On the third floor and on the west side of the new $27.6 million Alta Resources building at Skyplex in south Fort Myers, a large room has 272 empty office cubicles. They likely won’t be empty for much longer.
Alta Resources, which provides customer service apparatuses for Fortune 500 companies, including Kellogg’s and Stellantis, plans to hire 350 new employees over the next few months, said CEO and company founder Jim Beré Jr., who started the company with just three employees in 1995. Since, he has grown the company to more than 7,000 employees, with about 900 working out of the new south Fort Myers office. Alta Resources also has offices in Wisconsin, Southern California and internationally in Belize, Colombia, Mexico, Peru and the Philippines.
Alta Resources will host a job fair from 8 a.m. to 7 p.m. Wednesday at 13180 Paul J Doherty Parkway, which is just north of Southwest Florida International Airport and part of the Skyplex office and industrial area owned by Lee County Port Authority.
Alta will be leasing the 12.5 acres from the port authority for a little more than $7,000 per month, according to public records. The company has until 2025 to exercise an option to develop an adjacent 11-acre parcel.
Alta Resources began vacating its previous home at 12600 Gateway Blvd. in early March. The future of that building, which Alta had been leasing, remains undetermined.
Jim Beré Jr.
When Beré and his colleagues decided to build the new headquarters five years ago, they did so thinking it would be in addition to the Gateway Boulevard building. However, the COVID-19 pandemic disrupted office cultures nationwide.
Yet Beré said he stood by the decision to leave one office building to build another from the ground up.
“We love this place,” Beré said. “Five years ago, we had a vision to expand in Florida and Southwest Florida and Fort Myers. It’s because we love the place, and we love the people we hire; to watch them come into this office and say, ‘We work in one of the best offices.’”
Vincent Valeri, vice president of operations and analytics for Alta Resources, gave Gulfshore Business a tour. He showed amenities such as game rooms with a pingpong/pool table, an indoor shuffleboard court and a space for what will be the cafeteria. There are multiple break rooms and spaces for cubicle workers to step away for some privacy, as well as an outdoor walking path, an auditorium with room for 140 people and views of the nearby airport, where takeoffs and landings can be seen.
The pandemic changed office culture, but not enough to where Alta Resources wanted to abandon it altogether.
“It’s very interesting to me,” Beré said. “Because some people want to work from home, some people want to come back. From our perspective, we’re still working out where that ends up. We don’t know for sure. All we do know is when we bring people in, they want freedom. We want to go through their development, learning about the products, learning about the companies. Meeting who’s on their team. We want to give them a great place to work, but we also realize, with the environment that we’re in, there are so many people who are saying, ‘I would really prefer to work home.’ So we want to make sure that if they do work from home, that we’ve trained them properly. They’re proficient at what they can do. They can operate independently, but we’ve also got the technology to connect with them, using Microsoft Teams and things like that.”
Beré said he and his team are thrilled with their new home. A ribbon-cutting ceremony is scheduled for 9 a.m. tomorrow.
“This building was built to be a great place,” he said. “It fits our culture. It fits who we are. And it provides a great environment for people who want to work for Alta Resources.”
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