VonBru Design Achieves Turnaround with FSBDC at UCF Assistance

VonBru Design Achieves Turnaround. Beats COVID-19 Business Challenges.

June 29, 2021

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

Contact: Hal Thayer, Communications Director, FSBDC at UCF, 407.420.4850 or hthayer@ucf.edu

                 John Finnegan, Consultant, FSBDC at UCF, 407.579.2111 or John.Finnegan@ucf.edu 

Orlando, FL – Three years after starting her own business, Jamie Dickerson was excited about her success.  She had extremely satisfied clients, revenues were coming in and growing, and the future looked bright. Then the COVID-19 pandemic quickly stopped everything in its tracks. It was a dark time for Dickerson and her company, VonBru Design, until she connected with the Florida Small Business Development Center at the University of Central Florida (FSBDC at UCF).

VonBru Design is a graphic design and marketing firm specializing in logo and print design, website creation, and digital marketing solutions for small-to-medium sized businesses. Dickerson’s vision for the firm is to provide small businesses with access to the same polish and elegance in graphic design and marketing communications that she experienced as an inhouse designer for a major corporation. She was succeeding in doing just that until the pandemic shut down nearly everything for her almost overnight.

“Like everyone else, I have a Covid story,” Dickerson recalls. “For me, Covid hit and I found that the business I had spent three years building completely bottomed out in three days. I went from a full client roster with a waiting list to zero open projects. As a business owner, it was terrifying. I wasn’t really sure what to do and it took me a moment to adjust.”

“Thank goodness, along came the FSBDC and I was able to use their resources, their sales experts, their government contracting specialists to help me,” Dickerson continues. “We went through my finances, did financial forecasting, did a complete redesign of my business plan. It was a whole turnaround. They really helped support me through that change into what we are today.”

“I found that working with the FSBDC gave me such incredible accountability,” Dickerson says today. “I met once a week with an entire team and worked at my finances, my sales & marketing plans, my goals for my business. I cannot stress how beneficial it was to have this team surrounding me, encouraging me, and wanting me to succeed.”

“When I started VonBru, I think I was thinking too small. When I started working with the FSBDC, they helped me dream big because they took away some of the intimidation. Starting a business is scary, and it’s kind of lonely and isolating. It can feel like it’s too big for you. The FSBDC took that fear off my plate, walked me through the steps of growth and helped me see what my potential was,” says Dickerson.

“The FSBDC helped me reframe the structure of my business, my business plan, my growth model. In so doing, it helped me build a team of freelance designers, freed me to be a project manager and get closer to my clients, enabling me to better guide them through the creative process,” Dickerson states. “I was able to take on larger clients, win larger contracts and actually grow my business about 285% over the last year since I started working with the FSBDC.”

“I tell everyone: Run, don’t walk, to the FSBDC,” Dickerson concludes. “It was such a game changer for my life, my career, my company and I want other people to feel that support.”

For more information about VonBru Design, please visit https://vonbru.com/.

— FSBDC —

About the FSBDC at UCF

Hosted by the University of Central Florida (UCF), and with its main office in the National Entrepreneur Center located at the Fashion Square Mall in Orlando, the Florida Small Business Development Center at the University of Central Florida (FSBDC at UCF) is part of the UCF Office of Partnership & Innovation and the Florida SBDC Network.

The Florida SBDC at UCF provides aspiring and existing small businesses with no-cost consulting, low-cost training, and access to business data and research resources. In addition to its core service offering, the Florida SBDC at UCF also offers specialized services to qualifying companies, including capital access, market growth, government contracting, international trade, business continuation, cybersecurity, disaster planning and recovery, and more. The FSBDC at UCF serves an eight-county area that includes Brevard, Flagler, Lake, Orange, Osceola, Seminole, Sumter, and Volusia counties and maintains 9 service centers across Central Florida.

In 2020, the FSBDC at UCF served more than 2,800 entrepreneurs in Central Florida with consulting services, resulting in more than 10,000 jobs created, retained or saved; $1.2 billion in sales growth; $92.4 million in capital formation; $92.7 million in government contract awards; and 86 new businesses started. For more information, please visit www.sbdcorlando.com .

About the Florida SBDC Network

For over forty years, the Florida SBDC Network, the state’s principal provider of business assistance [Fl. Stat. 288.001], has nourished a statewide partnership between higher education and economic development to provide existing and emerging small and medium-sized business owners with management and knowledge resources that enable overall growth, increased profitability, and economic prosperity for Florida’s economy.

In 2020, Florida SBDCs provided 162,476 hours of professional business consulting to almost 23,900 client businesses, resulting in almost 38,000 jobs impacted; $4.4 billion in sales generated; $335 million in government contracts acquired; and $385.8 million in capital accessed.

A statewide network of over 40 offices, the Florida SBDC is funded in part by the U.S. Small Business Administration, Defense Logistics Agency, State of Florida and other private and public partners. The Florida SBDC Network, headquartered at the University of West Florida, is nationally accredited by the Association of SBDCs and is a 2016 recipient of the President’s E Award for Export Service. Florida SBDC services are extended to the public on a nondiscriminatory basis. Language assistance services are available for individuals with limited English proficiency. For more information, please visit www.FloridaSBDC.org.

FSBDC at UCF | 3201 E. Colonial Drive | Orlando, FL 32801 | p 407.420.4850 | f 407.420.4862
sbdc@ucf.edu | www.sbdcorlando.com