05-02-2025
Business awards spotlight Suffolk's visionary businesses
The East Anglian Daily Times is delighted to announce the launch of the EADT Business Awards 2025 - celebrating the very best of Suffolk business.
From the moment I started my first job in journalism at the East Anglian Daily Times and Ipswich Star in 1992, things have been changing.
There was still a typewriter on one of the desks on my first day at Lower Brook Street in Ipswich. It wasn't in use, but not so long ago that it had been.
Back then, we used clunky computers with green flashing blobs and everything you typed would hover in the blob (or so it seemed) before flashing across the screen all at once.
When I moved to London, we had Quickmail and Quick Conference – a terrifying system where your message could fly up on the recipient's screen. Woe betide you if you sent a message to your friend about your annoying boss – only to discover that because you'd been thinking about him, your message had gone to your boss instead!
EADT editor Liz Nice at the EADT Business Awards 2024 (Image: Matthew Potter Photography and Videography)
From there, we got Apple Macs (mine was pink) and we really thought we'd made it. But the internet hadn't even been born yet and when it did appear, after the brief period of disaster they called the crash, suddenly the game changed yet again.
It has been changing, more or less monthly, ever since. And yet I'm still here. Still in this business. Most of my contemporaries are not.
I can't say why that is the case, but I can say what I've had to do to still be here: stifle a heck of a lot of eye rolls, smile when I didn't mean it, laugh when it wasn't funny, stay awake through a lot of not very interesting monologues. But hey, we've all done that, haven't we?
That isn't enough. The real secret to longevity, along with sticking at it and loving what you do, is the ability to adapt to changing circumstances with optimism, not dread.
If you stay looking forward, not back, you'll keep going. And if you support your colleagues and stick up for them, they will go with you and hold you up when you need it, because it was you who held them up when they needed you to.
We have a great, forward-looking business community in Suffolk, facing innumerable changes and challenges. And we will keep on embracing those changes and challenges and making them work for us because that is what we do if we want to stick around.
I will look forward to seeing you all at our beloved Business Awards, to be held at Kesgrave Hall on July 10, where we will be celebrating the new, the bright, the beautiful and the brilliant – if you're still here, still doing the thing you love with hope and passion, that's you, by the way.
If you want the rest of the county to know about it and be inspired, then please visit our website at and get your entry in by the deadline on April 6 – because everything will change again tomorrow and I promise you this – it's always good to remember where you've been and how far you have come.
Suffolk Business of the Year - sponsored by Suffolk Chamber of Commerce & Sizewell C
Businessperson of the Year - sponsored by Churchmanor Estates
Customer Excellence Award - sponsored by Greater Anglia
Medium Business of the Year - sponsored by Pound Gates
Large Business of the Year - sponsored by Larking Gowen
Employer of the Year - sponsored by Ashtons Legal
Small Business of the Year
Start Up Business of the Year
Environmental & Sustainability Award
Positive Impact in the Community
Growth Business of the Year
