Cultivating Florida's Second Stage Companies

Florida has made the development of its entrepreneurial economy a key piece of its strategy for the creation of jobs and diversification of the economy. Along with the expansion of tourism marketing, helping existing companies expand, and recruiting new companies to Florida, these investments have begun to demonstrate substantial benefits for the state and local economies.

To further develop Florida’s growing entrepreneurial economy and provide opportunities for graduates of Florida schools (thereby improving the state’s return
on investment in K-20 education), Florida policymakers may look to the GrowFL program, which targets small, growing companies that have the most potential to create jobs. While GrowFL is currently available to companies statewide, expanding the statewide impact of the program could have a significant impact on Florida’s economy.

To analyze the viability of expanding the impact of GrowFL statewide, Florida TaxWatch modeled the economic impacts of the program creating 1,000 jobs per year in Florida for the next 10 years.1 These impacts were modeled with a dynamic, multi- period model from Regional Economics Models, Inc. (REMI).

The results of this simulation show that the expansion of the GrowFL program would be expected to produce more than 25,000 total jobs, with more than 23,000 of those in private non-farm sectors. The average salary of those jobs was estimated at more than $77,000, and the increase in state tax receipts is estimated to be more than $16.5 million per year.