Vaughn Vasconcellos, founder of Akimeka LLC, was selected as second runner-up Tuesday in the Small Business Administration's competition to select the National Small Business Person of the Year. He was in Washington to receive the honor.
The winner was Jeanna Sellmeyer of ASSET Group Inc. of Oklahoma, a construction and remediation business.
Akimeka was founded in 1997. Today it has 161 employees in Hawaii, Texas, Florida and Washington, D.C., with annual revenue of $20 million. It provides information technology support to military medical services, including a database, the Joint Medical Asset Repository, that will combine military medical records and could also be called on to help deal with epidemics or terrorist attacks.
Vasconcellos earlier was named Hawaii Small Business Person of the Year. He is a Molokai native and graduate of West Point who was a paratrooper before becoming a computer technology manager.
Akimeka has headquarters on Maui. It started small — $35,000 was his initial stake — and he sought the assistance of SBA's Small Business Development Center and also took advantage of SBA's 8(a) program, which provides business development and federal contract support to small disadvantaged businesses.
His company works under the values Vasconcellos learned from his Hawaiian aunt and grandmother who raised him on Molokai: cooperation, leadership, family, generosity and harmony.
In 2004, he organized the Alakaina Foundation, a nonprofit that creates leadership and education programs for Native Hawaiian children.