Reporter's Notebook

Virginia Business
August 2006

The companies on the Fantastic 50 don’t make news just once a year. Two companies on the annual list of the Virginia’s fastest-growing firms have made major announcements in recent weeks.

AVID Medical Inc. in Toano plans to invest $8 million in an expansion of its James City County facility, creating 303 jobs. The company produces custom procedure-ready trays for the health-care industry and will double its existing 90,000-square-foot operation.

Meanwhile, Chantilly-based Germane Systems LC has named Gibson B. Kerr its chief operations officer. Kerr, a retired Navy captain, has worked the past 15 years in the area of process improvement and program management.

He joins Germane at a time it is forming a new corporate structure to improve operations. Germane is a leading original equipment manufacturer (OEM) of high-end business, government and military computer servers.
AVID and Germane have been named the top manufacturing companies on Fantastic 50 in recent years. AVID took the honor in 2005 and Germane was the award winner on this year’s list.!

Last month’s issue about the trials and tribulations of being a chief financial officer did not seem to win much sympathy from voters on our online poll. We asked whether regulations imposed by the Sarbanes-Oxley Act have put too much pressure on CFOs. The initial response was “No.” Thirty-seven of the first 53 people had voted that way by July 11. !

If readers haven’t noticed already, Virginia Business offers a publisher’s and an editor’s blog at our Web site at www.virginiabusiness.com. The blogs offer insights and comments on our travels around the state to various business functions. In addition, they give us another medium to share bits of business news that might not make our pages.