Brodie Tyler, Author at Best of Mile High

2023 Best of Mile High Ballots Are In!

Brodie Tyler on February 20, 2023

Ballots for the 2023 Best of Mile High Awards are in, and you folks knocked it out of the park. We are overwhelmed by the support we received, both in voter turnout, and company support!

The businesses and attractions that were up for voting in their respective categories were nominated by Denver metro area residents in December. The best of the best earned their spots on the ballot.

Thousands of votes were cast to show support for businesses and attractions in our community. We were overwhelmed with the enthusiastic response and can’t wait to share the finalists of each category.

What Happens Now

We want the Best of Mile High Awards to be as fair as possible, so our team is working hard to calculate the results and verify the findings. We use a scoring system that relies on a combination of votes from Denver area residents and reviews from Google.

Count Votes

Who had the most votes? Most business awards are prone to spamming, duplicate votes, or cheating. Best of Mile High only counts unique votes for each category, and we use text message verification for each ballot. While technology makes counting easy, we still need to verify the results.

BBB Review

The Best of Mile High has partnered with the Better Business Bureau to certify our finalists. The top vote-getters must also have a passing grade with the BBB in order to become a finalist. Their rating system utilizes a grading scale just like you used in school, going from an A+ down to an F, graded on 17 different factors. This rating represents a business’s overall trustworthiness and their good-faith efforts to address customer concerns.

Count Reviews

The Best of Mile High isn’t like most “Best of” contests, which simply count votes. We realize that the community has already been showing their support for the “best” by leaving reviews all year long, so we’re going to count every 5-star review published on Google within the last 12 months.

Calculate Score

While votes and reviews signify great work in the last year, overall ratings tell us how nominees have done long term. The mean rating from these platforms will be used in conjunction with 5-star reviews and votes to determine the winners.

Number of Votes + (Number of 5-star Reviews x Average Rating) = Score

Announce Finalists

The top nominees of each category will be publicly announced once we’ve verified our results. Finalists will also be notified by letter and email as soon as possible.

Announce Winners

Winners will be announced at the Best of Mile High Awards Ceremony in April. Finalists will be invited to purchase tickets for the celebration. The ceremony includes a red carpet entrance, photos, and other special prizes and opportunities.

Thank You

We’re grateful to everyone for the support and participation in this year’s Best of Mile High Awards. It’s been a lot of fun, and we’re already looking forward to next year’s contest!

Voting Now Open for our 2023 Business Awards!

Brodie Tyler on January 30, 2023

Best of Mile High 2023 is in full swing, recognizing the best businesses and places in our community.

The awards include over 200 individual categories, and uses a combination of 5-star reviews, online ratings, and community votes to determine the winners of each respective category.

Our nominees were selected by Denver metro residents in December, and the top fifteen of each category are moving on to the voting round. Voting takes place online from January 30 – February 15, 2023. Anyone with a Denver metro area zip code and mobile phone can vote.

When voters register their ballots, a confirmation code will be sent via text message. Enter the code to finalize and submit your votes.

While you can only vote once for each category, feel free to come back during the voting period to support your favorites in the dozens of other categories available.

Don’t Miss the Hump Day Giveaway!

We’re excited to announce a Hump Day Giveaway during the voting period. For every new voter you refer after registering your ballot, you’ll be entered into a weekly drawing for a nice prize. We’ve got a new prize every week while voting is open, and they are fantastic.

Details about the Hump Day Giveaway are available on the voting page.

When Will We Know the Results?

After voting closes on February 15, we’ll announce the finalists (the top 3 in each category) as soon as we have confirmed the votes and vetted our list with the BBB. But that’s not where it ends!

In addition to votes, the winner of each category is also determined by their online reviews from Google. Overall ratings and the number of 5-star reviews from the previous 12 months are counted. Our team will take a little time to confirm the review scores for each finalist and tally that with the vote total.

Once the final scores have been determined, we’ll announce the winners at the Best of Mile High Awards Ceremony first before publishing them online. The ceremony is tentatively scheduled for early April, though we’ll keep you updated as we get closer.
For more details about the 2021 Best of Mile High, see our details page.

Are You a 2023 Nominee?

Brodie Tyler on January 18, 2023

If you’re on the ballot for our 2023 Best of Mile High Business Awards, congratulations! As a nominee, you earned your spot by having a good mix of nominations and reviews. Out of tens of thousands of local businesses, we narrowed it down to 3,268 nominees that will move on to the voting round.

Now that you’ve been named a nominee, the next step would be to claim your nomination.

Why do you need to claim your nomination?

It helps us verify your business information.

You would be shocked if you knew how much time and effort our team spends verifying candidate information. Besides getting the business name and category right, we’re comparing information and addresses across Google, Facebook, Yelp, the BBB, and your websites for all locations in Idaho to make sure that all of your votes and reviews are credited accordingly.

But we’re not asking for your pity (we did this to ourselves!), just for your help.

When you claim your nomination, you have the opportunity to help us get it right so we can make sure we are as fair and accurate as possible.

It establishes a point of contact.

Some of our nominees are sole proprietors, forging their own path with the unique skills they possess. Others have an empire across Colorado, with dozens or even hundreds of employees. Either way, all of you are important to our community and it would be great if we knew who to present the nomination to.

We think we’re pretty awesome, but we are not going to assume that you’re automatically going to know the pertinent info for our awards. Claiming your nomination also helps us notify the right person when your business is nominated or if you become a finalist.

It helps us… and YOU!

It’s true! Claiming your nomination for Best of Mile High can make it better. High levels of engagement drive the adjustments we make year-to-year. We do the best we can to achieve a level playing field.

Categories with few nominations and even fewer claimed nominations get less attention. They may be absorbed by another category or disappear altogether.

