September 13 , 2005

Is the Hall a hall for all?

By the time you sit down in your bathroom to read this column, there will be little more than a month remaining to get excited for the 2005 Business Hall of Fame Dinner.

This year’s event, set for October 17 th at the Blair County Convention Center, is the sixteenth time that The Chamber has created a venue for recognizing the many outstanding businesses located here. It has been the model of consistency. If you attended the very first dinner in 1990, lapsed into a coma for, say, fourteen years and showed-up last October, you’d be hard-pressed to find significant differences in format or pageantry.

Whether or not consistency is a good thing in the realm of Hall of Fame ambience is secondary to the value of consistency in the selection process for the awards themselves. Real business enthusiasts will tolerate the same crab-dip and cheese chunks for fifteen years. Give them cause to question the validity of the award-selection process and they’ll be gone in five minutes.

Mindful of that, the Hall of Fame Steering Committee has a plethora of checks and balances at its disposal to assure that everything stays on the up-and-up. The committee possesses just the right mix of integrity and paranoia. They’ve even assigned someone to pour the kool-aid should anything unseemly occur.

Over the course of fifteen years, it would stand to reason that some miscalculation in tallying-up the votes or mailing-out an application form in a timely manner would cause a chink in the committee’s armor. If something like that has happened, it pre-dates me. And I’ve been at The Chamber for eight years. In a world where shortcuts and suspect behavior too often abound, the Business Hall of Fame Committee has adhered to the same high standards on which the Hall of Fame was originally founded.

The job, however, becomes tougher. Two backburner issues have moved front-and-center and the committee is in the early stages of addressing both. In the case of the first – determining a permanent site for the Hall of Fame – the committee simply grew weary of letting that issue twist in the wind. So it did what all committees do when they don’t have any idea of a rational solution. It issued a survey.

The response to the survey was so encouraging that the committee is now issuing another survey. If one survey is good, then two must be better. I’ll have to get back to you on that one.

The second issue of concern could actually be a blessing in disguise. Each year that the Hall of Fame awards have been presented, five businesses have been inducted. In 2005, there will be only three. The reason? The panel of independent judges felt that despite the fact that there were several businesses that applied, only three fit the Hall’s arduous criteria.

At first blush, it may seem like a cold slap in the face to the businesses that applied but were not selected. In actuality, the judges sent a clear message that should not be misinterpreted. That message emphasizes the importance of applicants telling their story in an accurate and thorough manner. As one judge told me later, if a question on the application was unanswered, the application was immediately removed from consideration.

The list of 2005 applicants contained several businesses that clearly belong in the Hall of Fame, based on their records of accomplishment. Many simply failed to include enough pertinent information. To someone familiar with the business landscape in Blair County, that might not have mattered. To a panel of judges from outside Blair County, it was essential.

There is a line of thinking that after fifteen years, the “deserving” businesses have already been admitted to the Hall of Fame and any inductees from this point forward severely waters-down the institution . In reality, people in the community would be amazed by the number of outstanding businesses that are still on the outside looking-in. A large number of them haven’t met the requirement of being in business for at least twenty-five years. Others have been nominated for several years but haven’t submitted applications recently because previous attempts had not yielded induction.

As the Blair County business community continues to grow and diversify, one thing is for certain: We will never arrive at a point where we no longer have qualified candidates for the Hall of Fame.

That’s a comforting thought. Pass the crab-dip.

Past Chamber Notes

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