Earlier this year, in the middle of the COVID-19 pandemic, the Mobile Area Chamber of Commerce surveyed its members to look back on 2019 and identify what set their companies apart heading into a year suddenly defined by social distancing, lockdowns and economic uncertainty. From those applications, a volunteer panel of local business leaders graded entries on business operations, financial positioning, innovation, entrepreneurship, market strategy and community involvement to select finalists for the chamber’s 2020 Small Business of the Year award.
The chamber named three finalists: Calagaz Printing, JJPR Agency and WaveFly, powered by JMF Solutions. The winner was set to be announced Thursday, Aug. 20. Each of the three companies represents a different slice of the Gulf Coast economy — commercial printing, public relations and telecommunications — and each spent the first half of 2020 adapting to circumstances no business plan had anticipated.
Calagaz Printing: A 30-Year Print Shop Pivots to Face Shields
Calagaz Printing, founded locally nearly 30 years ago in 1991, employs 18 people at its office on Mill Street in Mobile under president Joe Calagaz. The full-service commercial print shop supplies materials, signage and apparel to local businesses and has built a niche serving the national restaurant industry. Earlier in 2020, as its usual print production dropped to zero amid the pandemic, the company made local headlines by pivoting to manufacture more than 180,000 face shields — a shift that kept its existing staff employed, preserved some revenue and helped meet urgent community demand for protective equipment during the public health crisis.
The pivot became one of Mobile’s most-cited examples of pandemic ingenuity. When restaurants closed their dining rooms and offices sent staff home, the printing contracts that anchored Calagaz’s revenue evaporated almost overnight. The company’s management redirected its production equipment and workforce toward protective gear at a moment when face shields were scarce nationwide, converting a print shop into a small-scale manufacturer of medical-adjacent supplies. The move did not restore pre-pandemic revenues, but it demonstrated the flexibility that the award’s judging criteria — innovation, entrepreneurship and community involvement — are designed to recognize.
The episode also underscored the fragility of businesses tied to in-person commerce. A print shop whose niche is restaurant menus and signage suffers directly when restaurants go dark, and Calagaz’s experience mirrored that of thousands of small suppliers across the country whose fortunes rise and fall with their customers’ doors opening and closing.
JJPR Agency: A Boutique Firm Grows From One Account to Ten Employees
JJPR Agency, based in Daphne, serves midsized companies, nonprofits and the occasional larger client from its office on Friendship Road. Founded in 2010, the boutique public relations firm has grown from a single-account startup to a team of 10 employees under founder and president Jennifer Jenkins, who has built a public profile of her own through podcast appearances, lifestyle-magazine features and contributed articles. The firm has also been recognized repeatedly by local readers as a top marketing and events company in the region’s annual awards.
The firm’s growth track reflects a decade in which communications work spread across traditional media, digital channels and live events, demanding agencies that can move between all three. A decade of steady expansion on the Eastern Shore also illustrates the dispersion of professional-services jobs beyond Mobile’s downtown core: JJPR serves a regional client base from Baldwin County, evidence that the Bay area’s business community now supports specialized agencies on both sides of the bay.
WaveFly: The Largest Employer Among the Finalists
WaveFly, powered by JMF Solutions, is the largest employer among the three finalists, with 42 people on its payroll. The telecommunications company operates its own broadband network along with multiple data centers and offices across the country, providing managed network services — including fiber, cloud, VoIP and IPTV streaming — to clients in residential communities, health care, banking and industrial sectors.
The company’s parent, JMF Solutions, was recognized in 2018 on the Inc. 5000 list of the fastest-growing private companies in America, ranking No. 2,593, and was named to the CRN Fast Growth 150 list for channel technology providers in 2016. Those recognitions placed the Mobile-area firm among a national cohort of technology companies scaling quickly in the managed-services market, where businesses increasingly outsource their connectivity and communications infrastructure rather than building it themselves.
