MAPSource, with stores in Florida and New Orleans, prides itself on the accuracy and completeness of its maps.
By CONNIE JONES
Published September 20, 2003
LARGO - It began as a mom and pop operation in a home garage.
Today the local map company has 18 employees and is giving the nation's top-rated map publishers a run for their money, according to its vice president, Gene Ingle, who started MAPSource with his wife in 1991.
"Rand McNally left Tampa in May. Draw your own conclusions as to why they left," said Ingle, 69, adding that another competitor in Tampa filed bankruptcy this year.
MAPSource has retail stores in Largo, Tampa, New Orleans and Pensacola. The Largo store, at Belcher and Ulmerton roads, serves Pinellas County. Its corporate offices are in St. Petersburg.
The company, incorporated in 1994, sells about 200,000 folding maps, 30,000 street atlases and 500 wall maps a year and does custom cartography from artwork, said Ingle, who lives in Clearwater.
What sets MAPSource apart from its competition, Ingle said, is threefold - knowing names, addresses and phone numbers for its 10,000-15,000 customers; showing more mobile home parks, condominiums and subdivisions; and listing all streets by name after driving them to ensure accuracy.
"We drive more streets than any other map publisher in the country and for sure in the Southeast," he said. "Rand McNally and most other publishers depend on government sources for information. ... We are much less inclined to accept a map from a government agency as being gospel."
Ingle said as early as four years ago, an out-of-state competitor did just that and it was the laughingstock of the community.
"A major map publisher printed a map showing the Toy Town Dump as a subdivision, using Toy Town streets that had been plotted by a developer, but never built," Ingle said. "It used to be a city dump and landfill and is now filled up and used as a model airplane flying field."
Ingle said he used to drive more than 50,000 miles a year to ensure the accuracy of his maps, and although he still does some driving, he now has a full-time employee who does nothing but scout streets.
Jeff Kent, custom products division manager for MAPSource, said actually driving streets is the best way to ensure an accurate map.
"Some mapmakers do it quick and dirty, but that's not us," Kent said. "Some people are in the business just to make money, but having an up-to-date, accurate, thorough map product is our primary quest.
"People who want to get to the right place quickly use our maps."
The Hillsborough County Sheriff's Department puts a MAPSource map in every patrol car.
Violet Bachmann, a senior procurement analyst for the sheriff's department, said the agency ordered 1,200 of the Street Atlas books.
"A couple of deputies and a member of our geographical department looked at three different books and found MAPSource's Street Atlas to be the best," Bachmann said.
Ingle's success wasn't instantaneous.
Ingle graduated from the University of Iowa with a degree in journalism and came to Florida in 1969 to take an editing job with the St. Petersburg Times. He left in 1976 to try his hand at full-time mapmaking.
His first business, Map World, was started in 1971. He later sold the company to Rand McNally in 1984 when it was looking to expand its Florida market.
After working for Rand McNally for two years, Ingle left. In 1987, with the help of his brother-in-law, he formed Sun Belt Maps. Sun Belt pioneered a production system for maps on personal computers, he said. The business folded in 1991 due to a lack of customers.
That did not stop Ingle, though. He believed there was money to be made in the map business, and started MAPSource out of his garage.
The company produces 32 map titles from Sarasota to well west of New Orleans. They're working on 8 to 10 more.
Sales, Ingle said, have grown 10 to 15 percent during the past five years. At the end of July, sales were up 14 percent this year, he said.
He wants to expand, but won't say where for fear of competitors finding out.
Florida, he said, is the most competitive and second largest map market in the country, just behind California.
"There's a lot of room to grow in Florida," he said.
