Award for Business Owner: Grace Vaswani, president...

Award for Business Owner: Grace Vaswani, president and CEO of Santa Barbara Applied Research Inc., has been named the Los Angeles District Minority Small Business Person of the Year. Vaswani worked her way up at IBM from a receptionist to a senior manager before she left in 1988 to run the Ventura company. With the help of the SBA’s 8A minority contracting program, Vaswani oversaw the company’s growth from 20 employees and annual sales of $800,000 to 140 employees and sales of $7 million.