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Donald Mills, president, general manager, and co-owner of Mills Marine & Ship Repair, was named the Virginia 2025 Small Business Person of the Year. Mills and his wife will attend National Small Business Week in Washington, D.C., on May 4-5, where the SBA will formally recognize him and make him eligible to be the National 2025 Small Business Person of the Year.

Mills said he feels “humble” and “grateful” to have received the award and credits the success of his business to everyone, past and present, who has been a part of the Mills Marine & Ship Repair team.

“It has been the support of the people who roll up their sleeves every day and come in here and get after it,” Mills said. “So this is not my award. This is our award. I’m grateful that they put my face and my name on, but I will not accept the total responsibility for that honor, and that’s what it is. It’s an honor.”

Established in 2009, the company focuses on a variety of services, including ship repair, manufacturing and fabrication, warehousing and logistics, engineering services, and mobile welding services. It primarily serves the U.S. Navy, U.S. Coast Guard, Military Sealift Command, and U.S. Army.

Mills takes pride in being one of the nation’s only Black-owned ship repair and engineering support services companies. During his more than 25-year career with Newport News Shipbuilding, he said he never saw minority-owned companies but always saw minority employees.

“What I did not see on a continual basis was the people who own those companies, for those employees,” Mills said. “So, I knew that there was a void in the market. I knew that we had the skill set. I knew that we had the motivation and determination, and we just set up on that journey.”

While the company is based in Suffolk, employees are located along the East Coast from Mississippi to South Carolina, Hampton Roads, and Maine. A site is also being established on the west coast in San Diego, California, with hopes of expanding to other military locations such as Washington and Hawaii. 

After working for Newport News Shipbuilding and serving in the Army, Mills said he’s “an Army guy who fell in love with the Navy and their mission” and was inspired to use the knowledge he’d gained to create a business he was passionate about.

At 55, Mills said his wife allowed him to invest all of their savings in his business idea, and he started Mills Marine.

“You don’t get a chance at that level in your life,” he said. “If you mess it up, you don’t have time to recuperate. But it has been a wonderful journey. Have we been in lack? Yes. But have we ever had a need that God did not provide? Absolutely, positively, not.”

On June 28, Mills and his banker wife, Ernestine, will have been together for 52 years. Mills said his wife doesn’t get enough credit for the work she’s done for the company.

As the company’s senior vice president and co-owner, Ernestine and her team manage cash flow, receivables, and accounts payable.

The company’s website lists five core values Mills said they strive to achieve every day: trust, honesty, ethics, consistency, and reliability. But Mills said what keeps the company moving and growing is knowing why it’s in this business.

“Why we do it is because we believe in the mission of the United States Navy and our customers that we support on a daily basis,” he said. “And the people that has entrusted the well being of our families to us. That’s our platform, that’s our culture.”

When he first started the business, Mills said 16 banks turned them down, but that never dissuaded him.

The first few clients they had were people Mills had known and worked with personally in the past. As the business grew, what established their loyal customer base was consistency and trustworthiness, Mills said, and he takes pride in that.

“The ships that we fix, the things that we do; we got people, we got families, we got husbands, we got wives. We got somebody’s son, somebody’s daughter, somebody’s grandkids. They’re serving on that vessel,” he said. “So the quality of our work affects the quality of their lives. There is no compromising that.”