Gloucester County small businessman gets to meet with Obama

While other small businesses across the nation are cutting back or closing in a slow economy, Brian Bovio has expanded his Gloucester County company's operations and tripled employment.

That fact caught the eye of the White House staff and President Obama, who has been trying to convince Congress that an important route to recovery is through helping small businesses with loans and tax incentives.

So Obama, whose schedule Wednesday included taping an interview in New York for The View and attending two Democratic fund-raisers, invited Bovio and three other New Jersey entrepreneurs to an Edison sandwich shop owned by one of them to talk business.

"It was an amazing experience," Bovio, the owner of Bovio Advanced Comfort & Energy Solutions in Sicklerville, said of his meeting with Obama. "I was freaking out for the first couple of minutes, but he sat down with us after the press left and made us feel completely at ease."

So at ease, in fact, that "I had to pinch myself to remind me who I was with," he said.

Bovio, 31, isn't exactly sure how the White House got his name, but he believes that his involvement in the New Jersey Home Performance with Energy Star program may have been the reason. The program enabled him to expand his business from traditional heating and air-conditioning.

"I've also testified at state hearings on energy programs, and I'm vice president of a lobbying group called Efficiency First, so they might have heard about me that way," he said.

The transition of the business his family has owned for three generations meant a new focus: providing services to consumers - including the addition of an insulation division - designed to make their homes more energy-efficient.

The state Energy Star program provides incentives to homeowners and businesses to become more energy-efficient to reduce utility costs, he said.

Expanding his services allowed a business with just six employees to add eight workers in 2009 and four so far this year, Bovio said. Meanwhile, sales have doubled to about $2 million a year.

The group that met Obama on Wednesday, which included the sandwich shop owner, a restaurateur, and a paper-tube manufacturer, spent almost an hour with the president, who peppered them with questions about their businesses and asked what they needed him to do to help recover from the recession, Bovio said.

"I told them that there was an energy bill in the Senate that includes rebates worth up to $8,000 for homeowners who do energy-efficient retrofits that I'd like to see passed," Bovio said.

The program would provide rebates for adding insulation, sealing ducts, and installing efficient water heaters, heating units, windows, and doors. The rebates would be worth $1,500 per measure, capped at 50 percent of a project's costs or $3,000, whichever is less.

"It will mean a lot to businesses like mine and consumers," he said.

The passage of several hours had not dampened Bovio's excitement at having met Obama.

"There we were, in a space no more than 15 by 25 feet, sitting with the leader of the Free World," he said.