders of a world–class workforce. The organization acts as a catalyst for collective action by making connections among individuals, organizations and systems, including a collaborative effort with the Greater Philadelphia Chamber of Commerce in recruiting the business community to hire summer interns. The organization has designed and managed academically enriched workforce preparation programs for more than 60,000 Philadelphia youth. This innovative mix of internships, mentoring and job shadowing experiences, known as WorkReady Philadelphia, is the city’s strategy for helping its youth to see their possible futures and to start to understand how to prepare themselves to achieve their future goals.

PYN is also the managing partner of Project U–Turn, a collaborative campaign designed to raise awareness and coordinate effective policy solutions to the city’s dropout problem. Members of the Project U–Turn Collaborative have leveraged millions of dollars, helped to institute quality educational programs for hundreds of out–of–school youth, and created a new system to re–enroll students.

This spirit of collaboration serves as the Philadelphia Youth Network’s guiding philosophy and theory of change. PYN believes that systemic change can only be achieved when public, private and non–profit sectors find common ground, speak collectively and undertake concerted action.

For more information on the Excellence Awards, click here.