St. Pete X

A graduate of the University of Notre Dame and a U.S. Naval officer veteran, Mark Mahaffey joined his father’s business in 1969. Today, he is Chairman of the Board of The Mahaffey Companies, one of the largest family-owned real estate companies in Florida. St. Petersburg’s Mahaffey Theater bears his family’s name. In this edition of SPx, Mahaffey discusses his amazing life journey, as chronicled in his 2023 memoir “The Pathfinder.” In the book, subtitled “Finding the Right Path,” Mahaffey recognizes the defining moments that were the tailwinds to his considerable success.

Ken LaRoe is the founder of Climate First Bank, which is his third bank. After the very successful sale of Florida Choice Bank, his first, LaRoe and his wife Cindy rented a small RV to travel the country. For that trip LaRoe's brother gave him a copy of Patagonia founder Yvon Chouinard's book, Let My People Go Surfing. It proved to be a transformational read. In this episode of SPx we explore that transition into values based banking as well as entrepreneurial banking as a whole.

After looking for every reason not to open a fund in Tampa Bay, the founders of TampaBay.Ventures found the value to compelling to deny. They stood up a fund and the man who runs the day to day operations, Andreas Calabrease, is our guest on this episode.

Washington Post associate editor and senior national security correspondent Karen DeYoung is Joe’s guest on today’s SPX podcast. DeYoung, who has been with the Post for nearly 50 years, grew up in St. Petersburg, and wrote for the St. Petersburg Times in the early 1970s. The Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist discusses her many years as a foreign correspondent, her encounters with global heads of state and her love of travel – along with her thoughts on the role of the journalist in today’s society, objectivity vs. subjectivity, and what it’s like to have Jeff Bezos for a boss (Bezos purchased the Post in 2013).

A fourth-generation St. Petersburg native, Marcus Brooks passionately believes in absolute equity on every level, and as the executive director of the Center for Health Equity, he is fully invested in what he calls the “collaboration and connectivity” needed to achieve both physical wellness, racial balance, empathy and understanding in the city (and county) he loves. His daily affirmation: “Whatever gifts you are believed to have, are not yours. They were gifted to you for a finite amount of time, to be passed on and used in service of others.”

Jim Barnish is the Founding Managing Partner of Orchid Black and the host of The Dirt podcast. Orchid Black is a consulting firm that focuses exclusively on revenue-positive start-ups looking to make an exit within three years. This conversation discusses the nuances of Orchid Black's unique business model, the hurdles and opportunities facing companies looking to scale, and how to balance working with multiple start-ups. You can learn more about Orchid Black at orchid.black, and The Dirt podcast is streaming on all podcast platforms.

Ray Roa is the Editor-In-Chief at Creative Loafing Tampa, a weekly publication that focuses on city news, arts and culture, and more. Roa has held this position for nearly four years, building on a career writing for various publications in the Tampa Bay area. In this podcast, Hamilton and Roa cover the evolution of local news, and the alt-weekly in particular. They discuss the role of reporters in the local community, including how journalists strive for objectivity, what is worth reporting on, and what grace, civility, and good faith debate looks like in a world where much of our activity and perspective lives online for all to see.

Helen Murray is an award-winning playwright and director. Murray joined St. Pete’s American Stage as Producing Artistic Director in October 2022. Previous to her current role, Murray has notably worked as Executive Producer for the Aurora Fox Arts Center in Denver and as Artistic Director of the Hub Theatre in Virginia, which she also co-founded. She has authored over seven plays, and has directed over 19 productions. She has received multiple awards for her work.

Waveney Ann Moore’s first St. Pete Catalyst byline appeared just over two years ago, on Nov. 25, 2020, and her weekly columns have enriched and elevated our journalistic output a thousandfold. The Guyana-born Moore began writing for us following her retirement from the Tampa Bay Times, where she’d been a well-known reporter and columnist for 24 years. “My husband’s been telling everybody, for the past couple of years since I retired from the Times, that I failed retirement,” she says with a laugh in this SPX interview with Catalyst publisher Joe Hamilton. This month, however, Moore is taking another shot at slowing down. After more than 100 Catalyst columns - about community, about equity and about the abundance of positivity amongst the people of St. Petersburg – she is now officially, no-turning-back retired.

Judy Genshaft was President of the University of South Florida for nearly two decades, from 2000 to 2019, overseeing the most transformative change in the university’s history. Enrollment grew by 40 percent; the four-year graduation rate tripled. USF’s endowment jumped from $254 million to $480 million. And most significantly, USF's research activity has tripled to more than $568 million in expenditures, it’s now one of the top 25 public universities for research. Today, USF ranks as the country's fifth leading public university in generating new U.S. utility patents. It is also the state's third preeminent university. Recently, the Board of Trustees voted to re-name the Student Life Building, on the campus of USF St. Petersburg, in honor of the former president.

Regional chancellor Christian Hardigree joined the University of South Florida St. Petersburg administration in July, and she hit the ground running. In this wide-ranging conversation, Hardigree – who came to USF from Denver, Colorado, where she’d served as the Dean of Metropolitan State’s School of Hospitality – talks about the university’s forward momentum, and not only how to sustain it but grow it. She also touches on the future of education, bureaucracy and putting her stamp on St. Pete. The podcast concludes with some personal stories about her family and her almost becoming an FBI agent.

