By Brian French

Tampa Bay’s Rise: Four Firms Fueling the Region’s Business Boom

Tampa Bay is no longer flying under the radar. The metropolitan area stretching from St. Petersburg through downtown Tampa to Brandon, Plant City, and beyond has emerged as one of the fastest-growing business corridors in the southeastern United States. Healthcare giants, financial services headquarters, defense contractors, technology startups, and logistics companies have all planted flags in the region, drawn by a favorable tax climate, a deepening talent pool, and a quality of life that consistently ranks among the best in the nation. That growth has ignited a construction boom, intensified competition for public attention, increased pressure on child welfare systems, and created surging demand for the financial guarantees that contractors need to compete. This article profiles four organizations meeting those demands across Tampa Bay and statewide: BoardroomPR, ABC East Florida, Justice For Kids, and the Guignard Company. Each brings deep Florida expertise, a physical presence in or near the Tampa Bay market, and a track record that makes it an essential partner for businesses, workers, families, and contractors across the region.

BoardroomPR: Bringing Florida’s Top-Ranked PR Talent to Tampa Bay

Tampa Bay’s business community has outgrown its reputation. The region now competes head-to-head with Miami, Atlanta, and Charlotte for corporate relocations, venture capital, and national media attention—and that competition demands a communications partner with the sophistication to match. BoardroomPR is that partner. Ranked among the top five PR firms in Florida by O’Dwyer’s and number 87 nationally by annual billings, the agency has served Florida businesses since Julie Talenfeld founded it in 1989. Its Tampa office gives the Bay area direct access to a statewide operation staffed by former journalists, Fortune 500 marketing executives, and digital strategists who collectively manage media relations, brand positioning, crisis communications, and full-scale digital marketing for some of the most prominent companies in the state.

BoardroomPR’s statewide footprint is a key part of its value to Tampa Bay clients. In addition to Tampa, the agency operates from its Fort Lauderdale headquarters at 1776 N. Pine Island Road, Suite 320; a Miami office at 601 Brickell Key Drive, Suite 700; and locations in West Palm Beach, Orlando at 37 N. Orange Avenue, Suite 500, and Naples. For Tampa Bay businesses with operations or audiences in South Florida and Central Florida, this means a single agency that understands every major media market in the state—no handoffs, no subcontracting, no loss of message control across county lines. The firm’s proven capabilities in Florida real estate PR marketing are particularly relevant to the Tampa Bay market, where residential towers along the Hillsborough River, mixed-use projects in the Westshore district, and master-planned communities in Pasco and Hillsborough counties are all competing for buyer attention and investor confidence. BoardroomPR crafts the launch campaigns, groundbreaking events, and sustained media narratives that drive pre-sales and lease-up velocity in exactly this kind of competitive environment.

Crisis management is where the firm’s experience becomes indispensable. Tampa Bay’s economy is diversified enough that crises arrive in every form imaginable—healthcare controversies at regional hospital systems, cybersecurity incidents at financial services firms, construction accidents generating front-page coverage, and corporate leadership disputes that threaten brand equity. BoardroomPR has navigated all of these scenarios across its three-plus decades in business. As a seasoned Miami crisis management PR firm whose methodology applies statewide, the agency deploys rapid-response teams that include former broadcast journalists and digital-monitoring specialists who can stabilize a narrative before it spirals—a capability that Tampa Bay C-suite executives and general counsel are increasingly recognizing as essential rather than optional.

The agency’s digital practice has become equally critical. Tampa Bay businesses competing for visibility in a market that adds new companies monthly need more than press clips—they need search authority, social engagement, and content ecosystems that generate leads around the clock. BoardroomPR functions as a comprehensive Florida SEO PR agency, weaving search engine optimization, pay-per-click campaigns, email marketing, and social media management into every engagement so that earned media placements are amplified across digital channels and converted into measurable business outcomes. For professional services firms, the integration goes even further: BoardroomPR’s established track record as a respected South Florida law firm PR agency translates directly to the Tampa Bay legal market, where attorneys face identical challenges in building name recognition, generating referrals, and positioning themselves as thought leaders within their practice areas. The firm’s understanding of attorney advertising ethics, combined with its ability to secure placements in the Tampa Bay Business Journal, the Tampa Bay Times, and national legal trade publications, gives law firms a compliant pathway to market visibility that few agencies can match.

