Sinofresh HealthCare Inc. Profile (Gulf Coast Business Review)

Originally published in 2004

By Bob Andelman

When Englewood-based Sinofresh introduced Ed McMahon as its first celebrity endorser and spokesman in October, it made the leap from the sidelines to the frontlines. At least it could, if someone comes up with the right line for the new pitchman.

Got sinusitis? Heeeeeeeeere’s the cure!

McMahon, who was Johnny Carson’s sidekick on “The Tonight Show” for 30 years ("You are correct, sir"), made an even greater mark on national brands from Publisher’s Clearinghouse to Budweiser:

"You may have already won ten million dollars."

"You cannot be turned down."

"Budweiser, the only beer that's beechwood aged."

Charles Fust, chairman and CEO of the now publicly traded Sinofresh HealthCare Inc. (OTCBB: SFSH.OB {US}), was stunned to learn that McMahon, who has long suffered from chronic sinusitis, independently discovered Sinofresh Nasal & Sinus Care.

“One day my phone rang,” Fust recalls, “and the voice on the other end said, ‘Hi, this is Ed McMahon. I want to thank you for inventing this product! If there’s anything I can ever do for you, here’s my personal number.’”

A year later Fust was preparing to roll out his product’s first national TV campaign. “We thought it would be a natural fit,” he says. “Ed is a hero to me as a flyer from the Korean War; as a pilot myself I knew more about his flying skills than entertainment skills. Ed is a very believable guy, an icon and a great salesperson. It was a phenomenally good opportunity for us.”

Sinusitis is a personal topic and obsession for Fust, a former chemist. Ten years ago he was in good health; no upper respiratory issues. But while consulting for the Department of Transportation in Texas, everyone he came into contract with on staff there was addicted to nasal sprays. Before long, so was he. “I needed nasal sprays just to breath,” he says.

In search of relief, he became intrigued by the impact of airborne pathogens on upper respiratory disorders. By 1999, many medical researchers agreed that mold, fungus and bacteria act as trigger mechanisms.

“Sinusitis has been an elusive disease,” Fust says. “In 1995, the Mayo Clinic reported that sinusitis was an immune system response to the colonization of bacteria and mold in the sinuses. It’s a great breeding ground – it’s dark, it’s moist. Your immune system senses these organisms, but the harder it works, the worse you feel.”

That brings us to what Sinofresh is, an over-the-counter antiseptic and antifungal drug. It eliminates the mold and bacteria in the nose and sinuses, thereby stopping the triggering mechanism.

“What intrigued me in early years was that everything out there had to do with symptoms,” Fust says. “No one ever explored the possibility of eliminating the problem, going after the root cause. Commercially speaking, this worked well for Sinofresh. Bacteria and mold can no more be eliminated than tooth decay. You can prevent it, but you can’t fix it. If you deal with the pathogens in the nose and sinuses, you’re still going to be breathing them in. But we’re preventative. If you use Sinofresh routinely, a couple times a day, you will create good nasal hygiene. Nobody’s been using these inter-nasal antiseptics longer than I have and I haven’t had a cold or nasal infection since.”

Founded in 1998, the company has three US patents and 130 more worldwide on its technology, according to Fust. “Medical research groups around the world want to talk to us,” he says.

Sinofresh has been in national distribution – including 22,000 retail outlets such as Walgreens, CVS, Rite Aid and Wal-Mart – for the past year. Its 2003 sales of $1.8 million were matched in the first quarter of 2004 alone. Third quarter sales were $1.1 million.

If the national branding campaign with McMahon takes off, the company could certainly become a takeover candidate. “It is a huge, huge market,” Fust says. “Whatever surfaces, we’ll consider with interest. So far it’s the overseas pharmaceutical companies that are surfacing. We’ve had delegations from South Korea and Israel wanting to do business with us.”

By outsourcing its manufacturing to New Jersey, marketing to National Instore, and research to a variety of partnerships, the company runs a lean ship in Englewood, employing just 22 people almost entirely at the executive level.

“This company could have been almost anywhere,” says Fust, whose wife, Stacey Maloney Fust, was a former investment banking specialist with UBS Paine Webber before becoming investor relations manager for Sinofresh. “At one time I thought we would be in manufacturing. I bought a turnkey facility in Venice that we were going to upgrade to US pharmaceutical standards, but we made a logistical decision that it would be better to farm that out. We sold that facility and moved to a new one in Englewood. But it got me here and I’m in paradise.”

Copyright 2008 Bob Andelman. Click here for copyright permissions!

Retrieval Dynamics Profile (Gulf Coast Business Review)

Originally published in 2004

By Bob Andelman

Retrieval Dynamics is an electronic wireless application service provider and wireless Internet-enabled solutions developer, helping its clients develop wireless solutions to increase productivity. Specifically, its product helps businesses make the most out of mobile devices — pagers, cell phones, PDAs and wireless laptops — by combining those conveniences with wireless applications and customized applications.

The company made news in the last year when it struck a deal with real estate giant RE/MAX to provide its agents with handheld, wireless access to the Multiple Listing Service (MLS) via its Mobile Listing Advantage (MLA) software.

“MLA is a service that allows licensed Realtors and brokers access to their proprietary MLS with a wireless device such as a Blackberry,” explains Retrieval Dynamics CEO John Harkola. “Realtors and brokers take their listings and put them through the MLS and thereby supply them to other members of their board. That’s how they get shared commissions. They’ve shared through the Internet for years; we enable them to share through a Java-enabled device. In the field, they can now do a search and the results of that search will come back instantly.”

The product reaching real estate professionals today is, in many ways, a shadow of its original creation in 1999. Back then MLA was quite robust. It just wasn’t feasible.

“We hoped the wireless network would come up to a faster speed back then,” Harkola says. “When it didn’t, we took parts out of the product and brought the best parts to the market in a way that the technology allows.”

Founded in 1999, Retrieval Dynamics is a wholly owned subsidiary of RDC International Inc. in Sarasota. The company is publicly held but not yet trading, although Harkola expects to begin in 2005.

According to the National Association of Realtors (NAR), there are approximately 1.1 million licensed Realtors and brokers in the US alone. “We are very focused on making inroads into the real estate vertical market because it’s the largest mobile vertical market in the US,” Harkola says.

Wiring those professionals across multiple retail networks and hardware solutions will take time. Currently, MLA has been customized for the Blackberry and a series of Java-enabled Motorola phones being sold by Nextel. Harkola says that in the near future, MLA will port to the popular T-Mobile Treo, as well as the Palm OS and PocketPC.

Retrieval Dynamics has marketing partnerships with Nextel, ATA, T-Mobile, and Bell Mobility in Canada. And Motorola has certified its applications.

