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.”

The Importance of Stage 2 While stage 2 companies in Florida comprise 5.2% of all resident business establishments in the state, they are responsible for creating nearly 30% of the jobs.
Breakdown of Florida Companies (2008)
Size	Establishments	(%)	Jobs	(%)
Self-employed	678,725	31.6%	678,725	8.0%
Stage 1 (2-9)	1,352,836	62.9	3,774,725	44.6
Stage 2 (10-99)*	112,606	5.2	2,523,625	29.8
Stage 3 (100-499)	5,653	0.3	943,563	11.1
Stage 4 (500+)	452	0.02	552,093	6.5
Total**	2,150,272	?	8,472,731	?
Source: Edward Lowe Foundation * Florida gardening initiatives define stage 2 companies as having between 10 and 50 employees. ** Excludes non-commercial and non-resident establishments and jobs in Florida

GrowFL (growfl.com)

» Manager: Florida Economic Gardening Institute, a state-funded program housed at the University of Central Florida’s Office of Research and Commercialization

Tom O'Neal

» Executive director: Tom O’Neal, associate vice president for the UCF research and commercialization office

» Launched: November 2009

» Annual budget: $1.5 million (an additional $2 million was appropriated for 2010-11)

» Services: Counseling, advice and referral networks along with more sophisticated technical assistance. It also offers loans through a component managed by the Black Business Investment Fund.

» Scorecard: GrowFL has assisted more than 1,000 Florida companies with coaching, mentoring and peer-to-peer consulting. Some 160 businesses have participated in the technical assistance portion of the program, in which a team of advisers is assembled to solve a specific technical problem for a fast-growing business.

» Job creation: The program has helped create at least 420 jobs — based on a survey of 65% of 160 businesses helped by GrowFL. That amounts to an investment of about $3,571 per job — a bargain compared to incentives the state sometimes uses to lure companies from outside the state to create jobs locally.

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Working Regionally

GrowFL works closely with economic development organizations in each county to facilitate executive roundtables and other events to engage stage 2 companies. Examples include:

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:

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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.”

Economic Gardening Selection Criteria

To apply for participation in the Florida Economic Gardening Technical Assistance Pilot Program and/or the Economic Gardening Loan Fund, local businesses must meet the following criteria: