Marketing Muscle

Marketing Muscle

Entrepreneurs by Mark Gordon | Managing Editor

A pair of veteran business owners has opened their own company devoted strictly to marketing real estate projects. Will there be enough clients?

Early last year, when friends Stephen LeBlanc and Art Mahoney got together for lunch, they realized how well things had been going for them in their respective businesses: LeBlanc was doing just fine, running his own growing Sarasota-based portrait photography studio for 25 years. Likewise, Art Mahoney was in a good spot in his business life, having sold his ownership stake in two separate multimillion-dollar advertising firms.

But during that meeting, the pair of energetic entrepreneurs and real estate buffs decided the time was right to open a marketing business devoted strictly to promoting development projects with a heavy residential real estate component - despite the current market slowdown that has only slowed down more since then.

"In the old days," LeBlanc says, "you could put a gorilla in the sales office and sell." Since those days are history now, LeBlanc says there's a growing demand for what he and Mahoney are doing.

And it isn't a part-time twilight hobby or a passing fad. Both LeBlanc and Mahoney say they are in this business for the long-term, undaunted by the barrage of projects that have been scaled back or outright dropped over the last six months.

"Everyone is being real cautious, but projects continue to come out and they need marketing," Mahoney says. "The reality is that real estate is a big part of the Gulf Coast economy and always will be."

The company, LuxMark, is focusing its marketing efforts only on developers, builders and real estate professionals. Narrow, but necessary, says LeBlanc, the company president, because it allows him to legitimately boast to potential clients that he and Mahoney are completed devoted to the industry, not marketing for health care firms or manufacturers on the side.

LuxMark is already profitable, LeBlanc says, an accomplishment boosted by tying into the resources he already has with LeBlanc Studios. The company has been working on several projects, including putting together aerial pictures, ads and brochures for Legends at Forest Lakes and Enclave at Bay Isles, two residential communities being built by Sarasota-based Westwater Construction. Forest Lakes is being built on Beneva Road in Sarasota, while Enclave is on Longboat Key.

LuxMark also recently completed a four page glossy insert scheduled to run in the duPont Registry touting Positano On the Gulf, another high-end Longboat Key community. "When your marketing is tied into photography," LeBlanc says, "there's an unlimited number of things you could do."

LeBlanc, 51, and Mahoney, 65, both have previous experience in running their own startup companies.

Mahoney, a Long Island. N.Y. native, founded Morey Mahoney, a Denver-based advertising firm and, along with his partner Glenn Morey, grew it to $25 million-plus in annual sales. Clients included Colorado banks and real estate firms, as well as national fast food chain Quiznos. Mahoney sold his portion of the firm in 2000 and moved to Sarasota. He later bought Clarke Advertising with two other partners, then sold his portion in that firm last year before partnering with LeBlanc.

LeBlanc found photography through scuba diving. A native of Baton Rouge, La. who spent parts of his childhood in Houston and Southern California, LeBlanc's first career was as a youth diving instructor, making trips to places such as Cozumel and the Caribbean. He experimented with an underwater camera in the late '70s, and soon after opened his own above ground studio on the side.

He continued to work various jobs while running his studio, including one at a tool and dye factory, until he moved to Sarasota in 1983. He's been fine-tuning LeBlanc Studios since then, ultimately settling on a strategy of becoming a high-end, low-volume firm, focusing on family and school portraits.

He moved his seven-employee company into a two-story building he had built exclusively as a photo studio on Fruitville Road in 2003; company revenues have doubled the past two years, to the low million-dollar range.

REVIEW SUMMARY

Company: LuxMark, Sarasota

Business: Marketing and promotions for developers, builders and real estate professionals

Key: Finding enough projects to sustain business growth.