Liaison Technology Group is expanding its presence along Florida’s west coast with the addition of Sapphire, the St. Petersburg-based technology integration firm founded by Meredith and John Rodgers.
The move brings Sapphire into the Liaison Technology Group family after more than 11 years serving the St. Petersburg and Tampa Bay region. According to the announcement, Sapphire’s existing team will remain in place, current projects will continue without interruption, and clients will begin seeing the company identified as “A Liaison Technology Group Company” across customer communications and marketing materials over the coming months.
For homeowners, builders, designers, and commercial clients in the region, that balance between continuity and added support is the heart of this story and the broader narrative around Liaison’s expansion efforts. Sapphire has built its reputation around local relationships and personalized service. Liaison, meanwhile, brings a larger operational platform, broader technical resources, and a multi-market team that has been expanding across Florida and beyond.
“This was never about walking away from Sapphire,” Meredith Rodgers, co-founder of Sapphire along with her husband John, said in a statement. “John and I built Sapphire around one simple philosophy: our customers always come first.”
Rodgers said the decision was shaped in part by her family’s move to South Carolina and the desire to find a partner that would protect the relationships Sapphire has built. In Liaison, she said, the company found a group that shared the belief that “technology is important, but people always come first.” Rodgers will remain involved during the transition.
John framed the partnership as a way to build on the company’s foundation while giving its clients and team access to deeper resources.
“We’ve always believed that our reputation is built on one customer and one project at a time,” he said. “Joining Liaison Technology Group allows us to build on everything we’ve created while giving our team and our clients access to additional resources and long-term support.”
That emphasis on relationships echoes a broader theme Connected Design heard from Liaison owner Steve Weber during an April podcast conversation, recorded after a visit to the company’s Fort Myers location. Weber talked then about the challenge of growing an integration company across multiple markets without losing the communication, culture, and process discipline that make complex projects work.
At the time, Weber described Liaison as operating across Colorado, Illinois, Tennessee, Florida, and some early activity in Texas, with Florida alone giving the company a west-coast corridor “from Marco Island all the way up to north of Tampa.”
The Sapphire addition pushes that Florida story deeper into Tampa Bay and St. Petersburg at a moment when the region continues to see demand across luxury homes, condominiums, multifamily developments, and commercial properties. It also fits the type of market Liaison has said it wants to serve, areas where design-sensitive clients expect technology to be reliable, discreet, easy to use, and supported well after installation.
Liaison specializes in residential and commercial technology integration, including home automation, networking, audio, video, lighting control, motorized shading, security, and smart building systems. The company also has been building out specialized capabilities around lighting design and outdoor lighting, areas that have become increasingly important as integrators work more closely with architects, interior designers, builders, and developers earlier in the project lifecycle.
For Sapphire clients, the promise is that the local relationship remains the front door while Liaison adds more strength behind it.
“One of the things that impressed me most about Sapphire was their unwavering commitment to putting customers first,” Weber said in the announcement. “Meredith, John, and their team have built something truly special by delivering a personalized experience for every client and earning trust one relationship at a time. Our role isn’t to change that — it’s to strengthen it.”
That approach is also consistent with Weber’s own telling of Liaison’s growth strategy. On the Connected Design Podcast, he emphasized that multi-location growth only works when communication is treated as an operating principle, not an afterthought. Processes have to travel, but the client experience still has to feel personal.
Sapphire’s transition will be gradual, according to the announcement, with both companies focused on transparency for customers, employees, and community partners. The companies said existing commitments will be honored and current projects will continue without interruption.
In a region where design, construction, and technology expectations continue to rise together, the move gives Sapphire a larger platform while giving Liaison a stronger local presence in one of Florida’s most active markets. The real test, as always, will be whether clients feel the added resources without losing the relationship that brought them to Sapphire in the first place.
