The annual Small Business Awards Luncheon will be at noon on June 28 at the Marriott Hotel and Marina. Sponsored by the U.S. Small Business Administration (SBA) and the San Diego Regional Chamber of Commerce, the luncheon will recognize SBA, Chamber, BID Council and Contractor award winners.

“The San Diego SBA District Office is proud of its record of helping new and existing small businesses create over 1,000 new jobs with more than $350 million provided through SBA-backed loans this past year,” says Ruben Garcia, SBA district director. “Our local resource partners Counselors to America’s Small Business (SCORE) and the Small Business Development Centers have counseled over 10,000 potential and existing small businesses. It is this type of collaboration that makes the San Diego SBA office one of the best in the U.S.”

For more information or for tickets, call (619) 544-1339 or visit sdchamber.org.

Entrepreneur With Intelligent
Technology For Growth

Hany Girgis

Hany Girgis has lofty ambitions, which is putting it mildly. He wants his company, SkillStorm Inc., to hit $250 million in sales by the end of 2011. That’s a huge leap from the $45 million to $50 million he expects to generate this year. Can anyone challenge him on that?

Nope.

After all, Girgis, who turns 36 in December, grew the company from a one-man operation to a 500-employee business with offices in San Diego and 11 other areas of the country in a mere five years.

Girgis launched SkillStorm in 2002 from a bedroom in his La Jolla house. “I took out a home equity loan on our home and cleaned out our savings account,” he says, speaking of his wife, Summer. “I figured I basically had a year to make it work. Either that or find a new job.”

Work it did. The company, which is headquartered in Sorrento Valley, provides IT and other technological services to commercial and government clients, including major defense contractors SAIC, Northrop Grumman, General Dynamics and Raytheon.

The SBA named Girgis the 2007 Small Business Person of the Year.

The rapid growth of the company — about 9,000 percent from ’02 to ’06 — is attributable to Girgis’ belief after the terrorist attack of 9/11 that it would lead to a boom in defense spending and an increase in government contracting. Today the company is involved in providing IT and engineering and intelligence services to a range of government clients, is involved in counter-intelligence training and is helping build the next generation Mars Rover for the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena. It has offices in or near Tampa, Orlando and Fort Lauderdale, Fla.; Indianapolis; Dallas; Albuquerque, N.M.; Washington, D.C..; Charlotte, N.C.; Sierra Vista, Ariz.; and San Francisco and Pasadena.

Lamping Sheds Light On
Creative Financial Strategies

Susan Lamping

Take a look at the esoteric customer files on Susan Lamping’s Liberty Station desk — a dessert restaurant, a dry cleaner, a transportation firm and a hair salon — and it’s easy to see why her small business clients need her to secure financing.

“A lot of these places think they can’t get a loan because they’ve been turned down so many times,” says Lamping, community loan program coordinator for CDC Small Business Finance. “But I know which banks are more aggressive on certain types of funding, and how to think outside the box to get where the person wants to go.”

CDC is the SBA’s Financial Services Champion of the Year.

Assisting others comes naturally to Lamping, who served two years for the U.S. Peace Corps in Nepal, where she secured grants to build classrooms, and has been a math, science and ESL teacher.

“Economic development has been part of everything I’ve done,” she says. “I am helping people make their lives better and their dreams come true.”

A Winning SCORE Is First
For New Leadership Award

George Chandler was the heart and soul of the SBA’s San Diego district office between 1981 and 2005. The office was ranked No. 1 nationally for several years under his tutelage for its leadership in providing loans and other kinds of support to small businesses. Because of the former director’s legacy, the SBA created the George Chandler Leadership Award and named SCORE, Counselors to America’s Small Business, as its first recipient.

SCORE used to stand for Service Corps of Retired Executives, but the name no longer applies. Thomas Nickols, president of the San Diego chapter, says the volunteers are a mixture of people, both still working and retired, who feel an obligation to help small businesses grow. Nickols, 77, retired nine years ago. The local chapter has 78 volunteers. Nationally, the agency counts 10,500 counselors in 389 chapters. “The challenge of our membership is to stay current in new business ideas and innovations,” says Nickols. “We work very hard to train counselors in an orientation that takes four months.”

