Trend Spotting
MICHAEL POOLE is the founder of Winter Park’s PCE Companies (www.pcecompanies.com), an investment banking (IB) company with a branch in Tampa. A Tampa native and UF grad, Poole sat two terms on the Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta and is involved in a multitude of other business-related efforts. But Poole is not your everyday investment banker; he is also a social activist. At one time he took two years off to work in a homeless shelter.
 Back at the office, PCE Indexes (www.pceindexes.com) has developed seven indexes to track the performance of key industries in Florida’s economy. It recently launched a new index of Florida-based aerospace and defense companies. Included are 13 companies, four in the Tampa Bay area: Aerosonic, Blastgard International, Technology Research Corp. and Cyber Defense Systems. The index consists of publicly traded companies that meet certain financial guidelines.
“We deal with a lot of private investors who invest in these size companies,” says Poole. “Our index is a good measuring tool because the investors can then gauge if the investment they are looking at is better or worse than the market.” Indeed, he says he believes these indexes reflect the valuation of local private companies as well. “As we get better at this it will be a more commonly used tool.”
A Gleam in their Eyes
Tampa’s Telovations (www.telovations.com) is just more than a year old. Still, the barely new 20-employee provider of IP communications services recently secured $6.5 million in Series A venture capital (VC) funding led by Lovett Miller & Co.
How does a newbie so quickly catch the eye of VC folks? Seasoned management, of course. President and CEO Rick Schonbrun says he and Mark Swanson, chairman and CTO, have both been in the industry for more than 20 years. Swanson, he says, came from the soft-ware side and Schonbrun, telecommunications. The two met in mid-2005, both on a parallel track to start a new tech company delivering a hosted outsourced community.
The company was initially self-funded but the founders quickly brought in several strategic individuals in the area as seed investors.
 After that, the timing was right to look for an institutional round. “Lovett Miller understood the Southeastern market. It is an educational process to understanding business here, and we wanted to partner with an II (institutional investor) that understood this market and had a commitment to it,” Schonbrun says. The original seed investors stayed, too.
He admits raising money is never easy. “Access to VC, especially in the Southeast, is always a challenge. You must have a good value proposition to bring to them, and good management.”
Revolutionizing Technology
Four-year-old Sarasota-based Private Client Technologies (www.PrivateClientTechnologies.com) is expanding into St. Petersburg. Founded by Yale MBA Eric Livingston, it is a managed service provider (MSP). Livingston says he founded the company to offer small and medium-sized businesses the IT capabilities of large companies.
“MSP is a revolution in technology,” says Livingston, CEO. “It is not widely known because the general public is not really aware of it but it is a sea change for tech support and maintenance.”
Indeed, he says, it could not have existed before today’s high-speed net connection.
Livingston moved the HQ to Sarasota from Boston in 2004 to take advantage of the area’s small business demographics. “Sarasota is phenomenal for our biz.”
Now, he says, the natural expansion is north of Sarasota. The company is doing active PR and marketing in Tampa and St. Petersburg. It employs 12 people locally and a core of others in several other states.
Raising the Barcode
Dunedin’s Mintek Mobile Data Solutions (www.mintek.com) is celebrating its 20th anniversary this year. When president Jim Hut-ton left the food service industry in 1987 and founded Mintek, it started as a value-added reseller providing labels, scanners, print-ers and other devices using barcode technology.
As technology grew more complex and customer needs grew, Mintek – today an employer of 25 – developed internally an automated data collection system, ultimately progressing into a software company that manages barcodes.
The company’s primary customers are in the lodging and cable businesses. Customers include Bright House Networks, Comcast, Time Warner, Marriott, Wyndham Hotels and Resorts, and Loews Hotels, to name a few.
Ty Abrahams, director of marketing, says the company has been self-funded and is profitable. Mintek is tracking at about $5.5 mil-lion this year, about the same as last year. 2004 and 2005 were big years because of landing Marriott.
Capitalizing on Convergence
The Phoinix Group of Tampa (www.phoinixgroup.com) is not widely known, yet the company’s 2,400 technicians work all over the country. The 14-year-old outsource service company was found-ed by CEO Bill Cave. It provides services such as helping clients assess their I.T. needs and handling all logistics of hardware and software installations nationwide.
Clients include such household names as Ford, Fleet One, Williams and Sonoma, Eddie Bauer, K-Mart, Puma, AMC and Regal Theaters, and Albertsons.
Dan Trayler, the company’s VP of business development based in the Pacific Northwest, says privately-held Phoinix is debt free and capitalizing on the trend of convergence. It has seen a 25-percent people expansion in the last few years, related to the explosion in technology and all of the complexity it brings.
Phoinix says it can do everything from point of sale to major installations, to WAN (wide area network), LAN (local area net-work) and SAN (storage area network). “We can place technicians within your site within hours nationwide,” he says.
Tech FYI
Tampa’s Syniverse (www.syniverse.com) is acquiring the wireless clearing and financial settlement business of Billing Services Group (www.bsgclearing.com) for approximately $290 million in cash … Gainesville-based Quick-Med Technologies (www.quickmedtech.com) has entered into a multi-year patent and technology license agreement with Derma Sciences (www.dermasciences.com) … Lake Mary-based Fiserv’s (www.fiserv.com) PLUS System has been select-ed by Aequitas Capital Management Inc. to enhance its CarePayment program to help hospital clients improve net revenue collections … Orlando-based Nexxus Lighting is acquiring Advanced Lighting Systems Inc. in Sauk Center, MN. |
