Boca Leaders

Making Boca Even

Meet Some of the Leaders of 2022 Boca Raton

Written by Marie Speed and John Thomason

IN 2021, BOCA RATON ROARED BACK TO LIFE

with renewed purpose, new developments and a pentup demand for business as usual. From a sweeping redevelopment of the iconic Boca Raton Resort & Club (now The Boca Raton) to new tech at the Boca Raton Innovation Campus (BRiC), the city is poised to continue its growth as the jewel of South Florida business—with an unparalleled quality of life. Meet some of the people making it happen.

Daniel HOSTETTLER

CEO and President, The Boca Raton

One of the biggest stories of the last two years has been the sale of the Boca Raton Resort & Club to MSD Partners, Michael Dell’s company, and its subsequent sweeping renovation in its first phase that is changing the face of the property’s waterfront entirely. With a new era comes a new president and CEO, Daniel Hostettler, 52, married father of two and a longtime luxury hospitality leader. Hostettler comes to Boca Raton from the Northeast, after 12 years as president and group managing director of the Ocean House Management Collection (all Relais & Chateaux properties) that includes the five-star Ocean House in Watch Hill, Rhode Island, the three-star Weekapaug Inn in Westerly, Rhode Island, as well as the Watch Hill Inn in Watch Hill, the Inn at Hastings Park in Lexington, Massachusetts, and the Preserve Sporting Club & Residences, in Richmond, Rhode Island.

Before that, he worked at La Posada de Santa Fe Resort in New Mexico, Meadowood Napa Valley in California, and The Peninsula Beverly Hills. In addition to his job at the Resort, he will continue his role as North American president of Relais & Châteaux, promoting and working with 88 properties in the United States, Mexico, Canada and the Caribbean.

His general philosophy: My philosophy in leading a luxury team is that it really comes down to human resources. You hire the very best people and then you train them and then you constantly support them, because those are the leaders that then are supporting the line level staff that have to take care of the guests and the members. Bringing a five-star level of service to a property this big depends on the servers and the housekeepers and all those people.

What’s new at The Boca Raton: We are going back to be an independent luxury property with the goal to be one of America’s top five resorts by 2026—which is our 100th birthday. That shift only happens if we look at it like a club and a place people come to on vacation that happens to do some conference business as opposed to being a convention hotel that happens to take guests and members.

The new business model: [Our] business model says the resort is really five hotels. —If you want the Four Seasons experience and you are in the 30-50-year-old range and want that very high contemporary level, you are going to go into the Tower, which is undergoing a multimillion renovation that is extraordinary. —If you’re a little bit older than that, but don’t want children underfoot, you are going to go into The Yacht Club, which is 110 rooms, and it’s going to be five stars and butlers on every floor and no children under 16 and every room has a patio facing Lake Boca. —And if you are the convention guest, or maybe you’re a history buff, you are going to stay at the Cloister, because that’s 400 rooms connected to the conference center and the spa. —The Bungalows … are now being redecorated into all two-bedroom suites (60 total) with a kitchen, living room and dining room, and that’s going to be your long stay. —The Beach Club … is sort of something young, hip, patterned after the French Riviera or St. Barth’s.

And the new golden era: We have to absolutely honor the legacy of what’s been here for 95 years. [Back in the day] The Boca Raton was the height of elegance and the height of sophistication, and it was the place in America you wanted to go and see—it was on everybody’s bucket list—and that’s what I want to bring it back to.

Why Boca is good for his business: I think Boca is the American Riviera. It’s got everything from shopping to great dining and still has a small-town feel. … I think people are looking for that in their lives now.

We’re going to have the first STEAM Lab for a multi-tenant office building. That will allow tenants to have a place to prototype ideas they have. It’s a great asset for the community, because we can offer that to help people learn how to create a resume, learn skills.

