Dedicated IT and PeakActivity named Florida Companies to Watch
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Dedicated IT and PeakActivity were selected from more than 500 nominations as premier Florida companies expected to see significant growth over the next several years.
The tech companies, both based in Palm Beach County, were named to Florida Companies to Watch, a statewide program honoring 50 top companies. Their management teams, competitive market positions and strong community involvement were among factors that put the companies in contention for the award.
“These stand-out companies are all led by entrepreneurs and have demonstrated their capacity and intent to grow,” said Dr. Tom O’Neal, executive director of GrowFL, a statewide economic development organization focused on second-stage companies. “They also all have critical intellectual property or a niche position that gives them a competitive edge in their markets.”
Dedicated IT, based in Palm Beach Gardens and founded by Adam Steinhoff, is an IT services company specializing in serving small and mid-sized businesses to enterprises. It focuses on select industries, in order to make its sales and marketing efforts as impactful as possible while bringing deeper knowledge and more efficiency to clients it services. In the past year, the company has aggressively expanded its sales and marketing efforts beyond Florida.
Dedicated IT was founded in 2002, and it would be easy to rest on its laurels. Not Dedicated IT. In the past year, the company launched a sales and internship program in partnership with UCF. It has centralized its service desk, allowing for better training when on boarding new employees, resulting in work efficiencies and “all while improving our customer service,” said Steinhoff. The company has also decided to partner with just a core group of vendors to increase efficiencies and improve service. “Because of this, we have been nationally recognized by Microsoft and Cisco as staple vendors who are going viral with our growth.”
Today, Dedicated IT has 39 employees, with plans to add 19 through acquisitions and another 12 in the next year. During the hiring process, Dedicated IT looks for specific values in candidates – optimism, relentlessness, charisma, passion and a thirst for growth.
Revenues increased by 30% in the past year and the company has clients in 48 states. Dedicated IT’s goal, said Steinhoff, is to be generating $100 million in revenue by 2025.
PeakActivity is a technology solutions firm that partners with enterprises to drive digital results, said Scott Townsend, vice president of PeakActivity. Founded in early 2016 and based in Boyton Beach, PeakActivity has 75 employees and its CEO is Manish Hirapara.
Clients include City Furniture, Total Wine and More and Johnson Controls. PeakActivity is taking the furniture retailer off of its legacy e-commerce platform and putting it onto a next generation e-commerce system built by PeakActivity. The team built out Total Wine and More’s technology innovation center in Boynton Beach and now is helping the company develop mobile and cloud solutions for their customers. For Johnson Controls, which was previously all B2B, “we put together an e-commerce strategy for them and we provided a team of e-commerce experts. We have started building all their direct-to-consumer websites globally,” Townsend said.
PeakActivity closed 2017 with 7 employees and $1 million in revenue. In 2018 it surpassed $5 million in revenue with approximately 40 team members. “We are currently on pace to exceed $8 million and grow to over 75 team members in 2019,” Townsend said.
“We developed and are about to deploy a next-generation e-commerce platform solution as well as a mobile app solution. We are building out some pretty cool technologies and we are continuing to on-board great clients,” Townsend said.
“We were proud to nominate Dedicated IT and PeakActivity, both of which have grown their high quality teams exponentially over the past years here in the Palm Beaches,” said Joe Russo, President and CEO of Palm Beach Tech Association.
The 50 companies named the 2019 Florida Companies to Watch generated nearly $1 billion in revenue and added over 900 jobs between 2015 and 2018. Together, the companies project a 35 percent increase in revenue and 37 percent increase in job growth in 2019 compared to 2018.
“This list recognizes second-stage Florida companies with passionate leaders who are making a difference in growing and diversifying our economy,” said Jennifer Barrows, GrowFL Chairman of the GrowFL Advisory Board and Business Development Executive with WithumSmith+Brown, PC. Second-stage companies are defined as those with 6 to 150 full-time employees and between $750,000 and $100 million in annual revenue, she said.
Dedicated IT, PeakActivity and the other companies named to the list will be officially recognized November 14, 2019 at a special ceremony at the Hard Rock Live in Orlando. Florida Companies to Watch is a statewide program managed by economic development organization GrowFL, in association with the Edward Lowe Foundation.