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: Retailer of the Year, Pennsylvania General Store, and Technological Excellence of the Year, Instamed. Be sure to look for additional winners in upcoming issues.

Retailer of the Year, Pennsylvania General Store

The Pennsylvania General Store is a retail and mail order company selling Pennsylvania-made food and crafts located in the historic Reading Terminal Market. Founded by Michael and Julie Holahan in 1987, the store is an eclectic mix of locally made food and craft products.

The food selections range from Philadelphia favorites such as Melrose Diner Butter Cookies and Tastykakes, to Pennsylvania Dutch specialties such as Bauman’s Apple Butter and M & J Greider’s Lancaster County Saffron. The Pennsylvania General Store also carries products from the state’s chocolatiers including Asher’s Chocolates of Souderton and Lewistown, PA, and The Wilbur Chocolate Company of Lititz, PA.

Pennsylvania German Folk Art is also represented in the store with Amish quilts, Redware Pottery, wood carvings, and more. Local interest books and souvenirs round out the store’s selection. The store also provides valuable connections to their customers.

Just as their business celebrates both the urban and rural food traditions of Pennsylvania, husband-and-wife team Michael and Julie are a complimentary mix of city and country. Michael was raised in West Philadelphia and Julie comes from a dairy farm in South Dakota.

The Pennsylvania General Store started out as a box lunch catering business using the foods available in the Reading Terminal Market. Michael and Julie began offering their customers holiday gift baskets filled with locally made foods, which evolved into a retail and mail order business. In 1998, they sold their box lunch operation to focus solely on the retail and mail order business.

The greatest area of growth for the Pennsylvania General Store has been in their mail order business, which the Holahan’s operate out of an old chocolate factory in Manayunk. The Internet significantly increased their mail order business by providing them with a cost-effective way to reach out to customers interested in purchasing gift packages of Pennsylvania-made products.

Technological Excellence of the Year, Instamed

InstaMed is the industry leading healthcare payments network and platform. InstaMed was founded in 2004, by business partners Bill Marvin and Chris Seib, to make the healthcare payment process simple, convenient, reliable and secure.

InstaMed’s management team brings years of experience working on transaction processing with payers, providers, clearinghouses, vendors, billing services, and financial entities.

Before founding InstaMed, Marvin was an executive in Accenture’s Health and Life Sciences practice. Bill worked with clients such as UnitedHealth Group and the U.S. Department of Treasury, where he developed strategies and led projects in the areas of transaction processing, web-portals, provider adoption, and medical management.

Seib was also an executive in Accenture’s Health and Life Sciences practice. He focused on architecting and delivering portal and connectivity solutions for clients such as UnitedHealth Group, WellPoint Health Networks, and many regional health plans. Chris has managed large teams of people in multi-project initiatives such as eCommerce and software application development.

InstaMed is dedicated to transforming the healthcare revenue cycle for providers, payers, banks, and patients to accelerate healthcare payments and reduce administrative costs to all parties. Its patent pending platform handles real-time eligibility to more than 430 payers, real-time claims and electronic payments from patients and payers. The company supports claims, eligibility, status, remittance, credit, debit, eCheck, and ACH transactions.

InstaMed has customers across the country and has been processing live transactions since July 2005. It currently supports the healthcare payment processing needs of more than 700 hospital and clinic locations; practice management vendors and billing services representing more than 50,000 providers; and hundreds of healthcare payers of all sizes.

InstaMed is registered with Visa and MasterCard as a PSP of U.S. Bank. It is Payment Card Industry Level One certified and accredited by the Electronic Network Accreditation Commission as a healthcare clearinghouse.