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+ Wine entrepreneur seeks
connoisseurs with cash
Grant Cats built a multimillion dollar, 30-plus franchise wine business in Canada over 10 years - no easy feat in a country with alcohol taxes so high that customers sometimes pay as much as $5 in taxes on a $12 bottle of wine.
Turns out though that duplicating that success in the U.S., specifically in eastern Manatee County, has been equally challenging and frustrating. Cats has been working for the past 18 months on the Winery at Lakewood Ranch, a planned half-bistro/half-wine making shrine and sales store next to the Lakewood Ranch Cinemas on the area's Main Street shopping district.
The process has been so difficult that Cats is now desperate. He and his wife have already poured $425,000 into the business but due to a multitude of factors a store opening is several months overdue. Now he's seeking an additional $500,000 in capital - and if he doesn't get it by July 30, he says he will drop the entire project.
"We are prepared to put up our house and all of our assets to make things go," says Cats, who moved to Manatee County from Toronto with his wife last year. "But it's not looking good right now."
The source of the delays is not surprising to Coffee Talk readers familiar with the Gulf Coast's often frustrating development process: The first culprit was a six-month hold-up in receiving build-out permits from Manatee County. And while that was happening, during the fall and winter of 2007, the nationwide credit market crashed.
That led to Cats' potential loans being pulled. One possible funding source, the U.S. Small Business Administration, changed the terms on its loan, says Cats, raising the collateral requirements to the point where he can no longer make it work. Cats tells Coffee Talk he's since spoken with representatives for U.S. Rep. Vern Buchanan, R-Longboat Key, about a new SBA loan application.
And in an effort to find private investors, Cats has spoken with some heavy-hitters in the Greater Bradenton business community, including John Saputo, head of Gold Coast Eagle Distributing, the market's largest beer distributor. Cats has also taken his pleas to about a dozen Gulf Coast banks, all of which have turned him down, citing the difficult lending market.
As it stands now, the winery is about 75% completed, says Cats, including most of the heavy work such as the eight stainless steel vessels that make up the wine-distilling and fermentation process. The winery, which Cats says includes a filtering and private-bottling process, will complement the 140-seat restaurant he still hopes to open.
"The only thing we're lacking now," says Cats, "is a half-a-million bucks."
+ Southwest Florida
regionalism gets a new look
There's nothing like an economic downturn to revive the talk of regional cooperation.
Several organizations have sprung up recently in the region that stretches from Sarasota to Naples, including the Southwest Florida Regional Technology Partnership, the Southwest Florida chapter of bioscience industry association BioFlorida, and Southwest Florida Economic Development Partners, a group of economic-development executives.
Already, there are several regional business groups, including the Regional Business Alliance of Southwest Florida and the Chamber of Southwest Florida. But despite this, areas south of Sarasota don't appear on any site selectors' maps, says Richard Botthof, the executive director of the Regional Business Alliance.
"I would suggest we're invisible," he told a group of real estate executives recently. Site selectors generally ignore retirement and resort destinations, he says.
But Botthof says a regional branding campaign such as the one planned by Southwest Florida Economic Development Partners could change that by steering more research grants to Florida Gulf Coast University in Fort Myers. He says Southwest Florida should brand itself the same way the Tampa Bay Partnership brought Hillsborough and Pinellas counties together.
+ Red hot Sirion
on a roll of good news
Sirion Therapeutics, Inc., a five-year-old Tampa biopharmaceutical company, is on a serious roll.
Among other things, it has just raised $75 million in capital, got its first FDA approval for a new drug and moves into a new "green" headquarters east of Tampa next week.
Sirion specializes in medications for eye diseases. After a six-month review, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration has approved Sirion's new drug application for Durezol, a topical steroid, available by prescription, for the treatment of eye inflammation and pain after surgery.
"This is our first drug approval, and we were expecting it to take a little longer, so we were pleasantly surprised," Susan Benton, co-founder and senior vice president of sales and marketing, told Coffee Talk.
Sirion has submitted a second drug for approval.
Recently it more than doubled its office space, to 36,000 square feet, by moving to Crosspointe II, an environmentally friendly office building in Sabal Park, in eastern Hillsborough County. It plans a grand opening July 9.
It has 65 employees and plans to ramp up to 80 to 90 employees by the end of this year.
+ Sarasota real estate firm
takes auction process national
With the residential real estate market puttering along, auctions have become a Realtor's salvation on the Gulf Coast. Several of the recent top-dollar sales in the Greater Sarasota market, for instance, have been conducted through auctions.
Now comes word that Sarasota-based Sky Sotheby's International Realty is taking its fledgling auction business national. The Sarasota-based brokerage, which has hosted three well-attended local auctions over the past year, has formed a separate, auctions-only entity which will be open to Realtors and sales agents from any firm.
Laura Brady, one of Sky's most accomplished Realtor's, was named president of the new company, to be called Concierge Auctions. The company, which has eight employees, will be based out of a downtown Sarasota office.
"We want to grow the auction platform," Brady says, "and we thought it would be beneficial to further separate from the Sky Sotheby's brand."
Sky co-founder and President Chad Roffers has long been a fan of the auction process as a tool to aid in home sales. He says the idea of using auctions was actually in the company's original business plan in 2003, but it took the market collapse to get it going.
