Real estate brokers in

Business development manager T.J. Lewis is committed to helping Tallahassee attract people who can fill the kinds of jobs that the industries targeted by the Office of Economic Vitality have to offer.

Data Control

Dissemination of information is key to attracting businesses

STORY BY STEVE BORNHOFT // PHOTOGRAPHY BY LINDSEY MASTERSON

In conversation with real estate brokers, personnel at the Tallahassee-Leon County Office of Economic Vitality became aware of a disturbing reality.

Listed on the real estate platform that forms part of the Enterprise Florida website were properties throughout peninsular Florida and the Panhandle, but none from in or around Tallahassee.

Had there had been an innocent glitch or oversight? Brokers suggested otherwise.

“They told us that they reached out and tried to get their properties on there, but the criteria were too strict and the barrier to entry was too high,” said T.J. Lewis, a business development manager with OEV.

OEV contacted Enterprise Florida, the Orlandobased economic development organization for the State of Florida, and had the same experience, according to Lewis. He said that when OEV asked how to go about getting Tallahassee-area properties listed, it was met with a non-answer of an answer. But OEV wasn’t done. Lewis, himself, brought plenty of knowledge and experience to bear on the problem. After earning a bachelor’s degree in real estate, Lewis went to work for the state Division of Lands in 2007 and moved on to administer the real estate portfolio for the state Department of Highway Safety and Motor Vehicles.

He resigned his state job to run for a seat on the Leon County Commission in 2016, but his bid failed, and he went to work for NAI Talcor, a commercial real estate agency, before resuming state employment as a reviewer of comprehensive plans. In that role, he got to know folks with the Tallahassee-Leon County Planning Department and again departed his state job to work there.

In 2019, Cristina Paredes, the director of OEV, tempted Lewis over to her shop.

Even as Lewis was embarking upon his first state job, he was building a website, urbantallahassee.com, that was devoted to economic development news in Tallahassee. Lewis did so, he said, as a computer hobbyist with a passion for site development.

“I made a reputation for myself through my hobby more than I had with my career,” Lewis said.

To overcome the competitive disadvantage that Enterprise Florida had created for Tallahassee, OEV partnered with the company that powered the Enterprise Florida platform and integrated that platform into its own website.

The result?

“We built not only a robust listing service for our own community, but everything that we put on our website also appears on the Enterprise Florida site,” Lewis said. “It felt good.”

The impact of the workaround was felt almost immediately.

“Within a week, we were getting calls from site selectors looking at Florida,” Lewis said, “people whom we had never heard from before.”

After OEV launched its real estate platform in January, its leadership team had a meeting with local brokers to deliver good news.

“Now they are able to get their listings onto the Enterprise Florida website through our website, and it’s free of charge,” said Lewis, noting that the cost to establish an account on a national real estate platform can cost thousands of dollars and that additional charges are assessed on a per-listing basis.

The effort to get Tallahassee represented on the Enterprise Florida site was consistent with Lewis’ role as a business development manager at OEV. Among the organization’s four industry targets, Lewis concentrates on health care, professional services/ IT and applied sciences/innovation. Kevin Gehrke, who also works for OEV in a business development role, focuses on the fourth target: applied sciences/ manufacturing. Gehrke migrated south to Florida from Michigan and worked for Danfoss Turbocor before OEV put the arm on him.

Lewis, Gehrke and OEV business intelligence manager Richard Fetchik also work in concentration areas related to employers’ needs. Lewis specializes in land, Gehrke focuses on talent and Fetchik on capital.

The talent/labor piece can be a critical one.

“One of the reasons that we don’t land some of the industries that we have targeted is because we don’t have a skills match,” Lewis said. “We have low unemployment, and those who are unemployed do not have experience in manufacturing. We have to start identifying and attracting to our area people who can fill the jobs that our target industries have to offer.”

In those regards, Lewis singles out the work of Diverse Computing’s Lester Hunt whose initiative, Tallahassee Welcomes U, strives to link university students with tech companies looking to fill jobs in their areas of study.

“He acts as a conduit,” Lewis said. “He’s a perfect example of what we are trying to do community-wide: attract and retain talent, slow the brain drain.”

Too often, Lewis said, university faculty who come from out of the area to teach at FSU or FAMU don’t get to know the Tallahassee community and steer job-seeking seniors and graduates to opportunities out of town. The people, he said, who are most likely to remain in jobs in Tallahassee are those with ties to the community.

Lewis emphasizes that OEV is as committed to helping established businesses grow as it is to recruiting new ones to town. It employs a marketing analytics program to the benefit of any business with plans to land or expand in Tallahassee.

