Who stands
behind the seal.
We ask every business we award to stand on a dated public record. It’s only fair that we do the same. Two people run the Centurion Awards — here is who we are, why we built this, and how we make money.
Most “best of” awards are a sales funnel.
We wanted a scoreboard.
Local recognition comes in two flavors, and operators resent both. Newspaper vote drives, where the title goes to whoever has the biggest mailing list. And pay-to-play badge mills that sell “recognition” to anyone with a credit card, where the $499 buys the selection itself and nobody ever looked at the business. The scheme is common enough that the Better Business Bureau publishes a guide to spotting it.
Both models fail everyone at once. Customers can’t trust the signal, so they ignore it. Good operators either pay the toll, chase the votes, or watch a worse business buy the title. And every badge that gets sold makes the real thing worth a little less.
Our answer is deliberately boring: a bar published in plain language, applied to public evidence, the same way for every business in a market — with a dated record behind every award that anyone can check. Best of your town, on the evidence.
Two people, not a faceless directory.
Every claim below links somewhere you can verify it. That is the whole point of the thing we sell.
Nick Jones
Co-founder · Flagstaff, Arizona
Nick co-founded Freaky Foot Tours with his mother in Flagstaff in 2015. The haunted-history walking-tour company now runs in three Arizona cities and holds a 4.9 rating across more than 1,000 public reviews. He built its website and its digital marketing himself: last year the site earned 2.6 million search impressions and 28,000 organic visits from Google — in a market where national booking platforms usually own the entire first page.
Launching things is the career. He talked his way onto Uber’s early expansion team with a five-page cold email arguing they should come to Arizona; they flew him to San Francisco and hired him. He went on to launch more than 15 markets across North America and Latin America for Uber and Lime, led expansion into three new states at Sealed, and has advised more than 30 startups on operations and growth. In March 2020 he founded Eat Sleep Launch Repeat, a web design and digital strategy studio, and spent its first year helping hometown Flagstaff businesses stay findable while their doors were shut.
He has also won the other kind of award. Freaky Foot Tours has taken a newspaper vote-drive “best of” title more than once, and each win arrived as a certificate for the window with nothing a customer could check online. No page, no record, no proof. Anyone with a printer could claim the same thing. That gap is why the Centurion Awards exist.
Nick answers the same inbox you do — the one that fills up every morning with strangers selling SEO packages, website rebuilds, and badges. This program is built to be the opposite of those emails.
Brendan Tobin
Co-founder · Data & security
Brendan has spent more than a decade telling real from fake on the internet. He built data and security systems at Credit Karma, Figure, and Scale AI, co-founded a Y Combinator fintech, and today advises online platforms on fraud: bot attacks, fake accounts, review manipulation, deepfakes, identity verification. He studied engineering at the University of Arizona and Stanford.
Not all of it happened at a keyboard. In San Francisco he helped found a community benefit district, a neighborhood nonprofit that local property owners vote to create and fund through an assessment on their own buildings. It pays for things like street cleaning and safety, and it only exists if the people footing the bill agree to it. So the job was meeting after meeting with local business owners and community members, then a formal city process at the end. Convincing a street of shopkeepers is very different work from catching bots, and it’s how he got to know the kind of business owner this program is built for.
The fraud work is the reason the Centurion bar looks the way it does. After a decade of watching every trick used to manufacture credibility online, he built the evaluation around the signals a real business earns over time and a fake one cannot counterfeit: years in operation, a sustained online presence, an established customer track record, customers and a community that vouch for it, and recognition in the town’s own conversation about itself.
He also built the site you are reading, every page of it, from the winner records to the evaluation engine behind them. When something breaks, he’s the one who fixes it.
What the seal means when you see it.
If you are reading this because a business in your town displays a Centurion Award, here is exactly what it tells you — and what it doesn’t.
Nobody voted
The award is not a poll. It cannot be won by mobilizing an email list, a family, or a following. Every business in scope is evaluated against the same five published criteria, whether or not it ever heard of us.
Nobody paid for it
No fee, sponsorship, or relationship can move a business over the bar.
You can check it
Every award links to a dated winner page showing what was verified and when. If we revoke an award for cause, we will say so on that page and date the notice. Awards that come down for ordinary reasons, like a closure, a sale, a rename, or the owner asking us to, simply leave the index.
Treat the seal the way you would treat a recommendation from a friend who checks things: a strong signal, with a record behind it. It is not an inspection, a license, or a guarantee — use your own judgment, the way you always have.
We run websites for a living.
The award is the signal. The winner page is the asset — and it is built by people who do this work for their own businesses.
Between the two of us: a small-business site that holds its own in a crowded local market, and a decade of data and security work behind some of the largest fintech sites in the country. So a Centurion winner page gets the standard we hold our own sites to. It leads with the dated record of what was verified and when, published under your name, built to load fast, marked up so people and machines can both read it, and written so a reader can tell what you do and where to find you. It links to your site the way award coverage carries a link.
And no hoops on your side. No essays, no judging rounds, no vote-chasing. The evaluation is the real work, and we already did it on public evidence before you ever heard from us. From application to a live winner page is typically one business day.
Checking costs nothing
Most established businesses with several years of operation and a healthy review record are in range. The check is free and private, it takes about a minute, and your result is yours — if you don’t clear the bar, nothing is published, and we won’t publish a page off your check unless you ask us to.
Ask us the hard ones.
A skeptic is exactly the reader this page is written for.
One of your own businesses holds this award. Isn’t that a conflict?
Freaky Foot Tours — Nick’s company — is a published Centurion winner, and we would rather tell you than have you discover it. It went through the same automated evaluation as every other business in its market: same criteria, same weights, same bar. A human reviewer can correct a misidentified business or ask for a scan to be re-run, and every manual change to a result is stored beside the automatic one with a written reason in the audit log.
Its winner page carries the same dated verification record as every other, and it faces the same January re-evaluation. If it stops clearing the bar, it lapses like anyone else’s.
So how do you make money?
The straight answer, because you should ask. Nominating is free, and so is being evaluated.
When a business clears the bar and chooses to put the award on the public record, it pays a $199 processing fee. That fee covers the work behind a published win: producing and publishing the winner page and award kit, and hosting them. It is refunded in full if the application isn’t approved. Auto-renewal is optional at checkout; pay once and nothing recurs, and a cancellation never takes the page down. The evaluation is finished before any payment is even possible, so the fee cannot buy an outcome, and no business ever pays us unless it’s listed. That is the entire model.
Why should I trust two people I’ve never heard of?
Don’t, on our say-so. Read the criteria before you decide anything — they are published in plain language, and they are the gate. Pull up any winner page and check the evidence against what you know about that business. Follow the links in our bios above and see whether the work is real.
We keep the exact data points and thresholds internal for one reason: every “best of” service that publishes its rubric gets gamed within months, and then the badge means nothing. Everything else about how this works is on the site.
“A town’s best businesses deserve a signal that isn’t for sale.” — Nick Jones & Brendan Tobin, Founders