Gene Kirila II, president of GK Ventures in Transfer, has been selected to receive the Thiel College Haller Enterprise Institute 2003 Entrepreneur of the Year Award.

The honor will be bestowed at a dinner at 6:30 p.m. Oct. 6 in Howard Miller Student Center's Sawhill-Georgian Room on the campus of the Greenville college.

In 1984 Kirila, a Brookfield native, created a high-growth profitable business called Pyramid Fitness. He sold the business in 1993 just after it was one of four small businesses to have a site visit for the U.S. Department of Commerce's Malcolm Baldrige Award.

Kirila, in the meantime, founded Pyramid Composites. There he developed the VEC Operating System, a small factory that can be set up anywhere to turn out a variety of products from the same basic units run by just a handful of people and controlled by a computer.

In 1994 he founded a third company, Efficient Machine Tool Sales Inc., which reached No. 13 on Inc. magazine's "Fastest Growing Companies" list.

Genmar Corp., a billion-dollar boating conglomerate, bought the VEC Operating System in 1999 from Pyramid Composites.