The pandemic year put that kind of business model in an unusual position. As offices closed and households shifted to remote work and distance learning, demand for reliable bandwidth and managed networks surged — a tailwind for telecommunications providers even as their clients struggled. WaveFly’s mix of residential community, health care, banking and industrial clients spans sectors that experienced the disruption very differently, giving the company a diversified base at a volatile moment.
The Chamber’s Role in the Local Economy
The Mobile Area Chamber of Commerce, the economic development arm for the city of Mobile and Mobile County, represents more than 1,800 member businesses collectively employing upward of 98,000 people. The Small Business of the Year distinction is one of the chamber’s most prominent annual recognitions of locally owned companies navigating a difficult operating environment, and this year’s finalist pool underscored how differently three very different sectors — commercial printing, public relations and telecommunications — adapted to the pandemic’s disruptions.
Awards programs of this kind serve purposes beyond the trophy. For the finalists, selection brings visibility to companies whose customer bases are largely local or regional. For the chamber, the judging process doubles as a survey of the small-business economy’s health, with the applications revealing how member firms were positioned — financially and operationally — as 2020 unfolded.
Small Business in a Pandemic Year
The 2020 award cycle will be remembered as one judged against extraordinary odds. Small businesses across Mobile and Baldwin counties spent the spring of 2020 managing closures, remote workforces and shifting customer expectations, and the chamber’s decision to proceed with the program amounted to a vote of confidence in the local economy’s resilience. The finalist profiles — a print shop that became a face-shield manufacturer, a PR firm a decade into steady growth, a telecom company riding a surge in connectivity demand — read like a cross-section of how the pandemic treated different industries unevenly.
That unevenness is part of what the judges weigh. Financial positioning in early 2020 meant different things for a company facing collapsed demand and one facing unprecedented demand, and the panel’s criteria — operations, financials, innovation, entrepreneurship, market strategy and community involvement — allowed comparisons across those divergent circumstances.
The Aug. 20 Announcement
The winner was set to be announced Thursday, Aug. 20, closing out a selection process that began with member surveys earlier in the year and ran through the volunteer panel’s evaluation. For the three finalists, the announcement represented months of documentation and interviews distilled into a single evening — and, for the winner, a distinction that local companies have historically carried as a mark of standing in the Mobile business community.
Whichever company took the honor, the broader story was the field itself: three firms, founded in three different decades, in three different industries, all still growing and hiring in the middle of the worst economic disruption in generations. For a chamber whose mission is to grow the local economy, that was the headline the 2020 program was built to showcase.
Calagaz’s Niche in the Restaurant Economy
Calagaz’s specialization in the national restaurant industry is worth a closer look, because it explains both the company’s success before 2020 and the depth of its pandemic shock. Restaurants are relentless consumers of printed material — menus that change with the seasons, table tents, signage, promotional materials — and a print shop that wins that business builds recurring revenue on volumes most local clients cannot match. When dining rooms closed, that entire stream stopped at once, which is why the company’s usual production, by its own account, dropped to zero rather than merely slowing.
The face-shield operation, by contrast, grew out of the same capabilities: sheet materials, precision cutting and high-volume finishing work are cousins of commercial printing processes. The pivot succeeded because the underlying skills transferred, a lesson in how manufacturing-adjacent craft businesses can redeploy themselves when markets shift under them.
Why the Award Matters to Finalists’ Industries
For the public relations industry, a finalist distinction for JJPR highlights the maturation of Mobile-area marketing services. A firm founded in 2010 — in the depths of the last recession — growing to 10 employees suggests sustained demand for communications expertise from midsized companies and nonprofits that once relied on larger out-of-town agencies. Jenkins’ own visibility, built through podcasts, magazine features and contributed articles, reflects a modern agency model in which the founder’s public presence is itself a marketing channel for the firm.
For telecommunications, WaveFly’s recognition reflects the sector’s expanding footprint along the Gulf Coast. Operating its own broadband network and data centers requires capital investment and technical staffing that anchor high-skill jobs in the region, and the parent company’s appearances on national growth lists — the Inc. 5000 in 2018 and the CRN Fast Growth 150 in 2016 — signal that the growth has been competitive nationally, not merely local expansion.