- October 24, 2024
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The entire Gulf Coast was impacted by the one-two punch of hurricanes Helene and Milton. We share stories from executives after the storms — and how they plan to make a comeback.
As a business owner, Audrey Guillem-Saba says she wanted to return as soon as possible after Hurricane Milton to assess the damage. But when she got to St. Armands Circle to check out her shop – Le Macaron – the scene was eerie.
“Everybody was in shock,” says Guillem-Saba. “It was really sad.”
She and her family had evacuated from their Nokomis home to Orlando. Cameras at their company’s Bee Ridge Road headquarters in Sarasota helped provide a “better view” from afar, she says, but they wanted to be on the ground so left the hotel at 7 a.m. the day after Hurricane Milton made landfall.
“You want to go to your business right away after the hurricane to assess the damage, to do whatever you need to do,” says Guillem-Saba, who founded Le Macaron with her mother in 2009. It has grown from one store on St. Armands Circle to more than 60 franchises around the country.
The St. Armands shop had just been hit by Hurricane Helene, leaving it under 3 feet of water. “We lost all the equipment,” Guillem-Saba says, from the Sept. 26 storm.
What she found after Hurricane Milton was about 1 foot of water in the store.
“There were live crabs,” she says. The estimated damage is $100,000 because the shop will have to be rebuilt from scratch, according to Guillem-Saba.
In the 15 years Le Macaron has been on St. Armands Circle, Guillem-Saba says it never flooded until Hurricane Helene.
“But for Helene, it was a disaster,” she says. “The water lift lifted the fridge. The coffee machine was on the floor in the water. So we had to throw away everything….We were ready to put back the walls on [Oct. 6], and we looked at the weather” and realized it was best to wait until Hurricane Milton, which made landfall on Oct. 9, had passed.
“We are hoping to open back in two weeks,” Guillem-Saba says in an Oct. 17 interview.
During the St. Armands store closure, employees were offered work at the company’s confectionery on Bee Ridge Road, which had no damage and produces macarons for Le Macaron locations nationwide.
“They need the work, and we don’t want to lose them,” she says of her employees. “As a business owner, you have the responsibility of people’s livelihoods. We have a lot of franchisees that depend on us too, so we have to go back to work right away,”
On rebuilding the St. Armands store, Guillem-Saba is trying to find a silver lining. “It’s going to be even more beautiful than it was before,” she says, adding it was better the storm happened now than during her busiest time of the year, which is in December.
“St. Armands is a beautiful place. It brings a lot of memories to a lot of people,” Guillem-Saba says. “So I hope that everybody wants to come back and enjoy the circle as soon as possible because it will really help the business owners.”
When Kenyetta Hairston-Bridges was considering leaving Detroit for a job at the Downtown Tampa Partnership, one of her initials concerns was the threat of hurricanes.
Don’t worry, she recalls being told. Tampa Bay hasn’t been struck by a hurricane in over 100 years. We’ll be fine here, she was told.
Now, just shy of four months after she took over one of the Tampa’s most prominent economic development organizations July 1, the city has suffered not one, but two hurricanes in a matter of a couple of weeks.
“The only thing that kept going through my mind was, ‘I’m not prepared for these kind of emergencies,’” says Hairston-Bridges, the president and CEO of the Tampa Bay Downtown Partnership, laughing.
“I’m prepared for snowstorms, right? To sit home and drink hot chocolate. I’m not prepared for this level of weather damage.”
Despite her inexperience with this type of weather, as leader of the organization is was critical for her to make sure it was prepared for what was forecast as major hurricane pointed right at the region.
That included making sure the partnership’s fleet of bright yellow Teslas that make up its Dash ride service were safe from the storm. The partnership moved them to city-owned parking lots and got them into the top floors to protect them from flooding.
It also needed to protect the equipment from its Clean and Safe Program. That program, the partnership says, helps with additional litter and debris removal, minor landscaping, and maintenance to sidewalks, curbs and other public areas.
After the storm passed, the partnership helped with the clean-up of downtown, picking up 360 bags of debris over three days. That is what it normally picks up during a slow month.
“Oh, I didn’t have any second thoughts,” she says when asked about whether she regrets coming to Tampa after the past several weeks.
“You know, the storm comes and is gone, and you have 80-degree weather outside again. And the sun is shining.”
In Detroit, its sunny and 80 maybe for three months of the year. A fact that is not lost on Hairston-Bridges. Or her family.
“My husband is like, ‘If this is what the hurricane is like, I’ll take this one day for the rest of the days to be sunny.’”
Nearly 10 days after he, his wife and two daughters watched their home get destroyed during Hurricane Helene, Shirl Penney had to prepare for another storm.
There were reports starting to come in that another hurricane was heading toward Tampa Bay and Florida’s west coast.
As CEO of the St. Petersburg company Dynasty Financial Partners, Penney was getting the business ready for Hurricane Milton by putting a continuity plan in place.
