THE BUSINESS OF SPORTS: Tampa Bay Buccaneers
REDTEAM: Investing in the Future
SIGNS OF THE TIMES: Summerlin Avenue
UP CLOSE WITH Jan Edwards
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NOVEMBER/DECEMBER 2020
Orlando's Leadership Connection
BEV SEAY
UCF BOARD OF TRUSTEES
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2020 SPECIAL FINANCE Section PG$4.9535
4BUSiNESS Orlando's Leadership Connection
2020
Photo by Julie Fletcher
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B E V S E AY
UCF Board of Trustees
BUSINESS LEADER OF THE YEAR By Diane Sears
B
ev Seay has always been curious about how things work. As a child, she wanted to explore space. By eighth grade, she wanted to be a computer programmer. With a father who worked at IBM, she loved math and science and knew more about technology than most girls her age — traits she passed down to her two daughters and now her granddaughters, who are tinkering with computer hardware and creating video games. So it’s no surprise that when she became chair of the University of Central Florida (UCF) Board of Trustees in 2019, she wanted to understand the challenges facing the university and strengthen its governance. When she talks about what the board accomplished during her first year as chair, the words “deep dive” come up often. “My style is usually to get people together and get them the support they need,” Seay said. So the first thing she did was set up a board office and appoint a full-time professional to lead it. The office supports the volunteer board members in their governance role as they set strategy for the university. The new structure was important because the first year of Seay’s term as chair involved more difficult scenarios than most college board leaders would encounter in a decade: A state investigation into money incorrectly spent on capital improvements. Loss of funding because of the controversy. Lack of a permanent replacement for UCF President John Hitt, who had retired after 26 years. Reputational risk the university had never faced before. The board didn’t have a crisis management plan, so it worked with experts on UCF’s faculty to establish one, Seay said. “The university had
one, but it was more on the physical side — for a hurricane, an incident on campus, or a fire in a building. What we’re talking about at the board level is risk of reputation. “That crisis management plan happened to be one of the most important things we did. We knew we needed it, and it also showed us some gaps in the university’s crisis management as we put them together into a comprehensive plan for the entire university.”
“I’M LOOKING FOR THOSE BIG THINKERS, NOT THE ONES WHO ARE SILOED IN THEIR PARTICULAR INDUSTRY BUT THOSE WHO SEE HOW TECHNOLOGY TRANSFER ACROSS INDUSTRIES CAN ADVANCE US ALL AND RAISE THE LEVEL OF FUTURE ECONOMIC DEVELOPMENT FOR THIS COMMUNITY.” — Bev Seay The final version was rolled out in February — one month prior to Alexander Cartwright’s selection as UCF’s new president, and right before the pandemic caused the university to shift to remote classes and mostly remote operations. “That timing was very fortuitous because the Emerging Issues and Crisis Response Team has advised the board and the president through the entire COVID-19 crisis,” Seay said. Her top priority has been helping Cartwright get the right team of C-level
executives in place. “These leaders shouldn’t be viewed just as leaders of the university but also of the business community,” Seay said. “They should be able to communicate and work with business, community and government leaders to help us all look forward to what our region will be known for in the future.” Seay has a vision for Central Florida’s future — and UCF’s role in it. “We have basic expertise that has put Orlando on the map, and that’s modeling and simulation. The world views us as the center of modeling and simulation.” In fact, that’s what brought her to Orlando in 1990, as an executive with government contractor Science Applications International Corp., known as SAIC. Seay became involved with UCF two years later, and she has served as a trustee, chair of the College of Engineering Dean’s Industry Advisory Board and a member of the UCF Foundation Board of Directors. “I see a future where simulation is at the core of all our industries,” Seay said. Those include tourism, health care, transportation, energy, education, manufacturing and others. “It all comes around. UCF is here to support the community, obviously, first in education. But out of that education comes a workforce, opportunities for partnering, opportunities for research, and then it all feeds back into creating jobs here that will strengthen our region’s economy. “I’m looking for those big thinkers, not the ones who are siloed in their particular industry but those who see how technology transfer across industries can advance us all and raise the level of future economic development for this community. That’s important to me because I live here, my children live here and hopefully my grandchildren will decide to stay, too.” ▯ i4Biz.com | NOVEMBER/DECEMBER
