The Institute Named A Top 100 Small Business Influencer In North America
Monday, September 26, 2011 at 11:44AM Admin. The Guardian Life Small Business Research Institute has been named a top 100 small business champion in the 2011 Small Business Influencer Awards! Champions were selected for having made a meaningful and lasting impact on the North American small business market.
Guardian is one of just 16 corporations to win the award and the only insurance company represented. A total of 520 nominees vied for the Small Business Influencer Champion award. The selection process involved two stages: voting by the community, which exceeded 125,000 votes (weighted at 40 percent) and voting by a panel of judges (weighted at 60 percent).
The Small Business Influencer Champions were recognized at the live awards ceremony on Wednesday, September 14 in NYC, where each influencer was presented with a plaque recognizing their commitment to small business owners. The room was filled with key small business players from reporters and TV anchors to corporations and bloggers. Mark Wolf, director of The Institute, accepted the award on its behalf. 
In accepting the award, Mark said, “Thank you for honoring The Guardian Life Small Business Research Institute! Among the many insights we have identified through our studies are six key factors that characterize successful small business owners. They are collaborative, curious, future-focused, action-oriented, self-fulfilled and technologically savvy. In many respects these characteristics differentiate small businesses owners from executives at large enterprises. And those important distinctions are the focus of our next wave of research, which we hope will continue to be valuable, actionable and influential for the small business community.”
The Small Business Influencer Awards were sponsored by BlackBerry and produced by Small Business Trends and Small Biz Technology.