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Including startup founders, motivated executives and an Olympic cycling team’s leader, these folks don’t take no for an answer.
Eric Astor
Founder and CEO, Furnace Record Pressing
Alexandria
Eric Astor was a 15-year-old drummer living in Phoenix when he pressed his first album. “My band couldn’t find anyone to make a record for us, so I started a label and figured out how to do it myself,” says Astor.
Today, Astor is founder and CEO of Furnace Record Pressing, one of the nation’s largest vinyl record producers. Founded in 1996, Furnace employs 107 workers who use 14 presses to produce more than 25,000 vinyl records a day. The company expected to turn out more than 4 million records in 2023.
Furnace has had a long relationship with heavy metal legends Metallica; pressings for the band represent about 15% of Furnace’s output yearly, and in March, Metallica acquired a majority interest in the label for an undisclosed amount.
“There’s an appetite for vinyl,” says Astor. “As long as artists keep producing, people will keep buying.”
Paul Busch
Owner and mining engineer, R&R Remining and Reclamations
New Canton
Buckingham County resident Paul Busch has gold in his veins. A commercial miner, Busch owns R&R Remining and Reclamations (formerly Old Dawg Resources), the only company holding a permit to mine for gold in Virginia since the state’s last mines folded in the 1940s. (The General Assembly may review and update the state’s gold mining rules in its 2024 session, following a report last year by a study group.)
Busch currently operates on private land at the reopened Moss mine in Goochland County, where he processes mounds of contaminated tailings to separate remaining gold scraps from the toxic mercury that was used during mining decades ago. He delivers the mercury to a recycling center at Virginia Beach. “The state is happy, I get to do what I love to do, and the landowner is left with safer, cleaner property,” he says.
Nicola Cranmer
Founder and general manager, Virginia’s Blue Ridge Twenty24 Women’s Pro Cycling Team
Roanoke
When Nicola Cranmer relocated base operations for her team of elite women cyclists from Idaho to Roanoke in 2022, she knew it was a great move. “Some of the nicest riding in the world, and the hills are perfect for training,” says Cranmer, a native of Salisbury, England.
Her medal-winning team has adopted various iterations of its name over the years, the most recent reflecting its partnership with Visit Virginia’s Blue Ridge, the region’s official destination marketing organization. Cranmer founded the team in 2005 with eyes locked on the 2012 London Olympics and has adjusted the team’s name in four-year cycles ever since. Team Twenty24 is currently racing toward the 2024 Summer Olympics in Paris.
Besides building professional cyclists and a pipeline for future Olympians, Cranmer promotes cycling’s overall benefits through her junior program, connecting girls age 17 and younger with leadership and scholarship opportunities.
Siera Fountain
Graduate student, Virginia Commonwealth University
Richmond
An artist and designer who graduated with a bachelor’s degree in art from VCU and was an intern at NASA’s Langley Research Center in Hampton, Siera Fountain is now back in Richmond as a product innovation graduate student at VCU’s da Vinci Center for Innovation. This year, in addition to winning a $3,500 first-place award from the American Marketing Association Richmond-Robert R. Barber Endowment Fund for Scholarship & Training, Fountain earned an entrepreneurship certificate from the da Vinci Center. And this past summer, she participated in a European Innovation Academy in Italy to create a product. There, Fountain was exposed to how she could use her art skills in the field of business and marketing. She now works as a graduate assistant at VCU’s Shift Retail Lab, designing promotions and assisting local entrepreneurs. “Gen Z people are very interested in authenticity and being able to put themselves into the product or the brand,” Fountain says.
Matt Ganyard
Placekicker, University of Virginia Cavaliers football team
Charlottesville
“At the end of the day, in the locker room, I like to think that I’m another one of the guys,” says Matt Ganyard, U.Va.’s 34-year-old placekicker. That’s no typo. Ganyard is not only the oldest college football player in Virginia; he’s the oldest in the NCAA. As an undergrad, he tried out for the team and failed, and after his 2011 graduation, went on to serve in the Marines Corps, where he was an elite Cobra helicopter pilot and kept kicking the football in his spare time. In 2022, Ganyard came back to Charlottesville to attend U.Va.’s Darden School of Business and joined the team as a walk-on in 2023. A father of two, Ganyard says he is thankful for his wife’s patience regarding his unusual extracurricular activity. In May, he will graduate from Darden and has accepted a position at Boston Consulting Group’s office in Raleigh, North Carolina.
Laura Godfrey
Serial entrepreneur
Roanoke
Laura Godfrey founded or co-founded five companies in the past two decades. Among those are Brandpoint Analytics, a software-as-a-service platform, and Bookelicious, an online resource that focuses on increasing child literacy by curating books for kids. Godfrey co-founded Bookelicious with Lea Anne Borders — the wife of Louis Borders, founder of the now-defunct Borders Group books and music retail chain.
Godfrey stepped aside from Bookelicious in late August — she remains an investor — to take on new projects; as a “fractional” executive, she lends her experience to companies getting off the ground.
“I really like learning while doing,” Godfrey says. “That’s what keeps me focused and busy … always learning new things, new experiences.”