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4BUSiNESS Orlando's Leadership Connection
2020
Photo Credit: Orlando City Soccer Club
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A L E X L E I TA O Orlando City Soccer Club
SPORTS AND ENTERTAINMENT
A
lex Leitao remembers the day he knew he’d be a soccer fan for life. Where he grew up, in Rio de Janeiro, family tradition determined which team he was supposed to follow. When he was about 6, his father took him to the Maracanã, Brazil’s largest stadium. The star player, a beloved hometown hero, had returned to the Vasco team after playing for Barcelona in Spain. Vasco won that day 5-0, with that player scoring all five goals. Leitao, perched on his father’s shoulders, could feel the energy pulsing through the crowd. “It was a moment I’ll never forget,” he said. “That was my first real experience, where the passion started.” He has followed that passion through years of professional soccer management roles and today serves as CEO of the Orlando City Soccer Club. Leitao keeps a trophy and photo in his office from when he was part of the delegation for the Brazilian national team that beat Germany for the World Cup title in Japan in June 2002. He has been involved in every World Cup competition ever since. That’s one reason Leitao is adamant about bringing World Cup soccer back to Orlando, a host city in 1994. The Fédération Internationale de Football Association, or FIFA, will choose 10 U.S. cities out of 17 vying to host games in 2026 along with three cities each in Mexico and Canada. He describes the potential economic opportunity for Orlando in one word: massive. “I don’t think people realize it’s the biggest sports event in the world by far,” Leitao said. “It can’t be compared to anything
By Diane Sears
— not the Olympics, not anything. It comes with a huge economic impact, and it gives an important platform for whatever the regions and the cities want to use it for. In those 30 to 40 days, the entire world is looking at one place. … Let’s say we have three games in Orlando, you’re talking about three Super Bowls in Orlando in a period of two weeks. It’s incredible.” Leitao is also passionate about Orlando, a city he visited at 15 in a
“THE REASON WE HAVE AN MLS TEAM HERE IN ORLANDO IS BECAUSE OF THE FANS. THEY PUSHED AND THEY PROVED YEAR AFTER YEAR THAT THEY LOVE THIS GAME AND ARE PASSIONATE ABOUT IT.” — Alex Leitao
traditional Brazilian teenage rite of passage. He loved Orlando so much that he and his wife bought a vacation home here years before his work brought them to Central Florida. “We used to come here and vacation three times a year without dreaming we’d live here,” he said. “It’s a place that gives us some peace in our minds, and a place where we’re happy.”
Under Leitao’s leadership, Orlando City has been delivering on promises the club made to its avid fan base: joining the Major League Soccer (MLS) league in 2015, building the soccerspecific Exploria Stadium downtown, opening training facilities in Seminole and Osceola counties, and taking its men’s and women’s teams to higher levels of play. Several members of the women’s team, the Orlando Pride, are Olympic gold medalists and played on the U.S. team that won the women’s World Cup in 2019. This year, the men’s team hosted the MLS is Back Tournament in Orlando. Held in the summer when venues were shut down because of the pandemic, it became the first major league sports event to use the “bubble” concept. The 26-league MLS isolated its players, coaches and staff at Walt Disney World, where they played in a bracket system until the final two teams faced off in a showdown: Orlando City and the eventual victor, the Portland Timbers. Leitao recalls an MLS executive suggesting the league look at minimizing travel by determining a way teams could play in two or three bubbles depending on their location. “I started thinking, hey, there is a place that can accommodate that. It’s not everywhere you find 17 soccer fields in the same location. We have that at Disney’s ESPN Wide World of Sports.” He connected his sources at Disney and the MLS, and the solution emerged. “That was so important for us to keep ourselves in business and to give relief to fans to watch sports on television. We learned about protocols we put in place to finish the season outside the bubble. We learned inside the bubble.” ▯
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UP CLOSE
Jan Edwards With
By Meaghan Branham
