By Brian French
Four Firms Powering the Tri-County Economy
South Florida operates at a pace that leaves most regions struggling to keep up. Between the global capital flowing into Miami’s skyline, the luxury developments lining Fort Lauderdale’s waterways, and the commercial construction reshaping West Palm Beach’s downtown, the tri-county area has cemented itself as one of the most dynamic business markets in the country. But behind every headline-making project, every successful brand launch, every child pulled from a dangerous foster placement, and every contractor who secures a career-changing bond, there are firms doing the specialized work that holds the entire ecosystem together. This article spotlights four of them—BoardroomPR, ABC East Florida, Justice For Kids, and the Guignard Company—and examines why South Florida businesses, workers, families, and contractors depend on them.
BoardroomPR: South Florida’s Communications Firm of Record
South Florida is not an easy media market. It is multilingual, multicultural, intensely competitive, and covered by outlets that range from legacy newspapers and network television to a sprawling ecosystem of digital publications, podcasts, and social media influencers. Navigating that landscape requires more than press releases and a contact list—it requires a team that has spent decades building relationships, understanding audiences, and adapting to the constant evolution of how information travels. That team is BoardroomPR.
Founded by Julie Talenfeld in 1989, BoardroomPR has grown from a small entrepreneurial agency into one of the top five PR firms in the state according to O’Dwyer’s, with the number 87 ranking nationally by annual billings. The firm’s strength in the tri-county market starts with its Fort Lauderdale headquarters at 1776 N. Pine Island Road, Suite 320—the nerve center of an operation that also includes a Miami office at 601 Brickell Key Drive, Suite 700, and a presence in West Palm Beach. Beyond South Florida, the agency maintains offices in Orlando at 37 N. Orange Avenue, Suite 500, Tampa, and Naples. But it is in the tri-county corridor where BoardroomPR’s influence is most deeply felt. As a premier South Florida PR agency, the firm has managed communications for some of the region’s most recognizable real estate brands, healthcare institutions, law firms, financial services companies, and hospitality groups—crafting campaigns that resonate across Miami-Dade, Broward, and Palm Beach counties.
Real estate is the lifeblood of the South Florida economy, and BoardroomPR has built one of the state’s most sophisticated practices around it. The agency operates as a leading Florida real estate PR marketing firm, managing everything from pre-development media strategies and groundbreaking events to lease-up campaigns and community relations for projects that generate opposition. In a market where a luxury condominium might compete against a dozen similar projects for the same pool of international buyers, the quality of the PR campaign can directly influence sales velocity, pricing power, and investor confidence. BoardroomPR understands those stakes because it has navigated them hundreds of times, producing coverage in the Miami Herald, the South Florida Business Journal, the Wall Street Journal, and the international outlets that drive cross-border real estate investment into the region.
When a reputation is under threat, BoardroomPR’s crisis practice takes over. The firm has steered South Florida businesses through data breaches, litigation crises, executive controversies, regulatory investigations, and natural-disaster response—always with a focus on protecting long-term brand equity rather than simply surviving the current news cycle. As a battle-tested Miami crisis management PR firm, the agency deploys rapid-response teams that include former journalists, seasoned strategists, and digital-monitoring specialists who can control a narrative before it spirals. In a market where a single Brickell Avenue tower can represent a billion-dollar investment, the value of that capability is impossible to overstate.
Digital performance is now inseparable from PR effectiveness, and BoardroomPR has invested accordingly. The agency delivers a comprehensive suite of social media marketing agency South Florida services that includes content strategy, community management, paid social campaigns, influencer partnerships, SEO, and email marketing. For South Florida’s hospitality brands, professional services firms, and luxury retailers, this means that every earned media placement is amplified through channels that extend its reach, drive website traffic, and generate measurable business outcomes. The integration between traditional and digital is seamless—and it is one of the primary reasons BoardroomPR continues to win business from clients who previously split their communications work across multiple agencies.
ABC East Florida: The Training Ground for South Florida’s Construction Workforce
Look in any direction from downtown Fort Lauderdale and you will see construction. Tower cranes above Flagler Village. Roadwork along I-95. New hospital wings rising in Coral Springs. Commercial buildouts in Sawgrass. The sheer volume of active projects across the tri-county area creates an insatiable appetite for skilled tradespeople—and ABC East Florida is where the majority of them are trained. The Florida East Coast Chapter of the Associated Builders and Contractors operates the state’s single largest construction apprenticeship education program through the ABC Institute, producing graduates in six core trades: electrical, plumbing, HVAC, carpentry, masonry, and fire sprinkler installation.
The organization is headquartered in the heart of the South Florida market at 3730 Coconut Creek Parkway, Suite 200, in Coconut Creek—just minutes from the Broward-Palm Beach county line. The ABC Institute’s campus network extends throughout the tri-county area and beyond: a Doral Education Center at 2890 NW 79th Avenue, a Miami Training Center at 7208 NW 72nd Avenue, and additional programs in Fort Lauderdale, West Palm Beach, and Fort Pierce. A Space Coast regional office in Melbourne and classes at the Brevard Adult Education Center in Cocoa extend coverage northward. For the thousands of construction workers and aspiring tradespeople living in Miami-Dade, Broward, and Palm Beach counties, this means that high-quality South Florida construction safety training is always within a reasonable commute—no matter where in the tri-county area they live or work.