The program, Lewis explained, uses data tied to credit card information that is harvested from the “computers we all carry around in our pockets,” that is, cellphones.

“There are companies that mine information about your age, social status, your income, where you work,” Lewis said. “We can tell a business where its customers are coming from and where they get their information so they can target their marketing efforts using the

Tallahassee-Leon County Office of Economic Vitality director Cristina Paredes shares a light moment with business development manager T.J. Lewis at Cascades Park. Lewis achieved notoriety as a website developer, worked in commercial real estate and reviewed comprehensive plans for the state before joining OEV.

right media. And we can use that data to help a business — even a small one like a florist or a cigar shop — know where best to locate so that it has the greatest chance of succeeding.”

Lewis conceded that the program presents a “creep factor,” but “communities are using it and we decided to join them.”

Lewis has become involved, too, in enhancing the OEV website — oevforbusiness.org — with the addition of virtual site tours. He noted one that showcases Innovation Park and its business incubator project.

With the pandemic restricting travel, “a lot of site selectors are having to shortlist possibilities without making visits,” Lewis said.

Lewis intends that the OEV be the first point of contact for companies considering Tallahassee and said that with few exceptions, it is.

“If we are not the first, then companies are probably making contact with city or county leaders who refer them to us,” Lewis said. “Rarely does a business opening happen that we hadn’t heard was coming.” ●

Innovation & Technology in Florida’s Capital 609 patents

have been awarded to Tallahassee individuals and firms in areas from organic compounds and chemistry to nanotechnology and pharmaceuticals over the past 15 years.

In the past five years, FSU and FAMU have awarded a combined

2,263 degrees

in computer and information technologies

In 2020, software publishers, data processing and hosting, computer systems design and similar technical services accounted for a gross regional product of

$636.5 million and 4,512 jobs

In 2020, there were

5,959 jobs

in the computer and information field in Tallahassee, with 639 average annual openings, with median earnings of

$64,593

Sources: US Patent & Trademark Office; Florida Board of Governors, www.flbog. edu/resources/data-analytics/dashboards; EMSI 2021

GovTech Heats Up

Investment in government-focused technology surges amid pandemic

BY T.S. STRICKLAND

Bureaucrats, beware. Citizens, rejoice. DMV lines, disperse. The robots are coming, and they just might get your tags renewed before lunch. At least, that’s the upshot of a new report from insights and advisory firm StateUp, which paints a rosy picture for the global GovTech industry.

Investors have pumped nearly $700 million into the sector since last year, according to the report. This influx of capital represents a seachange for an industry that investors have traditionally viewed with skepticism.

That wariness is dissipating now, as governments rush to digitize their operations in response to the COVID-19 pandemic, and investors reach for civic-minded deal-flow after a year of political and social unrest.

Worldwide, governments are expected to spend more than $450 billion on information technology in 2021, according to Gartner. More than $112 billion of this spending is expected to go toward software. That’s an 8.2 percent increase over the prior year — and a good indication that the landscape is shifting.

Tallahassee, the seat of government for one of the nation’s most populous states, is home to a small but impressive list of startups that are poised to benefit from these trends.

A 70-year-old startup

Government is an enormous market, and there is a significant upside for entrepreneurs who can gain a foothold. That said, finding such traction can be difficult.

Government sales cycles are long, procurement processes are byzantine and payoffs can be uncertain. Success in this space has traditionally demanded what’s known as “patient capital,” and venture capitalists are not known for their patience. Perhaps that’s why the majority of GovTech firms are still privately held.

One of these firms, Tallahassee’s Municode, offers a master class in the virtues of patience. The company was founded by George Langford in 1952, long before the term “venture capitalist” had even been coined.

PHOTOS BY SAIGE ROBERTS / RPI FILE PHOTO

Prepress/production supervisor Starlett Lovel works in this 2018 photo in the printing room at the Municode facility in Tallahassee.

Langford stormed the beaches of Normandy during World War II before obtaining his law certificate from the University of Virginia. After graduation, he took a job with a legal publishing company, where he stumbled onto his first invention: a smarter way of binding codes of ordinances.

Realizing the idea had potential, Langford struck out on his own. He put 100,000 miles on his Oldsmobile, traveling from town to town soliciting new business. His very first client was Leon County. Today, the company serves more than 4,200 local governments in all 50 states.

“My dad (who sits on Municode’s board) calls us a 70-year-old startup,” CEO Eric Grant said. “We were the second internet connection to Tallahassee, and we were the first company to put city codes online.”

Municode has continued to evolve in the years since they moved their codebooks onto the web.