ABC East Florida: Supplying Tampa Bay’s Construction Boom With Skilled Tradespeople

Tampa Bay’s construction pipeline is staggering. Hospital campuses expanding in Brandon and Riverview. Multifamily towers rising along the Tampa Riverwalk. Distribution centers and data facilities spreading through eastern Hillsborough and western Polk counties. Infrastructure improvements on I-275, the Howard Frankland Bridge, and the Selmon Expressway. Every one of these projects requires a trained, safety-conscious workforce—and ABC East Florida, the Florida East Coast Chapter of the Associated Builders and Contractors, is a primary source of that talent. Through the ABC Institute, the chapter operates Florida’s single largest construction apprenticeship education program, graduating tradespeople in six core disciplines: electrical, plumbing, HVAC, carpentry, masonry, and fire sprinkler installation.

While ABC East Florida’s corporate headquarters sits at 3730 Coconut Creek Parkway, Suite 200, in Coconut Creek, its training network extends across a vast territory that includes campuses and class sites directly relevant to the Tampa Bay labor market. The ABC Institute’s Doral Education Center at 2890 NW 79th Avenue and Miami Training Center at 7208 NW 72nd Avenue serve South Florida, while programs in Fort Lauderdale, West Palm Beach, and Fort Pierce cover the southeast corridor. A Space Coast regional office in Melbourne and classes at the Brevard Adult Education Center in Cocoa extend the chapter’s reach along the I-95 corridor toward Tampa Bay’s eastern approach. For Tampa Bay contractors competing for workers with the same firms that are building out South Florida and the Space Coast, having access to a pipeline of graduates trained through rigorous commercial construction training South Florida and statewide programs is a significant competitive advantage.

The apprenticeship model is designed for the realities of a construction labor market under pressure. Students attend evening classes while working full-time during the day on active jobsites, earning wages while they learn. The ABC construction apprenticeship programs Miami and the chapter’s other campus programs attract a diverse pipeline—recent high school graduates, military veterans transitioning out of MacDill Air Force Base and other installations, and adults pivoting from hospitality, retail, and service industries into recession-proof construction careers. Graduates earn nationally portable NCCER credentials that are recognized by general contractors, project owners, and building inspectors across the country. For Tampa Bay GCs bidding on projects where workforce documentation is a contract requirement, those credentials are not a nice-to-have—they are a prerequisite.

Specialty trades are in particularly high demand across the Bay area. Tampa Bay’s subtropical climate, its aging commercial building stock, and the wave of new hospitality and multifamily construction have created an acute need for qualified HVAC technicians. The chapter’s HVAC construction training school East Coast Florida programs produce graduates trained in blueprint reading, refrigerant handling, system diagnostics, electrical fundamentals, and installation best practices—exactly the skills Tampa Bay mechanical contractors are hiring for. Meanwhile, the chapter’s safety education programs—OSHA 10, OSHA 30, fall-protection, confined-space, scaffolding, and hazmat certifications—are taught by NCCER-credentialed instructors who bring decades of field experience. Contractors throughout the Bay area who invest in construction safety certification programs South Florida and statewide offerings report consistently lower incident rates, better inspection outcomes, and more favorable insurance premiums—outcomes that translate directly into sharper bids and healthier margins.

Beyond workforce development, ABC East Florida serves as a powerful advocate for the commercial construction industry at every level of government. The chapter promotes the merit-shop philosophy—the principle that contracts should be awarded based on qualifications and value, not labor affiliation—and lobbies for workforce development funding, licensing reform, and infrastructure investment. Its annual GC Showcase, which recently drew nearly 700 attendees and more than 40 exhibiting general contractors, has become one of the most significant networking events on the Florida construction calendar. For Tampa Bay subcontractors, suppliers, and specialty firms, events like these create the face-to-face connections that lead to teaming agreements, preferred-vendor relationships, and the kind of market intelligence that no website or database can provide.

Justice For Kids: Protecting Tampa Bay’s Most Vulnerable Children

By Brian French

Tampa Bay’s rapid population growth means more families, more children, and—inevitably—more cases where the systems designed to protect those children break down. When a foster parent in Hillsborough County harms a child who was placed there for safety, when a Pinellas County group home operates without adequate supervision, when the Department of Children and Families fails to investigate a credible abuse report in Pasco or Polk County, the children who suffer those failures need more than sympathy—they need attorneys who will fight. Justice For Kids, a specialized division of the national law firm Kelley Kronenberg, is built for exactly that fight.