The challenge in reaching real estate professionals is two-fold. First, Retrieval Dynamics must acquire the rights to the MLS data. The rights are geographically positioned around the US with each individual MLS board. “We have been on a campaign, negotiating with boards to set up a relationship that allows us to access their information and give it back to the board,” Harkola says. So far, Retrieval Dynamics has secured rights to the data for approximately 200,000 brokers – in 20 major markets such as Boston, Las Vegas, Chicago and portions of Arizona, Tennessee and Texas – or almost 20 percent of the potential US market. “When we started, we were looking at the major MLS, the boards that had the most membership. Once we started providing the service, other Realtors started requesting it of their boards and they contacted us.

“We find that in the real estate business, a lot of people do not already own hardware,” Harkola continues. “A Realtor is an independent. So no organization can make a mandate to do it any particular way. That’s why we have such a good relationship with the carriers. They resell the network time and the data time. They act as our virtual sales force in many situations – they’re our channel partners. That’s what it takes today to have a national presence. We work through various sales channels with the telcos and subdealers that sell to prosumers – the professional consumers.”

In addition to RE/MAX International, the company also has a relationship with GMAC Real Estate.

Real estate is just the start for Retrieval Dynamics, however. “Our technology is also suitable for other verticals, such as transportation, medical, the alarm and financial industries. Those are the major industries we will pursue in the future,” Harkola says.

The coming year could be a breakout and break even one for Retrieval Dynamics. The 13-employee company reported zero earnings in 2002 and 2003 and just $50,000 this year. But Harkola expects his staff will double in 2005 and that he may even turn a profit.

“It’s unlike making ball bearings,” he says. “There was a great deal of work setting up a marketplace that didn’t exist. That is done; now the task is marketing to a sea of individual users. PDA sales are dropping but wireless handheld sales are rising. Two years ago, most people did not know what a Blackberry was. Now they’re using it for a phone, email and as a contact manager. Our subscription service costs $19.95 a month and a one-time provisioning fee of 39.99. It’s not a big ticket item, so I’m looking for volume more than anything else.”

(Sean Roth contributed to this story.)

Copyright 2008 Bob Andelman. Click here for copyright permissions!

Medical Voice Products Inc. (Gulf Coast Business Review)

Originally published in 2004

By Bob Andelman

Thirteen years ago, Ron Carson’s best friend, a chiropractor, was torn up on cross-examination in court because of the way he handwrote his patient notes. Not that there was much choice at the time; he could either write longhand or use a dictation machine and wait days or weeks to get the transcription back.

At the time, Carson was just out of the Air Force, “bumming around” as an itinerant salesman. On the golf course one day, his friend shared his frustration. He had heard of a software technology called “discreet speech” and wondered aloud whether it might be a solution to his industry.

A year later, the pair was marketing a primitive product that let chiropractors talk to their computers rather than sending out for transcriptions. It was the first voice-activated transcription replacement product.

“Back then, it was in DOS,” Carson says. “As a result, you had to talk like a robot, pausing in between each word. We started with chiropractors because they were very repetitive in what they said.”

They simplified sales by teaming up with a medical software billing company that already had a nationwide sales presence. And they quickly improved the software so a chiropractor could say short phrases or templates that the computer recognized as meaning something much longer.

Not that it was an easy sell. “It was seen as a toy; it wasn’t a necessity,” Carson says. “We first got doctors who were into technology and innovation.”

That system was a primitive antecedent of Medical Voice Products’ current technology, which is known as Vox2data. (The company, in fact, is in the process of assuming the name of its most successful product, and will soon be known as Vox2data.)

“When continuous speech technology became available, it allowed doctors to interface directly with the computer,” Carson says. “That opened up the entire marketplace. Now our product is a necessity.”

“Over the years, voice technology has improved,” says Medical Voice Products President Katherine Conners. “And with the advent of continuous speech — like we’re talking now — it’s able to service all specialists and can be adapted for a bunch of different purposes. Our main purpose is to help medical practitioners to get notes done in a timely fashion and help eliminate costly errors.”

In medical care, a mistake can be deadly.

Conners and Carson are partners in the company, with Carson its director of operations, support and development. Conners, whose background is in sales, previously sold another company’s medical billing package before being introduced to Carson’s advanced technology.

“Changes in technology allowed us to also produce medical software which automates the whole office,” Conners says. “It ties into our clients’ billing system and automatically inputs patient demographic information. So all the doctors are doing is dictating the appropriate information into their notes. There are a number of different products out that are aimed at electronic patient records. Everybody will be there in five years. But voice activation is the easiest because doctors already talk into a recorder. They aren’t changing what they do; they’re just talking into our system. They can use it as a document management program or as a full electronic medical record (EMR). Every doctor should have this.”

The company’s products include voice engine software, medical application software, bridges to billing systems, or front desk software, optional; computer hardware and accessories such as microphones and recorders. Products go by the names Vox2data for clinical practice and PacificVoice for Medicine Second Generation. The services Medical Voice Products provides include: installation of its products, training of the doctor and staff, customization of the doctor’s forms and reports, ongoing service and support at an annual membership fee.

The Vox2Data for Medicine document management system allows medical offices/hospitals to generate records that are stored and distributed electronically, rather then on paper. Physicians are able to create reports quickly and easily that are HCFA compliant and easily distributed to other physicians for immediate review and better implementation of patient care.

Medical Voice Products is now pushing a centralized dictation system for large practices and even hospitals.

“Doctors can use our system as a dictation station where they go before seeing the next patient,” Conners says. “It’s excellent for doctors that have several different offices because they can share a central data base. All this was always where we intended to go. We needed to tap our foot and wait for technology to catch up with us and make it doable. Whenever you produce technology, the challenge is making it simple enough for the end user. We had a doctor call and say, ‘Please help me. I should have bought your product in the first place. Now my staff has quit!’ ”

Medical Voice Products has specialized in servicing private medical groups since 1997 and is now pushing into large clinics and hospitals. It recently did a demonstration for administrators at Duke University Medical Center’s psychiatric unit and a trial is being run at Ingles Medical Center in Calumet, Ill.

“For the average clinic with two to five doctors, (installing Medical Voice Products’ entire system) is way overkill,” Conners says. “What we decided to do, since we started in the private practice market, is put it together in modules so they can get what they need and move up. The cost is affordable along the way.”

With dramatic improvements in transcription and office technology has come equally impressive leaps in sales for Medical Voice Products, including 50 new installations in 2004. Conners projects that total sales will top $1 million for the first time in 2005.

