An Anchorage supplier shrank to six employees, and now it stocks federal Alaska

Fifteen federal orders were placed with ASCI Federal Services between Aug. 17 and Aug. 19 for pens, pencils, binders and clipboards, worth about $11,000 altogether. Four years earlier the company had six employees.

ASCI Federal Services went through a partial liquidation in January 2021 and restructured as a majority women-owned company, with Christine Hopkins taking over as majority owner. It shrank from 125 employees to six by mid-2022, according to an Alaska APEX case study.

That November, the General Services Administration awarded it an indefinite-delivery contract worth about $12.4 million to run logistics for federal civilian and Defense Department agencies across Alaska. The company established a primary warehouse in Anchorage to hold inventory and process shipments, with proprietary software giving customers access to stock levels and delivery status.

The award was a total small business set-aside and drew four offers. The SBA certified ASCI as a woman-owned small business the following month, in December 2022.

The contract produces a steady stream of small purchases. Federal contracting databases show more than 14,000 awards and orders to the firm, many of them routine supply buys. A Navy contract that began in April 2024 has about $14.8 million obligated against a potential value of roughly $26.6 million.

The ASCI family of companies traces its history to April 1999, when it began supporting oil and gas operations on the North Slope before expanding into federal work. It handles procurement, warehousing, inventory management, transportation coordination and surplus material disposal. The company said that as of March 2024, 67 percent of its workforce was women and 28 percent were veterans.

In May, the SBA's Alaska District Office named ASCI the 2026 Woman-Owned Small Business of the Year for the state.