Entrepreneur Of The Year 2009
Road to Palm Springs
Kam Ghaffarian
SGT, Inc.
Greenbelt, Md.
When Kam Ghaffarian gazed at the night sky as a boy, he saw not just stars, but a career in aerospace technology. To launch that career, he attained the first of many degrees by working long hours as a parking lot attendant. In 1981, he made his way to the NASA Goddard Space Flight Center, where he worked on a Lockheed Martin contract with a colleague named Harold Stinger. At the time, he had no inkling that he and Stinger would someday be business partners.
In 1988, Ghaffarian decided to start a real estate company to supplement the income he was earning at Ford Aerospace. Five years later, he was ready to form his own engineering services company and persuaded Stinger to join him. Stinger Ghaffarian Technologies, Inc. (SGT) opened its doors in 1994 in a converted basement.
SGT provides services to the aerospace industry in the areas of systems engineering, scientific analysis and modeling, project management and information technology. By 2002, annual revenues were $10 million — a figure that has grown to $350 million today. In 2005, SGT received NASA’s prestigious George M. Low Award in recognition of performance. Most recently, it has performed high-tech engineering work on the Hubble Space Telescope and the James Webb Space Telescope.
Ghaffarian became president, CEO and sole owner of SGT in 2008, and Stinger remains active as chairman.