Angelo Bianco

Managing Partner, CP Group

Boca Raton’s history as a leader in mixed-use, “livework-play” development owes much of its vibrance to Tom Crocker and his colleagues. The developer, now retired, was a pioneer in this now-ubiquitous combination of workplace and lifestyle center. He built

Boca Center, with its lively mix of retail, restaurant and hospitality tenants, and Mizner Park—the city’s central plaza where apartments share real estate with boutiques, restaurants and visual and performing arts centers.

And now, CP Group (formerly Crocker Partners) is in the midst of its next great urban development: Remaking a Boca Raton landmark into a 21st century technology hub to rival the Silicon Valley giants. CP owns Boca Raton Innovation Campus, or BRiC, the largest building in the state of Florida. Currently leased by tenants including Modernizing Medicine, Bluegreen Corporation, Everglades University and Shoes for Crews, it was once the home of IBM, and the place where engineers designed the personal computer and the smartphone.

The site is once again poised to be a central location for developing technologies, with CP Group investing $100 million into its future— including a state-of-the-art fitness center and spa, a conference facility for meetings of up to 270, art galleries, a museum showcasing the history of technology, an amphitheater, a fullservice daycare, car maintenance and salon and dry cleaning service—even Boca Raton’s first food hall. Bianco, CP Group’s managing partner, tells us more.

On the inspiration for the renovated BRiC:

We stole a bunch of ideas from people we wanted to emulate, and that is Apple and Google. We figured that if we wanted to create a building that would attract those tenants, we needed a place that would attract their employees.

On why Boca is a tech magnet: We have a huge amount of technologically proficient, creative people that form the backbone of the labor pool. It allows companies to grow here and really foster a sense of technological advancement and a can-do attitude.

On Boca’s economic future: Boca Raton will disproportionately participate in the economic recovery [from the pandemic]. Boca Raton’s main asset is not a commodity base. It’s the people that live here, and the people who choose to move here. That intellectual capital is something we’re very fortunate to have. That’s why we’re trying to service it by creating an environment that will be attractive to those folks.

Andrea Virgin

President, Boca Raton Center for Arts and Innovation

Andrea Virgin is no stranger to the stage—but this time she’s advocating for it, rather than performing on it. Virgin is president of the Boca Raton Center for Arts and Innovation, the group behind the building of a performing arts center at the north end of Mizner Park. The center is an ambitious project, which Virgin estimates will cost between $100 million and $110 million to build, and will include an innovative facility design that has seven different spaces for both indoor and outdoor performances and events (including the existing amphitheater—reimagined), a six-story parking garage and more. It will also provide a home for local arts organizations and will be the capstone of Mizner Park’s original mission to provide a cultural arts center in the heart of Boca Raton.

Virgin, 36, who grew up in Boca Raton, was a former ballet dancer with the Houston City Ballet HB2 company and Ballet Florida before she became a civil engineer and launched her own design firm, Virgin Design. She became a proponent of the center following the tragic death of her young husband in a plane crash in 2015 that motivated her to change her life—and get more involved with the community.

Today, the center is well on its way to becoming real. After four years of pro bono work by engineers and attorneys and planners and architects, plans are drawn, donors have been contacted, presentations have been made and the group is now awaiting a ground lease from the city (as of this writing—Ed.) coming this fall—which will mark the starting block for serious fundraising. A founders’ circle of 25 people has been formed, seed money of $2 million is in place for initial development costs, and Virgin anticipates the center opening “to be conservative” by the end of 2026 or early 2027, “with the amphitheater being turned around by the Boca centennial year of 2025.”

How a ballerina became a civil engineer: My mom was a civil engineer, and I was good at math and science. I kind of figured it would be a great backup career to move into after dancing.

In 2008 I was dancing for Ballet Florida at the Kravis Center and the recession hit, and of course the arts sector took a massive hit. I had to make a decision [whether to] stay in the arts for two or three years and try to get by financially [or move on.] I had just graduated from FAU, where I had finished my undergraduate degree in engineering and I was given a nice offer at a company, so I decided it was probably time to go ahead and switch out the pointe shoes for the hard hat. So I switched careers and went straight into engineering. I was about 24 when I switched.

