June 7, 2026
Fifteen years ago, the Admin Awards started right here in Dallas with an idea, a ballroom I was terrified I'd never fill, and absolutely no clue what I was getting myself into.
Since then, thousands of Administrative Professionals have walked our red carpets. Across 27,000 nominations and 10 host cities, executives have shared what makes their Admins indispensable in ways that have made us laugh and cry.
So, as we celebrate 15 years of the Admin Awards, I'm sharing 15 stories: some of my favorite memories, things we've learned along the way and a few things that still surprise me. All part of this crazy, wonderful journey. We're counting down from 15.
15. We planned our first Gala aware that people might not come.
When I went to the Westin Galleria to confirm our event space 15 years ago, I chose a ballroom that held 300 people.
I remember thinking, If nobody shows up, we'll just spread out the tables and hopefully it won't look too sparse. We sold out within a week. 310 people attended year one. We made grown men cry.
And the idea that public recognition of Administrative Professionals was long overdue was cemented early on by Brint Ryan, CEO of Ryan, who wrote:
“Cheryl Portillo could literally run my company in my absence.”
In that inaugural year, 2012, Cheryl would go on to make history as the first Colleen Barrett Award for Administrative Excellence Winner. And we went on to make history as the world's first public recognition program for Administrative Professionals.
14. The Admin Award was almost a glass superhero cape.
Shannon Smock, Executive Assistant, Hunt Consolidated
True story.
The original concept for the Admin Award was a crystal cape.
Early on, as I began building the Admin Awards, I assembled an advisory board, and they politely explained that if we wanted this thing to be taken seriously, as it should be, perhaps handing Winners a superhero cape wasn't the way to go!
Fair.
The award you see today is loosely shaped like an A, and each one is hand-crafted by artists from a glassblowing studio in Texas.
13. I spent months writing an email that Colleen Barrett answered in about an hour.
Before we had even launched the Admin Awards, I wanted our most prestigious honor to be named after Colleen Barrett, the legendary President and COO of Southwest Airlines who began her career as a secretary.
I obsessed over the email asking her to participate in something that had never been done before — a public recognition of Admins. I wrote it. Rewrote it. Probably rewrote it again.
She responded within about an hour with an enthusiastic YES!
She loved the idea.
Then terror set in. Colleen Barrett would lend her name to our cause — I could not screw this up!
12. The Winner who taught us what “above and beyond” really means.
In 2017, an Executive Assistant at Wells Fargo Dealer Services named Alia Morgan was nominated for an Admin Award.
As we got closer to the Gala, our team kept trying to reach her for her headshot and bio. No response to emails or calls, which was highly unusual. She had won her award category, the Above the Call Award, so we knew there had to be more to her silence.
We soon learned why.
Alia had Stage 4 cancer and was undergoing treatment at MD Anderson in Houston. And yet, whenever she physically could, she was still showing up for work.
Alia's boss, Greg, wrote this in her nomination:
“Over a year ago Alia was diagnosed with Stage 4 colorectal cancer. This was a shock to her, her family and her family at work. The pain and toll on her body that over 20 chemotherapy treatments and medications have caused, she remains focused.
The item that upsets her the most is the time she might miss having to go to MD Anderson or side effects of treatment. She says the tears she has cried with me are about guilt of the time she has let me or work down.
She has never let me down. She has never disappointed me or anyone at work.
We have gained strength from Alia. We all love her and want her cured. She is currently on an experimental trial at MD Anderson and she reports to work every day she can. The pain sometimes sends her home early. We have a signal that she only has to let me see it and I know she is going home. We don't say it out loud, she tells me she can't continue the day with that signal. We text throughout the rest of the day.
What's above and beyond is her commitment to us, not the job, the calendar or answering a call. Her exceptional customer service is fighting and knowing we love her and pray for her.”
We gave Greg permission to let her know that she had won an Admin Award. She was overcome with emotion and so incredibly proud that a career she poured herself into was being recognized in a way she never imagined.
Alia passed away shortly before the Admin Awards.
Greg, her husband Heath and her son Kyle came to the Admin Awards to accept her award on her behalf.
There wasn't a dry eye in the ballroom.
Watch the video
And later that same day, at Alia's memorial, her Admin Award sat beside her photograph for all who loved her to see.
Nine years later, I still think about Alia, and how, while she battled cancer from a hospital bed, she was still worrying about Greg and whether he was getting the support he needed.
11. The people you'd think would need the most convincing usually need the least.
Fortune 500 CEOs, high-profile executives and Founders are often the quickest to understand the importance of recognizing a great EA.
