Business Community

Case Study: Sovran

When was your company established?

Sovran Training, LLC, was established in June 2005 to assist businesses with assessment, hiring, training and employee development.

What is the origin of your company name?
The name Sovran was chosen to convey that above all we believe excellence of character.

Who owns your company?

Sovran is a privately held company headed by CEO Barry Kamrad and Director Gabriela Santamaria with headquarters in Fairfax, Virginia.

What is your main business focus?

We are in the business of helping our clients grow their business.

Sovran offers professional psychological assessment of behavior and job skills for existing staff and prospective job candidates, as well as training and development programs. Sovran offers public training programs for employees, managers and executives from all levels across a range of industries, and can provide custom-designed programs unique to each company’s needs.

We also specialize in one-on-one executive coaching designed to improve a business’s strategic planning and implementation.

Who are your primary customers?

Our customers are companies who often become long-term partners with Sovran; companies who want to expand, and who realize that success relies on the quality of the people in the organization. They are intensely interested in identifying the best people available to join the business, and in improving the skills of current staff.

Where do you see your company in five years? 

The inspiration for the Sovran business goes back more than 20 years to the mid-1980s when CEO Barry Kamrad began his management career. He discovered very quickly that success in business is based on the ability to recruit, train and motivate staff to achieve excellence. For two decades he successfully managed growing businesses in northern Virginia and Washington, D.C.

In 2002 Barry met Gabriela Santamaria, who was coordinating training programs in the area. They realized that they shared a passion for developing people and businesses, and Sovran Training, LLC, was established. Since its inception, Sovran has provided a broad range of services to a growing client base in the Northern Virginia area.

Our continuing vision is to continue to make Fairfax an attractive place to do business, by helping to develop the management, sales and technical skills of workers, managers and executives across hundreds of area businesses.

What sets you apart from your competitors?
We believe that we are the only company offering the combination of professional pre-employment testing, and workplace analysis with training and development.

Because we do not sell “packages,” a second factor is our commitment to providing the right solution for each client’s unique needs. We begin every new client relationship with a comprehensive needs analysis, to identify the specific needs of the business.

Finally, is our focus on real world experience. The owners and managers are experienced managers who have had careers running real businesses, like restaurant chains, as well as training, computer equipment and software companies over a span of twenty-five years. We have worked for the largest – and the smallest – companies in the United States and around the world.

How many employees do you have?

We have seven employees, six of whom live in Fairfax County, and we outsource our support functions to three sister companies located in Fairfax.

What are the advantages of your Fairfax County location?

This year Forbes.com and CNBC ranked Virginia the best state in the U.S. for business. Forbes.com and CNBC identified that Virginia offers excellent opportunities to businesses of every size to prosper and grow.

As a local company, owned and operated by people who have spent their entire adult lives living and working here, Sovran is uniquely qualified to help companies capitalize on the opportunities present in Fairfax County and the greater Metropolitan D.C. area. The labor pool in this market is the right fit for companies interested in growth, and Sovran has the tools needed to help clients identify, recruit, train and manage these people.

Where our company is located?