CORTLAND, Ohio – Mike Hovis gestures to a far corner inside a spacious barnlike office building just off state Route 5 that he constructed three years ago. There, along a back wall, are more than a dozen metallic placards measuring roughly 4 feet by 2 feet – each identified with letters and numbers that were once brightly painted white but are now faded with age.
“These were building numbers at the Ravenna Arsenal,” Hovis says, lifting one to his chest. Some of these date to the Second World War, when the United States Department of the Army commissioned the construction of ordnance facilities on approximately 22,000 acres in Portage County near the Trumbull County line to support the war effort.
Today, Hovis’ company, Hovis Construction LLC, is active in construction and demolition projects at the site, now renamed the Camp James A. Garfield Joint Military Training Center. Hovis’ building is adorned with other artifacts from the base’s history: Wooden beams that were once used at the base’s storage buildings are now repurposed as an office desk he built, while other beams from the same source were used to construct a bar in the front of the building. Elsewhere are old ammunition crates, signage, a searchlight, an early alarm system and a segment of original gutter that is now used as decor above the front bar.
“It’s great to preserve some of this,” Hovis says with a sense of pride. “I’m having a lot of fun.”
Hovis is clearly at home at both his office and in the field. During the early 1990s, while attending Youngstown State University, Hovis joined the Ohio Army National Guard as a military police officer while also working as a subcontractor installing above-ground pools. In 1991, he was activated for duty during the Gulf War and was deployed overseas for six months.
His next career move was in public service as he joined the Cortland Police Department in 1993. The following year, Hovis joined the Bazetta Township department and served on the force for 25 years, six as its chief of police.
As a veteran, Hovis says it’s rewarding to be engaged in projects related to government and defense. Since he established his company in 2018, all of his government contract work has been at Camp Garfield, as the base upgrades its infrastructure and buildings.
“Mostly, we’ve done culverts, demolition and paving projects there,” he says. “It’s a beautiful facility out there, but the infrastructure hasn’t been updated in a while.”
Hovis says that after retiring from the force, he intended to move back into the construction field and explored opportunities available in government contracts. “I sort of taught myself about federal contracting,” he recalls, noting that the Bazetta police had secured a law enforcement contract with the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers as it was active in projects around Mosquito Lake during the period he served. “I learned real quick on how to do the federal stuff. I would conduct internal audits to make sure that everything was in compliance.”
Hovis also today serves as chairman of the board of trustees in Bazetta Township and is running on the Republican ticket for Trumbull County commissioner in the general election in November. His opponent in that race is attorney Kristen Rock, a Democrat from Liberty Township.
Once retired, a friend of his alerted Hovis to a program that made it easier for veteran-owned businesses to bid on government contracts. He applied for the program in March 2019 and landed his first federal contract at Camp Garfield that September. “It was a $1.7 million demolition contract,” he says.
The contract stipulated that the project would be completed within a year and a half. Hovis finished it in six months. “When it ended, the contracting officer from Columbus came up, and she said we want you to bid on every contract we have in the state of Ohio,” he recalls.
That project opened the doors for additional jobs at the arsenal, Hovis says. Since that first contract, the company has built culverts, performed more demolition work and engaged in several paving projects there. Four years ago, Hovis built a 1,100-foot-long tank trail at the base.
“That project was just shy of $1 million, and I think we moved 10,000 cubic yards of dirt. There’s a lot of activity going on out there,” he says. One of his most recent purchases is a new John Deere excavator, parked just outside the large barn. “We do a lot of site work, a lot of digging.”
Hovis Construction is a one-man operation that relies on subcontractors to complete some of the more complex projects. As such, Hovis says it is important to keep current on any changes to federal regulations and gain any insight or guidance on some of the back-end paperwork – registrations, required certifications, compliance documentation, for example – that accompanies preparing a bid for government business.
Much of this was new to him when he launched the company eight years ago. Among his first calls was to the Ohio APEX Accelerator at the Ohio Small Business Development Center at YSU. “I reached out to Joey Scott, who was the director there at the time,” he says, noting that Scott helped identify what would work best for the new company. Since then, Hovis has maintained a close working relationship with the accelerator.
“We’ve helped him with a lot of contractual issues, a lot of stuff on the back end,” says Scot Loveland, the current director at APEX. “We’ve also helped on the accounting end.”
In short, Loveland says APEX provides services that help small businesses wanting to sell their goods and services to the government. APEX, for example, has assisted Hovis with identifying potential subcontractors in the region that would make a good fit on a particular project. “At least we can introduce them officially,” he adds. Other services include reviewing a company’s request for proposals or qualifications to prepare them for entering the government services portal.
“Our job is to help companies become procurement ready,” Loveland says.
Hovis Construction is a good example of how small businesses use APEX’s services to navigate the sometimes confusing network of preparing a government bid. “There are about 200 active companies in our portfolio,” he says. In 2025, these companies landed a total of $80 million in government contracts, he reports.
Hovis says he actively engages with APEX and has in the past made presentations before student interns working with the program and has participated in webinars with the U.S. Small Business Administration, sharing his experience and insights relating to securing government work. The company recently completed a culvert project at the base and is preparing to bid on additional opportunities at Camp Garfield.
“Everybody thinks that to do business with the federal government is big and scary,” Hovis says. “Well, it’s really not if you know what you’re doing.”
Pictured at top: Mike Hovis holds a metallic placard inside his office.