Mr. Turnaround

Alan George Lafley had a lot of success in his nearly 40-year run with household goods conglomerate Procter & Gamble, where he was chairman, president and CEO for a decade beginning in 2000 and again from 2013 to 2015.

During his first stint at the helm, he turned a “crisis of confidence” into a corporatewide restructuring that empowered employees, established a culture of innovation and emphasized a renewed focus on customers and core brands such as Tide, Crest, Charmin and Pampers.

In the 10 years that followed, P&G more than doubled its annual sales, and the company's market capitalization skyrocketed, making it among the Top 10 most valuable companies on the planet.

A.G., as he's more commonly known, also jettisoned dozens of the Cincinnati-based company's brands and spent billions of dollars to acquire Gillette and other firms to better focus P&G for the future.

As if that weren't enough, during the same period Lafley chaired the Cincinnati Center City Development Corp., a group of civic and business leaders formed to revitalize the Queen City of the West's downtown and an economically disadvantaged area known as “Over-the-Rhine.”

Since its inception in 2004, 3CDC has invested roughly $1.2 billion — mostly private money — into revamping the city and staunching a slide that threatened to make Cincinnati another downtown Detroit.

“Cincinnati had a problem a lot of cities in America have today,” says Lafley, 69, who relocated to Sarasota full time last year after relinquishing the job of P&G chairman in June 2016. “More than 10,000 people would come into the city daily to work, but if there wasn't a Reds (Major League Baseball) game or a Bengals (NFL football) game, they'd leave at night. That resulted in decades of city neglect. Downtown just wasn't vibrant.”

The same could be true of a 42-acre, city-owned waterfront tract in Sarasota that today is home to the 1,740-seat Van Wezel Performing Arts Hall, hundreds of surface parking spaces, the Municipal Auditorium, the former GWiz children's science museum and other uses.

In an effort to make the land more of a public, cultural destination and better connect it to Sarasota's growing downtown, a nine-member board of mainly business leaders known as Sarasota Bayfront 20:20 has formed — with Lafley as its chairman.

Like Tampa Bay Lightning owner Jeff Vinik in downtown Tampa and Barron Collier Cos. work with the planned town of Ave Maria east of Naples, Bayfront 20:20 has crafted some ambitious goals for possible redevelopment.

Unlike Channelside in Tampa or the university-related project in Collier County, however, Bayfront 20:20 will have to work even more closely with city government, build a wide consensus among disparate stakeholders and navigate through a possible minefield of public opposition.

If anyone is up to the task, say people who have worked with him, it's Lafley.

“A.G. is a quick study,” says Stephen Leeper, 3CDC's president and CEO since 2004. “And he always finds a way to challenge you in a positive way. He never panics, and he has a knack for speaking to both princes and paupers. And he really cares about the things he gets involved with, he has a vision for things. He's perfect for the job in Sarasota.”

Dreams of Retirement

Lafley was introduced to Sarasota through his grandmother, who lived in the city in the 1950s and 1960s. Some of his first memories include watching Boston Red Sox spring training games in the stadium that once anchored the city's Payne Park.

In 2004, around the same time 3CDC was forming and following the death of his mother, Lafley went hunting for a Florida vacation home. After checking out Naples and St. Petersburg, he bought a place on Longboat Key.

His father, meanwhile, settled in at the Glenridge on Palmer Ranch senior community, where he lived for a decade. Lafley visited on long weekends and holidays from Cincinnati.

Lafley and his wife, Diane, moved their Florida quarters to a Sarasota condo tower in 2008, with an eye toward life after P&G. For the next few years, he commuted to Cincinnati.

He retired in 2010, but P&G's board called him back into service in May 2013, after sales flagged. He'd lead the company the second time until November 2015, when a successor was named, and stay on as executive chairman until June 2016.

Lafley then moved to Sarasota full time, intending to do nothing more strenuous than the triathlons he and his wife had gotten involved in.

But a telephone call from Bob Easterly, of Sarasota's Coalition of City Neighborhood Association, changed all that. Easterly was part of a committee that included restaurateur Michael Klauber and Gulf Coast Community Foundation executive Jon Thaxton that was working to frame a discussion about Sarasota's bayfront.

Was Lafley interested in participating? As he had with 3CDC, Laffley hesitated at first.

But he was intrigued with the bayfront's possibilities, and the idea that, unlike in Cincinnati, the 42 acres of property in question was controlled by a single owner. Three months in, his fellow board members elected Lafley chair.

“I like to start things,” says Lafley. “I like innovation. Hopefully, I can spend the next 15 to 30 years doing things that my grandchildren will benefit from.”

Unlike in Cincinnati, where 3CDC plowed money into establishing a museum, refurbishing a music hall and creating an ice rink, holding free concerts and other events, beefing up retail and restaurant and building parking garages, Sarasota officials were adamant about what they didn't want to see on the land: No condos, no office towers, no convention center.

With that in mind, Bayfront 20:20's board plans to hire a firm to develop a master plan for the city over the next two years.

“I'm a big believer in the idea that if we can keep this process simple and clear we'll have a chance,” Lafley says. “Look, in Cincinnati there were lots of things we could have done, but we chose to focus on just three. Last year, more than 2 million people attended an event downtown.

“I saw the public-private partnership work there, and there's no reason it can't work here, too, through a team effort. We brought disparate groups together, some of whom had never talked to one another before, to create something. And people have voted with their feet.”