The San Diego chapter counseled 7,887 clients last year and attracted 4,600 people to the many workshops it sponsored.

Small Business
Loan Workhorse

Kurt Chilcott

The work of CDC Small Business Finance Corp., a San Diego-based nonprofit agency chartered by the Small Business Administration, is anything but small. Last year, the agency provided more than 700 loans to small businesses in its region, resulting in more than $1.3 billion in small business investment. That included 162 loans totaling $112.8 million to small businesses in San Diego County.

Most of the loans processed by the CDC are under the SBA’s 504 program. Kurt Chilcott, CEO and president of CDC since 1998, describes these as “loans for long-term capital investments in property or equipment to help businesses expand and add jobs.” Loans granted last year throughout the region translated into a little more than 8,000 new jobs, says Chilcott, a former director of economic development for the city of San Diego.

The SBA awarded the agency its national Lender of Excellence Award for 2007 and the SBA district office in San Diego is to present it with its 2007 Small Business Lender of the Year award.

Partners Take
‘A Dive’ With Navy

Jim Stanton Tim Kiley

Jim Stanton, vice president and CFO of Marine Services Commercial Diving Co. in Chula Vista — and a former Navy diver — has a simple business philosophy when it comes to selling products to the military, one of his major clients. “When a customer asks for something, you give it to them to the best of your ability at a good price,” he says. “As long as you’re nice about it, they will come back.”

One of the products that Stanton, 39, and his business partner, Tim Kiley, 48, make is an exothermic torch, a device that can deliver up to 10,000 degrees of heat. The company made 10 of the self-contained torches for the Navy and it came back for more in a big way. “They asked for 10 more after that,” says Stanton. “Then they ordered 60 more and 64 more after that.” Now, says Stanton, the Air Force, Army and Marine Corps are starting to line up.

Stanton and Kiley (the president), both Navy veterans, purchased the diving company in 2005 from Janet Devine, who had helped her late husband, Tom Devine, launch the business in their garage in 1968. The business has since taken off. Last year, sales hit $2.3 million and the two owners say they will double that this year. The company was named the Veteran-Owned Small Business of the Year.

Linda Harasin Talks
Business Success

Linda Harasin

Linda Harasin’s career has come full circle. She and husband John opened Prestige Communication Services in 1980, specializing in health care marketing. But when John died in 1985, Harasin realized how much she didn’t know about her own business.

“I went to UCI and took a women in transition class with others in a similar situation,” she says. Intrigued, Harasin went on to earn an MBA from Pepperdine University.

Today, Harasin shares her knowledge as both a consultant at the North County Small Business Development Center and a business instructor at Santa Ana College. She is the recipient of the Delores Braswell Award.

“The advantage of coming to a consultant,” Harasin says about the SBDC, “is we all have had our own businesses so we’ve experienced the pitfalls.”

Harasin feels a special connection to her female clients because of her past. “The biggest challenge for women is how to balance a business with kids, and they can’t start running their own business unless they do,” she says. “But when they come to me, it’s not just to talk or bond but to really start the business with an idea one year, and perhaps marketing the next year and expansion the next.”

Father, Son Serve
Mexican Specialties

Javier Correa Sr., left, and son Javier Correa Jr.

Javier Correa Sr. opened his first Sombrero Mexican Food restaurant in Golden Hill in 1984 and never rested after that. Today, he and his son, Javier Correa Jr., own and operate 12 Sombrero restaurants around the county and are planning to open three more before the year is out. “And we have a couple of other projects in the works after that, both in and outside the county,” says the younger Correa. The company was named Minority Owned Small Business of the Year.

The father and son team (Correa Sr. is 46, Junior is 24) have split their responsibilities this way: the son, as vice president and CEO, runs the administrative side of the business while the father, president and secretary, focuses on finding locations for new restaurants and designing them.

Bank of America Is Small
Business Lender of the Year

Rick Benito says his bank puts its money where its mouth is when it comes to small business financing. “We’re the bank of opportunity,” says Benito, Bank of America’s senior vice president and credit solutions specialist. “One thing Bank of America prides itself on is making more loans to more small businesses than anyone else in San Diego County.”

