Aqua Expertise

When David Brown and James Guida worked for a state government water permit office, they struggled to balance the needs of clients with the bureaucracy that paid their salaries.

“We would see people come in and say, 'why are they doing it this way?'” recalls Guida, who, with Brown, worked for the Southwest Florida Water Management District, commonly called Swiftmud. “As best we could, we would steer them in the right direction, but we were still regulators.”

Instead of prolonging the bureaucratic agony, however, Brown, Guida and business partner Stephen Suau, another former government employee, took an unusual turn: They launched a private company, Sarasota-based Progressive Water Resources.

The firm helps developers, builders, landowners and farmers navigate Florida's perplexing water management and regulatory process. Somewhat paradoxically, the firm's client list includes engineering firms that work directly with local and regional government offices that also need water permit guidance. Some PWR clients are the government entities themselves.

“We worked for government, but we acted as consultants,” says Brown. “Now we can see both sides of the equation. We can see right through the cloud and actually predict what will be on the other side.”

Hyper-focused water permit consulting work has traditionally been the domain of large engineering and architecture firms in Florida and on the Gulf Coast, so PWR is in some rare space. The firm hopes to utilize that unique model in the near future with a focus on agriculture — an area government officials, including Gov. Rick Scott, say is ripe for job growth.

“Some developers are going back to agriculture,” Suau says. “They are realizing there is money to be made not by selling homes but by making organic food.”

Guida, Brown, and Suau, who previously advised Sarasota County on storm water runoffs and flood planning, formed the company in 2006. Guida and Brown met at Swiftmud, and the pair knew Suau independently from their work in the community.

Guida says he and his co-founders all witnessed government inefficiency in action, and they wanted PWR to provide an antidote. “We saw some things that could have been a little more business-friendly,” says Guida, “a little more logical.”

Now with eight employees and a satellite office in Brooksville, PWR has between $1 million and $5 million in annual revenues. Revenues have been mostly flat during the recession, executives say.

The firm's list of services is more than 50 tasks deep. That highlights both its breadth of experience and a regulatory environment that made the firm's existence possible, and profitable. Services range from alternative water supply planning to well construction to watershed development. The firm has completed projects in more than a dozen Florida locations, in addition to work in Alabama and Georgia.

Recent past clients include the city of Venice and AG Armstrong Development, which has an office in Tampa. With Armstrong, PWR helped put together a public water supply well system in Polk County. In Venice, meanwhile, the firm helped the city renew its Swiftmud water use permit. The firm navigated what it called “exceptionally stringent” water use rules in that project.

The firm nonetheless sees the most growth potential in agriculture. One challenge, says Brown, is it has been hard to find new clients other than through word-of-mouth. “You can't advertise to them, you can't market to them,” says Brown. “Agriculture is a tight-knit group.”