The winners of the Norfolk Business Awards 2020 will be announced on social media tomorrow, with a cohort reflecting a business community that has shone through in the most challenging of years.

Launching, growing and maintaining a successful business is an almost impossible task at the best of times.

If it were easy everyone would do it.

The truth is that behind every triumph is 1pc great idea and 99pc blood, sweat and tears. And the last few years have been anything but normal.

The business community has been on tenterhooks since 2016. It matters not which way anyone voted in the hugely divisive Brexit referendum now but the uncertainty that it has caused business rumbles on.

And yet this region’s business community continues to prosper.

In January came more unwelcome news as a then little understood outbreak of some strange illness in China began to spread. No one could have predicted the wave of chaos and destructive that engulfed each and every one of us in the intervening months.

Yes there are reasons to be hopeful, there is a faint light at the end of a still very considerable tunnel. But 2020 was as much about survival as growth.

And yet, again, this region’s business community hunkered down and got to work – even if more often than not it was on a Zoom call from the living room with the cat obscuring the camera.

Never before in peacetime has Norfolk’s businesses faced such a challenge.

I was flabbergasted by the quality of entries this year. In what has been a unremittingly bleak year these awards proved a very bright point.

Your stories, your endeavours your sheer hard graft is truly inspiring.

So, congratulations – you are the very best of the very best.

The winners will be revealed from 8am-2pm tomorrow, so keep your eyes on our social media channels – follow #NBA2020 for all the news and reaction – and the Eastern Daily Press website on the big day.

After 30 years of the Norfolk Business Awards, we are more grateful then ever to all our category sponsors and the headline sponsor Barclays for their continued support in this strangest of year. Without their support we would not have been able to honour so many incredible achievements.

In January we will be releasing a series of videos featuring all of our winners. So please do keep an eye out for that across our social media channels and on our website.

Things will improve. Life and business will get back to normal. And we will all be even stronger for this struggle.

Congratulations to all our nominees and winners.