Play Here, Stay Here (Quality of Life, 2009 issue)
When David Gillespie wanted to find a corporate headquarters for his biofuels manufacturing company, he didn’t go it alone; he hired a relocation consultant to help. Together, they looked at more than 100 metropolitan areas nationwide and considered various attributes, including cost of living, housing, local talent and incentives. Gillespie also wanted a place where he and his employees would like to live.

“Florida outweighed the others in the scheme of things,” says Gillespie, president and CEO of New Generation Biofuels, which manufactures alternative biofuels from vegetable oils and animal fats.

Miami and Tampa-St. Petersburg made Gillespie’s short list, but it was ultimately Lake Mary (population: 13,200), in Seminole County just north of Orlando that took the prize. Gillespie had visited the community previously on business, and he liked its feel. Apparently, so do a lot of other people. In 2007, Money magazine put Lake Mary, Florida, in the No. 4 spot on its list of the “Top 100 Best Places to Live” in America.

Since New Generation Biofuels was founded in 2006 as H2Diesel, its employees have worked from sites all over the country, including its manufacturing plant in Ohio.

“We’re a growing company, and we’ve had people all over the place in sort of a virtual organization,” Gillespie says. “But we’ve reached the scale in our development where it’s urgent to put people in the same place and develop critical mass. We haven’t really had a centralized corporate headquarters.”

And Lake Mary it is. Gillespie himself will relocate to Lake Mary from Houston, and bring in 25 other employees in the next one to three years. In making the decision to move, he had some other important people besides employees to consider.

Initially, his children weren’t too crazy about picking up roots, leaving friends behind and moving to a whole new state. In the end, Gillespie managed to persuade them with three simple words: Walt Disney World. Gillespie and his children, ages 11 and 9, had already visited the resort 10 times.

“The only reason it’s not World War III at my house,” he says, “is because we’re moving to Florida.” …