Home-Building, Construction Firms Among State's Fastest-Growing

September 1, 1999

GAINESVILLE —”Build it and they will come” could be a motto for success as homebuilding and construction firms emerged among the top companies in this year’s list of Florida’s 100 fastest-growing businesses, a University of Florida study has found.

Low interest rates and a booming economy are favoring the state’s construction firms on a long-term basis rather than the flash-in-the pan pattern of the past, said Joe McCann, executive director of UF’s Center for Entrepreneurship and Innovation. Four of the top 10 businesses are construction companies.

“There’s a history of construction firms experiencing meteoric growth with a hot streak of major projects, then having the projects die down and the companies’ growth rate slowing,” McCann said. “But this is a very strong economy in Florida, particularly in South Florida, on both the commercial and residential side.”

The Florida 100 list, the fourth annual ranking of the state’s fastest-growing small businesses, is a joint project of UF’s Center for Accounting Research and Professional Education and the Center for Entrepreneurship and Innovation. Many of the top companies — from a variety of industries — demonstrated revenue growth of more than 1,000 percent during the three-year evaluation period.

The top company, Highland Holdings, Inc. of Lakeland, a homebuilding firm, grew by 2,171 percent.

“That a homebuilder showed up as No.1 kind of caught us by surprise,” McCann said. “We think of the big mega-commercial building projects as ones that would so greatly accentuate a growth rate. You get one hotel project and it makes a 1,000 percent increase. It takes a lot of homes to do that in one year.”

The fastest-growing minority-owned firm is Construct Two Group in Orlando, a construction management company that was in third place overall, also making the 1997 and 1998 lists. The top family-owned company, also from Orlando, is USL, Inc., specializing in imported leather, jewelry and gift items. USL, Inc. leapt to No. 6 from the 44th position in 1998. And taking the highest spot for female-owned companies, at No. 16 overall, was another Orlando business, G and G Advertising Inc., a full-service advertising agency.

Many of the new companies are concentrated in Dade, Broward, Orange and Palm Beach counties, but those in technology fields, particularly involving the Internet, are scattered throughout the state, McCann said.

Although many Florida firms have experienced more dramatic growth than nationwide companies that appeared on a similar list recently in Fortune magazine, the state’s economy still is lopsided in favor of the service industry, such as construction, engineering or advertising firms, he said.

“We’re not a manufacturing state, and I guess you could say in some ways maybe that’s good,” McCann said. “We always have debates about that. When you want clean industry and high-paying service sector jobs, the result is that you don’t get a lot of manufacturing companies locating in Florida.”

Companies are ranked by sales growth over three years. To qualify, businesses must be headquartered in Florida; have sales between $100,000 and $25 million in the first year of the three-year period; be an independent, privately-held corporation or proprietorship; and show an increase in profit.

Gov. Jeb Bush is scheduled to be the keynote speaker at a banquet honoring the top 100 companies on Dec. 3 at the Omni Rosen Hotel in Orlando. Seminars geared toward owners of small businesses and the particular issues and problems of growing, small entrepreneurial companies also are planned, he said.

“What’s new and different this year is that we’re trying to understand much more about who these companies are,” McCann said. “Within the next couple of months we’re going to be releasing information about what the companies attribute their success to, as well as what to what they think the big issues are facing them.”