Helping Hands

Pam and Matt Weber turned to the state-funded GrowFL program for advice on how best to expand their internet marketing company. The business, Pam Weber says, has been able to have sustainable growth as a result of GrowFL’s help “and we really haven’t been in the program that long at all — just a few months.” [Photo: Brook Pifer]

In 2007, Orlando entrepreneurs Pam and Matt Weber bought Roar! Internet Marketing, a small website design firm that specializes in helping businesses use the internet to increase their leads and sales. The business took off, and Roar! steadily assembled a roster of clients ranging from restaurant groups to engineering firms.

Three years and nearly 200 websites later, Roar! had added employees and continued to grow, but the Webers felt it had even more potential. “We were so busy working in the business, but we really knew we needed to work on the business,” says Pam Weber.

The Webers turned to part of a state-funded program called GrowFL — run by the Florida Economic Gardening Institute at the University of Central Florida and modeled after a program pioneered in Littleton, Colo. The Florida program targets so-called “second stage” businesses with 10 to 50 workers, revenues of $1 million to $25 million and revenue and employment growth in three of their last five years.

Such businesses, data show, have the most potential for creating lasting jobs, typically generating 75% to 80% of a state’s real job growth. By contrast, recruiting out-of-state businesses is slow and costly. And figures show that programs aimed at creating jobs by boosting the number of startup businesses are uncertain and inefficient because most startups fail. Successful second-stage businesses, however, have established their viability, and frequently need only some specialized help to get to the next level.

The GrowFL program focuses on services and technical help more than capital. Some help, for example, consists of CEO forums and CEO peer-to-peer roundtables where owners and managers of existing companies hear from other entrepreneurs, leaders and CEOs who’ve faced similar challenges.

Some 300 companies, such as Roar! Internet Marketing, have received intensive coaching from a team of analysts who provide everything from advice on strategy and labor referrals to information on geographic information systems, network mapping, search engine optimization and social media strategies.

The GrowFl advisers, for example, urged the Webers to focus more on forming strategic alliances — and also to concentrate on clients with the potential for repeat business, instead of cultivating one-time customers.

Pam Weber says she and her husband are putting the ideas into action and have begun working on partnering with other marketing companies and advertising firms that don’t already have an online component. “We’ve already created that relationship with one PR agency,” she says.

The firm also makes certain it communicates to existing clients about all of its services. Roar!, Pam Weber says, was doing social media management for a few customers, “but we weren’t telling all our clients.” Today, clients hear about the firm’s full range of services.

Implementing that advice, Pam Weber says, has enabled the firm to hire one new employee, and it’s interviewing candidates for another job. Revenue for 2010 was up by between 20% and 25% from 2009, she says — a jump she attributes to the “good counsel from them and the great team we have.”