Lakeland Ledger Newspaper

Company Receives High Honor

By Mike Grogan
The Ledger

HAINES CITY -- A company that began as a failed dairy farm in Michigan five generations ago has become the first Polk County business to be given the U.S. Commerce Department's Export Achievement Certificate.

U.S. Rep. Adam Putnam, R-Bartow, presented the certificate to Michael Gordon, president of Equipment Specialists Inc., at the company's Haines City office Monday.

"That a family-owned business in Haines City can succeed in the global market drives home just how small the world has become," Putnam said in making the presentation. "It is wonderful to see innovators and entrepreneurs succeeding in Central Florida."

The company, which got its start because of an unsuccessful Detroit dairy farm in the late 1800s, provides the raw materials, engineering and installation for food processing plants, dairies and even water desalinization plants on a global scale.

"Right now our biggest market is in the Middle East," Michael Gordon said. "We have just sold the first carbonated beverage plant in Kurdistan. It hasn't been shipped yet, but the contracts have been signed."

Kurdistan is a part of Iraq, one of the most troubled locations in the world for doing business considering the war that rages in that country and the political and social upheaval that continues to plague the area.

But Gordon, who has made eight trips to the Middle East in the past year, said he has no difficulties traveling in the area and doing business there. In fact, he noted, it is a part of the world that offers great promise for companies such as his own that are looking for new markets and investment.

"There are people there who have the money to buy and they have the need," he said.

Among his company's recently completed projects in the Middle East is the Al-Ain Dairy Farm in the United Arab Emirates. Another dairy and an agricultural development company are currently under construction in Saudi Arabia.

"We are a small, family-owned business," Gordon said. "We don't advertise. Our advertisement is through our customers, and we choose our customers based on their ability to succeed."

Michael and his son, Jeremy, are partners in the business that was passed down to them from Michael's great-great-grandfather, Harrison Gordon.

"He started as a dairy farmer in Detroit in 1897," Jeremy Gordon explained.

But, he said, there were too many dairy farms in the area for the business to be successful. In order to put together some capital, Harrison Gordon sold some of his dairy equipment and discovered that many of the farms in the area were unable to find the equipment they needed to operate. Equipment Specialists Inc. was born to fill that need.

Michael Gordon, the fourth-generation Gordon to be involved in the family business, opened a branch office for the company in South Florida in 1987. In 1995 he bought the nine acres it currently owns between U.S. 17-92 and Lake Tracy in Haines City, and that now serve as the corporation's headquarters.

It was in 1995 that Michael Gordon began a working relationship with the Florida Export Finance Corporation (FEFC), a state-operated corporation that guarantees loans for Florida businesses looking to do business overseas.

"Everything we do is to fulfill a foreign order," said J. Stephen Fancher, the president and CEO of the FEFC. "Michael wanted to do business overseas and couldn't find a commercial lender to finance him, so we helped out."

That help came in the form of a guarantee on a $500,000 loan that got Equipment Specialists started on their overseas ventures, which have resulted in $26 million in foreign sales over the past three years.

"We don't make the loans, we guarantee them," Fancher, who attended the presentation ceremony, said. "We don't look for collateral, we look for people who get things done, people who are dedicated to their business."

George Martinez, director of the U.S. Department of Commerce's U.S. Commercial Service office in Tampa, said Equipment Specialists is one of fewer than 50 Florida companies to have received the export achievement certificate.

"You are the most deserving, in my opinion," he told Michael Gordon.

What makes the company so special, Martinez said, is that it is a small family business located in a rural area that competes with multinational firms -- and wins.

"We are looking for success stories, and this is definitely one of them," he said.

Putnam pointed to the difficulties the company had to overcome to succeed, difficulties that included the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks that strained U.S. relations in the Middle East, the war in Iraq that is still being waged as a new government struggles to find its way and the three hurricanes that hit Central Florida last year and did severe damage to the companies that Haines City warehouses.

"I was in Egypt when 9/11 happened and in Jordan when we invaded Iraq in 2003," Michael Gordon said.

Even so, he said, he has never felt afraid traveling in the Middle East and has had no problems with the people he has met and done business with there