Why she became involved: You always have a lesson that you leave a place better than you found it. … One missing piece of the puzzle for this to be the true world-class city that we all believe it to be is cultural infrastructure, which is so lacking here. I would love to do whatever I can to fill that piece, because it is something I am passionate about. … Charlie Siemon and Wendy Larsen were such pioneers [in the arts in Boca] to make sure Mizner Park was a pillar for the arts in Boca Raton. It’s incumbent on the next generation to do what they can to carry that legacy and honor their work and try to bring it full circle.

How it’s going: I feel very optimistic. We’re having very exciting conversations about cornerstone gifts, and we haven’t even gotten a signed ground lease. … We already had a strong feasibility study, and we would not have embarked on this had we not had the backing of the philanthropic community. Even more so, the pandemic was one of the best things that could have happened to this project, because the people who have moved here either want to make their name known, or they are looking to infill the cultural infrastructure they are missing from New York, Chicago and Los Angeles. ... Every day the number of people who call and want to be involved grows.

AARON BRISTOL You always have a lesson that you leave a place better than you found it....I would love to do what I can to fill the [cultural] piece here, because it is something I am passionate about.”

We learn from each other, and we care about knowing what the community needs, and we invest in the highest technology and the best decisions and clinicians. That’s a differentiator.

George Rizzuto

CEO, West Boca Medical Center

George Rizzuto has worked in hospital administration for 35 years, but he hadn’t been heading West Boca Medical Center for a full year before the crisis hit, in March 2020. “There’s no book on the shelf that says, ‘this is how a CEO leads a hospital during a pandemic,’” recalls Rizzuto, who became West

Boca’s CEO in 2019. “It’s totally different than anything we’ve ever had to face, and I’ve faced storms and fires and changes in management and sales of hospitals.”

Yet under Rizzuto’s helm, West Boca Medical Center proved to be a model for pandemic sustainability. The 190-bed institution quickly formalized Incident Command System protocols to establish a pyramid of leadership, from Rizzuto at the top, all the way through supply chain leadership, finance, logistics, EMS and more. “It was formal, it was rigorous, and it was open seven days a week, 24/7, for about 13 months.”

The results speak for themselves: West Boca never reached bed capacity, nor did the hospital lose any of its employees to the virus. Rizzuto elaborates on this, and shares other reasons that West Boca Medical Center continues to stand out as a superior health care provider.

On lessons learned from COVID: We thought we were always prepared. Hospitals are places that every day you start with a focus on safety, and you don’t go to bed at night as the leader of a hospital not thinking about that. … But this proved that you had to be absolutely facile, that you can’t do it alone. The quick exchange of best practices as people saw how they could use gowns or re-use PPE, or access alternate supply chains—those things have taught me that we need to be more nimble, to make decisions with the best information, and be ready to meet again and course-correct if we learn something new.

On hospital advancements over the past year:

The acceleration of telemedicine. In isolation rooms, we limited access to patients to the brave frontline nurses, but through telemedicine, we were able to connect specialists, sometimes within the hospital and sometimes remotely, so we could continue to advance the care. We’ll continue to look at that and expand that. We’re piloting tele-ER. Patients can make a call, connect with a doctor and have a telemedicine interaction, so the doctor can say, ‘you need to call 911,’ or they can determine, ‘that seems like a digestive issue; just follow up with your PCP.’

On Boca Raton’s excellent health care reputa-

tion: In the Palm Beach Health Network of hospitals [of which West Boca is a part], we learn from each other, and we care about knowing what the community needs, and we invest in the highest technology and the best decisions and clinicians. And I think it’s that combination that makes it great. We deliver that high quality care, but in a personalized way. … That’s a differentiator.

