For three new execs, a chance to prove themselves in 2004
By ROBERT TRIGAUX
Published March 15, 2004
A serial entrepreneur. A rare woman in banking's executive suite. A fifth consecutive CEO in search of a turnaround.
Here are three very different but very motivated executives who just received the corporate reins in 2004 to make a Tampa Bay area company gallop faster.
For the entrepreneur, a new CEO title is just the ticket to get back in the game of technology startups. For the banker, it's a rare chance to show the business of lending and saving really has outgrown the old boy's club. For Mr. Fix-It, it's an opportunity to avoid handing the corporate turnaround to the sixth straight CEO.
Here are their tales.
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Tom Wallace, one of the Tampa Bay area's renaissance men of technology, is on the move. Again.
The co-founder of the increasingly influential Tampa Bay Technology Forum on Friday was named chief executive of Tampa's Redvector.com, an online provider of continuing education and training for engineers, architects and people in the construction trades.
Wallace, 45, is a successful entrepreneur who by definition does not like to let the dust settle too long. He was co-founder and CEO of the Waldec Group in Tampa, a network integrator that grew to more than 300 employees and $75-million in annual sales before it was sold to IKON Office Solutions. He helped establish Brainbuzz.com, a Tampa startup backed by ex-Danka Business Systems founder Dan Doyle. With Doyle still serving as chairman, Brainbuzz recently morphed into Cramsession.com, which continues Brainbuzz's role of providing online training and certification to information technology workers.
Leaving Brainbuzz, Wallace collaborated with others to build the Tampa Bay Technology Forum. For this area's business community, TBTF may be Wallace's most lasting contribution. While TBTF emerged as a premier organization supporting the tech industry, Wallace also developed another business called MarketSmart Technologies.
The similarities between Redvector.com and Cramsession.com - online continuing education - are obvious. To Wallace, running a young, private 35-employee Redvector.com once again combines his love of education with his appreciation for the potential of online delivery. Techies call it e-learning.
"I think it was John Chambers, the CEO of Cisco (Systems), who said e-learning would be the killer app of the Internet," Wallace said Friday. "You could argue that has not happened. But it is still early."
Wallace departed MarketSmart by selling his stake to company co-founder Steve Tingiris. At Redvector.com, Wallace takes the CEO reins from founder David Chitester who, along with wife Kathleen, are the company's major investors. As CEO, Wallace will have options to invest in Redvector.com.
Now, Wallace said after a few years of juggling multiple projects, it is time to focus. "I'm on this 100 percent."
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From her days in 1973 as a teenage teller at a Clearwater community bank to heading the Florida empire of Alabama's AmSouth Bancorporation, Susan Martinez has come a long way.
A longer way than it might seem. The banking industry remains a notoriously slow-to-change industry of middle-age white guys dominating the executive suites.
Once in a while, a woman gains some access to the halls of banking power. Karen Dee runs Wachovia Bank in the Tampa Bay area. Bernadette Craig, and before her Katie Pemble, ran Bank of America's Pinellas territory.
But statewide power does not often. Not in Florida. Not anywhere.
Alex Sink cracked the regional executive barrier at NationsBank in the mid 1990s when she was named Florida president of the giant financial institution now known as Bank of America. But Sink eventually got caught in the swirl of a regime change at the bank's North Carolina headquarters and left the business.
Enter Martinez. Last month, following a series of AmSouth executive changes, she was named to run the Florida bank from its office in Tampa. She's in charge of 192 branches and $6.6-billion in deposits from the Tampa Bay area south to Naples, east to Orlando and Jacksonville and north to the Panhandle.
That makes Martinez, by my estimate, today's senior woman in banking in the state of Florida. She reports directly to AmSouth CEO Dowd Ritter at the bank's HQ in Birmingham.
"Our mission is to have No. 1 market share by internal growth," said Martinez, 48, recently. That may sound like a sound bite. But Martinez means it, even if that goal may be impossible to reach in a Florida banking market so dominated by giants Bank of America and Wachovia. AmSouth is No. 5 in size in the state, No. 5 in the Tampa market and No. 4 in Pinellas County. On Florida's Panhandle, it's even No. 1.
Martinez's resume reads like a history of Florida banks devoured by out-of-state predators. After a start in a local community bank, she worked for Tampa's First Florida Banks, later bought by Barnett Banks, in turn acquired by NationsBank.
Whatever the bank, she has moved consistently up the ladder, blending a no-nonsense style and a tradition of loyal employees. More than a decade ago, Martinez had no qualms about pounding the desktop of First Florida executive Frank DeMarco to make a point, winning her argument and making DeMarco laugh.
Back in the days when Barnett Banks' green logo dominated Florida's market, Barnett employees proudly bragged that they bled green. AmSouth boasts a similar culture focused on service, Martinez said. AmSouth employees, it is said, "bleed blue" to match the company colors.
Martinez was not born in the Tampa Bay area, but she's got deep roots.
"I remember when U.S. 19 was a small road with nothing on it," she recalls. Enough said.
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There's probably no truth to the rumor that keeping St. Petersburg's Danka Business Systems out of the financial fire drove company CEO Lang Lowrey to embrace seminary studies in the Episcopal Church.
But we'll be watching new Danka CEO Tom Mavis just in case the pressure of cutting overhead at the still struggling sales-and-service provider of office copiers prompts more than a few prayers from the executive chair.
In a recent interview with Times reporter Scott Barancik, Mavis said his top priority will remain cost, cost, cost.
Mavis, 42, has a big turnaround task. One that has consumed years and an entire series of Danka CEOs. Company founder Dan Doyle built Danka from a single Tampa office, but overpaid and overstepped in the $588-million purchase in 1996 of Eastman Kodak's worldwide copier business. When Doyle could not fix a debt-strapped and culturally divided Danka, he left.
Then came CEO Larry Switzer. Then interim CEO Michael Gifford. Then Lang Lowrey (who remains chairman). Now comes Mavis.
And the passion of the Danka CEO stays much the same. Grow leaner. Sell harder.
