Amy Keller | 2/1/2011

Money

As part of the GrowFL program, the Legislature authorized an $8.5-million Economic Gardening Loan Program for second-stage companies that demonstrate high potential for growth and expansion. The loan program’s scorecard:

Borrowers

Amjad Shamin

» AAJ TECHNOLOGIES, Fort Lauderdale

Business: Healthcare information technology consulting firm

CEO: Amjad Shamim

Amount borrowed: $250,000

How it used the money: Hired 11 employees to work on new initiatives that allowed the company to expand its products and services. Shamim intends to hire five additional employees in the first six months of this year.

» LEARNSOMETHING, Tallahassee

Steve Roden

Business: Education company provides e-learning solutions for pharmacies and supermarkets to educate their employees on how to comply with the federal Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act, along with Medicare fraud prevention and safety and other regulations.

CEO: Steve Roden

Amount borrowed: $250,000

How it used the money: Hired workers and restructured its debt. The 12-year-old company, which has 56 employees, is expecting to increase its revenue from $8 million in fiscal year 2010, which ended in June, to $10 million in 2011. “A company our size could have used a million to work with and done more growth through acquisitions,” says Roden.

Getting to the Next Level

For many businesses, good advice and strategy — not capital — is the key to growth.

» Pam Butler, CEO of Aegis Business Technologies, was looking to grow her Tallahassee technology company when she applied to be part of GrowFL’s technical assistance program in December 2009. Butler felt constrained by the limits of the local Tallahassee economy, but GrowFL provided her with market information that helped her land new clients in other regions of Florida, Georgia and even as far away as Maryland.

» Waymon Armstrong, president of Orlando-based Engineering & Computer Simulations, a 13-year-old company that creates video games and virtual worlds that the Department of Defense uses to train soldiers and first responders, was one of the first participants in the technical assistance portion of the program. Armstrong says he was impressed by how fast GrowFl provided help when he began moving into adjacent markets. “They had their stuff back to me faster than I knew what to do with it, and it blew me away,” says Armstrong, who is going back for a second round of technical assistance this year. “I only need it when I need it and I need it tomorrow.”