U

nlike most people who choose to leave the wintry North behind for the sunny beaches of Florida, Vil Ezerins moved to the Sunshine State for more than just the weather.
   He wanted a chance to be closer to family, a place where he could improve his quality of life, and an opportunity to turn an idea into profits.
   In the Southwest Florida city of Cape Coral, he found all three.
   The story of Ezerins and his Alvion Technologies enterprise is, in many ways, a microcosm of Cape Coral — a community birthed out of the ambitious dreams of Disney-esque entrepreneurs in the 1950s but since retooled into a city more relevant to the 21st century.
   Ezerins packed up and left Springfield, Mass., six years ago to be closer to his son and in the process found a place where he could turn his business into a global competitor. A firm that started with only five people now employs more than 140. From its headquarters in a class A office building in breezy Cape Coral, the data processing and business-process outsourcing firm now supports offices in Europe and Asia.
   Recruiting with relative ease high-tech workers from virtually anywhere, Ezerins is building a venture with a worldwide clientele and substantially increasing his profits from a headquarters location based on a peninsula that time seemingly forgot for four decades.

Vil Ezerins

   "I could have located my company virtually anywhere," Ezerins says. "The biggest positives in choosing Cape Coral were the labor force and the cost of living. There is a very large talent pool here of under-employed workers who can be employed at very cost-effective wages."
   For luring out-of-state help, Cape Coral is even better, he says: "For anyone in the U.S., relocating to Cape Coral is an attractive proposition. People want to be here. They like the place. We have received an unbelievable number of candidates who wanted to relocate here."
   Today, Ezerins employs a healthy mix of local and out-of-state talent. For customer service and administrative jobs, the local labor force is more than adequate. For the high-tech work like building customer interfaces for Alvion customers, Ezerins pulls in people from across America and overseas.
   Why do they come? "Quality of life is the number one reason people move here," Ezerins says. "That's the reason we are able to attract so many high-skilled people to Cape Coral. People are even willing to take a cut in pay in order to live here. The weather, the water, the lack of bumper-to-bumper traffic, commute times of only 10 minutes — these are the reasons so many people want to live and work here."
   Ezerins is not alone. From one end of Cape Coral to the other, entrepreneurs from the 78-million-strong Baby Boom generation are building second careers, second companies and second lives in a city that is the closest thing to a frontier boomtown that can be found anywhere in Florida.