Cabinetmaker named entrepreneur of the year

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This article was published 27/10/2018 (2531 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Manitoba’s entrepreneur of the year is a cabinetmaker and antique finisher who tears down barns and fashions them into furniture.

Blayne Wyton, 39, of Prairie Barnwood in Morden, was bestowed the Entrepreneur of the Year honour at the Manitoba Business Awards of the Year ceremony Friday night at the Fairmont Hotel. The awards are organized by the Manitoba Chamber of Commerce.

In addition to business, Wyton has provided humanitarian aid to widows and orphans in villages of rural India, including raising funds to build a farm that employs widows there.

Finalists were Hillary Proctor, Leaf Landscaping Inc., Karen Swystun and Fred Loewen of Waterford Global Inc.

Other winners included:

● Outstanding Large Business — SkipTheDishes was founded in 2012 by brothers Chris and Joshua Simair, who left their traditional careers to launch a Prairie tech startup offering Canadians a better way to order restaurant food through online delivery. The founding group also included another Simair brother, Daniel, and two university friends, Jeff Adamson and Andrew Chau. Skip established its Winnipeg headquarters in 2013 and it is one of city’s largest private sector employers, with 2,000 employees.

Other finalists were Hylife Ltd. and Westman Communications Group.

● Outstanding Medium Business — Keystone Western Inc., based in Grande Pointe, is a long-distance trucking logistics company. Keystone also offers freight forwarding services, logistics audits, shipment lane costing and carrier optimization across North America.

Other finalists were Vomar Industries Inc. (Tank Traders) and McNally Robinson Booksellers.

● Outstanding Small Business — Sycamore Energy Inc. of Winnipeg is a vertically integrated renewable energy design and installation firm. Its owners have been involved in the renewable energy sector for over 12 years. Sycamore Energy Inc. has over 30 years of residential, commercial and agricultural experience in the areas of solar photovoltaics, electrical, structural, design and sales.

Other finalists were Brockie Donovan Funeral Home & Cremation Services and The Sneath Group in Brandon.

● Lieutenant Governor Awards — Individual — Abdo (Albert) El Tassi is president and CEO of Peerless Garments, and a well-known philanthropist. For more than 45 years, he has worked closely with Department of National Defence staff working on the design and development of specialized garments for the military.

● Lieutenant-Governor Awards — Business — StandardAero, founded in 2011, is one of the aerospace industry’s largest independent maintenance, repair and overhaul providers. It employs 1,300 people in Winnipeg and 6,000 worldwide.

● Outstanding Social Enterprise — Manitoba Museum is the province’s largest, not-for-profit heritage and science centre. It holds more than 2.8 million artifacts and specimens, including 27,133 artifacts from the internationally renowned Hudson’s Bay Company Museum Collection.

Other finalists were Building Urban Industries for Local Development (BUILD) Inc. and NorWest Co-op Community Health Centre.

● Outstanding Long-term Achievement — Barkman Concrete has been an innovator and industry leader in precast concrete manufacturing. It started as a small septic tank-producing operation in Steinbach and is now a company that offers the most diverse, quality-tested precast product line for residential, commercial, and agricultural applications in Canada.

Other finalists were The North West Company and Triple E Canada Ltd.

Return to Work Award sponsored by Workers Compensation Board — Federated Cooperatives Ltd., Winnipeg Distribution Centre.