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Tampa Bay: Full Swing
"We try to target firms that fall within financial information services and medical and biomedical technologies and services," says Bill Lax, the committee's senior vice president. "It's all based on the infrastructure we already have. There's a critical mass that's tending to grow and attract others."
Two companies account for the bulk of new Hillsborough jobs announced earlier this year: Denver-based TeleTech and Baltimore's United States Fidelity & Guaranty (USF&G). Both will locate in existing buildings in east Hillsborough near Brandon. Both will eventually hire up to 500 people each. TeleTech is a customer service and technical support provider to Fortune 500 companies. "The reasons they chose this area were the large labor pool, proximity to the roadways and growth in the area," says Barbara Baroni, vice president of program development at the Brandon Chamber of Commerce.
USF&G follows a trend set by other big companies of establishing back-office operations in the Tampa area. The insurer plans a national claims processing center that runs 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. A management team is expected to arrive in Tampa in April to hire and train the staff for an opening in September. The Tampa-area location was chosen after a year-long search, during which 15 other metropolitan areas were visited.
"Tampa was selected because of the excellent cost of living, the quality of the work force and a very, very positive business climate," says Kerrie Burch-DeLuca, vice president of corporate communications for USF&G. "A group of business leaders talked to people from our company. We were very impressed by that. Also, many companies have businesses similar to ours who've located there already. They told our management about the people, the lifestyle, the employees available."
Illustrative of the growth in Hillsborough is the sprawling Brandon Town Center mall, which opened at the intersection of Interstate 75 and State Road 60 in March 1995. But Baroni says the Brandon Chamber of Commerce is promoting more than just retail trade. The mall refuses to release figures on its first year of operation.
"We're going to encourage professional office space," Baroni says, taking note of a plan to expand 255-bed Columbia Brandon Regional Medical Center by 35 beds. "Because of the hospital expansion, we're encouraging medical office space and the services that surround the profession."
Tourism's Critical Role
According to the University of Florida's Bureau of Economic and Business Research (BEBR), from 1995 to 2000, employment in Hillsborough and Pinellas will expand by more than 100,000 jobs. Tourism remains critical to the economies of the neighboring counties.
In Tampa, Legends Field, the New York Yankees' spring training complex, opened last month to raves. At the port, the Florida Aquarium has attracted more than 880,000 visitors since it opened March 31, 1995, although it is struggling to keep ahead of its debt service. The aquarium, the Garrison Seaport Center cruise ship terminal next door and the Ice Palace hockey arena under construction just to the west all are part of Tampa's downtown redevelopment efforts.
In Pinellas, almost 62,000 people work directly or indirectly in the tourist trade, serving 4 million overnight visitors a year and earning wages that amounted to $773 million in 1994, according to Carole Ketterhagen, executive director of the St. Petersburg/Clearwater Area Convention and Visitors Bureau. Visitor tallies for 1995 weren't available at press time, but Ketterhagen says, "What I have indicates '95 was a very strong tourism year. We saw a significant recovery from Europe and continued growth from domestic markets, as well."
St. Petersburg's landmark Renaissance Vinoy Resort is enjoying a boost in business from the latest Florida International Museum exhibit, "Splendors of Ancient Egypt." The same thing happened with the "Treasures of the Czars" exhibit last year. "We got a tremendous amount of activity in our restaurants," says Richard Seale, the resort's director of sales. "It's been very beneficial." Last year, for the Czars exhibit, the resort tried packaging hotel rooms with exhibit tickets, but didn't find many takers. Most of its business -- 65% -- comes from business travelers rather than tourists; conferences of national groups headquartered in the Midwest or Northeast are primary sources of bookings.
Although beaches immediately come to mind when discussing Pinellas, the county is also home to a rich cluster of businesses with a technical bent. According to the St. Petersburg/Clearwater Economic Development Council's Executive Director Bill Castoro, there are almost 1,500 manufacturing businesses in Pinellas. Among the state's 67 counties, it has the largest number of medical manufacturing jobs -- which helps explain its relatively high per capita personal income of $24,725.
One of the county's important employers is Jabil Circuit. Jabil started in Detroit in 1966, then moved its corporate headquarters to St. Petersburg in 1978 to be closer to IBM in Boca Raton. Though Big Blue has since reduced its presence in Boca, Jabil still has its headquarters and a plant in St. Petersburg; it also manufactures circuit board assemblies in Michigan, California, Scotland and Malaysia. In the last year, it added about 500 employees in Florida, and now has a worldwide work force of 3,000.
Why is a company like Jabil still in supposedly sleepy St. Pete? "We think this is a better environment for business, and we can get the kind of employees we want here," says Jabil spokeswoman Beth Walters. She says airline connections through Tampa International Airport are another factor: "We travel a lot to our customer sites and our customers come to us a lot."
Playing Catch-up In Pasco
While the two biggest counties in the Tampa Bay region remain the major centers of business activity, their less populous, more rural neighbors to the north are becoming more aggressive.