The privately held company, which started in Santa Rosa, Calif., under a different name in 1991, relocated to Sarasota in 1996. Staffing is tight with just eight people on site and three salespeople in the field. More tech support and salespeople will likely be added in the coming year. Medical Voice Products uses Webex to do live, online demos by appointment. It recently moved into larger quarters at the Airport Commerce Park.

Copyright 2008 Bob Andelman. Click here for copyright permissions!

Home Front Inc. Profile (Gulf Coast Business Review)

Originally published in 2004

By Bob Andelman

Brian Bishop wasn’t terribly impressed with traditionally homebuilding industry during the two decades he spent as a general contractor. And it isn’t likely the folks he left behind to found Venice-based Home Front Inc. in 1999 aren’t thrilled with him, either.

“It was that experience as a general contractor that drove us to develop a better way to build,” Bishop says. “(The homebuilding industry) was so unbelievably archaic. In 20 years, nothing changed in the building of the structure in any significant way. Energy performance is the same, trusses are the same – with cheaper lumber. Everything has remained the same or gone down in quality. The only thing that’s improved is you can draw plans faster because you have CAD. But you can’t build any faster. Plumbing is more exotic. Air conditioning has improved some. But a bricklayer can still only lay 200 to 300 bricks a day. He can fax the bill to you in a second, but it has nothing to do with building faster. Go back 100 or even 150 years and you’ll find that buildings are built substantially the same. Virtually nobody is trying to do anything to change their practices in terms of faster speed, energy performance and durability.”

Nobody… except Brian Bishop, he says.

Bishop’s Home Front Panelized Construction System is as close to a home-in-a-box as you’ll find. The traditional home is built with 20,000 parts that must be assembled or installed. Bishop has created a home building system with just 150 parts.

And where construction of a single-family structure used to take him 75 days from start to finish, he can now accomplish it in three or four days.

“And when we’re done, we have a thing that is competitively priced, more durable and up to three to five times more energy efficient than its contemporaries for the same price,” Bishop says.

Reaching this point wasn’t easy, fast or immediately profitable.

“We find existing materials and find a better use for them,” Bishop says. “That’s what an invention is. We patented a system. There is no wood in our buildings at all. We invested the money and time. That first year, there was a laundry list of negative hurdles that my associates said I wouldn’t be able to overcome: building permits; engineering; construction loans and mortgages; home appraisals and insurance; market conditions; and the desirability of the product. A program like this is like going in a warehouse and having someone give you a list of 5,000 problems you have to solve. ‘Can you build it to look attractive? Can you make it profitable enough? Can you assure a predictable outcome every time you build one?’”

Home Front built one house its first year another in its second. The following year, however, production and installation increased to 35 units. In 2003, the company completed 100 homes. “We will zoom past 100 this year and expect to build as many as 500 next year. We’re signing contracts at the rate of one a day and we’re getting 30 queries a day,” Bishop says. His plant has capacity for assembling at least 2,000 units per year.

“We will show a profit this year after five years of ramping up,” Bishop says. “This was a grassroots efforts. There was no big financing. It was done out of my wife Jeannie’s and my pockets. We didn’t have a big bankroll and didn’t want a huge debt against it so we have virtually no debt against this corporation. And because we had no capital, we had to rely on our wits and make it to market. So every process had to be done in a way that was simple and repeatable. Because of that, we’ve learned to be very resourceful and live within our means.”

Home Front has 10 employees on site in its production facility, plus three installation crews of four in the field. The Home Depot attracts employees who put their time in in construction trades and are ready something a little more steady and indoors. Those same men and women need not apply at Home Front.

“It’s almost better that they’re not in the trades,” Bishop says of potential hires. “Of course it helps to be a carpenter to understand angles of roofs. But we’ve had to do our own tools, including a saw that cost $50,000 to manufacture. There’s nothing like this machine.”

And while Bishop is swimming against one tide, he is simultaneously being swept up by another consisting of advocates of low-cost, hurricane resistant housing for the masses. “We believe this new system is the future of building in big segments of the market, from affordable housing to low-income. These people need energy efficient homes because they don’t have a lot of money. The average monthly energy bill in a Habitat for Humanity house that we deliver in South Florida is $50 – in the summertime.”

The next market segment that Home Front will pursue includes public housing authorities, subsidized, rental and HUD housing. Bishop submitted a proposal to the military for a house-in-a-box that can be rapidly deployed to places around the globe where soldiers will be hunkered down for long periods of time. It comes in an 8’ x 8’ x 20’ box that produces a 16’ x 22’ foot building that can be quickly assembled and disassembled.

And while this may not be everyone’s idea of upscale, Bishop says those opportunities are coming to him as well. The company is building a Sarasota School of Architecture design, another by Sarasota architect Carl Abbott, and even a Mediterranean revival. “It looks Mediterranean,” Bishop says, “but it is one of the best performing buildings in America.”

Bishop, a former card-carrying member of the block mason’s union, says he has built his last block home.

“I’m an evangelist,” he says. “I’m the Southern Baptist of panelizing. The building industry is lazy. It will not stop and hesitate for a moment to wonder if there is a better way to do it. I tell the traditionalists, ‘Throw your guns down and run your surrender flag! Give up on the old way! Give up your preconceptions of what a building is or should be!’”

Copyright 2008 Bob Andelman. Click here for copyright permissions!

Highwall Technologies (Gulf Coast Business Review)

Originally published in 2004

By Bob Andelman

There are two ways of explaining what an Internet security company such as Highwall Technologies does, the techie way or the plain English way.

Let’s try plain English.

“We’re like radar,” says Rich Swier, co-founder & CEO. “We scan a company’s airwaves for any unauthorized wireless activity and report back. If it’s found, we shut it down.”

In a typical scenario, an employee may bring a personal wireless access point such as a personal laptop or Blackberry into the workplace and inadvertently open a wireless corporate network to the outside world.

“That’s the primary threat we protect against,” Swier says. “If you bring a wireless laptop into the building and we ‘see’ your wireless card via the air, we can pinpoint that card and shut it down over the air.”

Highwall’s Rogue Detection System 2.0 sends the interloper a bunch of garbage data in a checkmate moved called a “denial of service.” A good analogy would be if you’re talking to a co-worker and your child starts shouting in your ear, you wouldn’t be able to concentrate on what your co-worker is saying.

See? Technology isn’t hard to understand.

But if you absolutely must hear the highly technical explanation, here’s what the company’s own literature says: “Highwall Technologies designs and develops next generation software and hardware that supports the security and management of WLANS and protects wired networks from unauthorized wireless devices. Its products detect and locate wireless devices, and enable the management and security of wireless and wired networks.”

