"Having looked at that, then having been nominated and winning it, what it did was validate our mission. We're one of the smallest companies that won this," he said. "It made us feel really validated, like we were in good company."

VitalSmarts has won numerous awards within its own industry. The company recently was named ISA's 2008 Business of the Year. But, Switzler said, the Entrepreneur of the Year award stands out.

"We're writers, teachers," he said of himself and his colleagues at VitalSmarts. "(The ISA award) is like being nominated by your peers to be the best. You look at that, and it's our peers, and it's really nice, but Entrepreneur of the Year is business people, so it's not just our content that gave us that award. It's our business. It validated a lot of people in our company, and we didn't even know its national and international reach then."

Now in its 22nd year, the EOY award program recognizes business leaders in more than 135 cities in 50 countries. Companies often are nominated by those with whom they have client relationships — such as a financial adviser or someone who hopes to be a firm's financial adviser.

But regardless of how an entrepreneur is nominated, he or she cannot receive the EOY award unless judges — many of them past winners and all accomplished entrepreneurs themselves — see sustained innovation, financial performance and personal commitment both to the business and the community.

Switzler noted that there are many ways to achieve that success, and the 2008 finalists bear him out.

There's American Name Services' Jill Grammer-Williams, who in the early days of her business would disguise her voice when answering the telephone to conceal the fact that her list brokerage firm was only a one-woman show. Now, of course, it's much more than that.

Or there's R&O Construction's Orluff Opheikens, who, in the face of a massive 1970s recession, reinvented his residential construction company as a state-of-the-art commercial builder that now works in 16 Western states.

John Hansen, Al Tiley, Sally Tiley and Diane Williams bought a struggling, debt-ridden manufacturer of branded surrounds for automatic-teller machines and turned Companion Systems into a flourishing, profitable concern that has achieved record profits in each of the last several years.

Travis Parashonts combined his love for his American Indian tribe, the Cedar Band of Paiutes, with his business savvy to create Suh'dutsing Technologies, a successful tribe-owned provider of information technology services and products.