Portsmouth company Paraffin awarded the Queen's Award for Enterprise

Paraffin Ltd has won The Queen’s Award for Enterprise 2021, particularly for outstanding short term growth in the international trade category.

The awards are given to UK businesses every year to recognise outstanding achievements in four categories: innovation, international trade, sustainable development and promoting opportunity through social mobility.

At the ceremony which took place at Portsmouth Guildhall on Monday, October 25, managing director Pam Hamilton was presented the award by the Lord Lieutenant of Hampshire Nigel Atkinson.

The ceremony was also attended by the Lord Mayor and Lady Mayoress of Portsmouth.

Paraffin works with international companies to provide training and capability programmes, aiming to ‘supercharge people’ and helping businesses and individuals work better together to create positive change in the world.

The company has also worked with The Hive Portsmouth for the last five years to create a workshop method called Project Bridge, which ‘brings together the local authority, the voluntary and community sector and cross-party elected members with local residents to solve some of the most important priorities.’

Project Bridge is now used within local communities across the UK, and has been applied to help tackle social issues such as rough sleeping, childhood obesity and employability for those affected by the Grenfell tragedy.

Mr Atkinson said: ‘From the experience of other award winners, it will just move the company into another sphere, and internationally particularly.’

‘Where there are only 205 winners across the country shows just how special Paraffin are.’

‘From my eight years of presenting the Queen’s Awards, I'd expect Paraffin to just grow and grow. Having a Portsmouth company win is very important because it will help the city enormously.’

Pam said it’s ‘awesome’ to receive such a prestigious award and she is honoured that Paraffin has been recognised as a small, independent business. After moving her business from London down to Portsmouth, she is proud to be a part of the city’s industry.

She said: ‘Portsmouth is the exact right size. It’s big enough to have businesses but also small enough that things get done. It’s an innovative and positive place, and I thoroughly enjoy that.’

‘The reason why I started my own business is because I wanted to work in a positive and collaborative way, and I know it could be possible without people being disrespectful of each other’s time or not working very nicely together.’

‘As we’ve built it, my team have made sure that we all kept positive, collaboration behaviours, we all respect each other and work flexibly together and I’m so glad we’ve managed to achieve this and grow without losing our intention, and I intend to keep going that way, so hopefully we can lead by example to other people too.’

To find out more about Paraffin’s work and for free workshop resources, visit paraffin.ltd.