Highwall primarily sells its products to Fortune 500 businesses and state and federal governments. Sarasota Memorial Hospital uses Highwall; Sarasota County Government is installing it. It’s essentially a wireless security company; once you understand its products, Highwall’s fortress-like name makes perfect sense.

Startup Florida launched and, to date, has primarily funded Highwall. “Without Startup Florida there wouldn’t be a Highwall,” Swier says. “They put in the initial $1 million to launch it and helped build the management. And they’re still working with the company.” (Startup Florida is a venture fund that 20 angel investors – plus Swier, Dan Miller and Jason Broom – use to invest in early stage companies.)

Founded in 2003, Highwall Technologies operates with just seven employees. It writes its own software program but contracts out the manufacturing of its sensor hardware, keeping overhead costs low. “All the real brains are software; it’s delivered on a sensor,” according to Swier.

The handful of employees it does have are all in well-paid, executive and engineering positions, earning at least twice the local average wage.

“You don’t need a lot of employees to create a nice big business in tech,” Swier says. “You can have a business like ours that generates $10 million in revenue with just 10 employees.”

Swier expects to handle between 50 and 100 customers in 2005, thanks in no small part to a new strategic partnership with Computer Associates. “We’re jointly selling our solution with them to their customer base,” he says. “We expect a lot of good things out of that over the next year. CA is a gorilla in this space that can pull through product for us. We now have a sales force and footprint that’s unparalleled in our industry. All the competitors are small and haven’t struck a relationship with anyone like CA. That will probably drive our growth and success. There is no company in America that won’t, at some time, need our solution.”

Highwall derives its continuing revenue like any enterprise software company, selling its product, collecting annual license fees plus maintenance and upgrade charges. It’s like any enterprise software company that sells software, collects an annual licensing fee plus maintenance and upgrades, creating a nice annuity stream at some point.

More than $2 million from a variety of sources has already been spent on the Highwall startup and the company is in the process of raising more money to fund its further growth.

“We had a profitable month in November,” Swier says, “but from a consistent point of view, we will probably be profitable by mid-2005. We’re trying to grow into new markets so we’re spending a lot of money in marketing and R&D. The expenditures, therefore, are inflated.”


Copyright 2008 Bob Andelman. Click here for copyright permissions!

The Gemesis Corp. (Gulf Coast Business Review)

Originally published in 2004

By Bob Andelman

If, by chance, you were at the 2004 Hong Kong International Jewellery Show in June and didn’t see Sarasota-based Gemesis Corp.’s booth among the 1,300 exhibitors, you weren’t alone.

“We had one of the worst locations, on the seventh floor of the building,” says new company president David Hellier.

And yet… the show was a complete and utter success for the diamond maker. How? Hellier took a strategy out of the playbook of one of his former employers, Iomega (he was on the original Zip drive development team), and distributed 5,000 large, attractive shopping bags with the company’s name and logo on the sides – as well as its location at the show. The move caused a buzz and generated traffic to Gemesis’ off the beaten track booth.

“For five days, we were swamped from morning till night,” Hellier says. “It looked like Gemesis cultured diamonds were everywhere.”

That is certainly Hellier’s charge since joining the company as chief operating officer in August 2003 to help his predecessor, Carlos Valeiras, with product strategy. Valeiras engineered the transition and ramp up of Gemesis from engineering to manufacturing and from Gainesville to Sarasota. Hellier took over in October 2004 with Valeiras continuing on the board of directors but no longer commuting from his home in Northern Virginia.

“Carlos and I divided and conquered in a lot of areas so the transition was pretty seamless,” Hellier says. “We had been an R&D company. But over the past year we’ve spent time understanding the market and transitioning to a commercial entity. We’re moving from development-focused to manufacturing-focused, tightening our recipe for growing diamonds. Scaling our manufacturing will be critical. Having someone who understands the difference between R&D and manufacturing is important. You can do things once or twice in the lab; we’re looking for consistent execution. We need to predictably and consistently produce at quality metrics.”

Started in 1995, Gemesis is the only U.S. company producing commercial gem-quality cultured diamonds for retail sale. It uses machines to replicate the conditions under which diamonds are created in nature. The machines apply about 850,000 pounds of pressure per square inch and extreme heat to a tiny synthetic or real diamond, graphite and a metal catalyst over the period of four to five days. The process grows a yellow diamond up to three and half-carats in size, which is then cut and polished for sale. These gems typically retail for 75 percent less than mined colored diamonds.

The Hong Kong show was like a debutante’s ball for Gemesis, coming on the heels of master distribution deals in Europe and Asia-Pacific. In fact, Hong Kong was one of seven trade shows in which Gemesis participated this year in an effort to speed up manufacturing and market penetration.

“It means we got our name out in the trade,” Hellier says. “We went from guarded curiosity to active engagement. We are investing in the belief that there’s a demand for the product. We have an opportunity, unlike the traditional diamond channel, to go direct to consumers. It’s been an exciting year.”

Other milestones include sales tripling in 2004, although the privately held company doesn’t release exact figures. Thirty retailers nationwide – as well as two Internet sites – now carry Gemesis diamonds.

Fashion is becoming a new factor in the way Gemesis approaches markets. “Our focus is on building relationships with jewelry manufacturers and providing a new way to present diamonds in fashion jewelry,” Hellier says. “We are selling limited quantities of pink and red diamonds and, on an even more limited basis, blue diamonds. But our primary market continues to be yellow and orange. In the United States, the popular colors are yellow, pink and red; Europeans want pink and blue; Asia wants pink and yellow.

Next up, Gemesis expects to announce new jewelry manufacturing partners. And with growing interest from celebrities, endorsements are probably not far off, either.

“The product is environmentally and socially responsible,” Hellier says. “We’ve been blown away by the size of the consumer market that feels that’s important.”

(Sean Roth contributed to this report.)


Copyright 2008 Bob Andelman. Click here for copyright permissions!

Florikan E.S.A. Corp. (Gulf Coast Business Review)

Originally published in 2004

By Bob Andelman

In a world of billion-dollar mergers and faceless corporations, you don’t hear much about successful family businesses. Well, meet the Rosenthals of Sarasota.

Florikan E.S.A. Corp., a family business with annual revenue of $50 million, is the big winner of the Technology Innovation Awards, sponsored by the Gulf Coast Business Review and Suncoast Technology Alliance.

And to think it all started almost 25 years ago in the back of Ed and Betty Rosenthal’s white 1975 Pontiac Gran Ville, the one with the rapidly rusting burgundy roof.

