As successful as our 2019 Best of Treasure Valley awards were, sadly, I didn’t know if we were going to do it again. Now is not the time to rehash the gynormous roadblock that lay before us at the end of Summer 2019. If interested, you can check out this article.

To solve our dilemma, I surveyed last year’s nominees in August, seeking their advice.

Should we walk away and shut it down? Or should we run the awards under a different name?

The replies I received were enthusiastic, if not encouraging. I immediately transformed from being deflated to feeling energized. The feedback was clear— keep the contest going under a new name. So, we fittingly settled on “Idaho’s Best.”

What a huge undertaking! For sure, I had my doubts about starting over, but fast forward a few months, and I sit here at the start of 2020 with absolutely no regrets. That “roadblock” I mentioned earlier? It was more like a “ramp” that catapulted the awards into the most legitimate and popular “best of” contest in Idaho. Not to give me and my team all the credit! We had loads of help from all sorts of angles— friends, family, colleagues, and of course, last year’s nominees. In reality, our adversity revealed our ingenuity!

Case in point, our new partnership with the Better Business Bureau (read about it on page 7) wouldn’t have come about if it weren’t for that obstacle. Two more examples— We had more support from sponsors this year and even though we doubled the size of our Awards Banquet, it sold out faster than last year!

At Inbound Systems we are honored to run Idaho’s Best. We promise to do all we can in maintaining it as the true gold-standard “best of” contest that it is. To that end, we should at least in part, thank the Idaho Statesman for placing that hurdle in our pathway last summer.

To being your best,

Brodie Tyler