2014 Entrepreneur of the Year

Entrepreneurship isn't for the faint of heart. Although some envision it as a chance to work for yourself, make your own hours and have the freedom to do things your way, anyone who has done it knows it doesn't quite look like that most of the time.

That's the rosy side.

The dark, thorny side of entrepreneurship looks more like few hours of sleep, sometimes lousy and uncertain paychecks and continual worries, questions and stress. Will I make payroll? Should I expand to pursue a new opportunity, or focus on my core product? Where will I find the capital I need to grow? And the biggie: How can I get help without losing control of what I've built?

Entrepreneurship is lots of questions and few answers; at least not the kind that come easily and definitely not the kind that come from a book. Instead, answers usually come in the form of success and failures. The former can be extremely lucrative, while the latter can be life-changingly costly.

Which is why entrepreneurship takes guts.

As a nation, we tend to glorify entrepreneurship, and perhaps rightly so. After all, it's the epitome of the American Dream — you can start with nothing and build a business as vast as you can imagine. If you are successful. If.

At the Business Observer, we celebrate those who have taken that risk and found success.

Particularly in this issue, for which we search from Tampa to Naples for the best entrepreneurs on the Gulf Coast.

For each region, we have chosen a winner, along with two finalists. We look for three consecutive years of exceptional revenue growth to help us decide. This year's overall winner, Greg Murtagh of St. Petersburg-based Triad Retail Media, nearly doubled his firm's revenues during that time, to $249.6 million (see page 8).

In this year's winners, we found great stories of the people behind the businesses. Like how Pat Neal learned the power of density on earning power with his first newspaper route. Or how Mark Stevens, after he graduated college, turned down a great job offer at Disney to work for a firm with five employees in Cape Coral so he could learn and do more.

Our entrepreneurs also shared some great lessons. Like how Scott Fischer trades some of his profitability to invest in training and staff development, and why he believes it's a competitive advantage in the end.

To gain more insight into how they think, we asked our top entrepreneurs what they would do if we gave them $1 million to invest in their businesses. See below.

We hope the stories on the following pages give you a few ideas. And maybe even a few answers.

- Kat Hughes

If I had a million dollars ...
To see how the top entrepreneurs on the Gulf Coast think, we asked this year's Entrepreneurs of the Year:

If you had $1 million to invest in your business, what would you do with it?

Mark Stevens, Stevens Construction: He would bank it. That kind of liquidity on the balance sheet of Stevens Construction could boost his bonding capacity, allowing him to take on more construction projects instead of opening up an office in another location. “I want to grow what we've got,” says Stevens, president and founder of the Fort Myers-based construction company.

Trevor Burgess, C1 Bank: If he didn't use the money to increase his new loans or look for new locations, Burgess says he'd use it to fund his newest toy — a disaster-recovery vehicle that the company is building, called the C1 Bank Mobile. “An amazing 40-foot bank on wheels unlike anything you've ever seen before,” Burgess says. “Again, more ways we can serve our clients, or ways we can differentiate our brand and meet the needs of Florida.” Burgess says the C1 Bank Mobile will make its way around various local sporting events, community festivals or fundraising events throughout the year. It will also be available for disaster recovery, if the state loses power or there's a hurricane, it will be there to help with disaster response. The bus is supposed to be ready by September, just in time for the Buccaneers' opening game.

Felix Lluberes and Hong Long, Position Logic: The duo say they would spend that sum on sales and marketing to boost awareness of their GPS-tracking software company, Position Logic. “We have a product that works,” Lluberes says. The company would hire more people to manage sales and grow its presence throughout the 80 countries and the U.S. where it has customers.

Greg Murtagh, Triad Retail Media: “I'd hire more new data engineers. Marketing has moved beyond 'I hope that worked' to 'Did it work or not?' The only way to answer the question and make sure doing activity X really equated to result Y is via thorough analysis of data — ecommerce sales, in-store sales, etc. That is what leaders like Amazon, Google and our clients eBay and Wal-Mart are doing. If you can prove what you do works, your business will thrive. Proof of ROI via hard data is the new currency of business success in the 21st century.”

Pat Neal, Neal Communities: “I would add new modules to our current operating system. The operating system manages our team's actions in design, estimating, purchasing, estimate scheduling, completion, and warranty operations.

The new operating system would generate estimates and unit costs for our new home designs, maintain our construction standards, allow the customer to use a tablet on all customer selections, and enable the scheduling portal to reduce the time of construction by tracking all construction activities on the critical path. Importantly, the system would track customer warranty calls by vendor and material supplier and maintain the warranty system.

The result would be even more consistent and enhanced quality, faster construction, happier customers, increased efficiency and improving the productivity and morale of the team.”

Scott Fischer, SCOTT Fischer Enterprises: He says he would spend that money on employees with more training and benefits. When pressed, he says he would rather spend it in this way than use it to build another dealership. It's part of Fischer's organizational culture to help develop people, improve morale and reduce turnover. It reinforces the corporate vision: to make peoples' lives better. Fischer reasons that happy employees will translate to happier customers, too.

Walt Augustinowicz, Identity Stronghold: “I would use the funds to build an expandable 15,000-square-foot facility in the Paul Morris Industrial Park (in Englewood).” Augustinowicz cites several reasons, mostly out of current need and future projections. The building, he adds, would streamline production; reduce air conditioning expenses with less exterior walls; eliminate recurring monthly lease payments; reduce insurance costs with a secure design that takes advantage of insurance discounts; and expand without losing any current employees due to a change in location.

Joey Redner, Cigar City Brewing: “We're almost maxed out here, so I'd start trying to refine how we're doing things.” Because the brewery has perfect east-west exposure without any trees blocking sunlight, Redner says he'd invest in solar for creating hot water and he'd look into a biodigester to use wastewater for the methane that runs the boilers. He'd also retrofit the brewhouse to automate the process for brewing higher alcohol content beer.