Categories with a lot of competitors and claimed nominations are likely to get more attention and be retained from year to year. This doesn’t mean they’re scored differently, but that it’s more likely we’ll add categories that are more narrowly defined, giving every business in that group better odds and a fairer shake.

Claiming your nomination can even give you an edge when you need it. Ties in scoring aren’t frequent, but when they occur the nod goes to a company who claimed their nomination if their opponent did not.

So, when in doubt, always claim your nomination!

The 2023 Nominations Are In!

Brodie Tyler on December 19, 2022

Finalizing 2023 Nominees — Brodie, at his messy desk finalizing the 2023 nominees.

For our first-ever Best of Mile High Awards, we have our hands full with, at first count, over 3,000 nominated companies and places… Wow!

The nomination period was open from December 7th through yesterday, the 18th. We got the word out over social media and through your nominations and reviews, it looks like we have plenty of candidates to vet.

What’s Next?

This is where we really get to work. To truly find “the best” that Denver has to offer, we will painstakingly review each and every candidate. We’ll ensure the category they were nominated for is a good fit. We’ll also ensure all the location data is up to date in our system.

A note on locations… A single location business is easy. We’ll simply count their votes and reviews for the final score. Multiple location businesses are a bit more complicated. Since the quantity of votes and reviews plays a primary role in who wins Best of Mile High, we didn’t want businesses with multiple locations to have an unfair advantage just because they were bigger. So, we average out the reviews on a per location basis.

This is all part of why it takes so long for us to finalize the nominees. We’ll be working over the Christmas break to get this done as quickly as possible and, hopefully, announce the nominees just after the first of the year.

Thank You!

We couldn’t run these awards without the help of the local community, so thank you very much for your support. And, thank you for your nominations, votes, and reviews!

2023 Nominations Are Now Open!

Brodie Tyler on December 12, 2022

“What Makes Best of Mile High the Best?”

Good question. The Best of Mile High Awards aim to recognize the best businesses in the greater Denver area. Using a combination of 5-star reviews, online ratings, and votes, we recognize Denver’s best businesses across over 200 categories. You can read more about how the awards work right here.

No one cares about getting it right more than Best of Mile High™ does, period. We are relentless in our pursuit to find and recognize the best places, companies, and organizations in Denver. We’re able to find the best (with your help) because we do it differently:

No pay to play — participation is free. While we couldn’t do it without our sponsors, they are still held to the same scoring standards as any business in Best of Mile High™.
You choose the nominees and do the voting, not us.
Online reviews help determine the winners.

TL;DR

The Best of Mile High Business Awards take place in three stages — nominations, voting, and reputation scoring.

Phase 1: Nominations

Anyone who lives in the Denver area can nominate a business or organization for Best of Mile High; you can even nominate yourself! Nominations take place online from December 7 – 18, 2022. Remember; the more nominations you get, the better. The top nominees in each region will progress to the voting round.

Phase 2: Voting

After the nominees have been determined and notified, it’s time to get out the vote. The voting period is January 30 – February 15, 2023. Any Denver area resident with a mobile phone can cast their vote for as many categories as they like, but only one vote for each category. Voting is done through our website and ballots are secured through SMS verification.

Every Wednesday during the voting period we’ll be giving away great prizes via our “Hump Day Giveaway”. Those who referred other voters via our voting application will be automatically entered to win; every referred voter is an additional entry.

Phase 3: Reputation

The top vote-getters for each category in their region will move on as finalists. We’ll announce this as soon as we can after tallying and confirming votes. Finalists are then scored for their online reputation. Specifically, we’ll capture the previous 12 calendar months of reviews leading up to February 15, 2023.

Announcing the Winners

Once all the data is in, we’ll announce the winners at our Best of Mile High Awards Ceremony, tentatively scheduled for the evening of April 6, 2023 in the Denver area.

Now let’s kick this party off with some nominations!

Best of Mile High is an awards contest that is owned and operated by Inbound Systems.

Kicking Off Our First Best of Mile High Awards!

Brodie Tyler on December 6, 2022

This has been a long, long road for us. We were poised to launch Best of Mile High in 2020, but then we ran into a slight hiccup. Not sure if you heard about it, but there was a little thing called COVID-19 that came along and shut us down for a while.

As the old Heinz Ketchup commercials used to say… good things come to those who wait.

At Inbound Systems, we are happy to announce that the wait is over! Tomorrow we are launching the nomination round of our first-ever Best of Mile High Awards, an annual awards program to highlight and recognize the best companies and places in the Denver area.

With well over 200 categories, we have just about every business-to-consumer niche covered. Some of our more popular categories will include restaurants, auto repair, entertainment spots, health and beauty businesses, and places to shop.

How Does It Work?

Local residents first have the opportunity to nominate their favorite businesses and places in the Denver area. From there, we will narrow it down to the top ten nominees.

Those nominees will again be presented to local residents to vote upon. The top vote-getters will also be scored based on their Google reviews for the last year, as well as their BBB rating to ensure that no bad apples get through.

This will leave us with the top three finalists in each category, from which we’ll announce the winners in April.

We really put these candidates through the ringer because of one simple goal… to reveal the truly best that Mile High has to offer.

Are You a Candidate?

Help get the word out to your customers, family, and friends. The more votes you have, the more likely you will come out a winner.

Just keep in mind that votes aren’t the end-all-be-all. Your Google reviews over the previous twelve months should be as spectacular as possible.

For more information on the awards program, be sure to check out these two pages:

Get Involved!

We operate these awards with a very small team and on a very conservative budget. If you’d like to get involved, the best way to support Best of Mile High is to become a sponsor. The best part is, sponsorships start at just $100!

If interested, please contact us and let us know.