If you’re driving along Moanalua Road in Aiea, you might miss the Audio Visual Company sign. The Audio Visual Company (AVCO) is tucked in between a pizza delivery company, a business that customizes trucks for off-roading and a store that sells tropical fish.

The unpretentious warehouse-like building belies a company that handles multi-million-dollar contracts for some of the biggest clients in the state and won the 2008 Technology Company of the Year Award by the Pacific Technology Foundation.

“I was very surprised to get it,” says company owner Thomas Lee on winning the award, “because we’re not a company that develops or makes technology. We take everyone’s equipment and we take their product and we put it together to create an integration of high-technology systems. We’re systems integrators,” he explains.

Lee began as a technician and built AVCO from the ground-up. “As a tech, he and others got together and realized at some point things couldn’t be fixed and it was time to sell people new ones,” says Ainsley Mahikoa, AVCO’s Market Development Manager. “And so instead of giving it to somebody else, they got into business selling and replacing pieces that didn’t work anymore and eventually built it into a business.”

Thirty years later, AVCO is still a small company with relatively few employees (at last count, there were about 43 workers on the payroll). But this small business has achieved huge success in the technology sector, with a list of clients any company would envy.

“The majority of our clients are in Hawaii. Makeup is military, corporate and education,” Mahikoa says. He quickly runs down the list of jobs completed. “We built the majority of (military) command centers in Hawaii, starting back in 1997 – 1998. We’ve done that for the Pacific Fleet for PACAF, Pacific Air Forces; Camp Smith, for the Pacific Command and Pacific Missile Range,” which is the Navy’s facility at Barking Sands, Kauai.

The company has a long-standing relationship with First Hawaiian Bank and other corporate giants. Major medical facilities, including Straub, Pali Momi and Wilcox Memorial Hospital, are all clients. In the education field, there’s always a need, from simple audio-visual equipment to state-of-the-art learning centers found at the John A. Burns School of Medicine in Kakaako. “Everything that’s audio-visual in that building on campus, we designed and installed,” Mahikoa says.

As AVCO’s Market Development Manager, Mahikoa keeps AVCO at the forefront of technology. “I’m constantly on conference call, and I deal directly with the manufacturers and my preference is to deal with the developers of new products, the engineers who write the code, the product managers who test the products, as well as sales engineers in the field and sales staff,” he says.

Mahikoa was a proponent of video communications from the onset and has guided the company into creating video-conferencing capabilities for a variety of clients.