Marinelli was the great American business tale

REVIEW AND COMMENT

Marinelli was the great American business tale

by Matt Walsh

Editor and Publisher

When the modern history of Collier County is written, Paul Marinelli Jr. will be regarded as one of the county's greatest visionaries, businessmen and leaders.

Marinelli, chief executive officer of Collier County's most prominent company, the Barron Collier Cos., died April 10 at age 52. He was in New York City at the time undergoing medical tests related to a fight with cancer.

His death was a shock. At age 52, he was still at least eight years shy of reaching his peak. And he was perhaps that far away from seeing one of his extraordinary visions reach its full potential - the buildout of Ave Maria, the town, and Ave Maria University.

They were Marinelli's ideas - to move the fledgling university from Michigan to no man's land in eastern Collier County and to build a town around the university. Those two ventures will be Marinelli's most visible and talked-about legacies. But they only capture a sliver of the Paul Marinelli story.

Marinelli's life is one of those great American business tales. The kind of story that grade-school kids used to find in starter books - biographies of modest men and women achieving great heights by going about it the right way.

I love the Paul Marinelli story. He was a model of American capitalism, can-do-ism, entrepreneurism, hard work, innovation, integrity, humility and leadership - all the ingredients that lead to great success. His story is so rich, especially for anyone who is a student of business, that we are reprinting a profile of Marinelli that appeared in the Nov. 7, 2003, edition of the Review (see page 6-7).

I didn't know Marinelli intimately, but in the days of interviewing him and speaking with associates and Collier family members, it was clear there was great depth to him. There had to be. Marinelli, after all, was the chief executive officer of a $250-million (revenues), 1,000-employee family business whose patriarch, Barron G. Collier, founded Collier County and whose vast land holdings made it the most prominent business and name in Collier County. In Collier County, the Barron Collier name was the equivalent of being an English "Royal." And by gosh, there was no room, not one inch, for any activity - business or otherwise - that would embarrass the Collier heirs, all three living generations of them.

Part of what made Marinelli's rise to CEO remarkable was his own humble beginnings. He was a middle-class New York City Italian-American who majored in accounting at Fordham University. Just a normal, albeit obscure guy, an accountant.

In 1977, right out of college, he became one of the legions of accounting grads who joined a Big Eight or Big Six accounting firm; in his case, Peat Marwick, which later became KPMG.

Around 1980, Marinelli was assigned in Tampa to work on the Collier family fortune. He was among the accountants who evaluated the partitioning of the family fortune among Barron Collier's grandchildren in the early 1980s. He obviously made an impression. In 1986, the family invited Marinelli to join the accounting department of the Barron Collier Cos. - seen as a future chief financial officer. He became treasurer, CFO in 1989 and CEO in 1992.

Bruce Sherman, CEO of Naples-based Private Capital Management and longtime money manager for the Miles Collier side of the family (Collier Enterprises), says he remembers Marinelli when Marinelli first joined the Collier family business. He has a picture of Marinelli at the board meetings. "He always conducted himself with intelligence and grace," Sherman says. "Paul was an extraordinary individual." Sherman equated Marinelli with three traits: "trust, integrity and intelligence."

Read the profile. Those characteristics come through.

To appreciate Marinelli's talents and contributions to the Collier family and Collier County, imagine being in his position. While he faced the challenges and responsibilities that every CEO faces - to try to satisfy multiple constituencies - he had to do it under a magnifying glass that made every decision subject to remarkable public scrutiny. He could not blemish the Collier name through his actions and decisions. The expectations were high:

• To manage the Collier family wealth and assets. To make sure that 30 heirs depending on his stewardship wouldn't have to worry about the value of their principle and would see it grow.

• To manage the family's businesses in a way that protected and enhanced the Collier family name and reputation and that demonstrated that the Collier family and its company employees were givers, not takers.

• To figure out how to keep the value of the family's agriculture-based assets growing. Sure, owning the largest amount of land in Collier County may not sound like a difficult challenge; all that is required is to keep developing it at a steady pace.

But obligations came with that proposition, too. The Barron Collier Cos. had to be a good developer and great steward of the environment. It couldn't develop schlock - and Marinelli made sure it didn't. Its projects were Class A.

Likewise, many challenges came with the family's land ownership. Much of its property was in the swamps of east Collier County and devoted to a fast-changing agriculture industry, one that was under the constant stresses of international competition, requiring increasing capital investment and in which the long-term returns were questionable. When we interviewed Marinelli in 2003, he told us candidly he has spent a lot of time thinking about his business challenge: what to do with so much unproductive land.

The results are reported in the Marinelli profile. They illustrate his intelligence and extraordinary business acumen.

Marinelli took on other important responsibilities, too. As to be expected, he was involved in the community in numerous not-for-profit organizations. But there was another challenge that also showed his depth: He felt it part of his responsibility to educate the succeeding generations of Colliers on the family enterprises. Marinelli wasn't a Collier, but he felt it important to expose young Colliers to the business to give them a sense of history, legacy and responsibility to the future.

Unlike many CEOs in this day of celebrity-itis, Marinelli grasped that what he was doing was not "all about me." It wasn't about him. He didn't crave the spotlight. It sounds like a typical CEO platitude: "I do not make anything happen," Marinelli said in 2003. "It's we, not I." He never indicated in public he wanted the credit. But everyone knew. Marinelli knew. As one of his friends told us, he was the engine for Barron Collier Cos. A model for our mixed-priority times: "trust, integrity, intelligence" ... humility, hard work, unselfish leadership.

Marinelli should be remembered in Collier County. He made a huge, lasting contribution.

+ They blew another one

There was great hope last summer that Florida's Taxation and Budget Reform Commission would vote to put on the November ballot a Colorado-like Taxpayer Bill of Rights amendment.

Known in many parts as TABOR, such an amendment would have imposed spending caps on state and local government tied to the combined growth rates of, say, the Consumer Price Index and population growth.

But last week those great hopes were scotched. The measure won only 14 of the 17 votes it needed from the commission to be placed on the ballot.

This is actually quite stunning.

When we spoke to TBRC member Patricia Levesque last week, she said in all of the commission's meetings where it heard from the public, taxpayers harped repeatedly on two issues:

• Cut government spending;

• Reform the state's property-tax system.

Levesque said she saw many of the same anti-spending groups attend five, six, seven meetings and sit through 10 hours of hearings to make their pleas to the commission members to get government spending under control.

"These people were passionate," Levesque said.

And yet, in spite of this outpouring, the liberal factions on the commission voted not to give Floridians the opportunity to vote on the matter.

This isn't the end of TABOR efforts. Count on this: If the Legislature fails to adopt spending caps in the 2009 session, there will be a huge grassroots movement to get the issue on the 2010 ballot. Floridians are mad as heck, and aren't going to take it anymore.