With an eye toward future expansion, NetWorld Alliance LLC officials plan to break ground on a new building within the next two months that will give the company room to grow.
NetWorld CEO Dick Good plans an 11,500-square-foot building on Eastpoint Park Boulevard in Eastpoint Business Center, moving the company into Jefferson County from Pewee Valley in Oldham County.
Good said he paid Eastpoint Office Park LLC $250,000 to buy about 1.25 acres for the new building. The total project cost is expected to be about $1.5 million, he said. Eastpoint Office Park is a 13.5-acre office-condominium development within Eastpoint Business Center.
Good will own the building along with other investors, although the other investors have not signed on yet, he said.
The primary reason for the move is that the company can get better technology in the form of dual-loop, fiber-optic networks in Jefferson County, Good said. The technology hasn’t reached his area of Oldham yet.
“It will offer us a much higher reliability for our Web sites,” Good said.
Growth outpaces office space
NetWorld Alliance, which develops and owns Web sites centered on news and information, started in February 2000 by creating a Web site for the ATM industry.
It has since added sites for the pizza industry and for churches, with the Web sites free to the public and generating revenue through advertising.
The company currently employs 24 people, including a recently added sales position in London, Good said. He expects to hire about six people per year as the company adds Web sites.
To accommodate recent hires, the company asked its landlord to tear down walls so it could take over space vacated by another tenant, Good said.
The company leases 5,000 square feet at 7600 W. Highway 146 in Pewee Valley. That lease expires in February.
Rather than renew the lease, Good started looking at other options.
“I was running into a few frustrations for handling our growth and what our landlord, or any landlord, would have available for us,” Good said.
Plus, he has extensive experience in the real estate industry, so he knew he could build a flexible building that would expand with the company.
Part of new building to be leased initially
The plans for the new building are to use about 70 percent of the space initially and lease the remaining space to another firm, with both companies sharing a conference room, Good said. In about three years, NetWorld could be ready to occupy all of the space and then could take over the tenant space. A tenant has not yet signed.
“If we are super successful, we will need more space than that,” Good said. “If the economy continues to falter, we may not need all of that, and the tenant can stay on.”
Construction of the brick, pitched roof building, which was designed by the architectural firm Tucker & Booker Inc., is expected to begin in late summer, Good said, with the company moving in during the winter. Sullivan & Cozart Inc. has been hired as the general contractor for the project.
Future possible Web sites include developing a family of sites aimed at the electronic payment industry or delving into another niche that NetWorld officials believe needs better Web coverage. The company’s plan is to add one or two Web sites each year, Good said.
“We are busy determining which way to go,” Good said.
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