A new West Dorset Gold Awards is to be staged later this year.

MW Events, which organises 16 business awards across Dorset and also neighbouring Ringwood, says the initiative will complement its current focus on promoting local businesses.

Category winners of its four separate awards in West Dorset – Dorchester, Bridport, Weymouth/Portland and Lyme Regis – will automatically be entered.

The West Dorset ‘winners of the winners’ will be announced at a special awards lunchtime ceremony in late summer.

The plan is to also roll out the format early in 2024 to the rest of the county with the East Dorset Gold Awards and the North Dorset Gold Awards.

Nigel Reeve, pictured left, of MW Events, said: “We believe that local businesses are the backbone of the local economies.

“They care about their area and their customers, they adapt to fit local needs, they innovate, they create employment and they are a major part of their community.

“Our local awards are quite different to the usual evening awards.

“The focus is on promoting the range and quality of local businesses through to one-man businesses working from home.

“At the lunchtime awards ceremonies the local winners are the stars of the awards, not the event.

“The quality of entries across all our local awards is high so it was a natural step to take this a stage further with the local winners getting a chance to build their profile further.

“They deserve it!

“In no way are we knocking the larger business awards.

“Our awards are for local businesses.

“They deserve to get recognised for all they do.”

Since the local lunchtime awards series started three years ago, there have been 2,400 entries/nominations and 950 business leaders have attended the awards ceremonies.

The various awards websites have been viewed more than 10,000 times and over £90,000 has been invested back into the local economies organising the awards.

More information about the West Dorset Gold Awards can be found on the Marketing West website here.