The location at 3545 SW 34th St. seemed jinxed. Three restaurants had come and gone since the building opened in 2004.
When the last one, MT’s Chophouse, moved out in March 2009, building owner Charles Allen decided to tackle restaurateuring himself, although he had no experience in it.
Now after its first year in business, Embers Wood Grill is thriving—with month-to-month sales 20 percent above those MT’s posted for the previous year.
Allen is one example of an Alachua County business owner who has succeeded in a down economy. To one degree or another, business owners who are thriving have followed a common formula, which includes working from a strong base of expertise, becoming more responsive to customers’ needs, streamlining operations, minimizing debt and paring expenses.

Brent Christensen, president and CEO of the Gainesville Area Chamber of Commerce, sees this formula working throughout the community. To thrive these days, he says, “You have to go the extra mile and find ways to fill gaps in the marketplace, while making your customers feel valued and wanted.”
Allen’s success was based on three significant advantages:

• The staff of 14 from MT Chophouse was available.
• Equipment left behind by the three previous restaurant owners was on hand.
• Allen and his wife June didn’t have any debt on the building, which is part of their Stratford Square Shopping Center.
• An even more significant key: Allen says he empowered his two partners—general manager Ryan Todd and chef Briton Dumas—and the restaurant’s employees.

“Ryan, Briton and I don’t tell each other what to do,” Allen says. “We respect each other’s expertise and listen to each other and our employees.”
The partners also get fresh ideas for improving the business from their interns, who include students in Eastside High School’s Culinary Arts Program and from the University of Florida’s Hospitality Management Program.
Embers stays competitive by keeping prices 25 percent below those of comparable restaurants and offering a wide price range of meals and appetizers, Todd says. “As a fine-dining restaurant, it’s easy to overshoot your customers,” he says. “We want to be sure that if you’re not comfortable with other items on the menu, you can rely on the steak as something familiar.”
Embers also advertises aggressively. “You have to leverage your ads,” Allen says. For example, he signed a $4,000 contract for the Larry Vettel Show on WRUF-AM to broadcast live from the restaurant every Thursday during football season. “People associate the Gators with excellence in football, and I want them to think of us as having the best steak in town,” Allen says.
To further promote their brand, Todd, who Allen says is the only wine sommelier—a high level wine steward—in Gainesville, has help the restaurant earn awards from two magazines, Wine Enthusiast and Wine Spectator.

Embers also has taken on the challenge of catering up to 1,200 meals for the Sebastian Ferrero Foundation’s Noche de Gala fund-raiser. This will expose a wider audience to its food.
“The time we put into special events provides great word-of-mouth advertising, and we know that someone has benefited from our efforts,” Todd says.
And the restaurant is offering cooking classes hosted by Dumas, who is a graduate of the Eastside program and Johnson & Wales University’s Culinary Arts Program in Miami.
“Great things happen when you’re pushed into new territory,” Allen says.

Streamlining Operation IS a Key to Success
April Strickland and her father, Rickie, always have believed that giving to the community reaps benefits, but they had no idea how massive that return could be until their business, Ark Remodeling and Construction, became the contractor for the Extreme Makeover Home Edition home built in Gainesville last winter.
The experience not only paid off in referrals, but also helped Ark streamline its building process. “We used to have a general idea of when things would get done,” April Strickland says. “We had to schedule things much more tightly during the week of the Extreme Makeover project. Now we have a tighter day-by-day schedule.”
As consumer confidence edges up, many people are realizing that remodeling their existing home makes more sense than trying to sell it and buy a new one, Strickland says.
“We’re doing a lot of porch enclosures, additions and bathroom and kitchen remodelings,” she says.

Finding New Ways to Meet Customers’ Needs
Tough times brought Mike and Heather Remer closer together. When the economy dove in late 2008, Heather decided to help Mike by going to work at ComputerCare, the business he founded in 2006 on a small scale and had gradually built.
“I got a chance to see how passionate he was about what he does,” Heather says. “A lot of couples miss out on working together.”
The Remers responded to the tight economy by being more serious about planning and striving harder to satisfy customers.

