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WARREN THOMPSON
Hall of Fame member A Hampden-Sydney College and University of Virginia Darden School of Business alum who grew up in the town of Windsor in Isle of Wight County, Thompson started his company in 1992 after purchasing 31 Big Boy restaurants from Marriott Corp., his former employer. Today, Thompson Hospitality is the nation’s la[...]
SHARON SMOOT
Smoot is a unicorn — a Black woman overseeing 4,700 employees in the highly technical field of manufacturing components for nuclear reactors. Named last summer as head of the Lynchburg-based federal contractor’s nuclear division, Smoot spent 30 years as a civilian employee of the U.S. Navy, ultimately serving as executive di[...]
THOMAS HASTY
Although Virginia has had notable Black banking leaders — including Maggie Walker at the start of the 20th century — it’s still a business that has not had a lot of African American representation in the C-suite. In 1999, after working for BB&T, Hasty took control of his fate and became a co-founder of Suffolk-based [&[...]
KEN AMPY
Growing up in rural Dinwiddie County, Ampy saw firsthand the power of community. After studying computer science at Old Dominion University, he built a career as a programmer analyst and developer for Dominion Virginia Power and Capital One Financial Corp. before launching staffing and consulting firm Astyra Corp. in 1997 in Ric[...]
CHANDRA BRIGGMAN
The leader since 2020 of a Richmond-based innovation incubator that includes a biotech park, startup development and a newly invigorated cluster accelerator for pharmaceutical research and manufacturing, Briggman is off to a fast start. Growing up in a town of 2,000 in rural South Carolina, she was inspired by her parents to pur[...]
KEVIN M. WIDEMAN
In just over four years, Wideman has quintupled the annual revenues of his Fairfax County-based government contracting agency from $100 million to $500 million, expanding its workforce from 130 to more than 2,100 employees, and landing it multiple times on the Inc. 5000 list of the fastest-growing U.S. private companies. A Templ[...]
