CEO Debra Ruh and her daughter, Sara

From Virginia Business:

TecAccess, a Richmond-area company, has been named the 2007 Small Business Success Story of the Year by Virginia Business magazine for its leading role in training and employing people with disabilities. TecAccess was one of the first companies in the country to rely on telecommuting and adaptive technologies to tap into a largely unused labor pool.

The company was selected from among 49 nominations of small businesses from around the state.

“She sees people with disabilities as a competitive advantage,” explains John Kemp, a partner at Powers Pyles Sutter & Verville law firm in Washington. Kemp himself is disabled, born without arms and legs below the elbow and knee. “If you’re too narrow on your applicant pool, you are probably limiting the number of highly qualified people based on unnecessary physical job criteria,” says Kemp. “Widening the pool allows you to find the cream of the crop and that can include disabled people.”

In a nutshell, that’s the sales pitch [of company founder Debra Ruh] to the business world. “We look at it from a return-on-investment approach, why this is good for the bottom line,” she says. “We want hiring to be about that, not about legality or entitlement.”

The private sector is responding. Although government clients (whose contracts tend to be larger) still provide the bulk of revenues, the company’s client list shifted over the past year to about 60 percent corporate and 40 percent government contracts. Corporations that have hired TecAccess include Canon USA, Circuit City, Wachovia and AOL.

From 2006 to 2007, the company’s sales shot up by 134 percent, from $1.7 million to nearly $4 million.

Check out the TecAccess website for a biography of manager Rosemary Musachio, an expert in accessible design. There’s a photo of her hang-gliding. Rosemary has cerebral palsy and uses a head pointer to communicate via computer. When she was born, the doctors said — oh, you know the rest of the story.

This entry was posted on Sunday, February 3rd, 2008 at 8:02 pm and is filed under accessibility, business, employment/jobs, success stories, technology. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.