There’s a line Freddy Williams, President and CEO of the Boys & Girls Clubs of the Suncoast, likes to drop into conversations: “We’re not your grandfather’s Boys and Girls Club.” Williams, a Florida native who’s been in the position since 2016 (after serving in the top spot for the Boys & Girls Clubs of Lake and Sumter counties) emphasizes that today’s clubs are so much more than the warm, caring, safe place for young people – with caring adults – offering recreational and other after-school activities. That, of course, is still the case but among other things they’ve added grade-level reading programs, expanded food service (hot catered meals at all locations) and workforce readiness, to ensure kids have job skills. Williams is also dedicated to deepening partnerships with other bay area nonprofits. He is a board member at the Pinellas Community Foundation, the St. Petersburg Area Chamber of Commerce and others.

Peter Belmont see cities through a special lens. It reveals to him the elements - the buildings, districts, and neighborhoods - that comprise the DNA of a place. From this DNA comes character, the character that shapes a community that in turn shapes our individual lives. Experience has shown Peter that not everyone can see the connection between the elements and the outcome. Newer, bigger, more profitable projects are enticing. There's a lot of money and political gain to be had from such 'progress'. But those short term gains can lead to long term losses for a city if they mutate its DNA too much. Peter has dedicated much of his life to preserving a healthy civic DNA. As a lawyer, an advocate and a historian Peter has been a multi-faceted champion for St Petersburg. He is willing to go toe to toe in the court room and step by step on walking tours. His impact on St Petersburg is immense and worth celebrating, and that's what we do in we do in episode 84 of St Pete X.

Katie Krimitsos started walking the line that most women walk. On one side, cultural and societal norms, family and even biology. On the other, exploration, self actualization and going deep into a passion. All genders walk the line in their own ways, and all genders suffer cultural expectations. The numbers show, though, that when it comes to families and the ‘invisible work’ of life admin, it’s women who are more likely to exit beast mode for diapers and laundry. Krimitsos has been driven and powerful since the beginning. Her family environment was female empowered and she was largely shielded from the injustices women faced. Thus it’s no surprise that her early women’s studies, and what they revealed about the world, made her angry. As a self-named ‘angry feminist’ she grabbed a hammer and set her sites on the glass ceiling. She started several businesses geared towards elevating people, some specifically for women, some for everyone. Each achieved success. They also took her on an evolutionary path for her own perspectives about being a woman in society. She realized that while we can see the faults in our societal framework, we still need to live in it. And that there was no one-size-fits-all solution for how to do that successfully. Thus, she surmised, the only way to walk the line without falling off is to draw your own line – one that takes no additional balance to navigate because it’s already perfectly balanced, for you. The Women’s Meditation Network helps women draw their line. Katie’s experience and passion, her wise cadence, her earnest caring are all infused in her meditations. She started releasing them on Tuesdays a couple years ago and women started listening….and listening…and listening some more. The WMN just passed 40 million downloads and the monthly download rate is accelerating. Please enjoy episode 83 of St Pete X – a full hour of Katie Krimitsos wonderfully walking her line.

Monica Eaton-Cardone has a rage to master. As a child she helped her father run his businesses until she was old enough to begin her own. Upon leaving high school she began the iterative process of creating her own business masterpiece with a DNA level drive to solve problems, work hard and grow her acumen. In this conversation Monica shares lessons learned on the path to mastery with threads on scaling, gender and her current business, Chargebacks911.

Charles B Dew had an experience not everyone gets to have - he had the reality built during his upbringing challenged in an accessible way. While most have their belief systems challenged at some point in their life, those challenges often inspire defense and hardening of the system. There needs to be several variables that align to resolve the equation of change. The information must come in an observable, non-confrontational way. The receiver must be of the right temperament and even in the right mood. The receiver must be in that small window of moral adventure that occurs sparingly throughout our lives, but most often in our late teens or early twenties. Those stars aligned for Dew and it revealed to him how deeply racist his St. Petersburg upbringing made him. Over the course of his life and career, Dew has studied the intricacies of the southern upbringing and the fear so deeply infused in it. He has unmade himself as a racist and documented that journey for us in his books, lectures and this episode of St Pete X.

Irwin Novack has done what very few CEOs manage to do - last. That speaks to the qualities that drove Kane's Founder Maurice Rothman to pursue a young Novack years after spending only a couple days together. Rothman convinced Novak to move his family down from North Carolina to St. Petersburg, and took him under his wing. Once working for Kane's, Novack's role expanded steadily until he eventually took the top spot as C.E.O. But we start our conversation earlier than that...when student Irwin Novack received the call we all dread.

It's the 1940s in Oklahoma. With his dad away for months on a welding job, 14 year old Frank Morsani is running a full bailing crew on his family's 400 acre farm. With no plumbing, electricity or even a tractor, the eldest son simply did what it took to get the job done. Though such a scene is unlikely in this century, it catalyzed a work ethic for the ages. In this episode we linger in the first half of Frank's life to better understand the experiences that built the man that has given so much to our community.

Master journalist Margie Manning sits down for a special episode of SPx. After 3 years transforming the St Pete Catalyst from a startup with a dream, into a respected news outlet, Margie retired to take on a top leadership role with her church. In her many years covering Tampa Bay, she has told the stories that shaped the narrative of our lives, and we are a better community because of her voice. In this episode we hear her story and celebrate her successful career.

Politics can be...political. And universities have their own unique kind of politics that can make government politics seem 101. It takes a deft touch to navigate either world successfully. Few have mastered both. Helen Levine is one of those few. Her recipe isn't complicated. Know who your client is. Be devoutly pragmatic. And listen. She leveraged these ingredients for decades to win the respect of those in power and a seat the table where the future was forged.