The last free lunch

One-liners sprinkle conversations with Bob Clark, a 78-year-old, handlebar mustachioed steel company executive who somehow manages to deftly mix southern gentleman panache with a fraternity brotherhood vibe.

Like this gem: “My first wife was a chemist,” cracks Clark. “She was able to turn money into s—t.”

There's also the business card he often hands out. The card, in part, mentions Clark's “wars fought, revolutions started and assassinations plotted,” in addition to his “tigers tamed and bars emptied.” The back states “as a last resort steel bridges are fabricated under the name of Tampa Steel Erecting Co.”

In between stories about wives and past lives, Clark has a unique tale: He's connected hundreds of Tampa area business leaders and government officials through what's become a legendary weekly networking lunch. Those connections have led to business deals and partnerships, in addition to new jobs and even the occasional romance and marriage.

“Lots of people have lunches and lots of people go to lunches,” says Irene Guy, a longtime Verizon lobbyist in Tampa, and a regular at the Clark-led lunches for a decade, even after she retired and went into nonprofit consulting. “But nothing is as intimate as this.”

Intimate and influential.

“I've done a lot of business in this town because of relationships I've made at that table,” says Dana Ludwig, a Pinellas County-based vice president with insurance giant Brown & Brown. “The lunches have taken on a life of their own. Many people in Tampa want to get invited.”

Every roundtable gathering starts the same way, with a Clark standard. “I'm Bob Clark, president of Tampa Steel Erecting Co.,” he says. “I'm in the iron and steel business. My sister irons, and me and my brother steal.”

The lunches are a bedrock of consistency: Clark has hosted the lunches with the same server, Armando Gonzalez, at the same back corner table at the Columbia in Ybor City every week since November 2001. The prior location, going back to 1997, was the now shuttered Seabreeze by the Bay in Tampa.

And, no joke, Clark picks up the tab and the tip at every lunch. What was once an $80 a week bill has mushroomed into $300 or so a week. That's roughly $15,000 a year Clark spends on lunches.

The money is pittance and penance for what Clark calls a past littered with too much carousing. “I missed Christmas in 1990 and I had to quit drinking,” Clark says. “So buying a meal once a week doesn't hurt my expense account like booze did.”

Strength of steel
Clark, say many who know him, is the classic definition of a “character.”

But behind the outgoing charm, says Ludwig, an original lunch invitee, Clark is one of the most generous and big-hearted people she knows — and not merely because he buys grub. Ludwig says Clark has bailed friends out of jail; loaned money to people for car repairs; and hired the down-and-out for jobs at Tampa Steel. “He helps people out, and he does it quietly,” says Ludwig, “without any expectations they do something for him.”

The other aspect of Clark's life, outside of the lunches, is Tampa Steel Erecting.

Clark's father, Robert Clark Sr., founded the company in 1945. The company grew quickly in the post-World War II economic boom, doing steel fabrication for a variety of buildings and structures. Later it worked on projects from power plants to Spaceship Earth at Epcot Center to the construction of the Florida Aquarium in Tampa.

The younger Clark joined the company in 1961, right after he graduated from Georgia Tech, and worked alongside his father. Clark's brother, John Clark, also went to Georgia Tech, was a decorated solider in the Vietnam War, joined the business in 1969 and is now a vice president. Tampa Steel shifted from general construction to fabricating steel specifically for bridges in the 1990s. That remains the niche today.

Bridges nationwide with the company's steel include the Casco Bay Bridge in Portland, Maine; the Storrow Drive Connector Bridge in Boston; and the 17th Street Bridge in Atlanta. Current projects include the Margaret McDermott Bridge being built across the Trinity River in Dallas. Tampa Steel, says Clark, does about $20 million a year in sales and has about 100 employees.

With a national client list, Clark rarely hunts for business in Tampa. That makes the lunches social occasions. That generosity, to many lunch attendees, is a rare trait. “Most of the people at the table can't help him,” says Guy, the former Verizon official. “It's really pretty amazing what he's done.”

On the wall
The genesis of the lunches goes back to when Clark, a Tampa native and Hillsborough High School graduate, volunteered for the Tampa Chamber of Commerce's Committee of 100 in the early 1990s. He and a few others, including sometimes Ludwig, took business owners thinking about relocating to town out to lunch to chat up Tampa. Someone would snap a picture of the gathering, and a few weeks later, that picture would be tacked to a wall in the chamber.

Clark recalls many conversations about those pictures, mainly people who wanted to be in the pictures. That gave him the idea to start the lunch bunch.

The picture tradition carries on today: Gonzalez, the regular waiter, takes a group shot at the end of every lunch. Then Clark, via one of his assistants at Tampa Steel, sends a printed picture to every attendee for every lunch. Some of the core veterans of the lunches have saved every picture in shoeboxes.

The lunches are held on Fridays, save for the occasional time when Clark is out of town for the weekend, say moose hunting. Then the lunches move to Thursdays. Clark looks for lively conversation at the lunches, which is why one of the few steadfast rules is to sit people boy-girl, boy-girl.

The lunches are invite only — Clark's invitation.

In a Clark it-sounds-like-he's-joking-but-he's-not answer on who gets an invite: “You have to be an attractive female,” he says, and then a long pause, “and/or someone who has amounted to something or has indicated you will amount to something in Tampa.”

Clark handles the invites himself, usually through a text he sends from his iPhone. He has a list of regulars who rotate in and out, and newbies come by referrals. Sometimes an invitation will come a month or six weeks in advance.

A tad more serious, Clark adds the lunches “are all about togetherness in Tampa. It's all about promoting each other in town.”

The all-time guest list is a thick book of Tampa's who's who. It includes Hillsborough County commissioners, Tampa City Council members, presidents and deans of USF and the University of Tampa, bankers, judges, nonprofit leaders, real estate brokers and executives from just about any industry. Columbia owner and prominent area restaurateur Richard Gonzmart has been to Clark-led lunches. So too has Tampa International Airport CEO Joe Lopano and former Tampa Police Chief Jane Castor.

One of the biggest challenges Clark faces is who, if anyone, will take over the planning and running of the group when he stops doing it. Clark has made no commitments, either to when he will give it up or who will take it over.

A semi-regular lunch attendee, Lions Eye Institute President and CEO Jason Woody told Clark a few years ago he'd love to be in the running to be the next lunch organizer. “I think it's a valuable and great service,” says Woody. “I would love to pick it up.”

Woody says he might pick up the tab for the lunches, or maybe the institute, an Ybor City-based nonprofit blinding eye disease transplant and research center, will pay for a portion. Logistics, Woody says, in getting invites out and other work, will be a tougher challenge than the financial side. A dedicated networker, Woody says he's willing to put the time in, whenever Clark calls.

“He hasn't affirmed he is giving me the torch yet,” Woody says, “but I hope he does.”

Bob's backers

Bob Clark with Tampa Steel Erecting Co. has hosted weekly networking lunches in Tampa for nearly 20 years. Here's what some regulars say about Clark, and the lunches.

“It's a lot of work to do this every week. He really is a community leader in the way we want all our community leaders to be.” Dana Ludwig, vice president, Brown & Brown.

“He's found people jobs, he's found people mates.” Irene Guy, nonprofit consultant, former Verizon lobbyist.

“If you get an invitation, you don't turn it down.” Jason Woody, Lions Eye Institute President and CEO.