For example, to meet the desire of businesses for predictable expenses and reliable computer operations, they started emphasizing service plans. “With the plans, we do a lot of preventative maintenance—cleaning up data, keeping software up-to-date, preventing longer-term problems,” Heather says.
Another emerging service is remote maintenance, with Mike and the company’s two other technicians monitoring client’s computers and networks from the ComputerCare office.
That goes to an extreme. The company now is remotely servicing the computers of Jon Heimer, CEO of the biotech company OxThera, in his office in Sweden and as he travels throughout Europe.
ComputerCare strives to make business simpler for its customers—who range from sole proprietors to companies with 100 workstations. “We want them to be able to work on their business rather than get bogged down in computer repairs,” Heather says.

Curbing Debt, Growing Customer Base Leads to Success
The economic downturn caused Sander Kaplan to dig deep for the first time in a long time. Before things got tough, the businesses in which he’s involved were “running themselves” and weren’t especially challenging.
“I had become complacent,” he says. “I never had to think hard.”

When business tightened, Kaplan became more creative in running A Candies’ Limousines and Motorcoaches and in serving as director of construction and administration for Deb-Lyn Inc., the Burger King franchise owned by his father-in-law, Chuck Gatton.
“There’s no manual to tell you how to get out of tough spots,” Kaplan says. “I really had to find a way to do more with less.”
He asked his insurance agent to “sharpen his pencil” when his limo and bus policy was up for renewal. “In the week we were negotiating on the policy, I saved $7,000 on a $50,000-a-year policy for vehicles,” Kaplan says.

He also dropped one office position, asking employees to take on the duties. And he paid off the three limousines on which he still had debt. “I wanted to have as much paid off as possible so I could withstand the economic ups and down,” he says.
Maintaining the bus part of his business, which Kaplan started in 2005, was doubly challenging because it was in its infancy when the economy slumped. Kaplan realized that the Gainesville area alone couldn’t provide enough business for the company’s three $400,000, 56-passenger motor coaches and its 28-passenger mini-bus. So, he started subcontracting his fleet to bus companies around the state. Sometimes, disasters actually help business. As the Gulf oil leak unfolded, Kaplan picked up business from other bus companies that were directing some of their vehicles to transport workers to the clean-up effort.
Kaplan also increased value to attract more customers. Borrowing the value-menu concept from Burger King, he offered four hours of limo service for a three-hour rate.
Finding Success in a New Field

Angel Venega started PC Techman in October 2008, when the stock market was staggering. In the time since, he’s found the down economy a blessing because businesses are more likely to repair their computers than replace them, he says. “No matter what, you need your computer,” he says.
Venega runs his computer repair shop differently than most of his competitors. His office suite is wide open, with the computers he’s working on visible, not closed off with the technicians behind a wall. “I used to work for a company where everyone was afraid of the customers,” he says.
Venega is PC Techman’s sole technician, keeping overhead low and workmanship high, while his wife, Michelle, assists part-time with bookkeeping and running the office.
Venega came into the computer repair business through the back door. Friends and family used to ask him to repair their computers, so he taught himself how to do it.
At the time, he was running a limousine service in Miami.
When that business declined, he moved to Gainesville and became a commercial trucker for four years, occasionally repairing computers for people he met on the road. He then worked for another computer company for three years. He also did side work and had a base of customers when he opened PC Techman.
Business it up 30 to 40 percent from his first year to his second, Venega estimates. He figures 50 percent of his business comes from returning customers, 30 percent from referrals and 20 percent from new customers who find him, some of them looking for Komputer Kingdom, which used to occupy his location.
The talkative Cuban-born Venega builds rapport with his customers, constantly throwing out words of encouragement. “One minister asked if I minded if he used some of my ideas in his sermons,” he says.
Venega’s advice about staying positive is to turn off the TV. “Concentrate on what you can do, not on the doom and gloom,” he says. “My dad used to say, ‘When you hit a wall, jump over it or dig under it.’”

As these business owners prove, while the recession has caused pain for many, some businesspeople  are finding it presents opportunity too. You just have to find the right way to approach the challenge.