An overflow crowd gathered at Richmond Hill City Center Thursday night to recognize the very best that Bryan County has to offer.

From a slice of pizza to getting your oil changed to financial planners, Bryan’s Favorites basically is your best advice to your neighbors. It’s a handy guides to services, events and people, all in one place, of what makes Bryan County the special place it is to live, work, worship and recreate.

You picked your favorites by going to the Bryan County News website and registering to vote. Some 17,000 ballots were cast, which amounts to about half of Bryan County’s population.

The takeaway here is pretty important. It provides bragging rights for the winners — and rightly so — but it is also a promotional tool for those winners, as you’ll see in the advertisements throughout this publication and the certificates hung behind the counters or in offices of your favorites.

If so many people think such and such is their favorite so and so, there must be a reason. It is an incentive for you to take your business to them and an incentive for them to prove they are worthy of votes by providing a better customer experience.

Many of the winners also do more than just the activity they won for. They are involved in the community in a number of ways, from philanthropic activities to supporting youth recreation to serving on municipal bodies. It’s all geared toward helping the community that allows them to pursue their dreams and make a living.

One such person is Randy Bocook, the title sponsor of the event, who won several awards and dedicated his time at the event to the Pregnancy Care Center of Richmond Hill.

The evening began with a special presentation of the Local Hero award, given posthumously to Mark Hummeldorf. Mark was a former Marine and Parris Island firefighter who we lost in a car accident shortly before Thanksgiving. On hand to accept the award was Angie Hummeldorf, a teacher and head softball coach at Richmond Hill High School.

A hard copy of Bryan’s Favorites 2018 was in Thursday’s paper, but you can also see it online at: https://bit.ly/2GJhApw

Enjoy the photos of the evening.