Jacksonville-based DiscoverTec is moving up in the world.
The technology company founded in 1994 by CEO and President Donny Lamey will more than triple in space when it expands Sept. 15 from one building to another in the Butler Plaza business park in South Jacksonville.
DiscoverTec custom designs and develops websites to drive traffic to customers’ sites through Internet marketing and secure hosting.
The company focuses on web design; Internet marketing and search engine optimization; web development so clients can increase revenue or decrease costs; and website hosting housed in two datacenters on the east and west coasts.
Lamey states that a company’s “online reputation” is a critical element of business.
“That’s how a business owner is viewed,” he said.
DiscoverTec partners its space with two companies –– N-Play, a real estate Facebook application, and MedOfficeDirect, an e-commerce site for medical supplies. Together the three have 60 employees in about 7,000 square feet on the second floor at 4899 Belfort Road.
Come September, they will move to the top floor next door at 4887 Belfort Road where they will occupy 24,000 square feet of space, which can accommodate 150 employees. It also allows space for a fourth complementary company, Lamey said.
Lamey said Wounded Warrior Project is expanding in the 4899 Belfort Road building and needed DiscoverTec’s space, which opened the door for the move and expansion.
Tenant Contractors Inc. is renovating that fourth-floor space, which formerly was used by Flytele, a call center operated by British Airways.
The call center closed late last year, laying off more than 250 people. It had leased 50,000 square feet of space at the building. Deutsche Bank is leasing the remaining 30,000 square feet it vacated.
Lamey said the new space will offer a game room that includes foosball and pingpong, screens that will accommodate lunch-and-learns, an in-house video production studio, training rooms, conference rooms, a cafeteria area and an open floor plan for creative work areas. Biometric readers and digital cameras will monitor all of the activity of the entire space.
There’s also a Zen room for quiet reflection, which DiscoverTec will keep.
DiscoverTec won’t keep the three payphones, unless for historical curiosity. Flytele opened in 2001, a technological lifetime or two ago.
Lamey, 42, started his business in 1993 while in college at the University of West Florida in Pensacola. He was a finance major but switched to management information systems.
He began in IT support during the “DOS days,” the widely installed Disk Operating System for personal computers when they were introduced.
Lamey landed a Raytheon contract and incorporated in 1994. He spent a year rebuilding the business and chose Jacksonville, where he moved in 1995.
At first, he did everything in the business. His first clients included a Southside executive business center that today is owned by Regus.
He worked at the center and then expanded into other executive centers to serve their clients. He then opened his own, which he sold in 2009.
He also branched into home automation, selling that in 2007 to return to a focus on web development, web marketing and web hosting.
He opened on Belfort Road in 2010.
DiscoverTec custom designs websites for its clients, often starting from scratch. The smallest site it builds is $5,000 and the average ranges from $15,000 into “millions,” Lamey said.
The sites are built so that customers can adjust and update them internally.
Lamey and his wife, Julie, an accountant and director at Deloitte & Touche LLP, have a 9-year-old daughter, Meagan.
Build-out OK’d for Pontoon; Adecco hiring HQ jobs
The city approved build-out Friday for the Pontoon division of Adecco Group North America at Riverplace Tower on the Downtown Southbank.
Dav-Lin Interior Contractors is the contractor for the $730,128 build-out of 14,600 square feet at the 1301 Riverplace Blvd. tower.
Adecco Group North America signed a lease in April for two floors of office space at the tower.
One is for the global staffing company’s Pontoon division and other will accommodate corporate executives, including the marketing departments, a few senior leaders and most of the executives.
Adecco Group North America is moving its corporate headquarters from Melville, N.Y., and adding 185 senior jobs in Jacksonville, where it already was employing 354 corporate positions in the suburban Deerwood South office park.
In April, City Council approved its portion of $2 million in incentives to recruit the headquarters. The city is responsible for $407,000 and the state pays the rest.
Most of the new Jacksonville jobs are in accounting and finance, as well as law, human resources, IT, procurement and real estate positions.
It posted an ad in Sunday’s Florida Times-Union seeking employees at the Jacksonville headquarters office. It specified that it needed accountants, accounts payable specialists, attorneys and paralegals, financial analysts, human resources specialists and procurement and risk professionals.
The jobs are posted at adeccocorporatecareers.com. Candidates can submit resumes there or fax them to (904) 632-5671.
Tyra Tutor, Adecco Group North America senior vice president of corporate development, said Monday the job openings are those that the company has been advertising since the decision to move.
She said hiring will continue for months.
Tutor said the space in Riverplace Tower should be ready in October for Pontoon, the first group to move in.
There wasn’t enough space in Deerwood South to accommodate all the corporate jobs, which is why Adecco sought another 30,000 square feet of space at the tower.
Adecco Group leases about 80,000 square feet at the Deerwood South office park and will take another 25,000 square feet in that building, Tutor said in April.
Adecco is considered the world’s leading provider of human resources and staffing solutions.
In 2010, Adecco acquired Jacksonville-based MPS Group Inc. for $1.3 billion. It promoted former MPS executive Bob Crouch as CEO of Adecco Group North America two years ago. Crouch continued to be based in Jacksonville and maintained his home here.
Tutor said the area corporate headquarters and division jobs will total more than 660 employees and that the company has more than 300 temporary workers, adding up to more than 1,000 employees in Baker, Clay, Duval, Nassau and St. Johns counties.
Bank of America to lay off 13
Bank of America filed a Worker Adjustment and Retraining Notification with the state Monday that it intends to lay off 13 finance and insurance employees Sept. 21 at its 9000 Southside Blvd. campus.
Bank of America spokeswoman Jumana Bauwens said Monday by email that the WARN notice relates to the company’s Legacy Asset Servicing area, the department that manages mortgage servicing.
“These notifications have been ongoing and reflect our previously announced efforts to reduce our size, resolve legacy issues and simplify our company for our customers and clients,” she said.
Bauwens said the number of delinquent mortgage loans serviced by the company has decreased to one-fifth the peak levels.
“As we continue to resolve the needs of these customers and experience lower customer demand for mortgage refinancing, we are reducing the size of the operations that support these specialized programs,” she said.
She said Bank of America remains one of the nation’s leading employers.
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