“I don’t know how I did it,” Ed Rosenthal says, laughing. “It was 1981. We came down here from the Canadian horticultural industry with a lot of knowledge about how they produced plant material for greenhouses. I also traveled to Holland, Israel and Japan seeking out efficient plant production ideas. We moved to Florida because we thought it was the biggest horticultural market in the US. But when I got here, I was shocked. There was no measurement, no control of pesticides being applied. Nurseries were willy-nilly with water.”

“I told Betty, ‘I have a lot of work to do here,’” he adds.

The Rosenthals, who had two young boys, set up shop in the family garage. Ed imported controlled release fertilizer from Japan and a high-grade, water-soluble brand from Canada that growers could apply through drip irrigation.

“I wanted to reduce the amount of fertilizer and pesticides the Florida growers were using. I was on a mission,” he says. “My first goal was to teach growers to water less, use nutrients slower, strengthen plants and use less pesticides.”

He rented a public warehouse on Clark Road and began testing a unique fertilizer mix. Then came the hard part: convincing commercial growers around the state to give his innovative mix a try. Every Monday at 4 a.m., Ed loaded up the Pontiac Gran Ville with bags of fertilizer and drove the length and breadth of the state, staying away from home until long after the sun set on Friday.

Every first conversation was the same:

“What is that? Birdseed?” the growers asked.

“No, it’s controlled release fertilizer,” Ed said, “and I want to test it in your nursery.”

“Where’s the label?”

“There is no label; I haven’t branded it yet.”

“If you burn my plants, you buy them!”

More than a dozen growers consented to side-by-side tests. While psychologically encouraging, the tests produced no income. Ed and Betty continued drawing down their life savings, hoping the nurseries would become evangelists for Ed’s mission.

“Whatever we had stretched a long way while we did tests,” he recalls.

On the road, Ed stayed in the cheapest roadside motels he could find. He carried a can opener everywhere and would buy a can of tuna fish, a loaf white bread, vinegar and a lemon. “That was my meal at night,” he says. “ I lost 20 pounds on that tuna fish diet.”

After several months of making his pitch and following up on his test cases, Ed noticed that the plants receiving his special fertilizer mix always outperformed the status quo fertilizer. He started making money on a line of plastic pots, but the fertilizer didn’t generate any income until one fateful day when the phone finally rang. It was a once skeptical grower in Homestead.

“Eddie,” he said, “you got more of that shit?”

The test plants in the grower’s nursery were twice the size – as well as taller and fuller – than those receiving a traditional fertilizer. And the other plants didn’t stand up in the heat.

“Even we didn’t know it would work that well,” Ed says.

Pretty soon Ed was receiving similar calls from all over the state. Every grower that accepted the test wanted more of the Rosenthal fertilizer. Now.

One problem: Ed didn’t have any more or any more money to buy more. But with orders in hand, Barnett Bank took a chance and extended a $125,000 credit line.

Ed Rosenthal’s mission was true and his acolytes became the truest of true believers.

“Every one of those customers that I started with in 1991, they’re all still our customers today,” Ed says. “And they’re big. Some buy a million dollars worth with us annually today.”

Ed and Betty Rosenthal were and are that rare couple that could work side-by-side on a shared business vision. Today, Ed is CEO and president of Florikan; Betty is CFO.

Over the years, their sons Eric and Jonathan worked for the rapidly growing manufacturer and distributor of horticultural products in its warehouse, left for college, tallied three years apiece of non-family work experience and returned three years ago to take a more active role. Jonathan, an attorney, handles the dual duties of general counsel and general manager for Florikan. Eric is the company’s sales and marketing director.

“I don’t know that we always expected to come back,” Eric says. “It just worked out that way.”

In a world of micro-miniature electronics, pharmaceutical breakthroughs and rocket science, how did Florikan top this year’s competitive field of local businesses for a top innovation award?

Florikan E.S.A. — the E.S.A. stands for Environmentally Sustainable Agriculture — bills its technology as more economical than standard fertilizer because of its controlled release of nutrients. Florikan has developed its fertilizer products with internal clocks that release the right amount of nutrients over a specified period, saving farmers time and expense and minimizing the amount of fertilizer run-off. The nutrients’ release can be spread out over months or even years. Florikan also uses Integrated Pest Management, a pest-control method that combines the use of biological predators and biorational pest-control products.

“The fertilizer is extremely technical,” Eric explains. “It’s not what people usually associate fertilizer with. Each crop has different requirements and growers grow each one for a certain period in fall or spring. With the coating we have on our fertilizer, we can control the release of the nutrients to the exact day.

“We ask a grower, ‘What kind of palm are you growing? What size? To the ceiling or one foot high?’ We have a fertilizer that will last 40 days; we have fertilizer that will last 540 days. Anything in between usually goes in 30-day increments.”

Eric acknowledges that Florikan isn’t the first or only manufacturer offering a polymer-covered, granular fertilizer. Florikan itself has offered a controlled release fertilizer for 20 years. But two years ago, Florikan took the idea a “quantum step” further by controlling each element in its formulation.

“That’s the big difference,” Eric says.

If a plant needs iron in the fourth month or nitrogen in the ninth month, the manufacturer can control its release. A palm may need magnesium in its last stage to stay green. A mum may require iron delivered via a different distribution strategy. It can also be made to order in one or two-ton batches.

Florikan offers 200 varieties of fertilizer; 50 bear its “Staged Nutrient Release” feature, for which the Rosenthals have a provisional patent pending. The company’s products are currently sold in nine southeastern states.

Sales people here are all either former growers or agronomists; they weren’t handing you fries at a drive-thru window yesterday.

“You’d have to be a pretty intelligent grower to go to our warehouse or Web site and just buy a product,” Eric says.

The manufacturer long outgrew employing just family members, of course. There are now 60 employees, with many added in the past year and more expected to join their ranks in 2005.

Sales revenue is rising steadily: the company reported $42 million in 2002, $45 million in 2003 and $50 million in 2004. Eric projects a 10% increase next year.

Environmentalists as well as growers will be buoyed by Florikan’s innovation, according to Eric.

“The big beneficiary is the environment,” he says. “By controlling release of the individual elements, nothing is wasted. A plant may only need nitrogen in months four through six, but other fertilizers constantly release it, causing it to run off into water. The way we do it, nothing is wasted.”

GCBR’s award isn’t the only received this year by Florikan, either. The business also won the 2004 Allied Associate of the Year Award from the American Nursery and Landscape Association (ANLA), the industry’s top distinction for an allied supplier; the 2004 National Society of Professional Engineers (NSPE) Most Innovative New Product for the United States — Small Business Category, a coveted recognition for exceptional engineering proficiency and achievement; and, most recently, the 2004 Southern Nurserymen Association (SNA) Most Outstanding Allied Product Award. (In 2002, Florikan won the “Governor's Award for the Most Innovative Product in Florida.”)

