MCC Partners Is Through to the Gravesham Business Awards 2026 Finals

A short one this week, and a slightly self-indulgent one, so I will keep it brief.

MCC Partners is through to the finals of the Gravesham Business Awards 2026. We are one of 33 businesses from across the borough that put an entry in this year, and we are genuinely pleased to be in among them.

We do not normally write about ourselves here. The blog is usually a VAT threshold or a director’s loan account, and it will be back to that next week. But this one felt worth marking, mostly because of who else is on the list.

What the Gravesham Business Awards actually are

If you run a business locally and have not come across them, they are worth knowing about. The awards have been running since at least 2018, and they exist to recognise businesses across the Gravesham borough — not the big national names, but the firms and charities that actually employ people here.

There are fourteen categories in 2026, and the spread tells you something about the local economy: Hospitality, High Street Business, Manufacturing, Rural, Innovation, Digital Marketing, Cyber Resilience, Environmental Sustainability, Family Owned, Youth Owned, Health and Wellbeing, Community Business, Not for Profit, and Professional and Consulting. There is also an Apprentice of the Year award, and a People’s Choice category voted on by the public rather than the judges — that one drew 3,020 votes this year, which for a borough of our size is a real turnout.

The charity of the year for 2026 is ellenor, the hospice at Northfleet. If you have lived in this part of Kent for any length of time, you will know someone whose family they have looked after.

What we put in our entry

Not much that will surprise anyone who has sat across a desk from us.

MCC Partners was set up on a fairly simple idea: that every business deserves to be spoken to in plain English by people who are actually interested in whether it does well. That is it. No jargon, no talking down to people, no annual meeting where the client nods along to something they have not understood and then leaves.

In practice it means we spend a lot of time on the unglamorous end — explaining what a payment on account is, why the VAT threshold is not the number people think it is, what a company car actually costs once the benefit in kind is in. Most of what we get thanked for is not clever tax planning. It is somebody finally understanding their own numbers.

Why local recognition matters when you are picking an accountant

Here is the part that is genuinely relevant to you rather than to us.

Choosing an accountant is difficult because you cannot easily judge the work. You do not know whether your return was filed well or merely filed. You will not find out for years, if ever. So people fall back on proxies — a recommendation from someone they trust, how the first meeting felt, whether the fee was explained properly.

Local awards are another one of those proxies, and not a perfect one. But entering means putting your work in front of a panel of local judges who have no particular reason to be kind, and it means standing next to your competitors in public. Two other Gravesend accountancy practices and a financial services firm on Saddington Street are in the same list this year. That is a reasonable test of whether a firm believes its own marketing.

The wider point: the businesses on that list of 33 are the local economy. A vineyard at Luddesdown, a bakery that grew out of somebody’s house, a martial arts club, two care providers, a recruitment firm, a solicitor, a takeaway that has been feeding Gravesend for twenty years. Between them they employ a lot of Kent people. When we talk about SME clients on this blog, that is who we mean, and it is a fair reminder of why the compliance and cash flow work we do matters.

What happens next

The judging is done and the People’s Choice vote has closed. Everything else is settled on the gala night, so we do not know the outcome any earlier than anyone else does — the categories are announced from the stage.

We will let you know how we get on either way. If it goes well, expect one more short post and then silence on the subject. If it does not, we will mention that too, because a blog that only reports its own good news is not worth reading.

Thank you

Mostly this is a thank you to our clients. An entry like this is really just a description of work done for other people, and every example in ours came from a business that trusted us with their books when they did not have to. Some of you have been with us since the beginning. A few of you voted. We appreciate it.

And if you are one of the other 32 — good luck. We will see you on the night.