"It was just sitting right there under my nose and it made sense. I'm sure lots of people thought something like [SnagAJob.com] would be a good idea. We just ran with it."

In the world of American small business, Shawn Boyer is king. Two weeks ago, the U.S. Small Business Administration named Boyer its National Small Business Person of the Year. Boyer is president and chief executive officer of SnagAJob.com, which is based right here in Richmond. In less than a decade, Boyer has led the company's amazing growth from being just a good idea to becoming the nation's largest hourly job site.

You just won the U.S. Small Business Person of the Year award. So I guess you aren't doing any job searches for yourself these days.

Wow, I hope not. I love it here.

Did you have any idea that you were going to be picked for the award or was it a complete shock?

It was a complete secret. Until we got the letter and the call, I didn't even know that we might be considered to the state award. We found that out about a month ago and we were completely excited and honored and shocked. Because of that we were able to go to D.C. to the national awards where they bring in all of the other state award winners. That Monday night we went to the state department for a big reception, which was super cool. That Tuesday they had stuff all morning and then they were doing the awards ceremony at lunch. They announced who the two second runners up were because there was a tie and then they announced the runner up but we were just happy to be there. In talking to the other people there I realized that there were some really cool companies there and a lot of people who had much larger companies that what we have so I had no expectation of winning. The way they did it was they would start talking about the company then they would call you up on stage. They said they were going to announce the winner and when they said, "In 1999, this person was searching for a job for a friend..." my wife who was sitting behind me started punching me in the back. That's how we found out.

After you won the award, you were thrown in to a whirpool of national media attention. You were interviewed by many major business publications, you were on CNN and you were even mentioned in a speech by President Bush. Has the reality of the magnitude of this award set in yet?

Probably not. I am super appreciative and totally excited about it but it is also one of those things where I will probably reflect on it over and over again and each time that I do I will get all excited over it over and over again. I like to write in a journal so as soon as I got home from D.C., I tried to write everything down as soon as we got home late that night because I didn't want to forget any of it. Over the weekend, my wife and I were talking about it and she said, "Can you believe that we got to go to the White House and meet the president?" It has just been really neat.

I know you have told this story a million times over the past two weeks but how did you come up with the idea for SnagAJob.com?

In 1999, I was working in D.C. at a law firm and I had a friend who was and was getting her Ph.D. at American University and looking for an internship in medical anthropology. She couldn't find one so she asked if I could look online for her. I went online and did a search and there was really only one other site at the time that was listing internship positions. My parents have a retail store in Williamsburg and I called my dad and telling him about it and he said, "Well, what about college and high school kids who just want more of a traditional hourly job during the semester or summer?" I went back online to do another search and there was nothing for them.

I thought that was odd. I would have loved to have had a site like that when I was in high school and college. I would have loved to have gone down to Hilton Head and worked for the summer but I wouldn't have known how to find a job down there. From a retailers perspective, my dad said he would have loved to be able to use a site like that to recruit people.

At the time, I wasn't proficient at all with the Internet. I didn't know anything about recruiting. I knew there were all the big job boards like Monster, CareerBuilder, HotJobs and a ton of other ones and I figured that maybe one of them was getting ready to do it. So I continued to do the research but not spend that much time on it but started to get more and more serious about it over time. I also had an idea for a real estate site and I decided to leave the law firm to run with it but the real estate thing kind of petered out. Then I went all out on SnagAJob. We made a business plan, we contracted out the initial build of the site to a local company and we ended up going live with the site in May 2000. Actually, it was eight years to the day from the time we opened our office to the day President Bush told the SnagAJob story on national TV, which is kind of cool.

Looking back, are you surprised that the online hourly job search niche wasn't filled at the time you started running with your idea?

Oh yeah. It's one of those things where it's not like it was a patentable technology or idea or anything like that. It was just sitting right there under my nose and it made sense. I'm sure lots of people thought something like [SnagAJob.com] would be a good idea. We just ran with it.

Also looking back, did you have any idea that this company would grow as rapidly as it did and become as successful as it has become in such a short span of time?

Yes and no. We had big goals for ourselves, probably primarily out of ignorance, that we could grow the company that quickly. But what I didn't realize or have the appreciation for was the impact it ends up having on people. Not just the people we have here in the company, but the impact it has on all of the jobseekers that you are able to have every single day. You can look at it in one of two ways. One way is looking at it at the macro level -- we are getting four million people coming to the site every month. The other way is looking at the anecdotal level -- look at a person's story where they were out of work for five months. They couldn't find a job. They were going to have to sell their house or weren't going to be able to pay their lease at their apartment. But because they were able to find a job on SnagAJob, they can now make that mortgage payment or make that lease payment and that is the really cool thing and something I did not have an appreciation for. The other thing is that from an employer standpoint we have been able to help some really big companies do business much more efficiently.