“Start-Up Girl.” The nickname given to Jan Edwards in one of the many phases of her career might still be one of the most apt ways of describing the leader, business owner, philanthropist and innovator. With decades of experience in sales, including more than 15 years in leadership at Bright House Networks/Time Warner, she had already established herself as a sales and communications expert when she began the steps toward her next journey: Paving The Way Foundation. It started when she attended the United Nations Global Education and Technology Health (GETHealth) Summit, where she met Dr. Enawgaw Mehari, a neurologist from Kentucky. Mehari runs a 501(c)(3) focused on orphans and vulnerable children in Ethiopia. “We all have those moments in time when we meet someone or see someone speaking and we feel drawn to connect with them,” Edwards said. “That was the case here.” They kept in touch via text and email until one day he told her of his upcoming trip to Africa. “I said, ‘Have a great time. Let’s talk when you get back,’” she recalled. Mehari’s response came as a question: “Do you want to go?” Well, as Edwards puts it, “It’s not every day you get invited to go to Ethiopia.” So she went. What followed has been a story of discovery, perseverance and change. “What we’re doing is important work,” Edwards said. “I know what the other side looks like. We work with many survivor/warriors and have several on our advisory board. They have been through things unimaginable. I see the faces of the children who are suffering on a daily basis in my mind, I see them on the news and know they are being exploited. There is no question why I do what I do. Prevention education is the key to ending child trafficking. It is what gets me up and drives our team every single day.” Can you describe some of your experience in sales and marketing, and how working with Fortune 500 companies prepared you for your involvement in philanthropy? At Time Warner, I worked for a large company with an extraordinary leader, Anne Ragsdale. Under her leadership, I gained the skills to meet people where they are, be curious about why they started their business and why it was important for them to succeed. Looking back, it was really a legacy conversation inside the realm of advertising and marketing. What laid the groundwork for Paving The Way were the times I was asked to start a new vertical or line item for the company, literally, from nothing. When there was a new opportunity, as the “start-up girl,” my boss tasked me to “figure it out.’’ I understand how to take an idea all the way to fruition. And do it successfully. That’s how Paving The Way Foundation’s film, Trapped in the Trade, was produced. We shot the film in two weeks — our crew, talent and
production team believed in what we were doing. Failure was not an option because we knew lives were at stake. Today, we use that film for all of our training programs. My business background means I understand the importance of using facts in business. One of my favorite business leaders, Jim Doyle of Jim Doyle Associates in Sarasota, said, “Facts tell, stories sell.” I’ve never forgotten that. Facts like: Online exploitation has increased 1,000% over the past year, which means millions of children in the United States are at risk of being exploited. Orange County has the secondhighest number of child-trafficking cases in Florida. Our community has the power to disrupt that. These are facts that grab people’s attention. As uncomfortable as they may be, it starts a conversation about what’s happening and how to prevent it. It’s simple—conversations can disrupt exploitation, and we are the ones who can do that. You and me, together.
What inspired you to start your work against human trafficking after your trip to Ethiopia?
Mission trips are fulfilling but exhausting, with 12- to 14-hour days where you give your heart and soul to others. On our way home one night, I saw two older men with two younger women, and it just didn’t feel right. You know that feeling in your gut when things just don’t sit right with you, but you can’t put your finger on it? When I got to my sponsor’s house and told him what I had seen, he said, rather nonchalantly, “That’s human trafficking.” I paused him and said, “Wait, what?” He continued, “Ethiopia has 4.5 million orphans, and we are the No. 1 source of human trafficking in the Middle East.” I said, “hang on, you’re telling me people are selling people?” And it was right there that this issue was imprinted on my heart. I came home, started doing research and learned that Florida has the third-highest number of calls to the national trafficking hotline, behind California and Texas. The average age
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UP CLOSE of entry is between 11 and 14. So I said to myself, “Ethiopia, I’m coming for you; however, I need to fix my own backyard first,” and we’ve been on that mission for seven years. Since then, we’ve educated more than 13,000 children and adults from Miami to Washington D.C., helped pass legislation at the state level (such as HB 851 in Florida), and we’re working to pass federal legislation and raise national awareness about this horrific crime.