Mark Templin, President & CEO of Toyota Motor Credit, is a shining example. When his EA, Eva Valenzuela, took home the Leadership Award in 2019, he saw firsthand what that recognition meant.
And it has always made me wonder:
Is it a coincidence that so many people who make it to the very top also seem to understand exactly how much of their success was made possible by the support around them?
I don't think it's a coincidence at all.
P.S. Mark went back to Toyota after his first Admin Awards experience committed to supporting the Admin Awards for years to come — including naming the Admin Awards' Kaizen Award for Continuous Improvement presented by Toyota Motor North America.
10. A surprising number of Nominees think we are spam. So did this one, and then she won.
Every year, some Administrative Professionals get an email saying they've been nominated for an Admin Award and immediately think: SCAM.
They delete it. Ignore our follow-ups. Sometimes ignore our calls.
That was Mary Jane Long of Quatrotax in Houston, whose leader finally had to chase her down a hallway and tell her to stop trashing our messages because yes, he had nominated her — for the Colleen Barrett Award.
Several weeks later, Mary Jane stood onstage accepting her Admin Award and confessed the whole thing to the room.
And yes, Admins everywhere: an awards program for someone other than your boss really does exist.
9. Last year, we honored an EA the GRAMMYs had already said goodbye to on television.
Lani Simmons, the Recording Academy's beloved longtime EA, had lost her battle with cancer and was honored live during the GRAMMYs' televised In Memoriam tribute.
Curious about the woman who had made such an impact, I reached out to the President of the GRAMMYs on LinkedIn, hoping he could connect me with Lani's leader (fully expecting to be ignored). He responded within hours, and within days, I was on a call with the CFO of the GRAMMYs, Wayne Zahner. Wayne shared story after story about what made Lani extraordinary — a masterclass in how one person can create belonging at work.
Near the end of our conversation, Wayne asked me something I didn't expect:
“Has the Admin Awards ever honored someone posthumously? Because I would love for Lani to have an Admin Award.”
Throughout the call I had been thinking about how I wished we had gotten to Lani sooner, because she sounded like the perfect candidate for the Lifetime Achievement Award.
Wayne comes from a world that understands the power of honoring people for their extraordinary contributions to a profession. And he wanted that for Lani, too — to be honored not only by the people who loved her, but by the profession she had given so much of herself to.
Shortly afterward, at the Admin Awards in San Francisco, Lani received the Jeannette Castellano Lifetime Achievement Award. Wayne accepted it on her behalf and told the room exactly what had made her so special.
Hint: It had nothing to do with calendars, spreadsheets or expense reports.
8. MIA in San Francisco.
Our very first year in San Francisco, we discovered that all nine crystal awards were still sitting on a truck headed to Denver for our next event.
An awards program with no awards. This is going to be interesting, I thought.
This is not the kind of discovery you want to make at 1:00 p.m. on Gala day.
By 3:00 p.m., we had somehow found a local engraver with nine crystal awards on hand — and enough time to personalize every one of them.
They looked nothing like the Admin Award, but they were awards. And that evening, nine Winners walked onstage and couldn't have been happier to receive them.
To this day, I'm still not entirely sure how we pulled it off.
There was one upside: when the originals finally made their way back to us, all nine Winners ended up with two — one for home and one for the office.
7. The Susan Lucci of the Admin Awards
For three years, an incredible Chicago Admin named Annette Ramos was nominated for the Admin Awards. And for three years, she didn't advance as a Winner.
But almost immediately after each Gala, Annette would email us asking if “Good as Gold” would still be the following year's theme, because she was already planning her outfit — as in, creating it from scratch.
We lovingly started calling her the Susan Lucci of the Admin Awards.
There's Churchill's sentiment about “going from failure to failure without loss of enthusiasm.” Not winning an Admin Award is certainly not failure — but Annette absolutely embodied that spirit.
Then, in 2022, she was nominated for the fourth time while at Link Logistics. And she won!
The Spirit Award, naturally.
6. The Team Spirit tradition: how it began
Team Spirit has become one of the Admin Awards' most beloved traditions, and like a lot of unexpected good things, it started during COVID.
When Saturday nights started feeling suspiciously like Tuesday nights, we knew our virtual Admin Awards broadcasts needed to give people a reason to dress up, celebrate and make the night feel special. So we created a competition for the most festive, over-the-top watch party.
Then the world opened back up — and there was absolutely no putting that genie back in the bottle.
We brought Team Spirit with us to the live Galas, and Admins and Executives alike have fully embraced it ever since. Teams show up in coordinated outfits, custom T-shirts, themed accessories, signs, props and occasionally a level of commitment that makes us wonder if they've been planning all year.
