Looking Ahead

By:Kathleen McNamara

Pointing up at a 20-foot-high wall, Carl White remembers the days when he watched drive-in movies with his family upon the flat, gray surface. Little did he know then that he'd one day work right under that very wall. "Never in my wildest dreams," he laughs.

But as fate has had it, White, now 39 years old, is director of the City of Fort Myers Business Development Center, housed in the very same building once used as a theater screen. And the 10-acre lot where cars lined up to watch movies is now the city's business "incubator," providing work and commercial space for about 21 start-up companies.

The companies who use the center pay a fraction of usual commercial rent rates. Manufacturing bays run .40 cents per square foot. Office space is $1.50 a square foot. The start-up entrepreneurs also have access to shared secretarial help, a conference room with audio/visual equipment, mail and custodial service and fax and copy machines. "The goal is to minimize the risk of failure," White explains.

White manages the center and his staff of five with a budget of around $200,000 a year. With those funds, he must maintain the property, provide services for the fledgling businesses and scope out new opportunities for networking, training and funding.

He has an ultimate vision to replace the old Business Development Center, located at 3901 Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Boulevard within Fort Myers' Dunbar area, with a new facility equipped with high-tech training capabilities. He hopes to kick off the project in the next 18 months to 2 years while Martin King Jr. Boulevard is widened. His present-day goal: raise funding for the project while raising excitement among businesses.

And, if enthusiasm level is any indicator of White's success, there'll be no stopping this very determined director.

The Disadvantaged Business Enterprise Program

The City of Fort Myers Business Development Center is only part of the city's 11-year-old Disadvantaged Business Enterprise Program, of which Carl White is also director. The DBE program encourages the growth of businesses certified as "disadvantaged" within city confines.

For a business to be certified as disadvantaged, it must be at least 51 percent owned by a disadvantage entrepreneur. And for the entrepreneur to qualify for this definition, he or she must have a "substantial difficulty in achieving business success" in at least three of the following areas:

*Disadvantage with respect to education

*Disadvantage with respect to employment

*Social disadvantage

Disadvantaged wit respect to residence or business location

*Lack of business training in a specified field, in which the applicant has experience.

Certification, granted for a year, allows the business to take advantage of city procurement. White offers an example of a small, certified construction company bidding against a larger company for a city project. Under the city the program, the disadvantaged-certified business would automatically win part of the contract -- the larger company would have to give 12 percent of its contract to the smaller company. About 45 companies are currently certified under the city program.

White's Own Objectives

Born and raised in Fort Myers, White followed the migration pattern typical of talented local teenagers. He left town to pursue a business administration and marketing degree at William Penn College, while he played basketball at the college. He then chose the corporate path, working 15 years in sales and marketing at a company in Tampa.

But unlike most young local talent, Carl White returned to Fort Myers. He first came back to stay with his ill mother, who later passed away. During his stay in town, he crossed paths with Fort Myers Mayor Bruce Grady. "He asked me if I wanted to come back and give back to the city," White recalls. He accepted a city position.

The Fort Myers Business Development Center, in the meanwhile, had fallen on some tough times. In 1998, the city council considered closing it down at the mayor's urging. There were management problems, recalls Ann Knight, a Fort Myers city councilor who had participated in the center's founding back in the 1980s. The center had a nominal budget and high turnover of past directors. The city also was paying for many extra expensive services, including utilities, for some of the businesses. "The city tried to provide more than they started [out] to do," she says.

But the council gave the center another chance, and Grady chose White to fill the director's post in May of 1998.

But as White soon found out, there was a lot of work to be done. Simply maintaining the center was a mammoth task. The grass was overgrown, and vagrants lived in old wrecks abandoned out back. Former industrial tenants left behind waste, requiring environmental studies and specialized clean up.

Short of help during his first few months at the center, White took on some of the tasks himself. "There were a lot of times I had to get out there and mow the grass," he says. He later enlisted the help of the city's parks and recreation and public works departments, who cleaned up the environmental problems and moved out all the junk. He also hired a full-time maintenance person. Today, the lot is clean with the exception of items stored temporarily before shipment. "It's like a whole city effort now," White says.

In side the center, he hired on more staff members, making sure their goals were the same as his own. "We all came to the conclusion that we have to make it work," he reflects. He developed a better record keeping system and updated old resources. "We didn't have a website," he says. "We didn't have computers before."

He also developed better-defined goals for those taking advantage of the center's resources. Tenants now sign a two-year lease, with a third year option. After that point, the companies are expected to strike it out on their own. The purpose, White says, is to "incubate, not hibernate," and give the entrepreneur a small push, if necessary, into the business world.

Accompanying that push, however, is an effort to equip the business owner with information about owning and operating a business. White's right hand, Disadvantaged Business Enterprise Coordinator Erma Dennard, works with the entrepreneurs to secure permits, operational licenses, certifications and grants.

Through the center, companies can be put in touch with lending institutions -- White is currently working with Fifth Third Bank and SunTrust to develop a revolving loan program. And the can attend their choice of 12 low-cost training workshops (certified businesses are required to take eight) and technical assistance courses.

When a business is ready to leave the center, White says he'll help the entrepreneur find realtors, accountants and attorneys. "I just try to make their path a little bit easier, showing them who they have to go to," he says.

Getting Started

Lauretta Rasmussen's Neon Signs is one of the small companies taking advantage of the Business Development Center and the city's Disadvantaged Business Program. Lauretta Rasmussen, who owns the business with her husband, is a neon manufacturer from New Jersey. She learned her trade up north and inherited much of the equipment necessary to make the neon signs.

When she moved with her family to Fort Myers, however, she had little funding to get started in her own business. The start-up costs, namely rent for commercial space, were just too high. "We had been pricing shops for 2 years," she said, "and shops are so expensive."

Last year, she signed on at the city's Business Development Center, where she hopes to gain a foothold and grow her business. She presently manufactures neon lighting for other companies, but she's working on getting a license to hang the neon signs herself for commercial businesses. "We never would have been able to go into business ourselves if it wasn't for this," she says, standing in her small yet ample manufacturing workshop.

Among others using the center: a Jamaican food store, two auto body shops and a pool parts manufacturer. White says he enjoys seeing the companies leave the center and strike out successfully on their own. "That's the purpose [of the center]," he says, "for them to outgrow it."

Challenges

White admits the Business Development Center has had to fight a bad legacy. But he says that he now has a good working relationship with the Fort Myers City Council and with an ever-increasing number of supportive businesses. "We're organized now," he says. "We're more focused."

Knight agrees, saying that White has injected new enthusiasm into the center. "I think he's doing a very good job," she says.

She says she follows the "teach a man to fish" outlook -- that as a incubator for smaller entrepreneurs, the center is indeed helping get workers out from home and into the workforce, creating more potential jobs in the process. "It's really a learning tool," she says. A good example is some of the auto body shops located in the center. Without a place like the center, she says, they'd probably be working from their front yard at home -- and without a license.

Yet, White still acknowledges he has an "uphill battle" to keep the center going and growing. Resources are limited, despite his ongoing attempts to get the word out and find financial support from both public and private sources.