Along with my husband, David, I am co-publisher of the monthly publication you’re holding in your hands right now, Insight Magazine. Our baby. Our pride and joy.

To us, the magazine represents much more than just a smattering of articles. You see, Insight is designed to be more than just a collection of issues and advertisements. More than just a coffee table read. Really, it’s more than a magazine in our eyes. Insight represents an ideal. A way of thinking.

In the dictionary, the term “insight” is commonly defined as “an instance of apprehending the true nature of a thing” or “an understanding of relationships that sheds light on or helps solve a problem.” That’s what we try to do each month.

Our goal is to offer you, our readers, a unique, unbiased perspective on the issues that affect our community of East Orlando in the hope that it will give you a greater understanding of what’s going on around us. But more than that, our hope is that it will help cultivate a heightened sense of community to make this a better place to live, work and play.

The fact is, tighter knit communities lead to better, stronger communities. We’d like to think that insight is one of the vehicles we can all use to get there.

A Brief History

Being so connected to the community doesn’t happen by mistake, or even coincidence. David and I are always out, always meeting new faces that make up the patchwork we like to call home. Some of the more common questions we’re asked is, “How did Insight Magazine get off the ground?” or “Why did you guys want to do this?” In case you’ve ever wondered why we decided to leave our comfy corporate jobs, venture out onto our own and tackle the beast that is entrepreneurship, the answer is a few paragraphs away.

Essentially, Insight Magazine got its start from a visioning study to, believe it or not, offer insight to local leaders and business owners. In 2003 while I was volunteering as president of the East Orlando Chamber of Commerce (EOCC), our community conducted a 10 month visioning study to find out what was needed to make our businesses, our neighborhoods and our communities stronger.

Each month we went out and discussed an issue - be it education, transportation, the environment, public safety and even architecture - with members of the community. We always made sure to talk about where we were then, where we wanted to be in 25 years and how we were going to get there.

The end result was writing a 74 page document, with my good friend Jim Spaeth, that became known as the East Orlando Visioning Report. The report was a huge success and it created a lot of buzz among the business community and residents on this side of town. So much so in fact, that in 2005, Orange County Mayor Richard Crotty announced his vision for a high-tech corridor called Innovation Way that would link UCF to the Orlando International Airport. This report was extremely similar to the document we produced a short time earlier.

I remember it like it was yesterday. A very good friend of mine and a former Stoneybrook resident, Linda Shroll, saw that there was a need and an opportunity to create a community-based magazine that built upon our original visioning study to provide us with access to the news, views and issues that meant the most to us - the things that were going on right in our backyard.

So, one night about 25 of us, including local elected officials and grass roots advocates, met for dinner at one of our favorite Italian restaurants. Two hours later we emerged with full bellies and a concept for starting a new business. Partnered with the EOCC in the first year, we gave away free advertising to chamber members who would then promote the new publication to their member base.

That’s how the publication itself got started in 2004. Insight Magazine was created as a continuation to the efforts by this community to create a dialogue about the issues that are important to us. That’s why each month, Insight is focused on a particular topic.  This month it is construction and growth.  Last month it was our local economy.  Next month we will focus on education.

Meanwhile, David and I were still at our corporate jobs. Fast forward to 2005 - I was beginning my efforts to get elected as our next Orange County Commissioner for District 4, the region we all live in. Linda was looking to move onto her next challenge and raise a family. David and I both were looking to move into a more flexible environment that would allow us to grow professionally and personally as the campaign revved up. We were already heavily involved in nonprofits and community events, but taking over the magazine seemed like the next logical step to become further invested into the community and really make a difference.

The stars aligned and we purchased the magazine in mid-2005.  It was a whirlwind of excitement. Anticipation. Independence. We took the leap and became small business owners.

It’s a decision that has shaped just about every aspect of our lives to this day. We wake up, eat breathe and sleep this community. It’s a move that neither of us regret and it has allowed us to meet hundreds of extraordinary people and experience some of the area’s most incredible experiences.

It seems like the past years have been a blur. When we started, we relied on a lot of interns and a lot of very late nights. Our time was scarce and those first few months were more of a learning process rather than anything else.

Since purchasing the magazine, we’ve been fortunate to more than quadruple our distribution list, have sponsored dozens of community events and have grown into the area’s leading community magazine.