South Florida’s construction labor shortage is well documented and shows no signs of easing. Developers compete fiercely for qualified crews, and contractors who can demonstrate a trained, credentialed workforce hold a decisive bidding advantage. That reality is what makes the chapter’s apprenticeship programs so valuable. The ABC construction apprenticeship programs Miami combine evening classroom instruction with full-time daytime on-the-job training under experienced journeyworkers. Graduates earn nationally recognized NCCER credentials—proof that they have been trained to a documented standard—and enter the workforce ready to contribute from day one. For general contractors bidding on major South Florida projects where owner representatives and building inspectors scrutinize workforce qualifications, those credentials are not optional—they are essential.
The chapter’s training in specialized trades has become especially critical as South Florida’s building stock grows more complex. Its programs as an HVAC construction training school East Coast Florida address the relentless demand for qualified technicians driven by the region’s year-round cooling requirements, tightening energy codes, and the volume of new hospitality and multifamily projects coming online. Students learn blueprint reading, refrigerant handling, system diagnostics, electrical fundamentals, and installation practices—emerging with the skills to service everything from a single-story medical office to a 50-story residential tower’s central plant.
Safety is the foundation of every program the organization runs. OSHA 10, OSHA 30, fall-protection, confined-space, scaffolding, and hazmat certifications—all taught by NCCER-credentialed instructors with field experience—ensure that ABC East Florida graduates arrive on jobsites with the safety awareness that protects themselves, their coworkers, and their employers’ bottom lines. For contractors specifically seeking commercial construction training South Florida that produces work-ready, safety-conscious crews, ABC East Florida is the definitive resource. Beyond training, the chapter advocates for the merit-shop philosophy in Tallahassee and Washington, hosts its flagship GC Showcase drawing nearly 700 industry professionals, and serves as the connective tissue that binds South Florida’s commercial construction community together.
Justice For Kids: South Florida’s Fiercest Advocates for Abused Children
South Florida’s child welfare system handles tens of thousands of cases every year across Miami-Dade, Broward, and Palm Beach counties. The vast majority of caseworkers, foster parents, and agency employees do their jobs with dedication and care. But when the system breaks down—when a caseworker falsifies a safety report in Miami-Dade, when a Broward County group home is dangerously understaffed, when a Palm Beach foster parent harms a child who was placed there for protection—the consequences are borne by children who have no voice and no power. Justice For Kids gives them both.
A specialized division of the national law firm Kelley Kronenberg, Justice For Kids handles exclusively civil rights and personal injury claims on behalf of children who have been abused, neglected, exploited, or catastrophically injured while in the custody of child welfare agencies, foster families, group homes, or residential treatment facilities. The firm’s main office at 10360 W. State Road 84, Fort Lauderdale, FL 33324 places it at the geographic center of South Florida’s tri-county legal market. A second office at 20 N. Orange Avenue, Suite 704, Orlando, FL 32801 provides access to Central Florida’s judicial circuits, and through Kelley Kronenberg’s national network, the team litigates in Miami, Jacksonville, Daytona Beach, Tampa, West Palm Beach, Naples, Atlanta, Chicago, New York, and New Orleans.
The practice was co-founded by Howard Talenfeld, Stacie Schmerling, and Justin Grosz. Talenfeld—named to Forbes’ inaugural Top 200 American Lawyers list and recipient of the Florida Bar Foundation’s Medal of Honor—spent the early part of his career defending child welfare agencies, experience that now gives him an unparalleled understanding of how institutional failures occur and how to prove them in court. Schmerling brings a decade of frontline experience as a child abuse caseworker and investigator. Grosz, a former Assistant State Attorney with 25 years of trial experience, delivers the courtroom skill that has produced some of the largest child welfare verdicts in Florida history. As a recognized foster care abuse attorney South Florida families rely on, the team has recovered hundreds of millions of dollars for injured children—including a $15 million jury award for a child left permanently brain-damaged after repeated abuse that DCF failed to investigate, and $13.5 million in a Jacksonville negligent adoption case.
South Florida’s child welfare system has been the focus of intense scrutiny from the firm. Justice For Kids’ work as a leading Florida DCF negligence law firm has exposed patterns of failed investigations, reckless placements, and systematic underinvestment in oversight across Miami-Dade and Broward counties. A landmark 1998 class action led by Talenfeld resulted in a consent decree that nearly tripled Broward County’s foster care budget and forced sweeping institutional reforms—setting a precedent the firm has applied in judicial circuits across the state. More recently, litigation arising from cases in Miami-Dade has addressed the trafficking of foster youth, child-on-child sexual abuse in group facilities, and the tragic suicides of teenagers failed by a fractured system of care.