The success of the firm's local auctions, as well as four others it helped put together for other Sotheby's offices in Florida, prompted Roffers to take the concept national. The recent auctions, says Roffers, confirmed what he had previously thought: "The auction process is becoming more viable and more mainstream."
While Concierge Auctions will take listings from other broker's outside the Sky system, Brady and Roffers plan to maintain some Sky staples, including the company's high-end, luxury-only philosophy. The company will strive to be a Tiffany's-style, white-glove service auction house, says Roffers.
Before joining Sky in 2003, Brady worked in the retail and commercial real estate industries in Dallas, including a stint as a buyer for luxury retailer Neiman Marcus.
+ Real estate vets
branch out to invest
The heads of CLW Real Estate Services Group in Tampa have formed another company, LVR Real Estate Partners, to focus on real estate investment opportunities. Tampa real estate veterans Brad Luger, Doug Rothschild, and Lou Varsames have created LVR (borrowing from their initials) to buy retail, office and industrial property throughout Florida.
Luger, an executive with GVA Advantis and known for his work in finding investment properties, will continue to do that for LVR. Rothschild and Versames will continue to run CLW as well as serving as partners for LVR.
The partners believe that the softer real estate economy represents opportunities for LVR. That's one of the reasons they started the company.
"We think there are opportunities," Luger told Coffee Talk.
He says it could be "well into 2009" before the commercial market sees sustained strength in Florida.
LVR will particularly focus along the Gulf Coast, from Naples north to Tampa through Orlando and into Jacksonville and Tallahassee.
+ The millionaire next door:
Neighborhoods are crowded
The Gulf Coast economy might be slogging its way through, but the number of millionaires, at least in the Tampa area, is growing.
At least that's the word according to Merrill Lynch and Capgemini, a Paris-based global technology consulting company. The duo's 12th annual World Wealth Report, released late last month, found that the number of millionaire households in the Greater Tampa area grew 7.4% in 2008, from 58,310 in 2007 to 62,613 this year.
This follows a 4.1% jump in the area's millionaires from 2006. What's more, the Tampa market joins Atlanta, Orlando, Phoenix and Sacramento in the list of the five cities expected to have the most millionaire growth over the next five years. The survey, which was aided by data from Claritas, a San Diego-based market research firm, counts a millionaire household as one that has net assets worth more than $1 million, not including the primary residence.
One aspect of the area's seven-figure heaven, however, isn't so angelic: While the 2007 study predicted that millionaire households in Tampa would grow by 51% over the next five years, citing stock gains and a growth in the nation's GDP, the most recent study drops the rate of that projected five-year increase to about 27%.
+ Sher takes on role
with Lightning
Craig Sher, executive chairman of the Sembler Co., the St. Petersburg-based retail development and management firm that did BayWalk and many other projects, is now part of the new ownership team for the Tampa Bay Lightning.
Sher and Irwin Novack, chief executive officer of Kane's Furniture, are minority partners. The ownership group is headed by Oren Koules.
Sher's participation brings a well-known local executive to the group. Prior to joining Sembler, he was a vice president with the Rutenberg Corp. in Clearwater. The bearded executive is also active in a number of business and community organizations.
+ Companies seek gas savings
through an extra day off
The three-day weekend is back - and not because of the July 4 holiday.
Several Gulf Coast businesses are experimenting with closing offices on Fridays. Dieter Zoellner, president and chief executive officer of a Bradenton-based family-run sod company, heard about the move from some clients in the commercial construction industry.
So Zoellner, who runs Dieter's Sod Service, recently imposed a Fridays off policy at his company, which reported $5.18 million in 2007 revenues, down 23.5% from the $6.77 million it reported in 2006. The idea was to both save fuel and give the company's 22 employees a tangible benefit during the morale-busting economy. The company now has a four-day, 10-hour workweek, with staggered shifts running from 6:30 a.m. to 5:30 p.m.
The trickier part is to save money on fuel, since the company still has the same clients and the same routes. In the first quarter of 2008, for instance, the company spent $42,000 on gas for its fleet, up 17% from the $36,000 it spent on fuel in the first quarter of 2007.
Carole Zoellner, the company's finance officer and the wife of the president, says the hope is that the company will see some savings in not starting up its five semi-trailer trucks and its dozen pick up trucks as often. Some of the company's vehicles run on diesel, as well.
"We have to stay alive somehow," Carole Zoellner tells Coffee Talk. "Why not try this out and see?"
+ East Tampa office park
scores big tenant
In a softer economy, you savor financial victories.
PharMerica Long-Term Care recently said it will occupy more than 50,000 square feet of the Eastpointe building in the Corporex Office Park in eastern Hillsborough County.
The building has a total capacity of about 80,000 square feet, making PharMerica the largest tenant at Eastpointe.
PharMerica will relocate its offices from Sabal Park, which is also in east Hillsborough, in September. The owner of Eastpointe recently renovated it.
+ USF business school
recognized internationally
The University of South Florida retained an international ranking recently, but it wasn't for athletics or medical research, which have drawn attention to the Tampa-based institution.
The USF College of Business retained accreditation from the Association of Advance Collegiate Schools of Business. The association recognizes less than 10% of business schools worldwide for excellence in business and accounting programs.
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