NEWPORT – Since moving to the Oregon coast in 2007, Colorado Springs transplant John Lavrakas has grown his business, Advanced Research Corp., from a one-man band to a five-person operation.

That growth, much of which took place during the worst recession in living memory, was one of the factors that led the Small Business Administration to name Lavrakas the Oregon Small Business Person of 2011.

Since his move to Newport, Lavrakas has won contracts to work on an infrastructure assessment for wave energy, a fishery management database and a fish tracking system in the Gulf of Mexico in the wake of the oil spill there.

“I think the trick is understanding what your customer needs,” said Lavrakas. “Not just understanding the technology, but understanding the need.”

Lavrakas also is president of the Lincoln County Technology Solutions Alliance, which aims to support economic growth and education throughout the community.

Family circumstances conspired to bring Lavrakas and his wife, Melody, to the coast. With the kids grown and out of the house, the couple was thinking about moving to a smaller home. Lavrakas said a daughter in Salem and a sister in Portland tilted the couple’s thinking toward the West Coast.

“My wife said, How about moving to Oregon?’ I said, Well, honey, I don’t have a job.'”

That didn’t last long.

After the couple moved to Newport, where Melody volunteers at the aquarium, Lavrakas set up Advanced Research as a one-man consulting business.

Then, he got in touch with Oregon Coast Community College’s Small Business Development Center (SBDC) and embarked on a two-year management training program.

As new contracts came in, the company grew. Lavrakas said sales have doubled since 2007.

“I think John Lavrakas could be the poster child for economic gardening in rural Oregon,” said SBDC director Guy Faust. “If we had 20 more just like John, we would have added over 100 new family-wage jobs to our local economy over the past few years.”

Lavrakas refuses to measure success purely by the company’s bottom line. He prefers to think in broader terms, about how the company can achieve success by helping the entire area succeed.

Lavrakas said Lincoln County’s success in becoming the Pacific homeport for NOAA is an example of what the community can achieve if it aims high enough.

In anticipation of NOAA’s move, Lavrakas helped arrange a series of free seminars to train local vendors in doing business with the federal government.

Lavrakas’ interest in science began at an early age. His mother bought him a membership in a science kit of the month club. One month, the kit would be an optics project; the next, radio.

“Each month I would be building something and thinking about it.”

Later, with degrees in math under his belt, Lavrakas became a math teacher. Then he left the profession to pursue a career in GPS.

Lavrakas has a pronounced entrepreneurial streak. While in Colorado, he launched ARC in 1993 and again in 1995, with little success.

He said he regards these failures as a crucial part of his business education, once titling a presentation to Newport High School students, “My Life as a Failure.”

As a scientist, said Lavrakas, failure “is the only way you learn.”

“I realized a few years ago why small businesses fail,’ he added. “It’s because they don’t know what they are doing. And I was one of those in the mid-90s.”

Lavrakas said the small-business management training helped him gain skills he needed to complement his scientific knowhow.

“People need to get over the idea that they have to do it all themselves,” he said. “They need to understand that there are others that will work with them.”

Lavrakas was invited to Washington, D.C., to participate in events during Small Business Week on May 18-20. And he was honored at the Small Business Administration Small Business Week gala May 12 in Portland.