When Amos Otis was working out of his basement in the late 1980s trying to establish his government contracting business, he “sincerely believed” he could turn his fledgling operation into a thriving enterprise. It took about five years but SoBran, Inc. finally took off. It is now a $61 million technical and professional services company that provides expertise on biomedical research, engineering and logistics programs for government and commercial clients around the world.
Success didn’t come easy, but Otis doesn’t hesitate to give credit.
“I attribute it to my education at Tennessee State University, where you believed if you got a chance, you could do anything. I didn’t think it was going to be as hard as it was, but I believed I could do it. I also understood I couldn’t do it by myself, that I had to hire other people — people smarter than me.”
Otis almost didn’t attend college. Although he was bright and had good grades in high school, at 6 years old Otis’ parents divorced, resulting in him being raised in a home with limited means. He spent a year after graduating from high school trying to secure a job so he could send himself to college.
“I was doing odd jobs, whatever I could get — a bill collector for a used furniture store was one job,” he recalls.
One day, his uncle, a TSU alumnus, literally packed him up and drove him from Detroit to Nashville, and introduced him to the university staff with instructions to “put this boy in school.” They did.
After graduating from Tennessee State in 1965, Otis joined the U.S. Air Force, where he became an officer, assigned to the strategic air command as a missile combat crew commander — he served for 21 years. “That’s all I ever really wanted when I was growing up, to be an Air Force officer,” he says. “I grew up around the Maxwell Air Force Base [in Alabama], and I saw a lot of the Black officers and pilots. They were highly respected in the community and they were very upstanding, intelligent guys — with that swagger — and that’s what I wanted to be.”
