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The most common safety risks that we come across in our daily work around bicycle safety, technology and operating instructions are also published by us in articles in the leading German special-interest magazines TOUR (Europe's road bike magazine no. 1), BIKE (Europe's mountain bike magazine no. 1), MYBIKE and EMTB in order to make this information, which is important for the industry, available to a wider public.

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News

SAZbike 2018/10/10
Reading time 3:00 minutes

Zedler-Group awarded with business prize

The Zedler-Group was awarded with the business prize “Großer Preis des Mittelstandes 2018“ (Grand Prix of Small and Medium Business 2018) presented by the Oskar-Patzelt-Foundation. Both economic success as well as social commitment were the decisive factors.

As proud as a peacock? At the fifth attempt Dirk Zedler won the coveted trophy.

This year it ‘s already for the fifth time that Zedler-Group has been nominated for the Grand Prix of Small and Medium Business. In 2016 they had already reached the final. All the greater is the joy that the company group finally received the “Grand Prix of Small and Medium Business” award in 2018. The competition is under the patronage of Dr. Nicole Hoffmeister-Kraut, Baden-Wuerttemberg’s Minister for Economic Affairs, Work and Housing.

According to the company, the award was presented for an innovative business model and the operations management of strongly increasing the owner’s capital share during an enormous growth while binding the employees for many years at the same time. Dirk Zedler’s comment on the ceremony: “This award is a great gift for our 25th company anniversary and confirms once again our performance. At the same time it is a motivation to present us with innovative ideas and entrepreneurship in the industry and to continuously further develop our business fields.”

Under the motto “Shaping the Future” the Awards Gala of the Oskar-Patzelt-Foundation took place on the occasion of the 24th competition for the competitive German federal states Baden-Wuerttemberg, Hesse, Bavaria and Thuringia. During the evening, the executive board members of the Oskar-Patzelt-Foundation, Dr. Helfried Schmidt and Petra Troeger, presented the statue to 14 companies, four of which are from Baden-Wuerttemberg. All winners prevailed over 2,436 competitors which had been nominated in the four competing regions. All in all 4,917 small and medium-sized companies as well as banks and local communities had been nominated nationwide for the competition in 2018.

In the “Grand Prix of Small and Medium Business” competition the evaluation of companies is not only based on business criteria, but in their entirety as company including their role in society. “Zedler-Institut is possibly the smallest major corporation in the world and has shown a double-digit growth for many years in succession”, Gunther Jahnke of Jahnke & Hofmann Partnerschaft Steuerberatungsgesellschaft justifies the nomination and continues: “It is not only the economic success that characterises Zedler-Group, it is also their commitment to social and sustainable issues - on a local level as well as worldwide. In addition to an educational partnership with three schools in the vicinity, the group has also been donating bicycles for Africa for years.”

The criteria framed by the foundation are that the companies must be innovative, that they should abide by proven principles and pass them on to the next generation. The companies should act with strong values, clear strategy and high flexibility, partly over the course of several generations by mastering crises as well as structural changes. In addition, the candidates were expected to care about people, to hereby maintain the social peace and to stabilize nearby regions and economic cycles every day. According to the foundation, the companies in the competition were not only considered under individual business aspects, but in their entirety as company including their role in society.

In the laudatio it was pointed out among other things that the Zedler-Group was strongly committed to encouraging the next generation of young talents. That is to say they were involved in joint research projects with colleges and universities, offering internships and supporting final theses. School classes were also regularly guided through the workshop, the laboratory and the bicycle museum.

Thanks to the fact that they were dealing fair with their staff, there were low fluctuation within the team of the Zedler-Group; in addition, the company would maintain an educational partnership with three schools where they had installed a bicycle workshop. The objective pursued is to provide support to special care kids and teenagers from disadvantaged social backgrounds. On the international level the company would provide support in form of donations of the most different kinds, e.g. for the project “Bicycles for Africa”, Greenpeace and “Doctors without borders” as well as for three godchildren in India, the Senegal and Ecuador.

Author: Tillman Lambert
Photo: Boris Löffert

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