Lancashire business heroes to be unveiled by BIBAs team on Friday

The Be Inspired Business Awards, The BIBAs, will live-stream its BIBAs Heroes ceremony on its channel on YouTube, at 2pm.

The prize-giving is being held on the same day the awards would have hosted its ceremony at The Blackpool Tower, which had to be cancelled due to the coronavirus pandemic.

Instead it launched The BIBAs Heroes to recognise the achievements of the Lancashire business community during the pandemic.

Babs Murphy, Chief Executive of the awards’ organisers, the North and Western Lancashire Chamber of Commerce, said: “We promised we would not let the efforts of our county’s business community go unnoticed, and we will not.

“We were obviously hugely disappointed to have to cancel our ceremony, but there simply was no way we could do it safely, so we launched The BIBAs Heroes instead.

“We have received hundreds of applications from across Lancashire and we hope that people will join us on Friday afternoon to celebrate the achievements.”

The BIBAs Heroes will award prizes for Business Hero, Business Owner Hero and Business Employee Hero, recognising firms, their owners and the people behind them.

To tune in, simply search “BIBAs Heroes - Ceremony Stream” in YouTube and tune in from 2pm on Friday.

The awards have also promised to reflect on the achievements of businesses and their people throughout the county since the pandemic began. Despite the cancellation of this year’s awards, The BIBAs has vowed to return in 2021 to celebrate the achievements of the Lancashire business community.

Babs Murphy added: “It quickly became clear to us that we would not be able to hold either judging rounds or a ceremony which did justice to The BIBAs name with restrictions in place to keep people safe.

“However, we hope that with the hard work and commitment of everyone in Lancashire we will be in a position to start again next year and bring The BIBAs back bigger and better than ever.”