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What Bad Economy? Tribridge Expects to Double Revenues

DOUBLING YOUR REVENUES FROM ABOUT $4.3 MILLION TO $8 MILLION might seem like a good trick in a year like this one, but for Tribridge Consulting Inc., it's just a matter of continuing a tradition. All right, it's a tradition with a short history, but "I think our business model will sustain our profitability," says co-founder and chief executive officer Tony DiBenedetto, who says that the second-year revenues of $4.3 million followed first-year's $2.2 million.

No tricks necessary, DiBenedetto says, because "we're not trying to be a public company. We're interested in being a high-quality firm, and that's never out of style. It allows you to surface to the top of the heap. Some chase being sexy and big, but we're not a flash in the pan. I think our model, over time, will be best for us. We've decided to stay focused on our clients."

Tribridge (www.tribridge.com) opened its doors in September 1998 when DiBenedetto, Brian Deming and Michael Herdegen, all of whom had worked together at Arthur Andersen but in different areas of expertise, sat down with venture capitalist Tom Wallace at Malio's restaurant in Tampa. "He was the seed capital behind the company. He said the business plan was great, but advised that our clients were going to dictate what business we were going to be in. Tom gave us the push over the cliff to allow us to do things right. We turned a profit in our fourth month. We had thought we'd be successful, but that was a surprise."

The trio left the big consulting firm for different reasons, but agreed that as its business model changed "there would be an opportunity to take market share in the middle market, to provide really high quality services in that space that others weren't focused on." And there was the personal aspect: "We all had young families. We thought it not in our best interests to be traveling the world, but would rather focus on a city or state, keeping the business focused." Plus, they wanted to adopt a different culture. Tribridge has "open management, open accounting books, open decision-making," DiBenedetto says, "and we bring in the kinds of people who are open-minded to everyone's input. That's hard to control in a large firm. We have 53 people now, and they're probably stronger than the people we had at Arthur Andersen."

A key to Tribridge's success has been its exhaustive screening process that allows the firm to "get the cream of the crop of the Big Five," DiBenedetto says.

Steve Terp, director of business development, says the firm has become a "go-to place for employment. A people hire A people," he says. "Our culture says we're going to find the right people, and the people we put into projects have a vast amount more experience than our competitors." One measure of the success of that idea is that "40 percent of our revenue comes from repeat business," says DiBenedetto.

Tribridge services include business process reengineering (backoffice, accounting, sales and marketing), as well as developing marketing plans. But half the revenue comes from "a variety of technology services, including selecting and implementing software for CRM or ERP. We're also a development shop, and have about 17 of our people doing development of applications that run on the Web. We're a close partner with Microsoft in that space," DiBenedetto says.

In three years, Tribridge has "done 150 projects for 78 companies, everyone of them a referencable client," he says. "In 10 years with Arthur Andersen, I did work for 100 companies."

While DiBenedetto cites a long list of reasons why Tribridge has spent most of its existence in the black, he gives credit to "Tom Wallace's great advice. Always listen to the marketplace, he told us. It may be difficult for a big firm to change, but I'm not on a big cruise ship now. This is a speedboat. We can be nimble, focused. And we've turned projects down if we think we can't add value."

USF Starts Incubating
The long-awaited University of South Florida incubator for high-tech firms was due to open in September, complete with its first occupants and plans to house from six to eight new firms in the next 18 to 24 months.

Prof. Michael Kovac, executive director of high technology partnerships for USF and chair of the steering committee to establish the incubator, says the 11,000-square-foot space rented near the university at Tampa's Verizon Telecom Park will house three possible levels of firms: 1) companies that have plans to commercialize some of the intellectual property generated by USF researchers, who this year are working with $171 million in externally funded research; 2) USF graduate students or faculty members interested in starting a company, providing it meets screening criteria; and 3) anyone in the Tampa Bay area with a tech-related idea that has some synergy with the nature of university research and would benefit from a university affiliation.

Firms accepted into the incubator will be offered reception services, telecommunications facilities and copying services as well as access to accounting and other professional services, including some pro bono legal work, plus introductions to venture capitalists.

Funding for the incubator is being shared by USF and an unnamed bay area entrepreneur, Kovac says.

Branding Hydrogen
There was a lesson in the perils and wonders of outdoor advertising for technology companies in Hydrogen Media Inc.'s Kevin Hourigan's talk at a luncheon meeting of the Internet Business Association International Inc. (IBAii). Hourigan, president and CEO of the St. Petersburg firm that seemed to mushroom onto the tech scene two years ago, said the billboards the company used were originally intended as advertising.

"We devoted 20 percent of our revenue to branding in 1998," he said, "and the company went from one to six offices, and quadrupled our revenue. We used the billboards you may have seen everywhere as advertising we probably had the majority of billboards in Florida at that time but they didn't work." They were a huge success as a branding tool, however, Hourigan said.

Placement of the billboards was one reason he cited for their failure as advertising. The most expensive one in the state was outside Walt Disney World on I-4. "But it didn't work." Families with theme park fantasies in their heads may not be the best target audience for an Internet firm like Hydrogen Media.

The billboards by airports were an entirely different story. Hydrogen established a billboard presence at the airports in Tampa, Fort Lauderdale, Los Angeles and other cities around the country. "Business travelers saw the billboards at both ends." Hydrogen, which occupied a distinctive but fairly small set of offices just south of Ulmerton Road at the time, suddenly had a national presence and was off to a roaring start.

The company has since retrenched, and now prefers more mundane and far less costly kinds of advertising, Hourigan said, focusing on tech and media and real estate trade shows, for example.

Juicing the Quest for "White Light"
To accelerate the development of ultraviolet light-emitting diodes that it expects will provide efficient "white light" devices, Uniroyal Technology Corp., Sarasota, has signed agreements with the University of South Florida, the University of Central Florida and the University of Florida. The company's researchers will be working in a new high-tech facility nearing completion in Tampa while each university will be conducting its own research.

USF will research structural measurement, UCF electrical and optical characterization and UF epitaxial or layed crystalline growth and processing of ultraviolet devices. The universities will receive part of the $3.6 million Uniroyal hopes to reserve from a sales tax credit for research and development, with the State of Florida matching those funds.

Uniroyal says high-brightness LEDs could set up new markets in solid-state white lighting, particularly useful in medical diagnoses, optical storage and compact sensing devices in the chemical, environmental and biological fields. Michael G. Kovac, USF's director of high-technology commercial partnerships, says the move is likely to make the Tampa Bay region "the nucleus of an explosive expansion into a major new technology market."

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