Diane Mastrull: In Burlington County, a small business grows with government contracts for shipping boxes

Jim Brennan is a rarity for a small-business owner: He has an executive-style corner office. But before you get too envious, consider that it is partly made from a shipping container.

Then again, be envious. From his rather unusual perch in Burlington County, Brennan has been presiding over a business whose growth has been staggering, especially for these woeful economic times - and for a U.S.-based manufacturer.

For 28 years, Brennan's Sea Box Inc., in Cinnaminson, has been demonstrating with astonishing creativity the many uses for shipping containers - including a giant movie screen when stacked 10 high, living quarters for circus elephants, mobile repair stations for military vehicles in war zones, and the latest adaptation, temporary emergency housing. As in, a kitchen, a living room, three bedrooms, and a handicapped-accessible bathroom.

As Sea Box's customer list and designs (more than 5,000 and counting) have grown, so has its workforce, now up to 170 from 50 in 2004. In that time, annual revenue has ballooned, too - from $23 million to nearly $100 million.

But to Brennan, it's not enough. He is fighting for greater government-contract opportunities for small businesses.

Specifically, Sea Box wants more government work to be "set aside" for small businesses. Without that, the size of a small business puts it at a competitive disadvantage, said Robert Farber, Sea Box's in-house counsel and director of contracts.

"You compete against large companies and foreign companies," Farber said of the shipping-container business.

Because it has less than 500 employees, Sea Box is considered by federal standards to be a small business. So it has turned for help to the U.S. Small Business Administration, where Farber worked for 20 years until joining the container manufacturer in 2004. Sea Box sought assistance through SBA's procurement division, the sector charged with helping small businesses do more work with federal agencies. In Sea Box's case, the U.S. Department of Defense.

At issue was that the Defense Logistics Agency (DLA) Troop Support in Philadelphia, a centralized buyer for the Defense Department, was purchasing all cargo containers needed by the military from a large company in South Carolina, said Ricardo Sacidor, a local SBA procurement-center representative who worked with Sea Box to change that.