“We were very honored, very surprised. My parents were extremely happy,” Eric says of receiving the GCBR award. “This is the fourth award we won in 2004. It’s all coming at once. When it’s local, it has more impact, being recognized in the community.”

Florikan also participated in post-hurricane, nursery industry relief efforts this fall. Ed Rosenthal personally delivered ice, water and supplies to growers. Other donated items included generators, ladders, cable cutters, as well as large quantities of poly film, one of Florikan’s signature products.

Florikan employee Lee Padgett drove 1,200 miles roundtrip to purchase and provide six generators for a nursery that needed them on the Florida’s East Coast. Padgett and Danny Brook, another employee, developed a plan for transporting more generators from points north to the Georgia-Florida state line, and then to the southern part of storm-battered Florida. Still others on the Florikan team, including Dyke Holly, became Red Cross volunteers and drove official vehicles with food and water to distressed areas. They even established an Emergency Relief Depot at a damaged nursery where 300 people were being housed.

“Our recent awards were clearly momentous for Florikan,” said Eric. “But everything is put into clear perspective when something such as a devastating hurricane brings destruction and harm to so many people in the industry. We considered it our duty and privilege to provide aid to our grower-partners across the region.”

Copyright 2008 Bob Andelman. Click here for copyright permissions!

Columbus McKinnon Corp. (Gulf Coast Business Review)

Originally published in 2004

By Bob Andelman

Honestly, a new tire shredder is not most people’s idea of innovation – or even a boon to the environment. But when Charlie Astafan, general manager of Columbus McKinnon Corp.’s Sarasota operations, explains the significance of the CM Liberator on its industry, it’s hard not to pay attention.

The Liberator takes tires and completely strips the steel wire and fiber from the rubber. “We get clean rubber out one side, steel wire out the other,” Astafan said. “When you recycle a tire you have three major ingredients – rubber, steel and fiber. Most people go after the rubber. We call it a ‘Liberator’ because it liberates the rubber and the steel. The machine gets the wire clean enough to recycle. In the past it was landfilled. Now we’ve created a revenue stream from the steel.”

Is it real technology? The company filed for five patents on the new shredder. The prototype machine summered at the Hillsborough County landfill where it was demonstrated, tested and quickly sold. “The Hillsborough landfill is one of our customers,” Astafan says. “They allow tires into the landfill as a service if you live in the county. They use them as daily cover in the landfill. Instead of using materials such as dirt, they use the tire chips.”

The CM Liberator, like previous shredders, was completely designed and manufactured here. “We have competitors that do similar things,” Astafan says. “But this machine has five patents, so we would say it does revolutionize the industry. Most people grind up tires to get the rubber. They sell and market the rubber. Our focus is the steel. Everyone in recycling is trying to get 100 percent recycling. Take, for example, a Pepsi bottle. The bottle is normally clear – that’s one plastic. The ring is different. And the paper wrapper is different. Most companies went to a plastic wrapper because you couldn’t recycle paper.”

According to Astafan, the sales impact of the CM Liberator will be “quite large. Its impact on sales this year already has been pretty good. We’re probably looking at about a 20 percent increase and expect about the same again next year.”

Sales volume in 2002 was $6.4 million, growing to $7.6 million in ‘03. This year, sales are on track to reach $9 million.

“I think we’ll deliver five or six CM Liberator machines in 2005,” Astafan says. “They sell for approximately $375,000. We advertise, attend environmental trade shows, and belong to industry associations. I also write technical papers and do presentations. We do all that globally.”

Columbus McKinnon, which is based in Amherst, NY, has had a manufacturing plant in Manatee (off Whitfield Ave., near Donzi and Wellcraft) since 1970. It employs 38 people, a number which increased by 3 in 2004.

“The corporate culture is unlike that of a lot of companies; it feels like a family,” Astafan says. “We’re a large corporation run like a small company. We’re a bit of an independent division. We’re completely responsible for our own P&L and new products design. We get little control from the corporate side. We’re so different from the rest of the corporation, it’s almost a hands-off situation.”

Astafan, who has been general manager for six years and director of sales for eight years before that, says that Columbus McKinnon is a pretty great place to work. “We have very little turnover. That helps with the corporate culture. I think the average employee has been here for 12 years. We’re very competitive in our wages and our manufacturing facility is completely air-conditioned, including the shop. I think that’s unique for Florida.”

That said, this high-skill machine shop struggles to find qualified tradesmen when it posts job openings. “We’re not finding people who are interested in this type of trade. They may realize the industrial sector of the US is being outsourced to China and other places,” Astafan says.

Copyright 2008 Bob Andelman. Click here for copyright permissions!

Aerosonic Corp. Profile (Gulf Coast Business Review)

Originally published in 2006

By Bob Andelman

The New Year is off to a fine start at Clearwater-based Aerosonic Corp., where the venerable manufacturer of precision flight instruments announced the settlement of a long-simmering class action lawsuit, learned who killed one of its employees almost three years ago and saw its stock shoot up.

And that was just January.

In the suit, company officials were accused of inflating financial results to boost Aerosonic’s stock (AMEX: AIM). It caused the company to restate millions of dollars in earnings in March 2003, put the stock in freefall (it reached a high of 27.50 in May 2002) and ultimately caused the company to structure a $5.4 million settlement, of which it paid $800,000 and its insurance company paid the balance.

“It was an amazing relief,” says Mark Perkins, executive vice president of Aerosonic and the man responsible for its headquarters facility. (Under Aerosonic’s unusual structure, its chairman, president and CEO, David A. Baldini, is stationed in Charlottesville, VA; he travels back and forth between operations there and corporate headquarters in Clearwater.) “It was quite a distraction for the management team to be dealing with, all the thing associated with something of that magnitude.”

Aerosonic doesn’t have deep layers of management, so the people responsible for its day-to-day operations also handled the day-to-day demands of lawyers on both sides as well as an SEC inquiry (which concluded without further incident in October 2004).

“It really made us look at ourselves,” according to Perkins. “It was a public company that didn’t get out to the public. It taught us how to settle those things; I think it made us better managers of the company. It certainly made us understand better what it means to be public. I think it changed our view of the responsibilities of being public and what that means to everybody. We try to operate in a more transparent manner now. We’re driven more to the performance of the company than ever before. The shareholders invested their money and they deserve people who are ethical and who will communicate with them. There was little communication from this company to its shareholders for years. Aerosonic wasn’t helping to define its future. Now it does.”

The settlement was officially announced on January 11, but internally, Aerosonic had already moved on.