Katrina Carter-Tellison

Vice President of Academic Affairs, Lynn University

Katrina Carter-Tellison has taught at Lynn University for 17 years and was integral to launching its Bachelor of Fine Arts program in 2018, specializing in musical theater and acting. “That was a pretty big deal for us,” she says, “a signature program here at Lynn.”

Since then, her name comes up often, not only at Lynn but in business circles. She has years of community experience in Boca Raton and now sits on the board of the YMCA, and on the International Advisory Board for Women Forward International, an organization focused on using art and culture and education to empower more women and “help advance human progress … in a way that helps solve problems.”

Carter -Tellison, now 50, has a Ph.D. in sociology from the University of Miami and is no stranger to problem solving, overseeing “the academic side of the house” which numbers about 200-250 people, including the areas of career connections, learning abroad and “any experience that the students would have from an academic perspective.”

Her emphasis in education: My emphasis is to create a curriculum that helps [students] succeed, helps them understand that they need to go into a job and right away, on day one, be making a difference—in that environment, but also understanding the importance of being part of the human race, being a citizen … Understanding the role of democracy is really important. Understanding that they need to make a difference in some small corner. They don’t need to donate big money, they don’t need to be in line for the next Nobel Peace Prize, but they do need to understand that collectively we all have to do something toward advancing our future, and that making money is not the only piece of that.

On why academicians and communities must

work together: Academics have to have a strong partnership with the community. If we don’t have a strong partnership with community, we don’t know what skills students are going to need when they go out into the world. … The second reason is that there are things we can do. We can help the community in terms of problem solving. The community can help inform how we do things as well.

On how Lynn has changed: We are reaching out beyond our borders, collaborating with other people, other organizations, other institutions. There has also been a tremendous amount of growth in student population numbers, the number of majors, even physically on our campus the number of new buildings. It’s been a period of growth for us but also a growth in perspectives, in ideas, in collaboration.

On why Boca is a great place to live and work:

For me as a woman of color, what I do see here is a lot of diversity of thought, a lot of diversity of perspective. I also see a strong foundation of art, and a strong foundation of culture. There is a high value on education as well, and that combination of arts, culture and education is very prominent here in Boca and holds the key to our navigating our way through a lot of our very complex problems. As a woman of color, I see [in Boca] a lot of diversity of perspective. I also see a strong foundation of art, and a strong foundation of culture. There is a high value on education as well.

The quality of life living and working in Boca exceeds any other experience that I’ve had. I’ve lived in Boston, I’ve lived and worked in Miami, and I’m telling you I love being in Boca.

Ben Spoont

CEO, Misfits Gaming

Ben Spoont, CEO of Misfits Gaming, has introduced a new—and formidable—entry into Boca’s business community. His company employs 70 people in high-paying jobs and is a leader in esports, or as he explains it, a sports franchise company in the digital arena of competitive video gaming.

“We are sports for the digital age,” Spoont says. “Think of what we do at this company in the same vein as what the Miami Heat does in basketball. We are a multi-sport franchise owner— just as the Madison Square Garden Group owns the NY Knicks and the NY Rangers, we own the

Florida Mayhem and the Florida Mutineers. But instead of playing basketball and hockey, our teams are playing “Overwatch” and “Call of Duty” [video games]. The structure and setup of these leagues is very similar to traditional sports, but instead of being watched on television, our matches are watched online in places like YouTube and a platform called Twitch. Truly, this is sports for the digital age—it’s the future of sports entertainment.”

Spoont, 36, started the company five years ago after a short career in banking, when he predicted the future of then-video tournaments would become more organized—and he knew leagues were the way to go, as league media rights and league sponsorships could be key revenue drivers.

His business model: So our business model is very much like traditional sports, where we have revenue that flows from the leagues through league revenue share and then we have our own sponsorship business. Much like the Miami Heat has a Jersey Patch partner, our “Jersey Patch partner” is SoFi [an online personal finance company known for student loans and home financing]. Our business is built upon this digital consumer, and we’ve been able to thrive.

