Lauren Davenport Fernandez and the Things She Kept

Lauren Davenport Fernandez sold the house, the cars, and the accumulated evidence that she had done well. She kept the company. In January 2019, after watching a documentary about minimalism, she and her husband, Daniel Fernandez, traded a settled life for travel. A founder who had spent years learning how to make things bigger was experimenting with how much she could remove.

There is a pleasing inconvenience in this story for anyone expecting a clean division between ambition and freedom. Lauren wanted both. The business survived the packing. So did her appetite for building things. Today she is the founder and CEO of Allegrow, the St. Petersburg firm that grew out of her marketing agency and now helps organizations navigate mergers, acquisitions, and the people involved in them.

Her career offers several versions of the same question: what should growth actually make possible? The answers have included a bigger team, a different company name, a suitcase, and an Airstream. None required her to stop being an entrepreneur.

A restaurant, a login, a beginning

The first version was modest. While studying at Middle Tennessee State University, Lauren persuaded a restaurant owner to let her handle Facebook and MySpace as an intern. This was 2009. By graduation in 2010, she had 15 clients around Nashville. In 2011 she moved to St. Petersburg after researching where to grow the business, arriving without an established network.

She hired her first full-time employee in 2013 and acquired a development firm in 2015. Those dates compress a great deal of ordinary work: finding customers, building relationships, and assembling people who could deliver what she sold. Her account of those years gives the business a practical origin. She had customers before she had a grand entrepreneurial autobiography.

In her writing about the agency’s early identity, Lauren described a familiar customer complaint: vendors who would not collaborate, and marketing whose return was difficult to establish. She wanted a team capable of joining the pieces together. The company’s musical vocabulary began there. A symphony was a useful image for specialists working toward one result.

By the time she explained the change from Symphoni Media to The Symphony Agency in 2016, she said the team had grown from three to 25 in two and a half years. The business had moved into a 7,000-square-foot headquarters and added in-house development through acquisition. Its customers had changed too, from local businesses toward larger organizations with more complicated problems.

The original spelling had borrowed the fashionable “i” associated with devices such as the iPod. Eventually the identity needed to accommodate traditional advertising as well as digital work. Even a company name can become an old outfit: perfectly respectable, increasingly tight at the shoulders.

The dog deserves some credit

St. Petersburg also changed Lauren’s personal life, with assistance from a very small intermediary. Three days after moving, she met her future husband by tripping over his dog, Chance. Wanderlocal identifies Chance as a miniature longhaired dachshund. This is an unusually efficient introduction service, even by the standards of dogs.

Their first date was skydiving. Lauren later described jumping from 14,000 feet as her most adventurous experience. In 2015 she was named to the Business Observer’s 40 Under 40, while serving as founder and CEO of Symphoni Media. It makes a useful companion to the résumé: the person acquiring a development firm was also quite willing to leave an aircraft.

Daniel became her partner in Wanderlocal, their travel project. His background in marketing and photography complemented her interest in storytelling. Their public account of meeting starts with the dog rather than the job titles, a sensible editorial decision. Chance had already supplied a better opening.

Protecting the people she had hired

Expansion brought exposure. In January 2016, a large client’s financial trouble left the agency unpaid. Lauren described an overnight hit of 23% to the bottom line, just as the company was building out its new office. The leadership team reduced its own pay, cut costs, and increased sales activity. She said they closed the gap without layoffs.

That episode gives weight to the emphasis on people in her later business. A value becomes easier to understand when somebody has had to budget for it. Preserving the team meant making decisions about whose paycheck would shrink and which costs could go. The office was an expansion project; the employees were people she had persuaded to join her.

“It’s all about efficiency - whether business or running.”

Lauren Davenport Fernandez, 2018

Away from the office, she had another way of thinking through decisions. She ran around the lake at Carillon Park, sometimes recording business ideas into her phone mid-run. Short outings came with music; longer ones came with audiobooks. In early 2018, she was on her third listen to Patrick Lencioni’s The Five Dysfunctions of a Team. Some people take their management problems to lunch. Lauren took hers around the lake.

Her goals had a habit of multiplying. She and Daniel planned to run a 5K each quarter in 2017. She later said she completed 12 that year. In 2018 she was preparing for a Disney Princess Half Marathon and talking about a full marathon in Iceland. These were ambitions expressed at the time, with the same interest in measurable progress that appeared in her account of the company.

The company came along

The decision to sell their possessions in 2019 changed the scenery around that ambition. They later summarized the adventure in a few compact numbers: two suitcases, 16 states, and 15 countries. Their business remained part of the arrangement. Travel and work would have to coexist.

Wanderlocal gave the journeys a public home through video and social media. Its name also contained an instruction: pay attention to the places you visit. The couple’s project developed around local businesses and the people behind them, a subject Lauren already understood from the other side of the counter.

By September 2020, they were preparing to run the business from an Airstream for a year. Lauren admitted how new the vehicle was to them: “We’ve never stepped foot in an RV in our entire lives up until two nights ago.” It is a refreshingly unpolished sentence for the start of a travel enterprise. Expertise would evidently be arriving later.

The plan was ambitious: explore the country while supporting small businesses along the way. In a public post introducing the project, Lauren promised that Daniel’s first attempt to back up their 30-foot Airstream would be comical. A marketing background can help launch a channel; reversing a trailer insists on its own qualifications.

Their 2021 Wanderlocal travels covered 74 cities and 27 states. By February 2022, the couple were discussing minimalism, community, and life on the road in a filmed interview. The experiment had become a continuing story, with enough room for both the attractive views and the awkward maneuvers.

When the questions outgrow the name

Meanwhile, clients were asking Lauren’s company questions that extended beyond marketing. How had it organized an entirely remote team? How did it recruit and train people? Could a brand attract employees as well as customers? These questions became central to her explanation of the Allegrow identity.

The new name, introduced in 2023, kept a musical connection to Symphony through allegro, meaning fast and bright. The added “w” pointed toward growth. Lauren framed the change around work already taking place: branding, recruitment, marketing, and culture. A new sign on the door followed a change in what people were coming through it to ask.

Allegrow now describes its work around due diligence, integration, and troubled mergers. Its communication services include identifying the groups affected by a deal, understanding their concerns, planning messages, and adjusting to feedback. The sequence is revealing. Before deciding what to say, somebody has to work out who needs an answer.

Its integration practice extends that attention to leadership alignment, company cultures, customer transitions, and team belonging. These are the places where an organizational change becomes a daily experience. A transaction may have one closing date. The employees and customers involved have considerably more questions than a date can answer.

A life with room to move

Lauren’s public ambitions have extended beyond her own company. She served on the board of Creative Pinellas, including as board president, and co-chaired Emerging Technology Leaders of Tampa Bay. In December 2023 she was a judge at AMPLIFY Clearwater’s first tourism incubator Pitch Night, where two businesses received awards totaling $30,000.

There is a thread between the student finding an opening at a restaurant and the executive listening to other founders pitch. Both involve taking a young business seriously enough to ask what it might become. Her own company has offered her repeated opportunities to revise the answer.

The possessions sold in 2019 make a striking opening, but the thing she kept explains the rest. Lauren retained a business she could continue shaping, alongside a life she and Daniel were prepared to rearrange. The house could go. The work still had somewhere to take her.