“About five years ago, we started looking at the landscape from a broader perspective than just codification,” Grant said. “We started at our roots and asked ourselves what our founder’s life work really was. And that was to strengthen democracy.”

With this insight in hand, Municode began acquiring other GovTech startups in 2014 and integrating them into a new, unified offering called the “Circle of Governance.”

Municode acquired four companies in as many years, expanding their core offering into web development, document management and government meetings. Grant said Municode was actively seeking new acquisition targets and considered “about 100” such prospects each year.

“The trust we’ve built over the last 70 years enables us to continue offering new services to our clients,” Grant said. “It allows us to have that conversation.”

An industry built on trust

The importance of trust is also top of mind for Mindy Perkins, CEO of Tallahassee-based election software provider VR Systems.

“A lot of the elections community relies on trust,” Perkins said. “It’s all about relationships and the history you’ve had with your existing customer base. Even though there are thousands of election officials, it’s a small community. They see how their vendors are providing products and services to them. A lot of it is word of mouth.”

VR Systems was founded in 1992 by Jane and David Watson. Perkins, their very first employee, was hired in 2001.

“The election offices here in Florida were very much underserved when we started,” Perkins said. “They were still using DOS.”

The Watsons recognized the potential for software to streamline this work. Their

Municode president Eric Grant at the business’s offices in Tallahassee. At top right, a sample of Municode’s work — a website developed for the City of Freeport.

Security was something on which many in the election industry were focused, but it wasn’t something people talked about. VR Systems has been helping lead the way in that since 2016. Not only are we more secure now, but the elections system is more secure, as a whole.” — Mindy Perkins, CEO of Tallahassee-based election software provider VR Systems

first product was an electronic voter registration system. Today, the company offers a full suite of related software and hardware products — from custom websites to e-learning software for poll workers to ballot printing.

“The one thing we don’t do is count the votes,” Perkins said.

VR Systems signed their first customer, Leon County, in 1993. Today, they serve election officials in North Carolina, Indiana, Illinois, Texas and all 67 Florida counties.

The company is looking to expand into several new states, though Perkins said the patchwork nature of election laws meant the company had to do so very thoughtfully.

“We’re very strategic about the states we target,” Perkins said. “We have to understand the requirements ahead of time — who’s buying the system and what their needs are. In some locations, primarily the Northeast and Midwest, it is a municipality that runs elections. In Florida, it’s counties. In Georgia, the election officials are in the counties, but they use state products. It really varies depending on the laws in each state.”

In addition to a complicated sales process, VR Systems and other GovTech firms must contend with an increasingly treacherous cybersecurity landscape.

Perkins knows this all too well. VR Systems was targeted by Russian military hackers on the eve of the 2016 presidential election. A leaked NSA document outlining that operation was published by The Intercept in 2017 and resulted in a bevy of bad press for the company.

The document suggested that at least one computer belonging to a VR Systems employee had been compromised and that the Russians had used this beachhead to send emails containing malware to more than 100 election officials. Perkins was quick to dismiss these reports as “misinformation.”

“We were a target of foreign actors,” she said, “and that’s all it was. Many have been targets for many, many years, and our name was in a document that was shared in a manner that it wasn’t supposed to be.”

Perkins said the company has used the episode as an educational opportunity for customers and a chance to advocate for increased coordination among federal officials, election supervisors and government contractors on matters of cybersecurity.

“Security was something on which many in the election industry were focused,” she said, “but it wasn’t something people talked about. VR Systems has been helping lead the way in that since 2016. Not only are we more secure now, but the elections system is more secure, as a whole.”

Loyal customers

Despite the high stakes, Perkins and Grant both said working in GovTech offered unique advantages — customer retention being near the top of the list.

“If you provide a great product and great service and take care of these customers, they will remain extremely loyal,” Grant said. “Our retention rate is over 99.9 percent. That’s remarkable.”

Perkins agreed.

“We have annual contracts,” she said, “so, theoretically, a customer could halt doing business with us. There are other vendors to choose from. We’re not the only one, but it is a complicated process to switch to a new vendor.”

In addition to being very loyal, Grant said that governments were also just very good customers.

“Governments are honest,” he said. “They pay their bills. They have taxing authority, so when you deliver a product to them, you know you are going to get paid.” And, then, there are the intangible benefits.

“When you are helping a local entity, you really are purpose driven,” Grant said. “You’re doing something bigger than yourself. At any given time, if you were to add up the number of citizens who are able to access the law through our products, it is well over 200 million.”

With strong tailwinds in the GovTech sector, both Grant and Perkins see ample room for growth.

“I’m extremely bullish on the GovTech space,” Grant said. “There are well over 25,000 local governments in the United States. The green space out there is just enormous.” ●