The Heropreneurs Awards 2019

Entry to the Heropreneur Awards 2019 is now closed. Thank you to every one who nominated or entered the Heropreneur Awards 2019, we are excited to present the entries to our panel of judges over the next few weeks and look forward to sharing the shortlist with you. In the mean time, please keep up with us on social media as there is lots to share with you over the summer. 

If you need to get in touch about an entry you submitted for any of the below categories, please contact Amanda Rayner, Head of Awards – amanda@heropreneurs.co.uk

What’s so special about the Heropreneurs Awards?

• Heropreneurs is a charity, run by volunteers. The people that run Heropreneurs, including myself, receive no financial benefit whatsoever for the extensive amount of time that we put into running the charity or the Heropreneurs Awards.
• The Telegraph, the UK’s national newspaper of record, is continuing as the media sponsor of the Awards and has a long history of association with the UK’s Armed Forces.
• The Heropreneurs Awards have, for the second year, the support of the Ministry of Defence.
• Warwick Business School is also maintaining its support of the Heropreneurs Awards
• The Heropreneurs Awards are not being run for profit, and if we are fortunate enough to achieve a surplus it will all go to the benefit of the Heropreneurs charity.
• The Judges of the Heropreneurs Awards, chaired by General Sir John McColl, the Chairman of Cobseo and past Lieutenant governor of Jersey, are all highly successful people drawn from the worlds of business, politics, and the Armed forces. Our Judges include Nick Jenkins, the founder of Moonpig; Lt Gen Sir Andrew Gregory, Controller, SSAFA; Major-General Tom Copinger-Symes who commands Forces Troops Command; Iqbal Wahhab, successful restauranteur and entrepreneur; Matt Caines, Business Editor at the Telegraph; Andrew Quinlan, the founder of Orchard Pig.
• Our nominees, who represent the best of the ex-Armed Forces in business.

That’s why the Heropreneurs Awards are so prestigious.

The history of Heropreneurs

At Heropreneurs we are celebrating 10 years of helping ex-Armed Forces personnel on the road to creating their own successful business as Heropreneurs was launched as a registered charity in 2009. It’s very tough and lonely creating a new business – formal Government statistics show that 50% of new businesses fail in their first 4 years.

At the core of what we do is a mentoring programme which is free to join. We have a community of highly successful entrepreneurs and business people who give their time entirely for free to our members. They are similar to Non-Executive Chairmen and provide highly experienced sounding boards with whom our members can discuss their business concerns. We know how difficult it is to succeed in business and we don’t promote starting up a business for the sake of it, or for our own personal financial gain; indeed, none of the people that run Heropreneurs obtains any financial benefit whatsoever.

The advice that our highly experienced Mentors give is objective and unbiased – Heropreneurs isn’t trying to sell anything to anyone.

We also encourage our members to connect with each other and help themselves to solve their business issues. We believe that having benefited from the help given by Heropreneurs our members will help others joining our programme. Our ethos is we help people so that they can help others. My colleague Stuart Nicol, who puts considerable amounts of expertise, time and effort, into Heropreneurs, runs networking meetings every month or two for our members to meet each other in the real world.

When I discovered that no British charities were focusing on celebrating the outstanding achievements in business by people from the Armed Forces, Heropreneurs Awards were born. Getting the enthusiastic support of The Telegraph as our media partner in year one and thanks to Allister Heath, Editor of the Sunday Telegraph, continuing it this year shows how the newspaper values what the Military can bring to business.

Warwick Business School are also continuing their support by funding a bursary to study for an executive MBA; while other repeat sponsors from 2018 include OBXtek and The Veterans’ Foundation.

We know other sponsors will be joining us and we hope you will too; either by supporting the Heropreneurs Awards as a sponsor; buying tickets to attend this inspiring event or entering.

I look forward to your involvement and support.

Peter Mountford
Chairman