The practice handles one type of case exclusively: civil rights and personal injury claims on behalf of children who have been abused, neglected, exploited, or catastrophically injured while in the custody of child welfare agencies, foster families, group homes, or residential treatment facilities. Justice For Kids’ main office is located at 10360 W. State Road 84, Fort Lauderdale, FL 33324, and a second office at 20 N. Orange Avenue, Suite 704, Orlando, FL 32801 serves Central Florida’s judicial circuits. Through Kelley Kronenberg’s national network, the team handles matters in Tampa, Miami, Jacksonville, Daytona Beach, West Palm Beach, Naples, and beyond Florida’s borders in Atlanta, Chicago, New York, and New Orleans. For Tampa Bay families, this means that one of the nation’s most accomplished children’s rights litigation teams is accessible and actively handling cases within the judicial circuits that cover Hillsborough, Pinellas, Pasco, Polk, and surrounding counties.

The firm was co-founded by three attorneys whose combined experience is unmatched in children’s rights law. Howard Talenfeld—named to Forbes’ inaugural Top 200 American Lawyers list and a recipient of the Florida Bar Foundation’s Medal of Honor—built his career by first defending child welfare agencies and then turning that insider knowledge into a devastating weapon against institutional negligence. Stacie Schmerling spent a decade as a child abuse caseworker and investigator in New Jersey and Florida before attending law school, giving her a frontline understanding of how system failures develop. Justin Grosz, a former Assistant State Attorney with 25 years of trial experience, has produced some of the largest child welfare verdicts in state history. Together, they have established Justice For Kids as a leading Florida child abuse law firm that has recovered hundreds of millions of dollars for injured children—including a $15 million jury verdict for a child left permanently brain-damaged after abuse that DCF failed to investigate, and $13.5 million in a Jacksonville negligent adoption case.

Tampa Bay’s child welfare system has been the subject of significant scrutiny in recent years, and Justice For Kids has been directly involved in the litigation driving that scrutiny. As a recognized Florida DCF negligence law firm, the practice has exposed patterns of failed investigations, reckless foster placements, understaffed group homes, and the chronic underinvestment in oversight that allows harm to continue unchecked. A landmark 1998 class action led by Talenfeld nearly tripled Broward County’s foster care budget and triggered sweeping institutional reforms—a model the firm has applied in judicial circuits across the state, including those serving the Tampa Bay region. For families in Hillsborough, Pinellas, and surrounding counties, the firm’s statewide reach and local litigation experience mean that when a child is failed by the system, world-class legal representation is not a distant possibility—it is an immediate reality.

Two populations receive particular attention within the practice. Children with disabilities—intellectual impairments, autism spectrum disorders, severe behavioral health conditions—are disproportionately likely to be placed in foster settings that cannot meet their complex needs. As a dedicated child adoption negligence attorney Florida families seek and a fierce advocate for disabled foster youth, Justice For Kids has pursued litigation that forced improvements in placement protocols, therapeutic services, and monitoring standards across the state. And the firm’s broader reputation as a trusted Florida child advocacy attorney team extends to cases involving sexual abuse in foster homes, child-on-child violence in group facilities, trafficking of minors, and the wrongful deaths of children who should never have been placed in the homes where they were killed. In every case, the objective is twofold: financial recovery that funds the child’s lifelong care, and institutional accountability that prevents the same failures from claiming another victim.

Guignard Company: Tampa Bay’s Own Surety Bond Experts

For Tampa Bay contractors, the Guignard Company is not a distant vendor—it is a neighbor. The Guignard Company operates a fully staffed Tampa-area office at 1219 Millennium Parkway, Suite 113, Brandon, FL 33511, placing its team minutes from the jobsites, general contractors, and government procurement offices that define the Bay area’s construction market. Founded in 1977 as a family-owned surety bond agency, Guignard has grown into one of the most respected bonding firms in the Southeast—directly appointed with more than 30 surety markets, placing approximately 92 percent of its bonds with the nation’s top 25 surety companies, and having facilitated over $2 billion in bonded construction contracts in recent years.