But at the end of the day, it all goes back to one thing: providing you, our readers and our community with insight in the hope that we can better our community for the future generations.

What Will Tomorrow Bring?

What does the road ahead hold? That’s a good question and one that I cannot answer for certain. The magazine is doing well and it continues to turn heads and profits, despite a less than stellar economy. It finds a way to survive, much like you and I do.

We are directly affected by the ups and downs in the economy. David and I take our commitment to our community very serious and we pride ourselves on getting out there and getting to know the people that make our region such a great place to live.

I look back on the things we’ve done since we’ve been publishers of the magazine and one of our prouder moments was starting Coffee Club in January of 2007. Since then we have welcomed more than 3,000 Central Florida businesses to our weekly free networking event. We call them our Coffee Clubbers. Their will to grow, learn and take on the world with, sometimes, little more than a passionate ideal inspires us every day.

In our very near future, it’s my belief that our community must make progress towards diversifying itself and bringing real jobs and real opportunities here so that people just like us have the chance to start a business or offer better career choices for the next generation. My insight on the issue is this: we must recognize and gain a clear understanding of the environment that the business community needs in order to recruit and retain workers.

In business, one must always be moving forward.  Just because the economy is slow does not mean that we can slow down.  Small business owners must think outside the box when finding solutions.  The ability to find those solutions is what makes us unique. It’s what makes us entrepreneurs.

Insight is what you make it, both in terms of the magazine and, on a grander scale, your career and your day-to-day life. Insight can give you understanding, but it’s up to you to determine what to do with it, where to put your efforts and, ultimately, how to determine and support the choices you make.

We thank you for your tremendous support throughout the past five years. Without you, your family and your efforts - there would be no community here to call home. Hopefully, we’ve been a small to help to your family in because you’ve become such a big part of ours.

Here’s to an insightful tomorrow!

Article by Jennifer Thompson

Becoming the premier commercial electrical contractor in the Southeast United States doesn’t happen by accident. It doesn’t happen overnight, and it certainly doesn’t happen without a vision. Founded in 1993, family-owned Quinco Electrical, Inc. has done just that, however, on the way to employing more than 1,100 employees dedicated to one thing: client satisfaction.

“Quinco has been built on loyalty, trust and consumer satisfaction,” says David Deese, CEO of Quinco. Today, the company continues to expand with the ultimate goal of establishing new satellite offices throughout the United States, becoming the only truly national electrical contractor specializing in new fast track construction.

“All the while, we strive to ensure that family values are kept intact as well as the commitment to demonstrate the same dedication to our employees, partners and clients that has helped us get to where we are today,” says Deese.

Offering a wide range of electrical services that includes commercial and residential installation, a 24 hour service department and even a disaster relief division, Quinco is able to offer a results-driven approach that consistently ends with projects being completed on time and on budget, according to Deese. “The commitment to satisfaction, along with our expertise, has led to exponential growth by diversifying in residential, commercial and specialty projects from light to high density levels,” he says.

More often than not, common jobs for Quinco typically include higher education and medical facilities. Although they are primarily focused on commercial structures, the team also offers residential assistance on everything from installing an A/C unit, remodeling a home and even installing a swimming pool.

Based out of Winter Park, Quinco’s main office employs more than 40 Orlando-area residents and customer service specialists. Purchasing most of their material direct from manufacturers, the electrical company is able to stock everyday items in their 60,000-square-foot warehouse, allowing the company to provide a wide variety of services to accommodate the electrical needs of every client. “The warehouse also has a full staff to assist all projects from the prefabrication department to the fleet of vehicles constantly on the road delivering and picking up special order materials,” says Deese.

In addition to employing certified personnel to operate their large vehicles, such as boom trucks and trenchers, the company also employs an ASE Certified mechanic to maintain all company equipment and vehicles. “These quality control mechanisms have been implemented internally and externally,” says Deese. “We’ve achieved growth with continuous improvement in service efficiency, along with total quality control procedures in all operations.”

But what makes Quinco stand out more than just their extensive facilities and vast capabilities is their commitment to their customer, their recognition that if a client is doing well, so are they. “The success of Quinco depends entirely on the success of our clients,” says Deese. “That is a simple rule that has allowed us to provide the highest quality of work to a growing list of clients since 1993.”

