A west Lawrence computer software firm is bucking an industry trend and expanding  even as many technology companies struggle to stay alive.

And while LaGarde Inc.’s chief executive hopes to keep his growing firm in Lawrence, he worries he may have to move to a more business-friendly community.

“I am concerned about Lawrence these days,” Bob LaGarde said Wednesday. “Finding the right business environment for us to grow in is very important to us. It is more important than the cost issue, even.”

LaGarde Inc. is close to finishing a campaign to raise $500,000 that will allow the company, which specializes in developing e-commerce software, to increase its work force to 27 employees from 21.

It also is seeking to move out of its 7,000-square-foot office building at 5040 W. 15th St. and into a building twice the size. LaGarde said he hoped to find space in Lawrence, but he also is considering moving the company to Kansas City.

“We’re looking for some solid signs that we’re operating in a solid, growth-oriented, business-friendly community,” he said.

LaGarde said he hadn’t yet seen those signs, pointing to the unfinished South Lawrence Trafficway as an example of Lawrence’s failing to complete a project that would help the business community.

“We need to determine the character of our community, and right now our only defining characteristic is that we are diverse. I’ve said before that diversity has its dark side, and it is paralysis. It seems that we’re so diverse that we can’t make a decision.”

LaGarde said he expected to move into a new building by the end of the year. Whatever city lands the company should expect it to add about another 30 jobs during the next three years, he said.

The growth is coming because demand has been strong for several new versions of LaGarde software aimed at helping small- to medium-sized businesses sell products or services on the Internet.

The largest product release was earlier this year, when the company introduced StoreFront Now, a system that allows businesses to quickly create online catalogs, shipping systems, accounting systems and other necessary components.

LaGarde said the company had been able to grow despite the struggles of other Internet-oriented companies because his firm hadn’t tried to grow too quickly.

“I think our managed growth strategy is what has saved us,” LaGarde said, noting the company was able to weather a 50 percent drop in revenue in the months after the Sept. 11 attacks. “A lot of the Internet companies were based on a get-big-fast strategy.

“I know one company that received $38 million in investments, and they didn’t have revenues as much as ours. That’s when you can get in trouble because you create such a big, expensive infrastructure that when the money starts to dry up, you just crumble. We avoided that.”

LaGarde declined to release revenue totals for the company that was founded in 1996 in Topeka. But he said he was projecting revenue to double this year and the company should be producing $15 million in revenues by 2005.

LaGarde came up with the idea for e-commerce software programs when he realized in the late ’90s that as a computer consultant he was spending a lot of time developing Web sites for small businesses wanting to sell products on the Internet.

He said he expected the trend of e-retailing to continue to grow. He said industry analysts estimated that the number of small businesses selling products on the Internet would grow from today’s 1 million to about 2.5 million in 2005.