What were the first stages of creating Paving The Way Foundation? Once I learned the facts, I went on a quest to understand why no one was talking about this. I spoke to people at the Department of Homeland Security, the FBI, the Florida Department of Law Enforcement, undercover police officers and survivors. I asked everyone the same question: “What’s missing that would make the biggest difference?” They all said awareness. With my background in marketing and advertising, I knew I could help Given that children are the primary targets of predators, it was natural to talk with parents, and we tried, but mostly they couldn’t fathom the reality of child trafficking. That was frustrating, and I wasn’t giving up. I’d talk to anybody who would listen, and a plan began to form. I hired business coaches, took additional training and built relationships with other local organizations that were doing similar work. At the time, people were mostly focused on rescue and rehabilitation, which is super important, but only a few were focused on prevention. Learning that our children were the target, it was a natural place for us to disrupt the cycle, and that’s how we came to do what we do: educate, empower and prevent child exploitation. Our target audience is students, especially those in middle school, and the people who surround them. I’m happy to say that parents have come around and are now hungry for this information.
How has the COVID-19 pandemic affected your work and the issue of human trafficking?
According to the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children, tips about online child exploitation have quadrupled since the start of the COVID-19 outbreak. With everything going online, children
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began experiencing increased isolation and less social interaction. In April of this year, the center’s CyberTipline received more than 4 million tips about online child sexual abuse. Since most of the foundation’s programs had been delivered in person, we leapt into action to take our mission online. By early April, we had produced a dozen 30-minute videos that debunked myths about human trafficking, and we shared them on Facebook, Twitter and YouTube. We created four videos in Spanish for the Latin community. Most people don’t realize that human trafficking knows no socioeconomic or demographic boundaries. Children in affluent areas are as much at risk as those in lower-income areas. With increased job losses, thousands of families are in danger of exploitation, but we are out to disrupt that — as quickly as we can — by educating our community. One conversation, one deleted app, one call to the national trafficking hotline can save a life.
What is it like running a nonprofit in these times?
Exhilarating, scary and fulfilling, knowing that we make a difference every day. We run our 501(c)(3) like a business because, quite frankly, the only difference between my organization and a forprofit business is the tax code. We have a responsibility to run our organization as such. Not-for-profit doesn’t mean free — it means we take our profits and put them back into the organization. More people have stepped up to become involved, and we’ve raised a record amount of money this year since being accepted into the GlobalGiving Accelerator, a platform that helps nonprofits build skills, access tools and grow their base of supporters. Now we can share our mission with the world. One of the challenges was moving from a business environment, where there is a clear exchange of products, goods or services for money, to engaging donors to contribute to an organization that deals with a topic that makes people uncomfortable. However, with increased news coverage of high level arrests children being rescued, people are more willing to partner with us. We’ve created our first annual awareness campaign and fundraiser for Nov. 20, called Lights on For Children, where we invite people to turn
their porch lights blue to shine a light on child exploitation.
How can people in industries like finance leverage their skills and backgrounds to do their part to help the cause?
First and foremost, they can become educated about child trafficking and exploitation and share with others what they learned. Paving The Way Foundation has numerous resources on our website including downloadable tools and links to videos on YouTube. We are always looking for Mission Ambassadors we can train to speak virtually or in person with their friends, family, civic organizations, church, youth groups and parents. We love talking to potential new board members as well, especially people with experience in fund development, finance, marketing, education and curriculum development. We’ve created a Single Charity Fund backed by one of the top 5 LC Foundations in the world for people to contribute to the sustainability of our operations and program development. This will give us an opportunity to hire staff, expand our reach, and allow 100% of our public contributions to go toward program delivery. It’s a unique and effective way to run an organization like ours. We invite our community to partner with us to invest in our children and families here in Central Florida. ▯
FOR MORE INFORMATION
Lights on For Children event: www.globalgiving.org/donate/77919/ paving-the-way-foundation-inc
DOWNLOAD THE SIGNS OF HUMAN TRAFFICKING www.pavingthewayfoundation. org/uploads/6/1/0/6/61066657/ info_one_sheet_.pdf
National Human Trafficking Hotline:
888-373-7888
BEST PRACTICE
Meaghan Branham
is the managing editor for i4 Business, where she oversees the company’s digital media strategy, handles client relationship marketing for the print and digital magazines, and serves as one of the publication’s lead writers. A native of Brevard County, she splits her time between Central Florida and Nashville, Tennessee.