According to Deese, when a client enlists the services of Quinco, they become more than just another job - they become a partner. This philosophy has led to continually high levels of customer satisfaction. “When you partner with Quinco, you experience the best the industry has to offer,” he says. “Every member of our team practices senior-level skills that maximize efficiency and deliver quick execution. Each of our clients expects, and receives, nothing less.”

Even as the company continues to move forward with their expansion plans throughout the Southeast region of the US, they constantly are improving their infrastructure to achieve new levels of effectiveness. “In fact, we are operating at the highest level of efficiency to date,” says Deese. “In today’s world, it’s hard to find ideal partners who share the same visions and strive for complete customer satisfaction. That is the driving force behind our mission.”

Article By Corey Gehrold

These days it seems people aren’t as willing to give up their hard-earned dollar to just anyone, and companies have taken notice.  However, that hasn’t stopped the opening and expanding of local businesses.  So why open a new business now when many are closing their doors?

At this time in his career, Philip T. Hardy, M.D. of Legacy Family Medicine, saw a need in the ever-growing and diverse community of East Orlando.  “The time was right in my professional career where I could offer something of value to the community,” he says. “I feel the bilingual community may have needs that are not being met.”

For Teena Patel, owner of Doglando University, opening their new location, Groom, Grub, and Belly Rub in Avalon Park, was a way to bring exposure to the main Doglando campus, as well as offer a new set of doors people can walk through right into the heart of the community she wants to serve.

In these difficult times, small businesses have found a way to compete with larger companies, not only in the relationships they form with their customers, but in the way their services are provided.  Patel believes that unlike larger, chain corporations, her service is not an assembly line process. “We don’t want these dogs waiting around and getting all anxious and nervous barking in the kennel, waiting their turn,” says Patel.

Beyond general care and service, success is attributed to the individual attention and guidance offered by these thriving small businesses.  “I am not interested in placing Band-Aids. Instead, if we uncover fundamental problems, we can structure valid solutions. I believe each patient is unique, and requires a unique solution for his/her medical problem,” says Hardy.

Despite many consumers having less money in their pockets, support for local business is growing.  “So many people tell us, ‘we used to buy our food from such and such; we want to support local business.’  That is our motivation through these hard times,” says Patel.

So, what’s next on the checklist for these small business owners?  “Our long-term goal is more community service-oriented.  It’s more to shelter animals than it is retail,” says Patel.

As for Hardy, he hopes to partner with other physicians to bring world class medical care to the Waterford Lakes community.

“My long term aspirations would include attracting like-minded doctors who are excited about the things that Legacy Family Medicine represents,” he says. “We need to recognize that we are in the same corridor as the UCF Medical School, and the long term impact of this institution on our community will be immeasurable.”

Article by Erika Finnimore

There’s no denying it: things are different today. For better or worse, businesses of every size are running leaner and doing whatever it takes to stay afloat. As the economy continues to sift, business owners throughout East Orlando have been forced to evolve to survive. They’ve had to drop employees, change hours, offer discounts and more. In some cases, like that of Universal Home Mortgage in Avalon Park, they’ve had to realign how they do business and what services they offer.

Being a small, locally-owned mortgage company amid the recent real estate market, the upstart company was already walking a fine line. As the environment around them continued to shift, Zach Bleznick, director of operations for Universal Home Mortgage, says the company quickly realized they needed a new approach to push forward.

“We really had to restructure our business to become more of a full-service company rather than just concentrating on traditional mortgages like when we started,” Bleznick says. The decision was made to offer more services for clients looking to buy a new home or keep their current one. The company recently launched new options including loan modification and short sale assistance. “Three years ago there was no such thing as loan modification and foreclosure a word that was thrown around. Over the past year or so we’ve had to develop and integrate options to serve our new kind of customer in our new kind of market.”

Bleznick recalls when he was first going into the mortgage industry as a traditional loan officer. His days were filled with inbound and outbound phone calls but then, as the economy started to turn, his days became entirely more interesting. “People started to lose a tremendous amount of equity in their homes, suddenly when people would talk to you, nine out of 10 didn’t have any equity left,” he says. “When we first started, it used to be a cut and dry situation where we could either help you or we couldn’t. We just had to say there were no financing options available because there was no such thing as loan modification.”