Pasco and Hernando counties are working to shake off their bedroom community image as local leaders organize serious economic development efforts, seeking to gain a relative advantage by touting their still wide-open spaces. Already, they are attracting some companies that consider Pinellas and Hillsborough too congested or too expensive.
Matt Stone Co. opened an eight-person operation in Pasco County last December, in addition to its 42-employee plant in Pinellas. "There's more people wanting to work up here than in Pinellas," says Vice President Jeff Mattox. "We run an ad here and we get 20 to 30 prospects. In Pinellas, we might get two." In addition, he says, "It's not as congested for getting your trucks out. We have a lot of heavy trucks [in Pinellas] and traffic ties us up quite a bit."
Pasco County traditionally has been a retiree haven (on the west side) and an agricultural center (on the east) that hasn't provided enough jobs for its labor force. About three out of ten employed residents of Pasco commute to jobs in Hillsborough and Pinellas counties, according to BEBR.
But now there is a countywide effort to expand and diversify Pasco's employment base. "We target anybody and everybody," says Tom Gola, business development manager with the Pasco Committee of 100. "There's more bang for your buck up here. Everything's just a little bit cheaper. We can demonstrate a bottom-line savings."
John Stanton, president of Florida Engineered Construction Products Corp. in Tampa, bought 140 acres in Wesley Chapel, a community in southeastern Pasco, where he expects to build in three to five years. The 350-employee company already has plants in Hillsborough and Osceola counties. "We've looked at being able to consolidate at a location that would allow us to expand product lines and the geographic locations we could serve," says Stanton.
National Sash and Door Jobbers Association, a trade organization with 1,200 members, also opened its doors in Pasco in December. It moved its headquarters here from Chicago after considering the Carolinas, Texas and Georgia. "They were so cooperative in trying to attract us down here, we decided to come," says Robert O'Keefe, the association's CEO and executive vice president. "We found everyone welcoming us with open arms."
In Hernando County, "our mainstays have always been construction and real estate, with a strong retirement community," says Vince Vanni, president of the Greater Hernando County Chamber of Commerce. "That's beginning to change. Younger people are beginning to move in." He says one lure for working-age adults has been a growing number of health-services jobs.
Among other expressions of faith in Hernando's future, Wal-Mart is planning to expand its Spring Hill store this summer to 200,000 square feet. The expansion will create 250 local jobs. "We looked at the number and types of competitors in that market and felt the area was being underserved by major retailers," says Keith Morris, spokesman at Wal-Mart's Bentonville, Ark., headquarters. "Not only was there an excellent market, but there was excellent potential for growth in the future as well."
Excellent potential, indeed: Employment forecasts indicate a fast-growing supply of jobs in both Hernando and Pasco.
From 1995 to 2000, employment will grow 27.6% in Hernando and 17.6% in Pasco -- well above the 13.7% growth projected for the entire state -- according to BEBR. By contrast, BEBR's five-year forecast calls for 14.5% growth in Hillsborough and just 8.8% in Pinellas.
Talent Search
The experience of Philip Doganiero runs counter to concern about a shortage of skilled workers in Florida. "Having grown a business from three employees to 300, we haven't found that to be the case," he says. "We've always had access to a pool of talented people. There's a lack of understanding about what's available here in Florida."
Doganiero started National Data Products in Clearwater in 1982. In 1995, he sold the company to Dataflex of Edison, N.J. Dataflex just announced it is moving its corporate headquarters to Tampa Bay and will bring 300 jobs.
But not every company finds Florida as alluring as Dataflex does. Serious concerns about the quality of Florida's school system and labor force emerged in a recent survey of 314 corporate executives in the U.S., commissioned by the Florida Dept. of Commerce in partnership with 31 economic development organizations and companies in the state.
Such concerns are nothing new. Consider the internal uprising four years ago when Breed Technologies, a manufacturer of air bags, decided to move its corporate headquarters from New Jersey to Central Florida. "Many of the engineers didn't want to come," recalls Jim DeGennaro, vice president for industrial development with the Central Florida Development Council. "They didn't want to bring their children into the Florida education system."
DeGennaro is well-aware of outsiders' opinions of the Sunshine State. Four times a year, a sales force from his Central Florida Development Council spends a week in the Northeast, trying each time to convince up to 20 companies with expansion plans to relocate in Central Florida. DeGennaro says the sales delegations always encounter the same stereotypes: "We walk too slow, we talk too slow and we eat too many grits."
On the other hand, Florida business executives themselves tend to think more highly of the state than do their out-of-state counterparts, according to that survey of 314 executives.
That didn't surprise DeGennaro. "You know what?" he says. "Once a company's managers are down here a few years and they watch what's going on back home on the Weather Channel, grits don't taste too bad."
In addition to improving schools and expanding job-training opportunities, Florida Department of Commerce Secretary Charles Dusseau suggests that more aggressive marketing would help Tampa Bay and the state's other regions. "Perception is everything," Dusseau says. "People make their decisions based on their perceptions of the facts, not what the facts are. And in any environment where a situation is dynamic, like economic development, perceptions tend to lag reality."
