I almost didn't apply.
That's the honest version of this story, and it felt important to start there rather than skip straight to the good news.
The UK Small Business Awards has a category for home-based businesses. My immediate reaction was the one I suspect most small business owners know well: a kind of reflexive dismissal dressed up as pragmatism. There are so many applicants. There are businesses that have been going longer, grown faster, done more. Why would they choose us?
That voice is very convincing. It has a lot of practice.
But I sat with it for a while, and then I started writing the application anyway.
The process of applying for something like this is strange and clarifying in equal measure. You have to articulate things you've never had to put into words before - what the business actually is, what it stands for, where it's going. You have to make a case for yourself to a panel of strangers who don't know your story, can't see your studio, and have no particular reason to care.
One of the questions asked what obstacles I'd encountered. I wrote about time and energy - the particular challenge of running a business while teaching full time, coming home after a long day and switching into a completely different mode. There have been evenings where exhaustion won. But most evenings, the candles got made.
Another question asked about impact on customers. I found myself writing about a woman who ordered wedding favours, messaged when they arrived to say how much she loved them, and then came back months later for baby shower gifts. She didn't have to come back. She could have gone anywhere. But she did, and for two of the most personal occasions in her life. That's the bit that sticks. No five-star review comes close to what that actually means.
And then there was the question about recent achievements, which turned out to be the hardest one to answer - not because there was nothing to say, but because it meant looking honestly at how much has happened in a relatively short time. A complete rebrand. A new website, written and built from scratch. The Grove launched as a content space. New product lines developed. None of it came from an agency or a budget. All of it came from late nights and a genuine belief that this business is worth building properly.
Writing it all down made me realise how much I'd been carrying without fully acknowledging it.
There was one question I kept coming back to: why did you start? I wrote about needing something that was entirely my own. Teaching is a job I care about deeply, but it doesn't leave much room for personal creativity. When I relocated to the Wirral, I wanted to build something from scratch - on my own terms, driven by passion rather than curriculum. Candle making gave me back a creative outlet I hadn't realised I was missing.
That's still true. It's more true now than it was at the beginning.
And then the email arrived.
We've been shortlisted for Best Home Based Business.
I read it twice.
I'm not sure what I expected to feel. Relief, maybe, that the application hadn't disappeared into a void. But it was more than that. It was the particular feeling of having put something real out into the world and had it received - not just acknowledged, but considered. That doesn't happen often enough in small business life, where most of the work happens quietly and without much external recognition.
I don't know what comes next. The shortlist is the shortlist, and whatever happens from here is out of my hands. But I'm glad I applied. I'm glad I didn't listen to that voice that said it wasn't worth trying - the same voice that shows up when you're pricing a product, or launching something new, or deciding whether a one-person home-based business can really compete. It hasn't gone away entirely. But it gets a little quieter every time you ignore it.
If you run a small business and there's something you've been putting off entering or applying for because you've already talked yourself out of it - this is your nudge. The worst that happens is nothing. And sometimes, something happens instead.
Thank you to everyone who has bought a candle, left a review, shared a post, or sent a kind message. You're the reason there was a story worth telling in the first place.
Three Trees Candle Co. has been shortlisted for Best Home Based Business at the UK Small Business Awards 2026. Wish us luck.