Kevin Brown
VP for business development / Command and Control Technologies Corp., Titusville
A favorite author: Tom Clancy.
Family: Wife, Abby; daughters, Erica, 5, and Selena, 1.
Shuttle launches witnessed: Approximately 60.
Name: Kevin Brown, 39, vice president for business development of 21-employee information technology firm Command and Control Technologies Corp.
What CCT does: Sells software -- licensed from NASA for commercialization -- that automates rocket launches. "We've got a suite of products that replace the old way of doing business," Brown says. The company also does consulting.
CCT co-founders: Peter Simons, president, and Rodney Davis, chief technology officer.
Common denominator: All three worked for McDonnell Douglas, have engineering or computer science backgrounds and helped build the launch systems at Kennedy Space Center. Brown majored in computer science at the University of Louisiana in his home state.
Seed capital: Their own money and a Small Business Administration loan.
Revenues: Nearly $2 million annually. CCT is the fastest-growing private company in Brevard County and was small-business subcontractor of the year for 1998 at the Kennedy Space Center.
Market penetration: Three of the four U.S. licensed spaceports use CCT products.
Recent work: A portable payload test with Boeing and the spaceport control system for the new Kodiak Launch Complex in Alaska. "We're not interested in limiting our business to Florida. We're not interested in limiting our business to the United States."
Affiliation: Brown is past chairman and a current member of the board of the Florida Space Research Institute.
What CCT wants to do: Spawn new companies.
Quote: "The technology that we're developing provides incredible amounts of opportunity for new businesses, new products, new services," Brown says.
Battling Gunk
Clarence Baugh
President / Custom Biologicals, Boca Raton
For posterity: Baugh, while working for Merck, had his daughter, ill with the mumps, gargle for him. The virus she had is now the backup strain for the mumps vaccine -- preserved forever.
Family matters: Six grandchildren.
Pastimes: He and his wife "baby-sit a lot." They also play tennis and golf.
Clarence Baugh knows his critters. A bacterial physiologist, he worked for the Army's bacterial warfare center, for Merck on childhood disease vaccines and later was a professor at Texas Tech University. Now he owns Custom Biologicals, a Boca Raton company that develops microscopic critters that break down gunk in restaurant grease traps and gas station runoff. They also can be used for gold and copper refining. Biological treatment means big savings. A customer who spent $4,000 a month pumping effluent cut his cleanup bill to $600 in tablets.
Baugh, 72 and company president, works on the science. He leaves business operations at the $2-million company to his wife, Jayne, and five children. Eldest son Bill Baugh, 41, runs Custom Solutions, an underground tank business that also has revenues of $2 million. Son Bob, 40, is in Malaysia working on cleaning up shrimp farms. Daughter Barbara Friend, 37, does marketing. Chuck, 35, is in sales and management. Youngest son Thomas, 32, is the financial officer and does sales. Says their father: "They were unloading boxes of petri dishes when they were young."
Limited capital was a blessing for the 9-year-old firm. Unable to afford huge stainless steel fermenters, Baugh developed concentrated products. Custom's 8-ounce products have a shipping cost advantage over the 55-gallon competition. Baugh also specializes in custom treatments.
'Changing the World'
Jim Talton
President and CEO / NanoSphere, Alachua
Slogan: "Smaller is better."
Native son: Talton graduated from Broward's Plantation High School and the University of Florida.
Quote: "I can tell you with a straight face we have something that's going to change the world."
The first time Nanosphere's Jim Talton and Jim Fitz-Gerald mixed a laser, a polymer and a fine powder, the outcome was, unfortunately, noteworthy. "It bubbled up like -- I don't know -- like boiling a milk jug," recalls Talton, 30. "It smelled awful."
From that malodorous start, the two University of Florida roommates found a low-cost way to coat drug particles with a polymer for gradual release in the lungs. The process is a break-through for sufferers of asthma, tuberculosis and diabetes. "It's creating quite a stir in the drug-delivery world," says Sheldon Schuster, UF biotechnology program director.
Talton and Fitz-Gerald were working on their respective doctorates in pharmacy and materials science and engineering when they combined specialties. Talton, who earned his doctorate in 1999, the same year Nanosphere was started, is president and CEO. Fitz-Gerald, who earned his doctorate in 1998, is vice president and a professor at the University of Virginia. (Also involved are two of their UF professors, Guenther Hochhaus and Rajiv Singh.)
Nanosphere eked out a profit last year with grants and feasibility study funding. The company is working with makers of four inhalable drugs and two injectable drugs. An early result from two animal studies: An inhaled drug that normally was released into the blood from the lungs in minutes was still releasing, once Nano-coated, after eight hours. "The potential for what we're doing is just incredible," Talton says.
The only aroma their process has now is the smell of success.
Nuclear Physics: Captured by Science
Penny Skordas Haskins
President / Radiation Technologies, Alachua
Connected: Haskins is on the board of the Florida Space Research Institute and the Coalition for Improving Mathematics and Science Education. She's also director of Christian education at Alachua First Methodist Church.
Lately reading: "Before It's Too Late," the Glenn Commission Report on Mathematics and Science Teaching.
Recent writing: "Transuranic Optimized Measurement System (TOMS)," with J.E. McKisson and J.P. Oliver.
As a senior in high school, Penny Haskins visited Clemson University and heard how the collision of matter and anti-matter annihilates everything, leaving nothing but energy. "That was the coolest stuff I ever heard," she says.
It took awhile, but Haskins eventually got her doctorate in nuclear physics and now runs Radiation Technologies, an Alachua company that makes custom nuclear radiation detection systems. Its products can measure -- without opening -- the levels of plutonium 238-radiation in 55-gallon drums at a nuclear materials plant. The company consults on and tests monitoring devices for the comprehensive test-ban treaty.
Though a grandmother, Haskins is relatively new to business. The granddaughter of Greek immigrants, she earned her bachelor's in 1967 from North Carolina State University and intended to teach math. Instead, she raised her children and then went to the University of Florida to pursue a doctorate in nuclear physics. She earned it in 1984 and spent six years on the research faculty there and at the UF Space Astronomy Laboratory. Three shuttle missions have carried her work.
In 1990, she and electrical engineer Jack McKisson co-founded Radiation Technologies. It's not a big-dollar operation; revenues last year topped $500,000.
With revenues improving, Haskins now has an administrator at the six-employee company so that she can work more on physics. Running a business evidently doesn't hold as much appeal as the collision of matter and anti-matter she heard about as a teen. "It captured me and never let go of me," Haskins says.