Today, the business at Universal Home Mortgage has evolved to keep up with the demand. “We realized if we wanted to stay in business, we had to have a means to keep our clients in-house and help them so that’s what we did,” says Bleznick.

But, because of the industry, Bleznick and his team have had an entirely new set of challenges to deal with as well. Among ever-changing bank programs and laws, professionals in the mortgage industry must continually adapt to how they do business. “Every single day a bank offers a different type of loan modification or changes a guideline or expedites a process that used to take six months,” he says. “We are forced to stay up with all the changes because we are submersed in the industry every day; it definitely keeps you on your toes, that’s for sure.”

Aside from the standards, Bleznick and company have also had to keep up with competitors who, as he puts it, have seemingly come out of nowhere. “With any crisis, people come out of the woodwork to take advantage of the situation and most don’t have the necessary experience, licenses or certifications,” he says. “All of a sudden we saw individuals that were not mortgage professionals advertising they were ‘loan modification specialists’ and they started charging obscene upfront retainers to help people and, really, they didn’t even know if they could.”

Still, even with the new competition, the changing guidelines and the evolving business model, Bleznick says, although hectic, business is better because of the evolution. “We’ve definitely seen an increase after we opened up our options to offer services that people need now,” he says. “If you can show people that you’ll be there through thick and thin, then they’ll stick with you when times are good and bad.”

Article by Corey Gehrold

It was a hot summer day in mid-2009 when Billy G. White decided he had finally had enough. He couldn’t take it anymore. There needed to be a major change in his life and he was going to make sure he was in charge of it. A few weeks later, he founded Billy G. White & Associates, a financial services firm that provides counseling, credit repair services and financial seminars for individuals and businesses.

Working as a banker and financial advisor for almost a decade, White says that he simply had his fill of watching people being taken advantage of by banks and brokers who, he says, pushed products onto their clients. “Many people aren’t as well educated when it comes to their finances as they should be, and that’s not their fault, but financial firms have a tendency to take advantage of that,” says White.

Employed at a credit union, White says he came at odds with the employer because he was reluctant to push people into products they didn’t need. “I was meeting all of my numbers and doing everything I was supposed to do on paper, but I was thinking outside the box and offering real advice and they didn’t like that.”

From then on, White knew what he wanted to do. “Seeing people forced into taking out crazy loans and equity lines on their houses, cold call after cold call, was it for me. That’s when I decided I wanted to be that middle man,” he says. “Now, I don’t sell financial products, I sell a service that makes you a little more aware of what’s out there so you know all of your options.”

Venturing into business ownership in an uncertain time was something of a calculated risk for White. He had always wanted to own his business, but was never sure what that would be until his experience in the financial industry. “You could say I’m kind of in the right industry at the right time,” he says. “Business has been picking up ever since I started, thanks to relationship building and getting out into the community but also to the nature of the current economy - it sort of drives people to come and talk to someone like me when money is a little tighter.”

Even though he has slowly begun to cement himself as a financial counselor in East Orlando, many are still unfamiliar with what the term actually means. “The big difference between me and an advisor is that some advisors, not all, get to a point where they are selling to make the biggest commissions and not providing the client with the best solution,” White says. “They are trying to meet a quota or a number so they start to push a product like whole life insurance, for instance, that may not be the best fit for you.” White makes no money on the products clients eventually choose, he just tries to explain what’s on the table.

Not only has the financial counseling aspect of his business taken off, so too has the credit repair side.  “You know, it’s funny, a lot of the credit repair stuff I am doing is not for people who have terrible credit and are up to their eyes in debt,” he says. “More often, I’m seeing people that are in dire need to get their credit together so they can take advantage of the housing market. In fact, the last five people I have spoken to just want to clean up their credit and get ready for that next step in the home buying process.”

As business continues to pick up, White says he is ready for whatever road he may travel on in the future. “Business ownership is a lot harder than a lot of people think, but I’ve loved every minute of it so far,” he says. “I’m doing what I want to be doing at the right time to be doing it, you know, so I can’t complain.”

Article by Corey Gehrold