His inspiration for starting the company: I wanted to come back home (from Boston). I was born and raised in South Florida. And in coming back to South Florida I wanted to enter into a high-growth, big-idea space, and gaming has been a passion of mine since my youth.

How big gaming is: It is watched by more people in the U.S. than any traditional sport other than football. … The gaming industry is something like three times larger than the global film industry and three times larger than the global music industry, just to give you a sense of its magnitude. [The gaming industry was worth more than $90 billion in 2020.]

Why Boca: Would you rather cross the MacArthur Causeway or would you rather cross Yamato Road? The quality of life living and working in Boca exceeds any other experience that I’ve had. I’ve lived in Boston, I’ve lived and worked in Miami, and I’m telling you I love being in Boca. It is the best quality of life—and there is a vibrant and emerging tech scene here. We’re part of that. It’s working out great.

Lincoln Mendez

CEO, Boca Raton Regional Hospital

Boca Raton Regional Hospital’s (BRRH) fundraising ball—a January lynchpin for Boca’s high society, previously headlined by the Temptations and Rod Stewart—may have been canceled in 2021, but the coronavirus didn’t prevent the hospital’s stalwart givers from donating to an institution that was never more important than in 2020-2021.

“[Local philanthropist] Bob Sheetz committed a million-dollar matching fund, in lieu of having a ball this year,” says Lincoln Mendez, the hospital’s CEO. “It was called the Sheetz Challenge. I believe we have raised $3.4 million just on that campaign, which is incredible. … That support from the community has not stopped, not even through the pandemic.”

When Mendez accepted the hospital’s reins, in 2019, he inherited a tradition of giving that is rooted in BRRH’s history. The hospital was started by the community in the wake of the deaths of two children who were poisoned— but who never made it to the hospital in time because Boca didn’t have a hospital of its own. Through grassroots efforts, enough money was raised to open a four-story, 100-bed hospital some five years later, in 1967. Today, BRRH is a powerhouse of health care housing specialized institutes for neuroscience, cardiology, orthopedics and women’s health. It is now in the midst of a three-pronged capital campaign, Keeping the Promise, that will improve and expand its central campus on Meadows Road. With the pandemic easing, Mendez shares his thoughts on the past year—and the hospital’s bright future.

On a medical silver lining of COVID-19: We were at the forefront of convalescent plasma. The theory was, if you get the virus, you’re going to build up antibodies against that virus. After you test negative, you can go to the blood center and … go through this process where they can take plasma from you, and that plasma’s got antibodies. That plasma can be given to patients that are struggling, in trying to turn the corner in terms of their treatment. We were one of the first hospitals in South Florida to offer that.

On his commitment during tough

times: I was on the phone in the evenings with patients that didn’t necessarily know what I did for a living; they just thought I worked at the hospital. But I got really involved, because at that time we were taking care not just of the needs of the patients at Boca Regional, but at the other nine hospitals [in the Baptist Health family].

On the Keeping the Promise campaign:

The first plan was to build a parking garage, a 972-space facility … built in February 2020. Next is the Medical Arts Pavilion. It’s going to be a three-story structure of 60,000 square feet. On the top floor is going to be a surgery center.

The second phase is going to be the central energy plan. … It’s going to be a whole-house generator, not only for the existing structure, but for future structures as well. The final structure will be the Gloria Drummond Tower, the nine-story structure that will create all private rooms. The final phase of that project will be going into the existing hospital and reconfiguring all the patient towers. My goal will be that if somebody goes into the hospital, they’re not going to be able to say, “I’m in the old wing.” We want to make sure it’s very modernized, and we’re very excited about that. If you’re talking about philanthrophy in the city of Boca Raton, you don’t have to look further than this hospital. This hospital was built with community support. That support ... has not stopped, not even through the pandemic.