Congratulations to Kent Wood of Prisoner Transportation Services, LLC on being named one of nine “2010 Entrepreneurs of the Year” by Nashville’s City Paper. See excerpt below or click here (http://nashvillecitypaper NULL.com/content/city-business/2010-entrepreneurs-year) for the full article.

After joining two start-up companies that went belly up, Kent Wood said he was really trying to figure out where to go next with his career in 2003.

“I had a business mentor who had owned and sold his own business and was successful, and we decided to look for a company to buy together,” he said.

Wood spent six months searching for a company when he found PTS, a prisoner extradition company that transports inmates for state and local agencies. They bought the company in September 2003 and Wood said he knew the timing was right.

“We felt like it was a small company in a niche business industry without a lot of competition, and it had a lot of room for growth,” he said.

The fact that it was recession-proof was icing on the cake.

“We deal with government clients and as budgets are constrained, they do more and more outsourcing,” he said. “We’re focused on one thing, and we can do it better and save them money.”

Apparently, they’ve been doing something right. When Wood and his partner bought the company, PTS did less than $1 million in revenue. It has since grown 13-fold, doubling in 2008 alone. One of the keys to the company’s growth has been access to capital.

“With good capital, you can hire good people and provide good service,” he said.

Wood has more big expansion plans for 2010: The company employed 100 in 2008 and plans to bump that up to 125 this year.

The rising sentiment against illegal immigration is helping to grow a new line of business for PTS — transporting airplane loads of deportees back to their home countries and continents. As one of the largest international transporters of detainees, PTS flies inmates to Mexico, Honduras, Guatemala, El Salvador and Africa.