Mayor Chris Goertzen, Fred Hiebert and Chamber President Keith Unger

United Transportation Driver Training has been named Business Of The Year by Steinbach Chamber of Commerce. The award was handed out Thursday night. Owner Fred Hiebert's reaction was, "I'm speechless. To catch a Hiebert that's speechless, that's amazing." He adds "it just means the world to me. It tells me what kind of a team I have. Because this isn't built on one person only. This is built on a second to none team."

Hiebert says he started the business four and a half years ago working out of his basement. "I bought one truck, one trailer of course and I thought I would be a happy man for the rest of my life." And today, Hiebert says he's "trying to build this to a standard that I could be proud of and still go home and sleep at night. And we have not reached that standard and we will never reach that standard, it's too high. But that just means we're just going to keep on striving and striving."

There were other awards handed out last night. The Community Involvement Award went to Funk's Toyota, Future Leader Award was given to Justin Schinkel and the Customer Service Award was handed to Supersplash.

Cam Bergen from the Chamber sat on this year's nomination committee. He says the process changed this year. "Two things we did is bring simplicity and transparency to the process," says Bergen. "What we did is we reached out to the business community forming a selection committee made up of business representatives. So we had businesses honouring businesses."

Bergen says in years past there was a lengthy process consisting of a booklet, financial review, interview and questionnaire. But this year they broke that down into a few categories and put the voting online. "We've had more nominations, more voting, more response from the public," says Bergen. "And I was able to talk to all the winners tonight who all appreciated the simplicity to the process. So we're happy. We consider it a success."

The awards were handed out at this year's Annual General Meeting. Chamber President Keith Unger says the last year "was a year of trimming. We think it was a successful year. We needed to free up some resources and focus on some of the value added activities and make sure that what we're doing is benefiting our membership."