SHE EPITOMIZES THE AMERICAN DREAM
By Frederick A. Hurst, March 2009

       Coming to America from Ghana was a challenge for Vincencia Adusei. She was only 15, a delicate age when leaving lifetime friends was an especially painful challenge. Vincencia had to adapt to a new culture, enroll in a new school, and make new friends thousands of miles from her native country in a strange land where English, which she had yet to learn, was the dominant language. 

       For a 15-year-old, she was facing a challenging subset of tasks. But “Vee,” as her friends affectionately call Vincencia, was up to the challenge. Now, at 28-years-old, merely 13 years after arriving in America, she is fluent in English, has completed high school, earned a Bachelor’s and Master’s degree and many professional certificates, and launched a high tech business that will probably leave her financially secure for the remainder of her life. 

       Vee was born in 1980 to Isabella and Kwasi Adusei, who ran a service business in Ghana. Her parents immigrated with her to America and settled in New York where Vee enrolled in Richard R. Greene High School in Manhattan. After graduating, in 1999, Vee enrolled in the University of Bridgeport, where she earned a Bachelor of Science in Business with a minor in Human Resources. She then earned a Master’s in Marketing. While in college and thereafter, Vee, who considers education to be a continuous life process, also earned several technical certificates and took a writing course. She recently completed a course in web design and is actively planning her next course of study. 

       But, it is the way Vee’s career evolved into her current business that is intriguing. Her evolution wasn’t an accident but nor was it exactly planned. While in college, she worked as a resident director. A major part of her responsibilities involved organizing student events. At some point she recognized that her developing new skill posed a business opportunity. So she formed Vase Management, L.L.C. and began offering her organizational services to businesses outside of the university. She actually retained three clients before she graduated. Her first major breakthrough came when she was hired to organize local musicians to perform on stage with the late Isaac Hayes. She later planned and marketed a conference for the Chinese American Scholars Association, a teachers group that needed a venue for scholarly presentations, and later began planning events for the city of Bridgeport and its Department of Education. 

       When she completed her Master’s, Vee took a full-time job doing finance and marketing for an advertising company. But she continued organizing events. Soon she quit her job to devote her full time to organizing events for a growing variety of organizations, large and small, corporate and government. 

       As she honed her organizational skills, Vee also looked to expand her client base. She became a certified minority business with the Connecticut Minority Supplier Development Council (CMSDC), which is a regional affiliate of a national organization whose corporate members are committed to increasing their business with women and minority suppliers. Typically, she became an active working member. One day she attended a CMSDC meeting where preliminary discussions for a statewide construction exposition were being discussed.  Vee volunteered to organize the event. The first CMSDC exposition was held in 2005 at the Hartford Convention Center in Connecticut. It was a major success and Vee has been organizing the event every year since. The most Construction Expo was held at Mohegan Sun Resort and Casino in 2008.

Vee gained a collateral benefit from the construction exposition. It was not long before the businesses attending the exposition started asking her to organize events for them. And soon, governments, corporations, contractors and subcontractors began seeking her assistance connecting with others in the industry. The calls for assistance became so numerous that Vee had to direct the overflow to others in her office. It soon became obvious that the construction traffic was beginning to overwhelm Vase Management’s traditional events business. 

       In the resulting chaos, Vee detected another business opportunity. She realized that “buyers” of construction services nationwide and providers of them—“suppliers”—were having trouble coming together. She also recognized that the requests-for-proposals and bid processes they used to reach out to each other were extremely inefficient and technologically from the stone ages. And, she also knew that fielding telephone calls through her office and mechanically connecting the callers to one another was too cumbersome to solve the problem. So her imagination went to work. 

       Vee imagined that if she could build a nation-wide, self-operating, web-based registry of buyers of construction services and a certified directory of those who supplied them from around the country, complete with a registry of certified woman and minority suppliers, that effectively expedited the normally cumbersome bidding process, a lot of folks would be willing to pay for its services and, thus, she conceived the idea for the development of www.vaseconstruction.com.