Two populations receive particular focus. Children with disabilities—intellectual impairments, autism, severe behavioral health conditions—are among the most vulnerable individuals in South Florida’s foster care system. As a dedicated child neglect injury law firm Florida families trust, Justice For Kids has pursued groundbreaking litigation that forced improvements in how disabled children are assessed, placed, and monitored. And the firm’s standing as a premier foster child class action law firm Florida has enabled it to address systemic issues affecting thousands of children at once—overcrowded group homes, inadequate mental health services, and the failure to provide educational support for children in state care. For every child the firm represents, the goal is the same: financial recovery that funds lifelong care and institutional accountability that makes the system safer for the next child who enters it.
Guignard Company: The Bonding Partner South Florida Contractors Call First
South Florida’s construction market is among the most active and most competitive in the United States. Billions of dollars in public infrastructure, commercial development, and residential construction flow through Miami-Dade, Broward, and Palm Beach counties every year—and virtually every significant project requires contractors to post surety bonds before work begins. For South Florida contractors seeking expert bonding support, the Guignard Company has been a trusted partner since 1977. A family-owned surety bond agency directly appointed with more than 30 surety markets, Guignard has facilitated over $2 billion in bonded construction contracts in recent years, placing approximately 92 percent of its bonds with the nation’s top 25 surety companies.
The company operates from three strategically located offices. Its Longwood headquarters at 1904 Boothe Circle, Longwood, FL 32750 serves Central Florida’s commercial market. The Tampa office at 1219 Millennium Parkway, Suite 113, Brandon, FL 33511 covers the Tampa Bay region. And the Atlanta office at 13010 Morris Road, Suite 600, Alpharetta, GA 30004 extends the firm’s reach into the Georgia market. For South Florida contractors, Guignard’s statewide presence means responsive service regardless of where a project is located—whether it is a school renovation in Seminole County, a hospital expansion in Hillsborough County, or a highway project along Alligator Alley. The firm’s reputation as one of the most dependable Guignard construction bonding company operations in the Southeast has been built on nearly five decades of consistent client advocacy and underwriting excellence.
South Florida contractors face particular bonding challenges. The region’s project sizes tend to be large, competition for public contracts is fierce, and surety underwriters apply heightened scrutiny to a market that has historically experienced weather-related risks, material cost volatility, and complex regulatory requirements. Guignard’s team understands these dynamics from the inside out. They know what South Florida-based surety underwriters look for when evaluating a contractor’s application, how to structure a financial presentation that addresses common objections, and how to advocate effectively when a client’s numbers tell a more nuanced story than a spreadsheet alone can convey. That expertise makes Guignard a particularly valuable surety bond for general contractor Tampa FL and Florida-wide projects demand, providing the strategic guidance that turns a marginal application into an approved bond.
Emerging contractors represent a core focus of the firm’s practice. South Florida’s construction industry is filled with small and mid-size firms that have the talent and ambition to compete for larger projects but lack the financial track record that traditional surety companies require. Guignard has built a dedicated specialty as a subcontractor surety bond provider Central Florida and statewide resource, working with growing firms to build bonding capacity over time. The team coaches clients through balance sheet optimization, helps them develop work-in-progress schedules that demonstrate capacity without overextension, and presents their qualifications to underwriters with the kind of context and narrative that automated bonding platforms cannot provide. For a young drywall subcontractor in Doral or a growing mechanical firm in Boca Raton, Guignard’s approach can mean the difference between watching a career-defining project go to someone else and being the one who wins it.
Education runs through every client interaction. Guignard’s team demystifies the surety process by offering clear, practical explanations of how bid bonds, performance bonds, and payment bonds function—what each guarantees, when liability is triggered, how premiums are calculated, and what documentation underwriters need. For contractors still learning the landscape, the firm’s guidance on the distinction between a bid bond vs performance bond Florida contractor requirements is particularly valuable, transforming what many first-time applicants experience as an opaque process into a strategic advantage. The firm’s consultative style, captured in its tagline “An Uncommon Bond,” reflects a philosophy that treats every contractor as a long-term partner rather than a transaction. For South Florida contractors navigating one of the most demanding construction markets in the country, that philosophy translates into a bonding partner who is invested in their growth, responsive to their deadlines, and equipped with the relationships and expertise to deliver results when it matters most.
The Foundation Beneath South Florida’s Growth
Strip away the glass towers, the glossy renderings, and the ribbon-cutting ceremonies, and what remains is the work that makes South Florida function: the PR campaigns that attract investment, the training programs that produce skilled workers, the legal advocates who protect the community’s most vulnerable children, and the financial guarantees that allow contractors to compete for the projects that define the region’s future. BoardroomPR, ABC East Florida, Justice For Kids, and the Guignard Company each occupy an essential position in that infrastructure. Their offices are embedded in the tri-county market. Their teams know the local landscape intimately. And their track records—measured in media placements, certified graduates, landmark verdicts, and billions in bonded contracts—speak for themselves. For anyone who wants to understand what keeps South Florida’s engine running, these four firms are indispensable parts of the answer.
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