“We escrowed the amount of money we had to pay in some time ago,” Perkins says. “We’ve been focused on growing the company without that interference for the last six months.”

That renewed focus was reflected pretty quickly on Wall Street. The stock closed on Friday, Feb. 10 at 6.9001, up from its 52-week low of 3.75 although down from its 52-week high of 8.69. (http://finance.yahoo.com/q?s=AIM) In November, Aerosonic reported revenue of $27 million for the first nine months of 2005, compared with $23 million for the same period in 2004.

And between the time the class action was settled and the settlement announced, Forbes recognized the turnaround by naming Aerosonic to its “200 Best Small Companies” list in its October issue.

“It was a nice surprise to get,” Perkins says. “I think we use it to strengthen what we do and say. It’s an outside validation of the progress we claim in our presentations. It means a lot to people who listen. And it meant a lot to us, too. I think it put us on the radar screen of a lot more companies.”

Perkins, 49, is in his second tour of duty at Aerosonic. The first time around, in the mid-1980s, he worked in sales under company founder Herbert Frank, who died more than a decade ago. (Curiously, Frank’s name is nowhere to be found on the company’s web site.) Perkins joined the board of directors in 1997 and rejoined the company full-time in ’98. He is now charged with management and oversight of the Clearwater facility, its sales and profitability, in addition to communications with shareholders and potential investors.

“I had the pleasure of working with Herb the first time I was here,” he says. “He had a different slant on the company. It’s a very different company just because the industry has changed. The atmosphere has changed. It’s a much more corporate company with an independent board of directors. It’s no longer run by the personality of the founder. And it’s a fast changing industry. Most of the cockpits we equip today are extraordinarily high tech. They have more displays than gauges; we’re one of the few companies that can still make a wide variety of both of those products.”

All of Aerosonic’s products have one main purpose: deliver flight critical information to pilots from the air outside their crafts. And the company’s 160 employees manufacture, from the ground up, almost every one of the 500 component units it delivers to customers every month. There is a great deal of machining, assembly and calibration done at its Clearwater operation.

“It’s a craft; like watchmaking,” Perkins says.

Aerosonic still maintains an old-fashioned, vertically integrated structure in which it can manufacture almost all the structural parts of its products. It employs skilled machinists, model makers, inspectors on the quality side, calibrators, solderers and an engineering group that designs the things it builds. It also conducts its own functional and environmental tests, simulating the environments the equipment will see.

“We make a wide range of products that go into a cockpit,” Perkins says. “When you get into any Blackhawk helicopter since the beginning of that program, there are four different types of indicator that we supply – standard altitude, encoding altitude, air speed and vertical speed. We tend to be in fleets that are large, including Blackhawks, Seahawks, Chinooks, Apache Longbows and F-15s.”

The company’s biggest customer is the United States Armed Forces, supplying its devices for aircraft while they’re in active production and then continuing to provide support, replacement and repair. Aerosonic has also enjoyed a “nice climb” in its growing commercial aviation business as well, Perkins says.

Now, about that murder…

David J. Lunz, 56, was shot to death in his own home in Sunshine Estates near Lake Tarpon in early March 2003 – a month after his wife died of breast cancer. There were no signs of forced entry. Almost three years later, police in North Carolina arrested Lunz’s son and an alleged accomplice on charges of first-degree murder.

“(Lunz) was a wonderful guy who worked in our machine shop,” Perkins recalls. “To work alongside someone and then they’re not there – it’s shocking to know anyone that’s been murdered.”

That’s why getting closure in January was so important at Aerosonic. Tenured employees – and there are an awful lot of them here – could breathe a little easier knowing Lunz’s murder was solved and that it was a family member, not a random crime committed by a stranger.

“The people who work here tend to stay a long time,” Perkins says. “We have people who have been here for 40 years. Our salaries are on the high side for Pinellas County. And we have 100 percent pay for employee health and dental insurance and cover the majority of costs for their families. We’re proud of the people here and we try to protect and keep them as best we can.”

Aerosonic takes care of them in a different way, too.

Every year, the company draws names out of a hat to take an employee to each of its two major trade shows, the business aircraft show and the helicopter show.

“They get to go with the sales team to represent us,” Perkins says. “The first time we pulled a name out of the hat it was a machinist who had been with us 17 years. He had never been on an airplane, let alone ever been to Las Vegas, where the show was held that year. Our customers were impressed that it wasn’t just the suits representing the company and it’s a real eye-opener for people who work in Clearwater to see how big this company really is outside its four walls – and how big it can be. That program is one of the things I’m proudest of, getting people to understand what we do in the outside world.”

Rejoining the outside world was important to Aerosonic. As the class action suit dragged on, there was some limited discussion of taking the company private again.

“At this size, it would make sense to either go private or grow bigger; we’ve opted to become a company that gets bigger and makes more sense to be public,” Perkins says.

Among the paths that Aerosonic will likely to take will be through the rapidly developing private helicopter and light aircraft markets; it recently won a contract from Cessna to be a supplier on its new Mustang line.

“For us to get where we need to be, the organization’s organic growth path is not going to be enough,” Perkins says. “We feel in today’s world you have to be at least a $100 million company; some would say more. We have set our sights and that would include acquisitions. Not just for revenue gain but for technology gain; they’ll help us move into new products faster.”

Copyright 2008 Bob Andelman. Click here for copyright permissions!

Enterprise Village Grows Up (Gulf Coast Business Review)

Originally published in 2006

By Bob Andelman

If Alan Greenspan wants to do some serious research on how economies work before writing his autobiography, he should pay a visit to Enterprise Village in Largo, where the lifespan of an entire economy will flash before his eyes in less than six hours.

Oh, and his ears, too.

“Remember CVS – Customers, Value, Service. You want it, we’ve got it! CVS is waiting!”

Because the American economy is nothing without advertising, the pint-size world of the Pinellas County Schools System’s Enterprise Village is filled with the sights and sounds of modern hucksterism, promoting the wares and services of its myriad tenant sponsors:

• Home Shopping Network is represented with a fully functional studio that broadcasts child anchors pitching products on TV.

• McDonalds sells… popcorn.

• BIC Graphics USA has an assembly line for putting ballpoint pens together.

• Public address announcements are made at the radio studios of Mix 100.7.

• Kane’s Furniture sells bunk beds and student desks.

For the uninitiated, Enterprise Village is the product of a trip that former Pinellas County Schools Superintendent Howard Hinesley made to Kansas City in the mid-1980s. He saw something similar there that he thought could be recreated here using real businesses. Hinesley solicited the support of entrepreneur Gus Stavros and they created the independent, non-profit Pinellas Education Foundation.