       What eventually emerged from Vee’s imagination is a website that brings together buyers and sellers of construction products and services from all over the country in one place (a vertical web portal) and allows them to select one another according to their individual needs. It includes lists of companies that are looking to buy construction services, the requests for proposals that they use to solicit those services, and the specifications required of those who might bid for those services. It also includes a registered list of certified subcontractors that can provide those services and a mechanism by which those contractors can place their companies in contention for winning valuable work. And, it even provides a list of “certified” women and minority contractors who are available to compete for the bids and are eligible to help companies fulfill their diversity requirements. 

       Even with the economy faltering, many corporations and municipalities, state and federal agencies and others around the country are or soon will be scouring the country for construction professionals who will, in turn, scour the country for subcontractors to complete the different components of the construction projects. Sub-contractors and other suppliers of construction goods will be searching for buyers of their services and submitting bids. President Barack Obama’s recently signed multi-billion dollar bailout plan will soon be lending more momentum to these efforts. Some projects will be small and local and others large and national, but all will involve searches for and by qualified professionals to complete them. And, the search processes will be time consuming, expensive and risky as they always are.

       The “Big Dig” project in Boston is a classic example of how many things can go wrong when certain things don’t go right. Organizations involved in construction will be sending out requests-for-proposals and for bids on complex projects that require a level of coordination that is fraught with potential danger, including quality problems and excessive cost implications. And, though most organizations involved in construction looking to attract qualified professionals will spend an inordinate amount of time and money to get the desired results, altogether too often, the results will come up short. Vase Construction, through its vertical web portal www.vaseconstruction.com, has devised a sophisticated but relatively simple and inexpensive way to ease the risks, reduce the costs and save all parties involved a lot of time.

       Bringing the product from idea to reality was a time consuming and expensive venture.  Months of research and development ate up $150,000-160,000 man hours. And, in order to devote the time to the new project, Vee had to turn away other business, which meant that cash flow was severely pinched at a time when cash reserve was precipitously declining. And the website itself required that she retain the best website developer, who, by the July 2008 launch date for the site, had totaled up a tab of $90,000. 

       But the effort was well worth the cost. Within a few months after startup in July of 2008, www.vaseconstruction.com had registered almost 200 members from across the economic spectrum, including the Metropolitan District Commission, Leo Construction, Stop & Shop with over $1 billion in construction opportunities in Maryland, the District of Columbia and Virginia, the city of Bridgeport, the New Haven Housing Authority with over $530 million planned for future major work projects, and so many more, and the number continues to rise. Vee’s initial goal is to register 40,000 members. Her ultimate goal is to enroll the entire nationwide construction industry. And Vee says of her not-so-instant success, “I became accustomed to dealing with obstacles beginning with when I had to leave all of my friends behind to come to the United States. If life was easy, it would be very boring.”

       It is important to understand that www.vaseconstruction.com is the end product. And it is the user’s access to that product that brings the user value. Any person or organization involved in construction can use it for a small fee and small subcontractors can use it for free as long as they register on the site and their responses comply with the rigid certification requirements. 

       And, “certification” is a critical element for builders who are searching for suppliers on www.vaseconstruction.com. The website asks registrants a series of self-verifying questions, which are screened through data bases of government and other legitimate certification agencies. So a builder can select a subcontractor and have the highest degree of certainty about their qualifications. The same holds for those seeking qualified women and minority suppliers.

       I was tempted to ask Vee if I could invest in her product. But, it was too obvious to me that it took insight, knowledge, long vision and the ability to think big to develop www.vaseconstruction.com. It had been two years in the making and now was well on its way. I thought of Microsoft and Google and Amazon and took a deep breath and admitted to myself that, as has often been the case, I was late to the table. It was all too clear that this 28-year-old rising star from Ghana had already taken all of the risks and was well on her way to financial success and would not need my investment. 

       Ghana is the first African colony to gain its freedom from Great Britain and to remain continuously democratic while developing a vibrant and fast-growing free enterprise economy. Vee, who, by the way, comes across as polite, unassuming, accommodating and real, even as she projects intelligence, aggressiveness and a warrior’s instinct for focusing on the target, is simply a reflection of her homeland’s legacy.

       I want Vee to succeed as you should want her to succeed because she is 28-years-old and filled with big ideas and the moxie to convert them to reality. She represents the future and, at the risk of sounding trite, I feel compelled to point out that this fair and willowy ebony import from Ghana epitomizes the American dream.

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