- March 27, 2024
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Art Lambert, co-founder of Sarasota-based LexJet, says he refused to let the recession dictate how he runs his business, a digital printing and software firm.
“We decided that we were not going to retreat,” Lambert tells Coffee Talk. “We were going to attack it.”
The strategy worked. The $47 million company is on a hot streak as 2010 comes to an end. The first victory came a few weeks ago, when the company was awarded a contract from a global consumer products company with a world-famous brand name. LexJet executives declined to release the company's name.
“It was a major win for us,” says Lambert, a runner-up for the Review's Entrepreneur of the Year Award in 2008 with LexJet co-founder Ron Simkins. “It gives us huge growth capabilities for the next year.”
Good timing, too, because the firm recently signed a lease for 12,000 square feet of office space in the Bank of America tower on Main Street in downtown Sarasota. The 93-employee company, which added 15 employees over the last year, outgrew its current space in the former Century Bank building, a few blocks away.
The space in the BofA building, on the third and fourth floor, will be retrofitted to fit LexJet's technology needs. That includes small, mini-conference rooms with digital screens so employees can hold multiple cluster meetings simultaneously.
LexJet's other recent victories, says Lambert, include a new website launched earlier in 2010 that quadrupled online sales and a new division to aimed at working with government-related contracts and business.
The Economic Development Corp. of Sarasota County will aid LexJet's move and expansion, with at least $100,000 in incentives.