Today the Gus A. Stavros Institute is the umbrella beneath which Enterprise Village and two offshoots for older students, Finance Park and Career Cove, reside. It is overseen by Valerie E. White, a former Pinellas principal who made her mark by improving a state-graded ‘D’ school into an ‘A’, in part through a business partnership.

“Enterprise Village has been a tremendous success,” says Stavros, who is technically retired at age 81 but keeps a hand in the Pinellas Education Foundation and the Gus A. Stavros Center for Free Enterprise and Economic Education at the University of South Florida in Tampa. “I can only tell you that the reality became greater than the dream. The 4th graders now look forward to 5th grade when they can go to Enterprise Village.”

Children spend several weeks in their classrooms learning about business from both sides, all in anticipation of their day at Enterprise Village. When the big day finally arrives, they spend half of it working in one of the many Village businesses, earning a paycheck and then spending it during the second half by writing checks from their bank account. They’re able to purchase goods and services ranging from Jason Tyner bobblehead dolls from the Tampa Bay Devil Rays store to getting eye exams at Morton Plant Mease Hospital.

“Are we courteous to all the customers?” a parent volunteer asks his young employees at CVS.

“YES!!” comes the clamorous reply.

At the end of the day, each business manager reports back to the general population about whether they made money or lost it.

Businesses paid $50,000 for a 10-year Enterprise Village sponsorship.

“When we first started Enterprise Village we raised $1.1 million,” Stavros recalls. “We had a wooden mock-up of the village and we went to the companies and asked for $50,000 each. It wasn’t easy, even though I knew the people personally. The school system gave us the land; we raised the money and put up the building. Then we gave it back to the school system.

The Pinellas Education Foundation has raised $65 million for the public school system in Pinellas County since its mission began.

Today, Enterprise Village is a brand onto itself, thanks to a burgeoning partnership with Junior Achievement. Junior Achievement is taking the concept worldwide, with Enterprise Village affiliates opening as close as Tampa and as far as Tokyo. According to Stavros, former Blockbuster Video chairman Wayne Huizenga gave $2 million to build an Enterprise Village and Finance Park in Ft. Lauderdale.

“It has caught on because our young people, the Nintendo generation, they want to work with their hands,” Stavros says.

“It’s neat,” says Rich Engwall, senior vice president of the Pinellas Education Foundation. “We take great pride that a program was created here and was so successful and taken worldwide.”

Back home in Largo, the original Enterprise Village program accommodates 17,000 5th graders annually and has expanded twice to keep up with student interest. It added Finance Park, a household budgeting and financial planning experience for 8th graders, and Career Cove, a career planning and ethics curriculum for high school students.

“The kids enjoyed going to Enterprise Park in the 5th grade but they always wanted to come back,” Stavros says. “So we thought about doing something about budgeting for 8th graders. Now many mothers stop me in the mall and tell me, ‘My daughter knows more about budgeting than I do because no one ever taught me.’”

In Finance Park, pre-teens find a house and a car, arrange utilities and set an entertainment budget. But like real life, it’s not as easy as it sounds. At some point during their day at Finance Park, the students will draw a “bad luck” card and will have to adjust their household budget and purchasing to accommodate a broken down car, a busted water heater or the loss of a job.

Parent advisors are on hand here, too, to offer real world advice as students figure out their household budget for entertainment, for example.

“Make sure you include a tip when you go out to dinner,” a dad says. “Don’t be cheap.”

Then there was this exchange:

“Mallory! You have such a boring life on paper! Do something!”

“I can’t afford to!” says the budget-squeezed pre-teen.

And this one:

“One of my relatives died,” another young woman says. “I had to spend $600 to fly up there for the funeral.”

“How dare those relatives die!” teased the adult volunteer.

There are more – and different – corporations represented in Finance Park than Enterprise Park, including Outback Steakhouse, State Farm Insurance, Family Outfitters, The Sembler Company, American Express One, Valpak, Domino’s Pizza and Publix. They pay more to be here, with good reason: 8th graders are on the cusp of becoming real consumers and potential future employees. If they remembered and valued the Enterprise Village experience, sponsors believe they can make an even more positive brand imprint on the 13,000 students passing through Finance Park annually.

As for Career Cove, it’s a place where high school students can learn about career options that do not require a college education, meet individuals representing different careers and learn about ethical decision-making.

Selling sponsorship deals in the three communities became progressively easier with each new development.

“When they attempted to raise money to first build Enterprise Village, they were selling a concept and it took three years,” Engwall says. “After 12 years of success, when they went out to raise the money for Finance Park, it took six months. By then, the story was out. There was a waiting list of businesses that wanted to be here.”

“When we went to expand to Finance Park and Career Cove, it was easier even though we asked for more money,” Stavros says. “A full hub in Finance Park was $500,000. AutoNation gave us $500,000. Publix took half a hub for $250,000. Raymond James and Franklin Templeton split a hub for $250,000. Outback Steakhouse took a smaller part on one for $50,000. They saw the success of Enterprise Village and wanted to be part of this thing. We raised $4 million to do the expansion.”

Each company handles things differently after signing over their sponsorship checks. For example, when CVS took over Eckerd Drugs, its marketing staff took the appearance of its Village store quite seriously, right down to installing carpet with the red CVS logo emblazoned on it.

“Every year,” Engwall says, “the Tampa Bay Buccaneers and the Devil Rays back up a truck with leftover merchandise and giveaways from the preceding season. We’re piled high in bobbleheads for Rays players no longer with the team.”

Before joining the Pinellas Education Foundation, Engwall was the director of marketing for GTE (predecessor to Verizon as the local phone company in the Tampa Bay area). “I was one of those that Stavros and Hinesley came to for money,” he says. “We supported Enterprise Village out of our education budget.”

Engwall says that an institution such as Bank of America is involved to provide early consumer education – and imprint its brand on future customers.

“The sponsors believe, wholeheartedly, in the value of public education,” he says. “But there’s no denying that when the kids walk out of here and open their first bank account, they’re thinking first of Bank of America because that’s where they had their first checking account.”

Enterprise Village, Finance Park and Career Cove reach adult eyeballs, too; every day, at least 50 volunteers help the students through their day – 4,000 unique adults every year. (Volunteers and visitors, incidentally, must submit their drivers’ licenses to be scanned and checked against sexual predator list before being allowed admission.)


Copyright 2008 Bob Andelman. Click here for copyright permissions!

Tina Fey Quits "30 Rock" to Run with John McCain!

I loved her in Mean Girls, but I'm not sure that's a qualification to be vice president of the United States. (Photo credit: The Wall Street Journal)


Copyright 2008 Bob Andelman. Click here for copyright permissions!