Sharon Rowlands didn’t know much about Jacksonville when she was named CEO of Web.com Group Inc. in January 2019, soon after its acquisition by a private equity firm.
“I think I’d been here once before I moved here,” Rowlands said in a Feb. 16 interview at the offices of Newfold Digital, the Jacksonville-based company formed two years ago when Web.com merged with a competitor.
“Jacksonville has been a delight.”
Rowlands, a native of England and a U.S. citizen, has been a U.S. resident for 24 years.
“I love the vibe here. It’s so not what I thought Florida was. It’s vibrant, it’s multicultural, it’s got young people here. I mean, there’s just so much diversity.”
As Rowlands learns more about Jacksonville, the community may need to learn more about her company.
Newfold is one of Jacksonville’s largest companies with about $1.4 billion in annual revenue and more than 4,000 employees, plus more than 2,000 contract employees, in 20 countries.
It has about 350 employees at its headquarters in the Town Center Two building at 5335 Gate Parkway, south of St. Johns Town Center.
Web.com, which focused on developing websites for small and medium-size businesses, was a familiar presence in Jacksonville before its acquisition by affiliates of private equity firm Siris Capital Group LLC in late 2018.
Not only was Web.com publicly traded, but it also was building a national brand as the named sponsor of the second-level golf tour of the PGA Tour.
Rowlands has led the company through major changes.
“The point of taking a company private is typically the thesis that it’s not performing as well as it can as a public company and that if you take it private you can do things to it that are harder to do when you’re a public company,” she said.
“We don’t have to, like a public company has to do, worry about quarterly earnings, which sometimes makes you do unhealthy things because the investor base is so focused on that quarterly number.”
Rowlands focused on streamlining the company, including divesting six assets that she said were not part of its core business.
She also cut costs, including deciding Web.com did not need the full six stories of the Town Center Two building it leased in 2019. She thought the top floor of the building looked like a “palace.”
“I looked at the sixth floor and I said, ‘I am not going on that sixth floor. I want to be on a floor with my door open where I can walk down the hallway and people can walk up,’” she said.
Newfold now primarily occupies one floor, with many employees able to work from home at least part of the time.
Dun & Bradstreet Inc. bought the building in 2021 to serve as its headquarters and occupies most of it.Newfold now primarily occupies one floor, with many employees able to work from home at least part of the time.
“I suppose by the end of two years we’d really achieved a lot of what we’d set out to do with Web.com as we had a more streamlined, more modern company,” Rowlands said.
In February 2021, Web.com Group merged with competitor Endurance International Group with another private equity firm, Clearlake Capital Group, joining Siris as an ownership partner.
Endurance was equal in size and similar to Web.com, Rowlands said.
“They were public, under pressure from their investors and starting to do unnatural things to make investors happy,” she said.
“The opportunity we saw was, look, we can almost do Act Two: replicate what we did with Web.com” and streamline the business, she said.
Rowlands also thought the merged company needed a new name.
“I basically said, ‘Look, we’re starting a new journey as a new company together. Let’s get a brand new name,’ ” she said.
So Newfold Digital was born as the parent company of a number of businesses.
The company has widened its scope since the merger.
“When Web.com was a public company, it was predominantly ‘come to us and we’ll build your website,’” Rowlands said.
Now the company offers tools to help businesses build their own sites, as well as e-commerce and hosting services.
“What we are now is very much a full-service company for a small business, so everything you need to be successful in a digital world,” Rowlands said.
“It really is a one-stop shop of everything you need to run an online business.”
Rowlands said Newfold is the third-largest company in its field behind Shopify Inc., which reported 2022 revenue of $5.6 billion, and GoDaddy Inc., which had $4.1 billion.
Newfold is also gaining recognition for its female leadership. Rowlands said five of the company’s top eight executives are women.
The Globee Awards, a business awards organization, awarded Newfold its Silver Globee last year for Women-Run Workplace of the Year.
Before joining Web.com, Rowlands served as CEO of ReachLocal, a public digital marketing company, leading it through a strategic transformation and the 2016 sale to Gannett.
At Gannett, she served as president of the USA Today Network Marketing Solutions business while continuing to serve as CEO of ReachLocal.
She also previously served as CEO at Penton Media, Altegrity and Thomson Financial.
Rowlands said the Newfold executive team is connected to several organizations in the Jacksonville community, including the American Heart Association Go Red for Women campaign to raise awareness of cardiovascular disease.
Rowlands hopes her company’s involvement in local organizations is setting an example.
“We all know that yes, there’s movement in terms of women executives on boards, but nowhere near where it should be,” she said.
“I think local women on the whole, they get inspired when they can see other successful women.”
