Publix Super Markets maintained its No. 1 spot by a wide margin. At $13.1 billion in 1999 revenues, the grocery retailer pulled in nearly twice as much cash as the No. 2 company, JM Family Enterprises. Publix grew by 8.3% over the previous year and managed to increase its net earnings by 22.2% to $462.4 million.
Some prominent companies from last year's list had to be dropped from consideration in 2000. AGES Group, an aviation support services company based in Boca Raton, was No. 30 last year with revenues of $358 million. AGES is now a subsidiary of Swedish company Volvo Aero Corp. Computer distributor Future Tech International, last year's No. 59 company with $200 million in revenues, was purchased by San Jose, Calif.-based Bell Microproducts in July 1999.
On the following pages, Florida Trend reporters Mike Vogel and John Finotti take a look at some of the companies on the list: the sports franchises (Nos. 3, 120, 122, 131 and 198), Colorado Boxed Beef Co. (No. 14), TraveLeaders (tied for No. 37), Spirit Airlines (No. 43), Mars Music (tied for No. 74) and National Gold Exchange (No. 94).
This list includes only privately held Florida-based companies. Subsidiaries, divisions and other holdings of out-of-state companies were not considered. Information was provided by company representatives; Florida Trend assumes data are accurate and truthful. Companies that did not provide sufficient information also were omitted.
(List is available in the print edition only. Research by Davis Kilgroe and Janell Miller)
#14 Colorado Boxed Beef: Catering to the "Case-Ready" Market
In 1998, Colorado Boxed Beef executive Bryan Saterbo was in North Carolina when he heard his company's name on CNN. He wasn't thrilled. The Auburndale company had just been forced to recall 359,000 pounds of ground beef after a government test turned up E. coli. The company complains that the initial government test results were never confirmed. No one got sick. But, "it cost us a lot of money and probably hurt our business a little," Saterbo says. The incident explains why Colorado Boxed Beef has become a leader in offering ground beef and chicken that has been exposed to radiation to kill any pathogens.
Irradiated meat is, however, just a sidelight for Colorado Boxed Beef, a $680 million (revenues) food distributor serving the Southeast U.S. Florida is a major cattle producer, but calves usually get sent west for fattening and slaughter. When Richard "Dick" Saterbo founded the company in 1975, it originally distributed boxed beef from Colorado, hence the name. Saterbo died in 1991, and the company is run by his sons Bryan, Steve and John, all senior vice presidents. The company supplies beef, chicken, lamb, pork and seafood to cruise lines, retailers such as Wal-Mart Stores and its Sam's Club, restaurants and food service companies.
Colorado Boxed Beef only went into food processing in a major way in 1996, with the completion of a plant in Auburndale. As a processor, the company helped pioneer the "case-ready" market to retailers who want to save on the preparation, labor and cleanup involved in grinding their own beef. The company also is a key supplier of uniformly portioned meat cuts to the cruise industry and restaurant chains such as Chili's and Hops. Colorado Boxed Beef and similar processors have benefited from the rise of casual dining chains, which prize consistency.
Saterbo believes irradiated beef, though a sliver of Colorado Boxed Beef's business, could grow to 10% of revenues. Only five small chains and retailers have tried it, but "there's quite a number of people looking at it," he says -- after all, lovers of a rare burger have no other safe way to go. Next up? Saterbo thinks there's money in using irradiation to make raw oysters safe to eat.
#37 TraveLeaders and #43 Spirit Airlines: Big Movers
Two travel industry companies -- Coral Gables' TraveLeaders and Miramar's Spirit Airlines -- made big moves in Florida Trend's annual ranking of private companies. Acquisition-minded TraveLeaders, buoyed by more than a dozen purchases in the last year, climbed to 37th from 100th last year. Earnings grew 30% in the first quarter. In July, it announced five more acquisitions and was planning even more in hopes of boosting revenues to $1 billion by year-end -- which would be good enough for 9th on our list. "Travel is the world's largest business now," says CEO Keith St. Clair, a former travel consultant educated at Birmingham University and the Open University in England. He wants TraveLeaders to be known for its online and offline services. He reasons that while travel business on the Internet will grow, it will remain a subset of overall travel-related spending. St. Clair plans to take the company public. The timing will be decided by "natural evolution," he says.
Low-fare Spirit, which moved to 43rd from 95th, continues to add destinations and flights. In October, it will fly for the first time to Chicago's O'Hare and later in the fall will fly to Washington's Ronald Reagan National Airport. The regular addition of new flights and destinations has boosted revenues to $330 million. The 2,000-employee company also is replacing DC-9s with larger and more fuel-efficient MD-80s. Revenue passenger miles are up 31.5% through June. The total passenger count is up 23.2%.
