The best businesses in London

IT SEEMS absurd that London, one of the world's great commercial centres, has not had its own business awards. Unbelievable, and a pity, that down the centuries the innovation, skill and vision of the entrepreneurs - without whom the city would not be the booming magnet it is today - has gone unrecognised.

That injustice was finally rectified last night when the winners of the first-ever London Business Awards, organised by the London Chamber of Commerce and sponsored by accounting group KPMG, with the Evening Standard delighted to be a media partner, were announced.

The awards dinner, hosted by newscaster Alastair Stewart at the Hotel InterContinental in Mayfair and attended by business leaders and senior politicians, was not simply an occasion for praising profits growth. It was also about business being forward-thinking, about putting something back into the community.

The judging panel included Lord Marshall of British Airways, Sir Peter Davis from Sainsbury, Fru Hazlitt from Yahoo!, David Page, the ex-PizzaExpress chief, Hardeep Kalsi of Carlton, Tom Vyner of L'Oreal, Trevor Phillips, chairman of the Commission on Racial Equality and - I'd better declare an interest - myself. Sir Gulam Noon, the London Chamber's past president, was chairman of the judges.

Entries were strong and the judges were faced with some tough decisions. Take Entrepreneur of the Year, for example. The shortlist of four comprised: Sally Preston, who remortgaged her home to launch Babylicious frozen babyfoods and clocked up sales of more than £500,000 in its first full year; Chris Carey, founder of Chris Carey Collections, a Deptford-based recycling business; Ian Rickwood, head of Benjys, the sandwiches retailer; and Karan Bilimoria, the brains behind Cobra Beer.

The award went to Karan Bilimoria for establishing the Cobra brand, for making the beer a staple ingredient of many Indian meals in less than 13 years, and for doing so in the most fiercely competitive of industries.

Business innovation is always a tricky one - for every idea that succeeds there are countless that look good but ultimately fail. The London Business Innovation of the Year award came down to four entries: Sepco, solar technology for street lights; Berwin Leighton Paisner, for a 24-hour database for lawyers; Clifton Packaging's resealable zipper packets for biscuits and Spero, which came up with a secure way of delivering previews of rock albums over the Internet.

The winner was Clifton Packaging - not least, possibly, because the judges were grateful to anyone who could solve the age-old problem of biscuits going soft. The fact that Clifton's revolutionary design has been seized upon by major manufacturers and retailers also had an influence.

With many of the London Chamber's members qualifying as small businesses, it was to be expected that Small Firm of the Year would receive a shoal of nominations and would be a close-call. And so it proved.

Cleankill (Environmental Services) is a pest control company with annual growth of 20% and sales this year of £500,000. An online firm, toptable.co.uk, aims to remove the pain of booking a restaurant, allowing diners to secure a slot in seconds. Counting Sir Alex Ferguson and Gary Rhodes among its backers, toptable now has 150,000 registered users. The Feel Good Drinks Company is competing for a share of the burgeoning demand for blended ?health‘ and fruit juices but is more than holding its own. Feel Good was joined on the Small Firm shortlist by the eventual winner, Retail Profile.

From pioneering the introduction of ?semi-mobile‘ market stalls in shopping centres, the company has seen the idea extend to malls in airports and train stations. With predicted sales this year of £3.5m and 80% of a still-largely-undeveloped market, Retail Profile is unlikely to feature in the Small Firm category much longer.

Some of the biggest companies, not just in London, but in the world, were among the entries for Commitment to the Community. Two, Unilever and EDF Energy, made the shortlist. Unilever invests almost £10m a year in projects throughout Britain, many of them in the capital. French-owned EDF supplies electricity to London and also invests £1m a year in community work. Its Helping Hands programme, which gives staff paid time off to assist in educational initiatives, has so far benefited 4000 pupils.

The two giants were joined by Bankside Restaurant, where manager Kelvin Macdonald works with teachers in schools in surrounding Southwark to educate pupils in the catering trade and to highlight issues in food preparation and hygiene.

Winner, though, was Allen & Overy/School Governors' One-Stop Shop, a collaboration between one of the City's major law firms and a charity to encourage employees to become governors in schools in some of the most needy parts of London. To date, 38 Allen & Overy staff have volunteered. What impressed the judges was the way the firm was exhorting staff to participate in an area far removed from their day-to-day work, in advising multinationals and other large organisations on complex cases and deals.

Benjys figured again in the battle for Manufacturer of the Year. The chain serves 100,000 customers a day with sandwiches made at its expanded and redesigned Bow factory. Also on the shortlist was R Holt, a company based in Hatton Garden, supplying polished gemstones to the jewellery trade. But R Holt has gone further than it needs to, setting up two

schools to teach new skills in an industry under threat from overseas. Another craft-based candidate was Carrington Hull which, trading as Drakes, makes ties, scarves and shawls in luxury fabrics in a factory near the Barbican. Around 90% of Carrington's output goes for export.

The winner, however, and acclaimed by all the judges, was Kesslers International. Not so long ago,

London's economy was rife with firms like Kesslers: family-owned and run, not big on a global scale but a pillar of their local community, solid, dependable and above all, personal. Not any more. Kesslers, though, has broken the mould, making shop display units for over 100 years, still in the family, still in the East End and still going strong.

What made the company a deserving winner was the way, as the decades have rolled on, Kesslers has embraced, not resisted, change. It now has state-of-the-art design and production systems, enabling it to service leading brands such as Christian Dior, Swatch and Tesco. Established by the grandfather of William Kessler, the present chairman, Kesslers, employs 270 people and is now, sadly, one of London's largest remaining manufacturing companies.

Exporter of the Year saw Carrington Hull prominent again. This time, the company lost out to Sortex, which makes optical sorters used to identify and clean dirty or diseased crops after they have been harvested and sells to more than 50 countries.

Others who made the shortlist were: Sleek International, a designer of cosmetics and hair products for black women; Met Studio Design, which has overseas sales of £120,000 per employee, six times the industry average; and SDMS Security Products, a Chelsea firm supplying anti-terrorist equipment to more than 130 countries.

In Young Business Person of the Year, the winner was Charlie Osmond, 26, co-founder of FreshMinds which links bright graduates with companies for short-term research projects. Shara Vickers, 29, founder of Tela, a website design consultancy; Manish Madhvani, 28, director of GP Capital, an ambitious corporate finance house aiming at business start-ups; and Fabiane Perrella, 28, who runs Flour , a design company that counts Selfridges among its clients, also reached the final stage.

The most prestigious award, and the only one which was open to the judges to make nominations, was Business Person of the Year. This went to Martha Lane Fox, the unanimous choice, for surviving the dot com crash and now prospering.

Lane Fox's company, lastminute.com, does appear to have turned a corner and is on an upward path. There was also a feeling that, as a young woman, Lane Fox has endured a tougher baptism of fire than any male equivalent. 'She is a very worthy winner and a great asset to the capital's business community,î said Colin Stanbridge, chief executive of the London Chamber of Commerce.

The judges felt that in more ways than one she represented the future - a future that London's entrepreneurs and all of us can look forward to.