This as-told-to essay is based on a conversation with Carlos Questell, a 50-year-old Chief of Staff and Head of Strategic Partnerships at Webull, based in St. Petersburg, FL. The following has been edited for length and clarity.
When I joined the FinTech startup Webull in 2021, we had two floors in a building right down the street from the stock exchange, on Wall Street. Now, we’ve relocated our headquarters to Florida.
As a FinTech company, the markets are in our DNA, so a presence on Wall Street still matters to us, but we’re a fully in-office culture, and we were running out of space. We wanted to purchase our own building, and in New York, that feels rare for a startup.
After visiting several cities across the country, Miami was a consideration, but we decided on St. Petersburg instead. It was hard to challenge my own legacy assumptions that financial innovation can only happen in New York or in other premier cities. But now I get that professional growth alongside a better quality of life for my family.
We created criteria for what type of city could be our next headquarters
We weren’t originally set on Florida. We set clear criteria, then narrowed down to a group of cities across the country that were possibilities.
Some of the cities we looked at were Atlanta, Austin, Charlotte, Raleigh, Miami, Tampa, St. Petersburg, Denver, and Salt Lake City. We visited each city to get a sense of the place.
Our priorities were a business-friendly environment, a strong local talent pool, and a high quality of life for employees. In-office culture is super important to us. If we’re going to ask our employees to come in, we want it to be in an area where they want to be.
Why we skipped Miami as a headquarters
A lot of companies are relocating their headquarters to Miami right now, and it was on our list of cities. I saw Palantir moved to Miami recently. With Florida, the business benefits are amazing.
We were preparing to go public and anticipating accelerated growth. The oversaturation of business traffic was one reason we didn’t choose Miami and went to the other side of Florida. We wanted to stand out and not get buried in a wave of new businesses.
St. Petersburg feels like a place on the verge of real growth
There are thousands of grads a year in this area from colleges like the University of South Florida, the University of Tampa, and St. Petersburg College. This is a great talent pool to tap into for expansion, which was in our criteria. There’s a big research community here as well, which excited us.
I was shocked by how vibrant the city felt. A colleague recently told me St. Petersburg reminded her of Austin about 10 years ago, a place on the verge of real growth, and I couldn’t agree more.
A lot of energy is going into growing the businesses here and making this a FinTech hub. We saw an opportunity to be one of the anchors shaping that growth. A benefit of moving to a less saturated market is that we stand out to talent and customers.
We relocated our headquarters in pieces until we purchased a building
My biggest piece of advice if you’re considering relocation is to contact an organization that is responsible for attracting companies to that city. We contacted the St. Petersburg Area Economic Development Corporation to show us around and introduce us to other companies that have relocated. We got a more candid perspective on the moving process that way.
A few of us relocated and worked out of a coworking space from August 2022 to January 2023 while we looked for a property to purchase. This gave us time to find a building we loved. We purchased a five-story, over 150,000-square-foot building in St. Petersburg’s financial district at the end of 2022 for $29,500,000.
We moved into our new building with some new hires and some people from New York. Others relocated over time, and we are now over 150 people based in St. Petersburg. We still lease two floors on Wall Street and maintain a team of people in New York. That presence will always matter to us.
The personal payoff has been wonderful
I lived in New York for over 20 years. It’s one of the greatest cities in the world.
That being said, the move has been a blessing for me personally. I have a six-year-old daughter who was born in Manhattan, and now I get to raise her somewhere she can be outside almost 360 days a year.
My wife loves it too. She wanted to be by the beach, and we live 15 minutes away. She also wanted to be able to travel to major cities easily. I can leave my office and be at a gate at Tampa International Airport in 20 minutes — I’ve timed it.
We’re still on a rocket ship as a company.
Leaving New York was tough, but the payoff is worth it
We’ve experienced substantial growth since being here. Moving isn’t the only reason for that, but operational costs are better for us in Florida because of the business environment. We can actually shift that investment into product innovation.
Going from the financial capital to being a trailblazer in this area was stressful, but I think it’s always stressful to be a forward thinker. I didn’t struggle too much with the decision by reminding myself of that.
Since we are helping build this ecosystem, we’re very attractive to talent and customers here. Timing is everything. My only regret is that we didn’t move sooner.
Do you have a relocation story to share? Contact this reporter, Agnes Applegate, at aapplegate@businessinsider.com.
