How many employees does it take to run a multi-national consumer products company? A few thousand? What about an industry-leading special-effects and event production agency? You need a couple hundred people, certainly. How many workers for a vintage home décor studio with customer and vendor networks that stretch all over the world? Surely, that takes at least a few dozen dedicated employees. Would you believe 32, two and three, respectively? The companies are Lentek, Wow!Works and Vintage Poster. Like thousands of other businesses in the region, they're small. But you wouldn't know it by looking at them.

Going Global

"I guess you would classify us as a small business, but we have the procedures in place like a big business, and with the volume we're selling, I don't know if you'd still consider us small," says Lou Lentine, Lentek's President.

The Orlando enterprise designs, develops and manufacturers innovative products for your home, pets and family. You've seen them on the Home Shopping Network, in Sharper Image stores and catalogues, in WalMart, Home Depot, and elsewhere. The automatic pet-food dish that opens and closes while you're on vacation — that's a Lentek invention. Air purifiers for your car, Magneto-sonic pest repellents that plug into the wall and a new mosquito trap that can clear more than half an acre of the pesky bugs are just a few of Lentek's patented items.

"We employ 32 people, and we do more than a million dollars in sales per employee," says Lentek's chairman and chief executive officer, Joe Durek. "We're very proud of that."

With manufacturing facilities as far away as China and customers all over the globe, how does Lentek keep it all together, and how does it keep it's status as a small company? Lentine says it takes hard work, but it's not rocket science.

"To do the numbers of a large corporation in a small-business environment is a day-to-day challenge," he says. "You must have people who work at an exceptional level, and you've got to be right in there with them. As CEOs, we (Lentine and Durek) are working down in the trenches with the entire staff. At big corporations, you just see the CEO's picture on the wall."

That kind of team spirit is common in Central Florida's overachieving small companies.

"We're three people, and we work out of our home gallery/office," says Michael Cipollaro, founder, owner and "chief cook and bottle washer" at Edgewater's Vintage Poster. From the gallery — and the company's outstanding Web site — Vintage Poster ships its unique artwork to customers in Japan, Indonesia, Saudi Arabia and a laundry list of other exotic locales.

Vintage Poster used to maintain a storefront, but because of the success of the Web site, (www.vintageposterart.com), Cipollaro was able to close down the store, eliminate 40 percent of his workforce costs and spend his time traveling back and forth to Europe, keeping close contact with his dealers. His company got smaller, but his business has never been bigger. It's a neat trick Cipollaro attributes to some innovative thinking about the Web.

"We understood something a lot of companies don't appear to understand," he says. "Designing a Web site is an important first step. A critical second step is marketing your Web site. We had to understand how the search engines find sites. Now, whether it's Yahoo, MSN, Google or whatever, we're in the top ten for vintage posters. That's probably the most critical element to attracting people, because 50 percent of our visitors come from the search engines."

Two and Out

Long the staple of quick and nimble small companies, well-managed outsourcing is the secret to success at many micro-enterprises in Central Florida.
Bettina Buckley and Tylor Wymer know both sides of the business equation. Both were high-level executives producing live events at Disney. They've done Superbowl halftime shows, theme park openings, Disney Twenty-fifth Anniversary extravaganzas and the like. After 20 years, they decided to go it alone, leaving the Mouse House to form Wow!Works, an international all-encompassing special-effects company.

As a two-person operation, they're bringing Disney magic to private clients. Remember the fireworks and special effects spectacular that welcomed the Olympic torch to Lake Eola earlier this year? You can thank Buckley and Wymer for that. But they couldn't do it alone.

"There's an entire industry of people who make their living doing projects or freelance work," says Buckley. "I don't need a truck driver 365 days a year, but when I do, I make one phone call, and I've got him. The same goes for any other service.

"We stay small, and we're nimble. We can tailor our services to customer needs on the fly. We're not burdened with the red tape and/or bureaucracy that can come with a big company."

That may be the single biggest asset of the small business — the ability to both succeed and fail quickly, the ability to alter your business model on the fly and meet the needs of the customer in front of you at that very moment. Lentek knows this sensation well.

"If Joe and I want to make a decision, we can make that decision quite quickly," says Lentine. "We don't have to worry about what the board wants to do or what the stockholders want. We make our decisions based on what's best for us, best for our company and what's best for our customers."