UW Minority Business Awards honor top ventures, announce expanded partnership

The 2012 University of Washington Minority Business Awards honored ten top performing minority-owned ventures in the state of Washington.

The December 6 event, co-hosted by the Business and Economic Development Center (BEDC) at the UW Foster School of Business and the Puget Sound Business Journal, also unveiled an expanded partnership between BEDC and JPMorgan Chase, and welcomed back an old friend,

That would be Ali Tarhouni, the popular senior lecturer who famously left his post at Foster in early 2011 to serve as finance minister for the Libyan revolutionary government. Tarhouni, who has initially declined a run for the newly democratic nation’s prime minister, expressed his pride in the growth of this unique Center that he helped found in the early 1990s.

“The Foster School of Business has heart,” he said. “We teach our students how to create wealth, and that’s our primary responsibility. But I’m also proud to be associated with a school that subscribes to do the right thing—even though it doesn’t usually have an immediate reward… Doing what is right and creating wealth aren’t mutually exclusive.”

The long-term impact of BEDC in promoting a robust economic diversity across the state was evident in the range of 2012 awardees.

The William D. Bradford Minority Business of the Year is Redapt, the Redmond-based provider of innovative data center infrastructure solutions.

Regional winners include:
King County Award – Jabez Construction/ST Fabrication and Radarworks
Northeast Washington Award – Spoko Fuel West Plains
Southeast Washington Award – RJS Construction
Northeast Washington Award – Gliding Eagle Marketplace
Southwest Washington Award – Sunmodo Corporation
Rising Star Award – C2S Technologies

Zones, the Auburn-based enterprise IT firm, received special commendation for reaching $1 billion in annual revenues. Accepting the award was Firoz Lalji, CEO and chairman of Zones, who noted that his company has become successful by serving businesses nationwide with expertise in all areas of IT, including systems and storage, networking and security, software, virtualization, procurement, logistics, any and everything tech.

Michael Verchot, founding director of BEDC, announced a transformational $600,000 gift from the JPMorgan Chase Foundation, the largest in the center’s 17-year history. Verchot said that the gift will allow the center to engage more students in consulting to small businesses in Seattle’s low- and moderate-income communities and to grow its faculty-led small business classes throughout the state. And, perhaps most significantly, the investment also will enable the center to build a regional and national network of business schools that follow the BEDC model to spark economic development in their own communities.

This newest investment brings Chase’s total support of BEDC over the years to more than $900,000. “At JPMorgan Chase, we believe in strengthening small business and creating jobs. And we believe that is critical to the progress of our country,” said Curt Fraser, Chase’s CEO of middle market banking for the Pacific Northwest. “We’re thrilled to partner with the UW Business and Economic Development Center in working to do just that.”