Marketing HOW TO GET MORE EARNED MEDIA COVERAGE FOR YOUR BRAND
Earned media coverage is content marketing at its best. — Meaghan Branham
I
t might not be true that any press is good press, but it certainly is true that the kind of coverage now known as “earned” press has a special ring to it. In fact, it is music to the ears of many marketing experts. Earned media is coverage or promotion of your brand that is free, as opposed to paid advertising. Examples are when a reputable website shares or republishes your content or when news outlets cover your brand in a story. It’s essentially word of mouth, with the added element of reputability. And just because it’s free doesn’t mean it’s ineffective. The numbers alone make a strong argument:
Ɏ 57% of people in the United States trust what they hear from friends and family the most when it comes to a new product.
Ɏ According to a Nielsen report, 83% of consumers trust word-of-mouth publicity more than direct advertisements from brands.
Go Broad
Ɏ 25% to 40% of all traffic and lead generation comes from earned media.
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Earned media coverage is content marketing at its best, doing the triple duty of establishing your brand as an authority, informing your audience and spreading the word about your work, all at no cost to you. And while earned media is promotion not managed by a marketing team, there are things you can do to make yourself more likely to be noticed by media outlets. It’s all about creating content that is newsworthy. If you’re looking for ways to be noticed by news outlets and journalists, remember what kind of content these sources are looking for: stories that are relevant, current and appeal to a wider audience. Stories about just your
brand typically will not be picked up. A better bet would be something a bit broader. A story or press release relating to your industry as a whole, a charitable partnership with a topical mission or a company culture lesson are all better bets for casting a wider net.
EMPOWER & DEVELOP YOUR MOST SUCCESSFUL TEAM!
Reports and Studies
Journalists and audiences are more likely to take an interest in and trust a data-driven story. Curating your own white papers, reports and studies that tackle industry issues or hot-button topics can pack a bigger punch.
Bill ‘Roto’ Reuter
Leverage Your Paid Media Coverage
Often, traditional advertising in combination with your other efforts can get you noticed. This means a good marketing strategy focuses on both. Paid advertising can increase brand name recognition and, in turn, make other outlets more likely to want to feature you as a reliable source or well-known name. That can then lead to more brand trust and so on. Just remember to keep an eye on what kind of paid content seems to lead to the most earned coverage so you can best leverage your momentum.
Social Media
Social media has really changed the meaning of “earned media” since its introduction not so long ago. Today, interacting with audiences on social media, posting reviews and testimonials on different platforms, and producing shareable content can get your product and brand in front of more people than ever before. This digital word-of-mouth strategy is powerful, and the best way to get the most out of it is to stay engaged and active. You can see which posts are getting you the most earned coverage and use these statistics to shape your goals and strategies.
Awards and Accolades
Recognition from your community doesn’t just feel good — it’s also usually accompanied by press releases, articles, social media shout-outs and more. Keep an eye out for upcoming ceremonies or opportunities to recognize a member of your team or leader, and you might be surprised at how much of a boost it can give you. Earned media might not be paid for — but it definitely is earned. It comes from a mix of strategy, intention, consistency and reliability. Think of it like a spotlight: Sometimes, it will fall on you at just the right moment, but at other times you might have to nudge it a little bit in the right direction. Either way, be ready to show off what you’ve got when it lands on you. ▯
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