Sam K. Alley: Arkansas Business Hall of Fame
Sam Alley
Chairman
VCC, LLC
At age 14, Sam Khamis Alley traveled with his family from Jerusalem to North Little Rock, Arkansas, to begin life in the United States. He began classes at Rose City Junior High while learning English and working after school in the family’s grocery store.
Alley attended the University of Arkansas, earning a civil engineering degree in 1979. After working as a project manager for a construction firm, he joined colleagues Ed DeMoss and Gus Vratsinas to open VCC, a construction company in Little Rock in 1987.
Today VCC is a full-service general contractor encompassing pre-construction, design-build, construction management, consultation, value engineering and contract delivery services. It has offices in Little Rock and Fayetteville, as well as Phoenix, Arizona; Irvine, California; Tampa, Florida; Atlanta, Georgia and Dallas and Houston, Texas. The firm is consistently ranked in Engineering News-Record’s Top 100 contractors and considered the largest retail construction company in the nation with projects in all 50 states.
After holding the titles of founder, CEO, CFO and chairman, Alley handed the CEO reins to his son in 2021, while remaining the company’s chairman. His other two children also work at the firm.
Alley was inducted into the University of Arkansas College of Engineering Hall of Fame in 2023. He and his wife endowed the Sam and Janet Alley Master of Science in Construction Management program with a $2 million gift to the University in 2020 and the Sam and Janet Alley Family Foundation Civil Engineering Access Arkansas Scholarship in 2010.