Three Centretown businesses are being recognized in this year’s Best Ottawa Business Awards for their strong contributions to the Ottawa business community.
The Best Ottawa Business Awards is an event organized by the Ottawa Chamber of Commerce and the Ottawa Business Journal that honours local businesses through open nominations and a People’s Choice Award voted on by the public.
Assent Compliance Inc. and Ottawa Tourism will be honoured at the awards ceremony on Nov. 20 at the Shaw Centre in the open nomination categories, which include outstanding companies, exceptional new businesses, and performance categories.
One award selected by a committee – CEO of the Year – has been revealed, with Shopify’s Tobias Lütke receiving the honour.
“It takes a city to raise a company, and Shopify owes much of its success to being headquartered in Ottawa,” Lütke said in a statement. “A lot of our amazingly talented team are Ottawa natives, and it’s all of them, and our awesome staff in Toronto, Montreal, and around the world, who deserve this award.”
Lütke’s company has seen significant growth in the past year, according to the Ottawa Chamber of Commerce. Shopify, an e-commerce business, expanded to 100,000 online stores by April and moved into a new, six-floor office space at Performance Court on Elgin Street just last month.
Another occupant of the Performance Court building, not-for-profit organization Ottawa Tourism, will also be recognized in the awards this year.
The organization earned its award for the One Young World conference it worked hard to secure in 2016, according to Jantine Van Kregten, Ottawa Tourism’s communications director.
Van Kregten says the conference showcases young entrepreneurs and attracts people from more than 190 countries to the host city each year.
“We led the bid process in partnership with various museums, attractions, and hotels – almost the entire tourism community,” Van Kregten says. “This has been a huge coup for Ottawa to get this event.”
While the Ottawa Tourism subgroup Events Ottawa won in last year’s Best Ottawa Business Awards, Van Kregten says this is the first for the main arm of the organization.
“It’s a great honour,” she says. “We love being recognized for the things that we do.”
Just blocks away from the first two businesses is another award winner, IT company Assent Compliance Inc., located on Sparks Street.
Assent Compliance produces environmental compliance software which helps companies comply with their country’s rules on controlled or restricted substances. The company also offers other consulting services and compliance-related modules to businesses.
Matt Whitteker, director of marketing at Assent Compliance, says the company has marked a few milestones in the past year, including bringing in a new CEO and raising its global staff to 150.
“It’s great being recognized locally because none of our customers are local. The majority of our customers are U.S. or EU-based, so we don’t typically get a lot of recognition in Ottawa because we don’t have much of a local presence beyond our workforce,” Whitteker says.
While Assent Compliance has offices in New York City and London, England, the company has always kept its roots in Ottawa, with another location at the World Exchange Plaza.
“Ottawa’s a great spot in terms of talent recruitment,” Whitteker says. “We’re lucky in Ottawa in that we’ve got a pool that is usually pretty diverse and hardworking.”
One of those individuals is entrepreneur Joelle Parenteau, another Best Ottawa Business Award recipient this year who created Epic Perks, a virtual company that brings corporate perks such as discounts on office supplies to small businesses.
Parenteau says she hopes the award will help spread the word about her young company, particularly among businesses in Centretown.
“We’re looking to expand with new businesses, so the more the merrier. The more businesses we have, the more bargaining power we have with larger businesses,” she says.
“The award is extremely validating for all the work we’ve put in over the last two years, so it means a lot. It brings more exposure and credibility to the company, and it’ll certainly help us moving forward to get better and stronger.”