Thirty years of turning Florida tourism relationships into results — advertising revenue, destination marketing, award-winning campaigns, and events people never forget.
Let's TalkI've spent my career where visitors meet Florida: opening restaurants, running a wildlife attraction that welcomed 85,000 guests a year, growing a 40-year Gulf Coast seafood festival into one of the largest on the East Coast, and today managing advertising and distribution for three Gulf Coast visitor-guide publications across Tampa Bay, St. Petersburg, and Sarasota-Bradenton.
Along the way I founded businesses, led a nonprofit through fire and hurricanes, taught small rescues to write their own grants, and built the campaign that told the world John's Pass was weathered, not broken. The state of Florida has recognized the work with multiple Henry Flagler Awards — but the real measure is simpler: the things I build keep running after I've moved on.
Fresh out of the University of Florida, I told the Food & Beverage Director I wanted his seat within five years. He held the assistant director's job open and made me earn it — beverage cart, golf turns, purchasing, accounting, and the kitchen of an award-winning fine-dining room, graded every week for three and a half years. Then, on the ninth hole, he handed me a new set of golf clubs and the title. "That day you walked in, I knew you were something special — and you earned the rest." It's where I learned what I've practiced ever since: you don't give people a title, you help them become it.
Moved to the Gulf Coast and took over food, beverage, and banquet outlets at a premier beachfront resort as Director of Outlets — the role most hotels call Assistant Food & Beverage Director, with the outlet supervisors reporting to me. On my first Outback Bowl — a bitter-cold day when the call was to cut staff — I overrode it: fans who follow their teams don't go home for weather. I worked a 14-hour day, seven of them behind the bar, and showed my team I'd never ask them to do anything I wouldn't do myself.
Recruited to launch a brand-new concept — I picked the décor down to the Corvette booths and built a bike night that drew nearly 1,000 bikes and ran for twenty-three years.
Fourteen years of rescue, education, and conservation — 85,000 guests a year, the award-winning "We Speak for Them" campaign, and a rebuild after fire and hurricanes that ended bigger than it began.
Led the boardwalk's independent merchants, rebranded the village, and turned a first-time $75,000 county tourism grant into the marketing engine that grew a 40-year Gulf Coast seafood festival past 200,000 attendees — one of the largest on the East Coast. Along the way I set a world record — the World's Largest Bloody Mary Toast, 2,457 people raising a glass for charity.
After the hurricanes, I built the campaign that brought visitors back to John's Pass Village — honest storytelling for a whole community, recognized statewide.
I run the revenue engine behind the Welcome Guide-Map and Discover Downtown St. Petersburg publications: advertiser partnerships, renewals, and roughly 500,000 guides into visitors' hands each issue.
"A baby sloth learns what to eat from its mother — take it too early and it can never really go home. The exotic pet trade does exactly that. Somebody has to speak for them — so we did.""We Speak for Them" — two-time Bronze Flagler Award campaign
For fourteen years I cared for an ark of rescued and surrendered animals \u2014 and helped a generation of visitors and schoolchildren fall in love with creatures they\u2019d never seen up close. These studio portraits, by Urban Dog Studio, captured the ambassadors who made the education real.
A no belongs to the person who said it. I gave what I had; they chose a different path. That is theirs to own — it was never a measure of my worth. Here is the measure:
Multiple Henry Flagler Awards from VISIT FLORIDA. A first-application $75,000 county tourism grant turned into an award-winning festival. A black-tie gala at the Don CeSar. A studio campaign good enough to hang in a gallery. Fourteen years leading a rescue through fire and hurricanes — and an ark of animals who trusted me enough to be next to me, even the ones I was afraid of. I am the person who turns wreckage into life. That has always been true, and no answer from anyone changes it.
Tourism partnerships, destination marketing, speaking, and board service — if it puts more visitors in front of Florida's best, I'm interested.