What started as a way to make a virtual celebration feel festive has become one of the most fun traditions of the Admin Awards.
5. The case of the runaway binder that almost revealed the Fort Worth Admin of the Year Award Winner before we did!
During the presentation of our most prestigious honor at an Admin Awards Gala in Fort Worth in 2015, a binder sitting on the AV table fell onto the keyboard controlling the presentation.
Suddenly, the Finalist slides started flying by. One. Two. Three. Four.
Our events manager caught it approximately one click before the Winner slide appeared, which would have revealed Julie Brown of ACH Family & Child Services as the winner of the evening's top award.
Crisis averted.
This is also why event producers age differently than everyone else.
4. Does Dallas / Fort Worth just love their Admins more than the rest of the U.S.?
The Admin Awards has hosted Galas in 10 cities across the United States since our inception in 2012. And every year, DFW has held the record for most nominations and most attendees.
Last year we welcomed just over 700 attendees to the Admin Awards. Maybe it's home field advantage?
Or maybe everything really is bigger in Texas — hearts, too!
3. Who Really Runs Things? Why we created the first PSA in the history of the Administrative Profession
In 2025, we had a crazy idea.
After years of watching the Administrative Profession be misunderstood, underestimated and too often reduced to a list of tasks, we decided it was time to set the record straight — in a new way.
There was just one small problem: we had never made a commercial before.
Still, we knew the story we wanted to tell. Administrative Professionals are doing work that is far more strategic, influential and complex than many people realize, and we wanted the world to see what we had been seeing for years.
Toyota Motor North America believed in the idea and partnered with us to create Who Really Runs Things?
Then came the casting decision.
Instead of hiring an actor to play an Executive Assistant, we hired an Executive Assistant.
Magaly Santos is a Colleen Barrett Award for Administrative Excellence Winner who started her career at Toyota Motor North America as a tour guide before rising to Executive Assistant. She didn't need to pretend to understand the role. She had lived it.
We filmed onsite at Toyota Motor Manufacturing in San Antonio and, after countless hours of script writing, storyboarding, shooting and editing, the first Public Service Announcement of its kind for the Administrative Profession was born.
The result is one of the pieces of work we're proudest of and one of the clearest expressions of why the Admin Awards exists.
Shortly after we shot the commercial, we learned that Magaly had been promoted to Chief of Staff!
Watch Who Really Runs Things? and meet the amazing Magaly Santos here.
2. 15 years and 27,000 nominations later, what executives value the most hasn't really changed
There are skills, competencies and experiences that get you the job.
And then there are the qualities that make you indispensable to a leader.
We recently went back and evaluated what we've learned from 27,000+ nominations — work that now helps inform what we teach through the Admin Awards Institute.
From that analysis came the 12 Attributes of Award-Winning Admins.
And at the very top of that list of attributes is something deceptively simple:
Care.
In 2020, the Chief Medical Officer of Roche Molecular Diagnostics described her EA, Robin Greely, this way:
“Robin's professionalism makes her exceptional. But her care makes her irreplaceable.”
That line has stayed with me because it captures something we see over and over again.
Over 15 years, we've learned that the Admins executives cannot imagine working without are rarely described only by what they know or what they can do.
It's how they do it. With tremendous care.
1. And through every one of these 15 years, my Mom has been at the center of it.
My late Mom, Jeannette Castellano, spent her career as an Executive Secretary. She achieved her secretarial certificate in the early ’50s and retired from the profession just shy of her 80th birthday.
She is the inspiration for the Admin Awards.
Last year, she was supposed to attend our 14th Dallas celebration with about 20 family members and friends for what she believed would be her “last hurrah.” I told her, “Don't be ridiculous, Mom!”
But instead, she entered the hospital the week of the Gala. She died a month later. She never got to see Year 15.
But every Nominee we recognize, every executive who stops long enough to say thank you, every family member who gets to watch someone they love walk a red carpet, and every Administrative Professional who finally gets to step out from behind the scenes carries a little piece of her story forward.
And after 15 years, I think that may be the most important story of all: that an ordinary woman's extraordinary pride in, and love for, her profession inspired the world's first public recognition program for Administrative Professionals right here in Dallas / Fort Worth.
Here's to Year 15
Dallas / Fort Worth, thank you for giving this crazy idea a home 15 years ago. Thank you for believing Administrative Professionals deserved something bigger. And thank you for continuing to show us what happens when the people behind the scenes are finally given the stage.
Know an Admin who deserves the spotlight? Nominate them for the Admin Awards.
Sunny Nunan
Founder, CEO & Proud Daughter of an Executive Secretary, the late Jeannette Castellano