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Age: 41.

Profession-business: President and CEO, Visual Mining of Rockville. "For more than 13 years, Visual Mining has provided products and services that instantly transform data into actionable business information. Visual Mining's NetCharts products deliver comprehensive solutions for both end users (such as financial professionals) and developers that are intuitive and effective. And Visual Mining's support and professional services teams complement its products by providing the expertise to ensure success. Visual Mining has more than 2,000 clients, including IBM, RSA Security, Oracle, Sun, IBM, Standard & Poor's, NetApp, General Motors, Boeing Corp. and Medtronic."

Residence: "Beltsville during the week (our house in West Virginia, most weekends)."

Family: Wife, one daughter, one son.

Hobbies: Owning and operating a farm and restoring vintage cars.

Last books read: "Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking," by Malcolm Gladwell; "Business Dashboards: A Visual Catalog for Design and Deployment," by Nils H. Rasmussen, Manish Bansal and Claire Y. Chen.

Last movie seen: "The Pursuit of Happyness."

Next vacation spot: "My farm! (Just kidding, but I do relax on my farm.) I hope to keep a promise to my kids and make it to Montana in the not-too-distant future."

Latest accomplishment: "Relocating the Visual Mining corporate offices (believe me — doing this and still delivering increased profitability this past quarter took some energy!). We stayed within Rockville, but moved to much nicer space in the Park Plaza complex on Gaither Road.

How he keeps fresh ideas coming: "For me, fresh air brings fresh ideas, so I try to spend as much time as possible outdoors with my family. Also, I try to consciously remind myself to ‘zig' while others are ‘zagging.' Not that I'm a contrarian, and maybe it's the CPA in me, but if you see mass movements or strong trends in any direction, it's always better to take two steps back, assess and evaluate — rather than dive right in with the crowd. When you do this, fresh ideas just seem to spring up."

Quote: "As folks at Visual Mining always hear me say, ‘We need to continuously move forward and make progress.' In these economic times, I think this approach applies to our community in general right now — ‘Stay positive, and focus on making progress every day.'"