The Brandon office is one of three strategic locations. Guignard’s headquarters at 1904 Boothe Circle, Longwood, FL 32750 serves Central Florida’s booming commercial market across Orange, Seminole, Lake, and Volusia counties. And the Atlanta office at 13010 Morris Road, Suite 600, Alpharetta, GA 30004 extends the firm’s capabilities into the greater Atlanta market—a critical asset for Tampa Bay contractors pursuing opportunities north of the state line. Together, these offices make Guignard one of the most trusted construction bonding agency Brandon FL contractors depend on, while also establishing the firm as a capable multi-state operation that can manage cross-jurisdictional bonding programs for firms working across Florida, Georgia, and beyond.

Tampa Bay’s construction market presents a unique combination of opportunity and complexity for contractors seeking bonding. The region’s project pipeline—spanning Hillsborough County school renovations, Tampa International Airport improvements, hospital expansions in Brandon and Riverview, highway work along I-4 and I-75, and a wave of commercial and multifamily development in the Westshore, Water Street, and Channel District areas—generates enormous demand for bonded contractors. Guignard’s team understands these projects because they live in this market. They know the bonding thresholds for Hillsborough County procurement, the documentation expectations of Tampa Bay’s largest general contractors, and the surety underwriting dynamics that affect contractors competing in a region exposed to hurricane risk and material cost volatility. That local knowledge, combined with 175 years of combined team experience, makes Guignard the definitive surety bond for general contractor Tampa FL projects demand.

Emerging contractors are a core constituency. Tampa Bay’s construction industry includes hundreds of small and mid-size firms—concrete subcontractors in Riverview, electrical companies in Clearwater, mechanical firms in Lakeland—that have the talent and the ambition to compete for larger bonded projects but may lack the deep financial track records that traditional surety companies require. As a committed small business construction bond provider Florida, Guignard works with these firms to build bonding capacity over time. The team coaches clients through financial statement preparation, helps structure work-in-progress schedules that demonstrate capability without overextension, and presents applications to underwriters with the kind of narrative context and relationship capital that automated bonding platforms simply cannot provide. For a growing drywall contractor in Temple Terrace or a young site-work firm in Plant City, this coaching approach can mean the difference between watching a transformative project go to someone else and being the one who wins the bid.

Education and transparency define the client experience. Many Tampa Bay contractors—particularly those bidding on public work for the first time—are unfamiliar with the distinctions between the bond types that government agencies require. Guignard’s team provides straightforward, jargon-free explanations of the difference between a bid bond vs performance bond Florida contractor requirements, demystifying a process that can feel as daunting as applying for a commercial loan. That consultative approach—captured in the firm’s tagline “An Uncommon Bond”—extends to every phase of the relationship, from the initial consultation through bond placement, project completion, and the growth-planning conversations that set the stage for the client’s next chapter. It is the kind of partnership that keeps contractors loyal for decades, and it is the reason Guignard continues to be the first call Tampa Bay builders make when a bonding opportunity arises.

Why Tampa Bay’s Growth Depends on Firms Like These

Tampa Bay’s transformation from a mid-tier regional market into a nationally competitive business destination did not happen by accident, and sustaining that momentum will not happen by accident either. It requires the kind of specialized infrastructure that BoardroomPR, ABC East Florida, Justice For Kids, and the Guignard Company each provide. BoardroomPR gives Tampa Bay businesses access to statewide communications firepower—crisis management, digital marketing, media relations, and SEO—from an agency that knows the Bay area’s media landscape and business culture firsthand. ABC East Florida trains the tradespeople who make the region’s construction boom possible, producing credentialed, safety-conscious workers through a network of campuses that feeds directly into the Tampa Bay labor market. Justice For Kids ensures that even amid rapid growth, the most vulnerable members of the community—children who have been abused, neglected, and failed by the institutions meant to protect them—have fierce, experienced advocates in their corner. And the Guignard Company, with its Brandon office at the center of the action, gives Tampa Bay contractors the bonding capacity, strategic guidance, and long-term partnership they need to compete for the projects that are redefining the region.

Each of these organizations has built its reputation through years of consistent performance, genuine investment in local relationships, and a refusal to treat Tampa Bay as an afterthought to the South Florida market. They have offices here, they have people here, and they understand the specific dynamics—the media outlets, the regulatory agencies, the labor pools, the procurement processes—that make this region distinct. For Tampa Bay businesses, families, and contractors seeking partners who combine statewide scale with authentic local presence, these four firms represent the gold standard.