Canadian Couple Moves Business to Florida
JWL Profiling LLC of Highlands County
James Egan and his wife Sybil were living in Vancouver Island, Canada, when his step-daughter Jasmine came up with the idea to start an inertial profiling business. “She was living in California at the time but her husband, being in the military, got deployed to Alaska and kind of derailed her plans,” Egan said.
Having already invested in the equipment for the business with her, James and Sybil decided to take over the business. “Doing a little bit of research, we saw that places like Texas and Florida were really good options to bring a business like inertial profiling,” he added.
JWL Profiling LLC is a niche company that measures road smoothness in the paving and asphalt industry.
While the couple started JWL Profiling LLC in Texas initially, they eventually decided to make the move to Florida and reached out the Florida Small Business Development Center (SBDC) at University of South Florida (USF) for assistance. “We needed to transfer the LLC from Texas to Florida,” Egan said. “We got connected with Greg and had a number of meetings with Gregory and got some really good advice on where to go and how to set up the license properly; make sure it’s transferred properly.”
Since working with business consultant Greg Manning initially, the company has since transferred to Florida and garnered multiple contracts. “Since working with the Florida SBDC the business has been doing really well,” Egan said. “We’ve worked with a company out of Virginia recently. We’ve had a couple of contracts with them up in the Richmond, Virginia area. We did a small one in Lexington, Virginia and we did a large contract in Richmond, Virginia but for the whole county of Henrico.”
The Henrico County contract involved more than 1,500 miles of surveying and inertial profiling.
Moving forward, Egan is excited about he future and continuing to work with the Florida SBDC at USF. “It’s often used just to measure pavement for pavement asphalt companies but mixed with the pavement assessment, we’re taking this industry in a little bit of a different direction,” he said. “It’s a more comprehensive, overall view of the condition of the road and what that road’s possibly going to be looking like a year down the road.”
In the future he says he hopes to take advantage of the Center’s annual financial health check to ensure they are on the right track as the business continues to grow.
“We really appreciate everything that the Florida SBDC has done for us,” he added. “There was a lot of great advice from Gregory and it was a lot of information in there that I wouldn’t have known if it wasn’t for his unput, so it was very appreciated and it got us off to a proper start.”
