ETM President Tyler Mathews talks growth of CRE in North, Central Florida
By James Cannon
Tampa Bay Business Journal
Published: Oct 1, 2024

Jacksonville Business Journal Editor James Cannon recently spoke with ETM President Tyler Mathews, for a segment of the Florida Business Minds podcast.

Sponsored by TECO Peoples Gas, the audio series features candid conversations with top business leaders from the Orlando, South Florida, Tampa Bay and Jacksonville regions.

With a variety of projects in the works and clients requesting support across the state, ETM's leader, Tyler Mathews, is planting teams in Tampa Bay and Orlando. In this episode, JBJ Editor-in-Chief James Cannon invites Mathews to share ETM's success story, and how he plans to duplicate that level of service in development consulting and public works in multiple markets.

The following is a brief excerpt from the conversation, edited for length and clarity.

You have a saying, 'work where you live' as part of your company philosophy. Can you talk a little bit about why that's important to you and how you kind of live that at ETM?

It goes back to our tagline of trusted advisers creating community. We say we want to be a trusted adviser. So that's aspirational of I don't want to just be a vendor. I want to be an adviser, much like how you think of your closest lawyer or your closest doctor; they're an adviser to you when you're going through hard things, much like how we see ourselves. But then the second component is creating community, and that is what we believe, is our why.

I know you've recently expanded into the Orlando market. What's that been like so far?

We're also in the process of expanding into Tampa today. For so long, we have had clients tell us, 'We love working with you. We love the way you think ... what ETM delivers is different than what other firms like yours deliver. And so we want to take you with us.' For so long, we actually would tell people no, because in our business, you've got to have some physical presence. You can't just parachute in from anywhere in America, because you've got to have local relationships. We just said, 'Thank you for the kind words, but I can't serve you like I want to serve you in Orlando, so we're just not even going to try.' Effectively, our pivot in 2020 was, let's just start saying no less ... to the spirit of when we have a real opportunity and real clients or real hiring that presents itself in Orlando and then now in Tampa, Let's just methodically start saying yes, and let's not promise more than we can deliver, but let's methodically, one great hire at a time and one great project at a time, methodically build a business. Today, we have over 50 people in Orlando, so you just look at it and say one by one, one great hire, one great project at a time, you can start honoring that commitment if we really want to be a client's competitive advantage, and now we can do that in Orlando. Five years ago, we couldn't.