Vanessa C. Hampton
Senior vice president and not-for-profit and government banking team lead, Truist Financial
Richmond
Today, Vanessa Hampton leads a team of bankers in Virginia who focus on large nonprofit clients like health care organizations and private foundations, and government agencies, but she’s been part of the banking industry for more than 20 years, beginning at BB&T, which merged with SunTrust to create Truist in 2019. She also spends a fair amount of time engaged with the Richmond community as a board member of YWCA Richmond and the Memorial Foundation for Children. A Radford University alum, Hampton enjoys the beach and traveling the world with her family.
Arketa Howard
Director of business and policy affairs in offshore wind, Crowley Maritime
Norfolk
A Norfolk State University alum who’s worked in project management, marketing and higher education, Arketa Howard was hired by Crowley in 2021 to work in the burgeoning offshore wind industry. She was still new to the field, but Howard started learning more about wind energy before her hiring, as part of the Virginia Maritime Association and the Hampton Roads Alliance. Now, she chairs the alliance’s Women of Offshore Wind group, founded in 2022. “We understand that women may not be represented a lot in certain spaces,” Howard says, “and what I love the most is our excitement when we see each other.” Outside of work, Howard is a marathon runner, averaging one race a year, and she supports her two children’s interests in art and sports.
Kevin Hubbard, Kristina Loftus and Matt Loftus
Co-founders, Rhoback
Charlottesville
The day after Kristina Loftus graduated with her MBA from the University of Virginia in 2017, she packed a wooden camper with high-performance activewear and hit the road promoting Rhoback, the privately held clothing company she co-founded in 2016 with her husband, Matt, and his best friend from his undergraduate days, Kevin Hubbard.
Kristina hauled their pop-up shop to retail venues along the East Coast, but she was never alone. Her dog, Bunker, rode by her side as the face of the fledgling brand. “Bunker is a Rhodesian Ridgeback, dogs that are bred to hunt lions,” she explains. “Rhoback takes its name from this breed that perpetually craves activity.”
Matt and Kevin joined Kristina when they could, but both were still holding other demanding full-time jobs — Matt as a financial consultant and Kevin as policy director of the U.S. House of Representatives’ Rules Committee, a position he worked up to since arriving on Capitol Hill as an intern in 2011. Both have since left those positions to commit full-time to Rhoback.
The brand offers a line of fast-wicking activewear for men and women. Its popular print designs range in theme from universities (U.Va. being first) to states and popular destinations.
Wendy P. Lewis
Richmond office managing partner, KPMG; chair, Virginia Board of Accountancy
Richmond
Although Wendy Lewis is a numbers person — she is, after all, the Richmond managing partner for Big Four accounting firm KPMG — she also is a self-professed people person who loves being involved in the community. In July, she became the first Black woman to become the Virginia Board of Accountancy’s chair, a post she will hold through June 30, 2024. Lewis says much of her job at KPMG and at VBA supports career development, particularly with training fellow accountants in technological advances such as artificial intelligence. Away from work, the beach lover, home cook and runner can also be found investing in playtime with her son, a fourth grader.
Peter Mann
Founder and CEO, Oransi
Radford
Peter Mann has had an eclectic career, serving in the Navy, marketing tech solutions for companies like Dell, and launching two flourishing companies in succession.
In 2009, Mann founded his air purifier company, Oransi, in part seeking solutions to his son’s asthma. And now, after merging with an electric motor company, Oransi is making an effort to bring its manufacturing business back to Virginia. In 2021, the company bought a 156,000-square-foot factory in Radford that’s expected to create 100 jobs. “It’s been under development close to two years; we essentially had to create an entirely new supply chain that could compete with Chinese imports,” Mann says.
Cindy Yao
Chief financial officer and executive vice president, Markel Food Group
Richmond
A native of Shanghai, China, who speaks three Chinese dialects, Cindy Yao not only serves as CFO for Markel Food Group but as CEO for three of its subsidiaries operating in China. Yao came to the United States as an MBA student at the University of Rochester and earned her master’s degree in accounting at Virginia Tech. After working for Bausch & Lomb, in 2013 she joined Markel Food Group, a $350 million independent subsidiary of Fortune 500 insurance holding company Markel Group, with around 1,000 employees worldwide.
She’s also founding dean of Markel Business Systems Leadership University, an internal school she established to provide leadership coaching for a diverse group of employees.
“It not about the job we do, it’s the purpose each of us has in life, and my job is truly to help people to achieve their goals and the purpose in their life,” Yao says.
Chryssa Zizos
Founder and CEO, Live Wire Strategic Communications
Arlington County
Strategic communications and crisis management expert Chryssa Zizos believes flourishing in a competitive industry requires boldly trying new things. “People learn as much from failure as they do from success,” she notes.
Zizos founded Live Wire Strategic Communications 26 years ago in her Alexandria home. Now, with 10 employees, the company has served more than 100 clients, nearly half of them Fortune 500 firms. Looking to 2024, Zizos projects the firm will gross about $4.5 million in revenue.
“Our relationships are impressive,” says Zizos, pointing to notable clients such as Georgetown University’s McDonough School of Business, Accenture Federal Services and General Dynamics Information Technology.
“Our success comes from staying true to who we’ve been since the beginning: a boutique, high-touch strategic communications firm,” says Zizos. “We have a long runway ahead, and this team gets better every year.”