Spirit's origin as an air carrier dates to 1980, when founder Ned Homfeld took a ground transportation business and began offering gambling day-trip flights from Chicago to Atlantic City as Charter One. In November, it relocated its headquarters from Detroit to Miramar in southern Broward County.
#74 Mars Music: Same Song, Different Tune
When Mark Begelman left Office Depot in 1995, he gave retirement a try. It was a brief fling. A guitar player for 30 years, Begelman discovered a new business opportunity. "I thought, 'Gee, why not tie a vocation and avocation together,' " he says. Thus was born the concept for Mars Music, a chain of musical instrument stores.
As Begelman dug deeper, he saw a fragmented industry with 8,500 mostly mom-and-pop music shops that had little control over distribution. "I saw Office Depot all over again," he says.
Having opened its first store in March 1997, Mars Music is on pace to hit $300 million in sales this year at 35 stores and another six that were slated to open in August. While the music industry as a whole has been growing at about 9% a year, Mars Music has been posting same-store sales growth rates in the double digits.
Nor is Mars Music strumming just one tune. In what Begelman terms "edutainment," the company offers an array of music instruction, clinics and performances at its stores. Mars Music also has a record label and a music publishing business. "This is a store for musicians by musicians," Begelman says. "We have a ball."
The 53-year-old exec also finds the time to jam with his classic rock band, playing about a dozen gigs a year.
Depending on stock market conditions, look for Mars Music to go public in late 2001 or early 2002. Rock on.
#94 National Gold Exchange: Silence is Golden
If there were an award for the most "private" of the top private companies in Florida, a strong candidate for the honor would be National Gold Exchange. The owners of the Tampa-based company, brothers Mark and Alan Yaffe, like their privacy, apparently for competitive reasons. They declined to discuss any of the details of their business with Florida Trend.
This much is known: National Gold Exchange's business isn't what its name might imply, in that the company doesn't buy and sell gold bullion. Founded in Florida in 1988, National Gold Exchange is one of the largest wholesalers of rare coins -- those minted before the mid-1930s. It specializes in supplying retail outlets with double eagles, gold coins of the U.S. issued from 1849 to 1933.
In addition to making the top 100 of Florida Trend's private company list, National Gold Exchange also stands out for having one of the highest revenues-per-employee figures: The company's 30 employees generate annual sales of $163 million -- an average of $5.4 million per worker.
Besides going good with pizza, beer is good business. Five beer distributors are on the list: Southern Wine & Spirits at No. 10; Gold Coast Beverage Distributors, No. 69; Wm. Thies & Sons, No. 92; Great Bay Distributors, No. 149; and Pepin Distributing Co., No. 153.
Sports Franchises: Big Business?
Look at Florida's sports teams this way: The combined revenue of the major, privately owned NFL, MLB, NHL and NBA franchises in Florida -- the Jaguars, Buccaneers, Dolphins, Marlins, Devil Rays, Lightning, Heat and Magic -- wouldn't even beat out Anchor Glass for the 50th spot on Florida Trend's public company ranking. You could put the teams' aggregate revenue on one side of a scale . The counterweight? Forty-four average grocery stores. Of course, we don't spend hours on a Sunday cheering on glass production at Anchor, nor do we spend a lot of time talking about Publix produce manager moves no matter how much we drop there each week. That thing that floats our boats about sports is what economists call psychic income, or public consumption benefit -- the glow Jacksonville people feel on the Monday after a Jaguars game. Some research has put the economic benefit of such psychic income at $2 per person in the market to $20 per person, says Daniel Rascher, a University of San Francisco sports economist. Just don't look for it on a team's revenues statement. "If you ranked firms in Florida based on the mind share of the public, the sports teams would be high," Rascher says. But "in terms of dollars, they're not that important."
Putting Auto Racing on the Right Track
Bill France Sr. built a whopping big revenue engine from a small meeting he called in 1947 to organize auto racing in Daytona Beach. The National Association for Stock Car Racing, now controlled by France's sons Bill and James, pulls in $2.5 billion in annual revenues. Much of that money -- like the $45.6 million in 1999 from the France-led and publicly held track operator International Speedway Corp. in Daytona Beach -- goes right back out as prize and point money to driving teams.
Total number of full-time workers employed at the 200 companies: 268,502.