In 2006, B of A provided 193 loans totaling $6.5 million in San Diego, and was the leading volume lender of the SBA’s 2,500 bank lenders nationwide.

But B of A’s involvement in small business success goes beyond making loans, says Benito. While helping applicants through the loan process is part of the relationship, supplying other tools for new and growing companies is just as vital. “It’s tough to run a small business,” says Benito. “There’s a lot of risk. That’s why our team works as consultants to fit the needs of the business and provide resources.”

Payroll is a top concern of business owners, he says, so B of A offers a payroll product in addition to other merchant services. Small business specialists are available in many of the bank’s branches to guide customers in which products and services they might need.

Wilson Helps Veterans Swim
Into Their Own Businesses

A.J. Wilson

Alonza James (A.J.) Wilson was enjoying success as a headhunter in the mid-80s when he bought a house with a pool. Not long after, Wilson asked a man servicing the pool what the pool business required.

“I liked my job but it took a lot of time,” says Wilson, a disabled Vietnam veteran and Purple Heart recipient. “So when he told me what I could make doing pools, I started right away.”

Founded in 1985, Wilson’s Like New Pool Cleaning and Repair Service Inc. is not only a lucrative venture for Wilson, it’s an example of how disabled veterans can create a flourishing business if they know where to turn. For many vets, it’s Wilson who provides that direction.

“I live to make people and veterans themselves aware of their just due,” he says about available assistance.

To further that effort, Wilson serves on the board of the San Diego chapter of the Service-Disabled Veteran-Owned Business (SDVOB) network, and was a coordinator of the first National Convention of Small Disabled Veterans Businesses, held in San Diego. He expects 500 attendees at the group’s fourth annual conclave this August at West Point, N.Y.

Gender, Race Not Factors In
Lattimore’s Success Construct

Aldrica Lattimore

After 13 years as president and CEO of Accurate Engineering, Aldrica Lattimore can chuckle about her company’s early days when she was not the typical construction firm representative.

“When people saw me coming, you could see the ‘oh, no’ on their faces,” she says about the male-dominated industry. “My husband or brother got the most eye contact in meetings. I got the least.”

In addition to being a woman, Lattimore faced more potential prejudice as an African-American. She says both characteristics are anything but excuses when it comes to growing her business, which was named Women-Owned Small Business of the Year.

“I make a tremendous effort not to focus on being black or a woman for why a door doesn’t open,” she says. “Instead, I do an assessment of myself and the company and try to figure out where we can do better.”

Aware of the challenges, Lattimore is eager to introduce construction as a viable career option for anyone willing to work hard.

“We have women out there in the field,” she says. “And we heavily recruit women for our internships. They think they’re going to come help file but we get them fully involved in project management.”

Ridding Social Ills Is No
Small Change for Jordan

Jeffrey Jordan

Jeffrey W. Jordan, president and founder of Rescue Social Change Group, estimates that federal and state governments and nonprofit organizations needlessly spend more than $5 billion a year on social change campaigns that are dispersed among consultants and advertising and public relations companies. He calls these “feel-good” campaigns that fail to focus on what he calls the “unique needs of social and behavior change initiatives.”

At Rescue Social Change Group, says Jordan, “We develop strategies that help governments and organizations change segments of the population for the greater good.”

The Peruvian-born Jordan, winner of the San Diego SBA’s Young Entrepreneur of the Year award for 2007, received the same award in 2005 from the Rhode Island and New England SBA district.

Jordan, 23, launched Rescue Productions, the former name of his company, when he was 17. His first campaign was an effort to reduce teenage smoking rates in Las Vegas. Jordan says youth smoking in Las Vegas fell to 18 percent in 2005 from 33 percent in 2001. The company is working on a similar tobacco prevention program for Virginia and Chicago. “It’s always people who are most concerned about their social success who end up smoking,” says Jordan. “Our campaigns attempt to break this connection.”

— Stories by Manny Cruz
and Christy Scannell