It makes a lot of sense. Winning a CEDIA Designer Award for your best project installations can be good for your business. It’s so simple, but yet there are so many CEDIA members that don’t bother to enter the annual contest. If you’re one of those people, there’s still time. But not much. The final deadline for entries is Monday, May 5.
For an industry event, the setting for the CEDIA Designer Awards doesn’t lack glamour or a cordial host.
Each year, many of the same companies win awards, but it’s not because judges play favorites. Not at all. But those same companies keep winning because they keep coming back for more. There’s a reason. It’s fun to get honored and it’s good for team morale and for standing out in the market.
The Designer Awards competition honors the top home technology projects designed and installed by CEDIA member home technology professionals. The competition offers a chance to be recognized within and outside the industry as a leader in your field. Recognition opportunities for winners include, being featured in Electronic Lifestyles magazine, being featured in key trade media outlets, gaining an enhanced listing in CEDIA Finder Service, being highlighted in CEDIA’s outreach to architects, builders, designers, homeowners, and mainstream press, plus, through CEDIA’s growing partnership with HGTVRemodels.com, entrants in the Home Theater, Media Room, and Integrated Home categories will have the opportunity to compete in the CEDIA/HGTVRemodels People’s Pick Awards competition, to be voted on by consumers, enthusiasts, and remodeling pros at HGTVRemodels.com.
For those who won awards last year, the effort involved with entering the contest, was well worth the payoff of winning.
“Winning an award by such an established organization brings a sense of real pride an accomplishment for the entire staff at Encore,” said Ian Williams, whose Chantilly, VA, integration company won last year. “All the hard work and many hours that these projects take makes the whole process well worth it. These awards benefit our company because it lets our previous, current, and potential clients know that we can be trusted in providing them with a turnkey solution that has an amazing end result in which will be designed and installed properly.”
Admit One gained accolades for this meticulously designed system. Williams credited “great documentation and a properly designed system,” for aiding his company’s win.
Vidacom’s David Haddad, from Barrington, IL, said that there were two motivations for entering the awards. The first was simply that is company takes “immense pride” in the quality of its work, and “it’s always emotionally satisfying to receive recognition for that.” The second is that recognition of this type “enhances your credibility with potential clients.”
In choosing a project to enter, Haddad found one that it he believed stood out in every way.
“That it was a statement project across the board that made it so exciting,” he said. “The sheer scale of it, the extreme motorization used throughout to hide televisions, the hundreds of motorized shades, the high-end AV performance in every room, and the dedicated two-story equipment room with the hidden entrance were some of the prominent features.”
Haddad’s suggestion for those still filling out entries, was to, “do your best to tell a story in pictures and words that communicate the project you delivered.”
Lance Anderson from Admit One, in Edina, MN, likes to choose a project that is a bit more outside the box and showcases a larger scale undertaking. And, he enters the Designer Awards, primarily, for team morale and to stand out among competitors.
“We have a lot of competition in our market, and this separates us from others,” he said. “Selfishly I think part of it is a feather in the cap sort-of-speak, or validation. It’s validation for the business, the team, and the client that it’s one of the better projects across the country!”
ZIO Group’s Peter Shipp, in Winter Park, FL, said that he believes the key to a winning entry is complete and detailed engineering documentation (floor plan layouts, functional schematics, power calculations, rack elevations and details such as room-specific elevations.) He chose projects to enter based on their visual appeal of the overall space that the systems were designed into.
ZIO Group picked a project that was sure to stand out.
“All of our projects are completed to the same level as the ones we enter, but not all projects are ‘photogenic’ from a commercial prospective,” Shipp said.
Winner a CEDIA Designer Award, Shipp added, helped validate that his company is “doing things right.”
“It helps to differentiate us from our competitors but more importantly it shows our clients, who often don’t even talk to our competitors, that we are competent and more than capable of handling their project therefore they don’t need to even consider an alternative,” Shipp said.