Dynasty is a services company for independent wealth management advisory firms. Penney says the company has a team of senior leaders that meets regularly to make sure it stays ahead of storms and tracks their paths.
On Saturday, Oct. 5, five days before Milton made landfall, the designated team began holding meetings and sharing information with employees. On the following day, Oct. 6, employees were told the company wanted them to work from a safe place and were given the opportunity “to take hotel rooms, rent cars, evacuate to wherever they needed.”
“To have a second storm like this, coming on the heels of one that was very damaging and had a significant storm surge, is a lot,” Penney says. “But we were prepared.”
Dynasty’s office lost power and was inaccessible for a couple of days after each storm, but it sustained only limited water damage. Penney credits the planning for allowing the company “to be fully operational with no down time.”
But as the company was dealing with its preparations for Milton, Penney had big problems of his own.
A few days earlier, when Helene hit, the St. Petersburg resident, like so many others in the past couple of weeks, lost his home.
“Our bodies are sore and spirits have been saddened over last 72 hours. We fought hard as a family to keep the water out of our house doing about everything you can in securing a home but ultimately” the water covered half way up the windows, he wrote in a LinkedIn message to family and friends shortly after Helene and shared with the Business Observer.
“We got water out as fast as we could and spent all weekend saving what we could,” but the majority of the home and all their furniture was ruined.
In all, he wrote, the family had four feet of water inside the home that did not receded for about eight hours.
And it wasn’t just the house. The entire neighborhood was destroyed.
The loss has been particularly tough on his teenage daughters, one, 18, who will soon leave for college and one, 16, for whom the home was a gathering spot.
“But as we have told them,” he wrote, “‘Home’ is what we make when we are together, it’s not a building.”
As president of a real estate organization with 23 offices, 100 staff members and about 875 agents, Corey McCloskey spent much of the lead up to Hurricane Milton making sure everyone else was ready.
That meant coordinating with employees and clients, making sure everyone was ready and safe, taking down signs and doing all that was possible for a situation like this. It also meant learning how to be better prepared and applying lessons from previous hurricanes.
“It’s sad to say this, but when these sorts of things happen, you learn, you get better at it every single time,” McCloskey says.
One of the lessons she learned after the double whammy of Hurricanes Milton and Helene is to approach preparations at the local offices, which are spread across the area, differently.
That means prepping the outer offices, the ones in Sanibel, Marco Island and Captiva Pine, first and then working inland. “You just don’t think about those sorts of things.”
McCloskey is also looking at technology like water barriers that will help keep the water office in the future, a big concern John R. Wood knows all too well.
The firm had recently completed work on its Ian-damaged Sanibel office before Helene hit the area and it again flooded. Working had begun to fix that damage when Milton hit, halting the work.
The firm is now looking at technological solutions to protect the property and insulate the offices better, McCloskey says.
As far as lessons go, the firm recently implemented a new plan that was developed after Ian.
It now goes to the offices on the barrier island to pick up equipment and other items to get them out of harm’s way.
That includes sending a van to pick up copier machines to keep them from getting wet and having to be replaced.
After “every one of these, we learn,” McCloskey says. “We sit down afterwards and we say: OK, where did we go wrong? What can we do better? How can we get this a little bit more efficient?”
Being an advocate for the local business community meant snapping into action after Hurricane Milton, opening up the chamber of commerce to those without power and handling a deluge of inquiries.
“We opened the chamber’s offices up to anyone in our community who needed access to charge devices, access Wi-Fi, or work remotely to get their job done,” Manatee Chamber of Commerce President and CEO Jacki Dezelski says in an email.
Since the week after the storm hit, the Manatee Chamber of Commerce has been systematically reaching out to every one of its more than 2,000 members. When her team calls, Dezelski says they are looking to find out how business owners are doing, what their status is and whether they need connections made for them, among other things.
“Our inboxes are constantly pinging with email alerts from our members who are seeking assistance,” Dezelski says. “Our phones are ringing a lot, too!”
Helping business owners in their time of need is “extremely rewarding,” albeit exhausting, and “is absolutely at the heart of the mission of the chamber,” Dezelski says. “Often, a friendly, sympathetic ear is what is helpful for a business owner stressed about their team, operations, facility or customer base.”
The chamber has also taken its mission online, for those who can access the internet. Within 48 hours of Hurricane Helene making landfall, Dezelski says the chamber put up a resource webpage that her team has been updating since Hurricane Milton arrived.
The chamber is also working with local officials throughout the recovery process.
“We are participating on twice daily emergency operations calls and serving as the voice of business needs for response and recovery,” Dezelski says.
Throughout, she says she has been focused on taking care of the community, including her workers and volunteers.
“We’ve bought T-shirts for all of our team members with the ManateeStrong logo we developed several years ago, [and] we provided lunch for our team members each day this week,” Dezelski says. “As a leader, my priority is ensuring the well-being of our team so that they can support our local businesses.”
