Awards

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Each year, Business Report recognizes leading professionals and companies in the Capital Region that distinguish themselves by not only succeeding in business, but also by giving back to the community and making our city a better place to live through our awards and honors programs. Honorees are profiled in the magazine and recognized at sell-out community events.

What follows is an explanation of the awards and their selection processes. For nomination deadlines and scheduled events for the current year, click here.

Business Awards & Hall of Fame

The Business Awards were launched in 1984 to pay tribute to remarkable individuals and companies in the Capital Region and celebrate their many accomplishments. In 1993, Business Report partnered with Junior Achievement to present the awards and added a Hall of Fame category to recognize those with a lifetime of achievement. Nominations are accepted in the late fall and reviewed by a community panel that makes the final selections. The honorees are celebrated at an event the following spring.

Influential Women in Business

Business Report also honors the incredible professional women in our community who have distinguished themselves in business or through government or nonprofit work and are making the Capital Region a better place to live, work and play. Nominations are accepted beginning in January and reviewed by a community panel before final selections are made. The event recognizing the honorees is in early summer. Get the nomination form.

Best Places to Work

Best Places to Work identifies what makes a great workplace in our community, and provides participating employers insight into what their employees think. Companies can register for consideration beginning in the early spring and are recognized at a celebration in October.

Independent national firm Best Companies Group surveys companies that choose to participate. For-profit companies and nonprofits as well as publicly and privately held companies are all eligible to participate, so long as they have a facility in Baton Rouge and a minimum of 15 full- or part-time employees working in the nine-parish Capital Region. Contract employees are not included in employee counts or surveys.

To ensure credibility, organizations with fewer than 25 employees are required to have an 80% or better response rate on the employee survey.

The first portion of the assessment involves a questionnaire about company policies, practices, demographics and benefits. The second portion involves a randomly selected group of each company’s employees, who respond—anonymously—to 78 statements on a five-point agreement scale as well as a handful of open-ended questions and demographic inquiries.

Best Companies Group analyzes and ranks participating firms on eight core focus areas: leadership and planning; corporate culture and communications; role satisfaction; work environment; employees’ relationships with supervisors; training, development and resources; pay and benefits; and overall employee engagement.

Top 100 Private Companies

The Top 100 Private Companies in the Capital Region are selected in July based on their reported or estimated revenue for the most recently completed fiscal year. Companies are recognized in our Top 100 Private Companies issue in July and celebrated at a luncheon in October.

So how does the selection process work? In the spring, announcements and emails are sent to all companies on our recent Top 100 lists and to those identified as possible qualifiers as well as those suggested by readers. We also placed notices on our websites, asking companies to post their information or submit it to us.

We follow up with emails, phone calls and research to confirm the data. In some cases we look at related industry performance reports and other business compilations to estimate revenue. Some companies declined to reveal their numbers, so we relied on public information and sources to make reasonable estimates. Those companies are denoted in the list’s footnotes.

Forty Under 40

Forty Under 40 honors local business and professional leaders who have achieved success and excelled in their field before the age of 40. An ideal Forty Under 40 is someone who has demonstrated leadership, initiative and dedication in pursuing their career, and who is likely to continue to achieve in the future. Most of those honored are involved in business or a related career, but previous Forty Under 40 classes have included honorees who were successful in a wide variety of pursuits, including politics, government and nonprofits. Business Report begins accepting nominations in August; honorees are profiled in the magazine in November and recognized at a celebration in December.