n outdoor cleaning equipment manufacturer, a professional mover, and an abatement and demolition expert check into a small boutique inn. While relaxing in the warmth of an outdoor hot tub, they swap stories about the successes and difficulties of small business ownership.
Sounds like a modern Canterbury tale. Instead, this group comprises the Alaska winners of the 2024 US Small Business Administration (SBA) awards. The SBA—which offers funding programs, counseling, and federal contracting certifications to small businesses across the country—announced this year’s winners on May 6 to coincide with National Small Business Week.
“The nominations we received from around the state this year are a witness of the ingenuity and tenacity of Alaska’s small business owners,” SBA Alaska District Director Steve Brown said at the time. “They are the backbone of our economy. They create jobs, drive innovation, and contribute to our communities. [They] embody the spirit of entrepreneurship and are a testament to the strength and diversity of Alaska’s small business community.”
“He needed a place to test his underwater photography equipment, so he called a [previous] roommate who made redwood hot tubs,” Bennett says. “Go figure! About forty years later, here we are selling hot tubs.”
As word of the Bennetts’ hot tub spread, the family started the mobile business, followed by a brick-and-mortar shop in Anchorage in 1982. Bennett delivered hot tubs with her father across Alaska during high school and was head of the service department when she graduated from college. She took over running the business seventeen years ago.
“[My parents] are still active in the business, which is fantastic because it’s a heart and soul situation for them,” Bennett says. “It was never that I was taking the baby away; it was that I was helping the baby grow up.”
And help it grow she did. Within her first year as owner, Bennett opened a second storefront in Eagle River, followed by a third (now closed) store in Soldotna. The company’s biggest growth came during the COVID-19 pandemic.
“We happened to have the right product line for everybody who had to stay home,” she says. “That was a really wild ride, with lots of unexpected growth. There was no way to plan for the complete and total chaos.”
Though Bennett may have been unable to plan for the chaos, she was able to leverage it to The Waterworks’ benefit, renting a warehouse and then, in 2024, purchasing a new 5,700-square-foot showroom on Old Seward Highway near Dimond Boulevard. The showroom, which she describes as “a really fun space and extremely relaxing,” has a sauna lounge, an endless pool, a mood room, and more space to showcase inventory.
Bennett explains, “The goal here was more so to create an environment where we could host events that would speak to our clients. No matter the product you’re looking at, the end goal, whether it’s entertainment or relaxation, it’s still wellness.”
She chose to fill it with bagels.
Ramiel purchased the Silverbow Bakery and Inn in 1997 and opened Alaska’s first New York-style bagel shop. It quickly became popular not just for its bagels and schmears but also for its sandwiches, freshly baked bread, and sweet treats. It also served as a gathering place for locals and tourists to linger over a cup of coffee or play a board game in the adjacent small dining room. That community feel was by design.
“I was coming out of architectural school, where we were learning about the notion of the third place, of being like a community center for congregating outside of your house,” Ramiel says. “That’s sort of where my interest was.”
The inn portion of the Silverbow was mostly an afterthought to Ramiel, who says her focus when she purchased the building was the bakery’s commercial kitchen. But she began to redirect her focus as the reality of running a restaurant settled in.
“Over the years the realization was, ‘Wait a minute, restaurants are really hard.’ And this little inn here is easier to run; it’s more profitable; it’s less labor intensive,” Ramiel says. “I started to enjoy that part of the business more, so I sort of shifted my focus to growing that.”
She renovated the space and added rooms, and in 2012 she built a second building for her family to live in. In 2015 she decided to focus exclusively on the inn and sold the bakery. Today, the Silverbow Inn is a sixteen-room boutique inn, complete with a rooftop hot tub with views of downtown Juneau, Douglas Island, and the Gastineau Channel.
“What I learned is, I really like the boutique hotel business, and I’m very thankful that I don’t have a restaurant anymore,” Ramiel says with a laugh.
“Dacia had worked in warehousing and logistics for a while and started the moving business on top of his two other jobs,” says Business Manager Anna Berecz. “He has a lot of energy, and he has the vision, so it’s definitely what drives the company forward.”
Green Gorilla Movers
“We acquired at first a small truck, then a couple months later a bigger truck, and we hired people so we can manage the business better,” Berecz says. “Four years later, we’re still growing fast.”
Green Gorilla now owns six trucks and employs eight to fifteen people, depending on the season. At the end of 2023, the company purchased a small warehouse in East Anchorage to use as a storage facility.
“We specialize in short-term storage if someone is trying to bridge the time between their move-out and move-in dates,” Berecz says. “We also store overflow equipment or furniture for businesses.”
Berecz says customers often ask what sets Green Gorilla apart from other moving companies.
“We’re here in town, and I think that really matters,” she explains. “We’re part of the community, and we’re still small enough that, if customers call us, it’s easy to reach the management.”
“They [the US Navy] had an existing cleaning machine, but it was an aging platform,” says Vogel, Triverus’ president and CEO. “We worked on designing toward that special cleaning environment for fifteen years.”
Those years of research and development resulted in the Mobile Cleaning Recovery Recycle System (MCRRS, or “McChris”), which uses water-jet technology, integrated air recovery, and wastewater recycling to quickly clear aircraft carrier flight decks of debris that can damage aircraft.
Use of MCRRS isn’t limited to domestic clients. Triverus also works with the navies of Spain and Italy. “We have a presence in other places, too, like Japan. It kind of got us into those environments, and we’re able to sell in those spaces,” Vogel says.
While it was business with the Italian and Spanish navies that qualified Triverus as an exporter for the SBA award, the inherent challenges of doing business from Alaska means he has a broader view of what it means to be in the export business.
“I think the export concept is recognizing that you’re… going out and figuring out what customers need,” he says. “We designed our business from the very beginning to be an ‘export’ business. Figuring out what the Navy needs on flight decks, figuring out what cities need for environmental needs, really paying attention to the customer-specific spaces and trying to be the best at understanding what they need. That is the export activity in my mind.”
Vogel says Triverus is not content to simply manufacture the machines.
Rodriguez joined the US Air Force in 1992 and served as a contract specialist when he transferred to Anchorage two years later. He fulfilled a lifelong dream of owning and operating his own business when he started Coldfoot in 2001, which initially offered painting, general construction, waste handling, and other construction-related services. But as Alaska’s construction industry developed, Rodriguez recognized the need for general demolition, environmental remediation, and hazardous materials abatement services, so he adapted the company to fill that niche.
Triverus
Triverus took what it learned from the development of MCRRS and created the Municipal Cleaning Vehicle (MCV) for airports and municipalities to clean outdoor hard surfaces such as parking facilities, sidewalks, and airfield ramps and runways. The MCV cleans large debris and sub-micron particles that are more difficult to recover and can pollute adjacent waters if not removed, giving the machine environmental applications as well, Vogel says. The company plans to release a larger, street-sweeper size version of the MCV this fall.
Berecz says Green Gorilla hopes to increase its warehouse space and has a mid-term goal to expand its geographical region to include interstate moves. “We just want to make sure that we’re providing a good service and that we have happy customers,” she says.
The Waterworks
“I don’t know when I’m going to jump on it,” she says. “I still remember the pain of my last renovation, so I have to wait a little longer to forget.”
And the new showroom for The Waterworks reshapes the business closer to Bennett’s vision. It has allowed her to host wellness-focused events at the store, such as hot tub yoga, with plans to do more in the future. She says, “We finally have this space that I’ve been craving, to do right by the clients and the experience that I wanted to create.”