I moved to Tallahassee in 1988. I had an industrial-strength southerner accent, used the word “y’all” in every phrase, listened to mostly heavy metal music, and my standard outfit was rising Reeboks. , ripped jeans and a polo shirt, every day. It was my uniform.

My first day at Maclay School was a bit off the wall. All those BCBG kids were looking at me a little weird and right away I was staring at them because they weren’t telling you as much as I was used to, among other things. But on the second day, I met another new kid, Dr Spencer Stoetzel, and we became friends.

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I went dancing, read William Johnstone’s “Out of the Ashes” series (post-apocalyptic books before they were cool) 2021 me) I even jam in a band with a few guys.

We played the talent show in school that year and our version of Metallica’s “Seek and Destroy” was an instant migraine inducer; also so much fun.

In grade two, I was dating a senior named Michelle, and she had a car, so the races were really there. Mom really liked this year. HA! You didn’t think much about relationships when you were young, or at least I didn’t. You were right and there you went to rehearse.

I am still in contact with a lot of these people, unfortunately not the group. A meeting would be nice. But those relationships and experiences that I cherish now. After Maclay I went to the University of Florida for an experimental apprenticeship, the experiment was to see if I could still be a student after not going to the first year of class. Success!

I was in a fraternity and still to this day I have football season tickets with eight of these guys. Talk about relationships that I enjoy and that I appreciate as well.

Doing business in Tallahassee over the past 15 years is a huge reminder of the importance of relationships. Does that sound too Captain Obvious to you?

Think of it like this, for years in Atlanta I worked in tech, managing the West Coast and never even met 90% of my clients. I have very few relationships that I cherish from this era (other than my boy Steve Berger, what’s up Steve?).

Working and living here is different, because I know 90% of my clients very well and I know their life, their children, their football teams, politics etc. It just means more. I think that’s actually the slogan of the Southeastern Conference, but we’ll borrow it for today’s purposes.

This week I hired a new office landscaping company, C&A. I met Chris from C&A in a lead group years ago and wow they killed him. His office manager even called afterwards to make sure things were being done correctly. Sound standard? Not all landscaping companies do it like this.

On the lawyer side, I recently spent almost a year with my lawyer on a trade deal. Davisson Dunlap is no ordinary lawyer; we’ve been friends since we were Gayfers Gents (the department store board, kind of a big deal) together in high school, and his introduction to Steve Evans who introduced me to Pam at Aegis brought me to me. sit here today as CEO.

I am very grateful to all of these people for these connections. A more recent relationship was my public relations consultant, Jay Revell. It was his idea for me to write my book, “Professionally Distanced” which came out this year. Just like Dunlap, I spent a LOT of time with Jay working on this fantastic project.

Writing a book, if you go down this route, takes a little longer than you might think, but Jay and the team at Rowland Publishing did it.

Our team at Aegis is one of my favorite connections. I fought the good fight for over a decade with these people and I would do anything for them. I also continue to follow the groups that I managed (first job outside UF).

One of those people is Ken Block of Sister Hazel and he was kind enough to write the introduction to the aforementioned book. It’s my favorite part, so be sure to check it out as it describes our rock’n’roll trip from Gainesville to Los Angeles in the 90s.

I spoke to another artist I used to work with, Charlie Mars, this week playing at Goodwood on January 12 (see you there). Love all of these guys.

My mom and dad are still here and I cherish my relationship with them, but the most important is my wife.

I mention her a lot in the book, but she’s the complete affair, smart, kind, funny, football fanatic (thank you, thank you), music fan and she’s very pretty too.

This column is obviously not about tech or even business, it’s just my open letter to Tallahassee to say thank you for welcoming this little country boy in 1988 and allowing me to do my thing with all these wonderful people and all those special relationships.

I’ve lived everywhere, even a summer in Los Angeles, but living here in Tallahassee – well, that just means more. Love and respect to all of you.

Blake Dowling is the CEO of Aegis Business Technologies, author of the book “Professionally Distanced”, host of the Biz & Tech podcast and writes for several publications. He is also a life student at the Football and Beer Institute, email him at [email protected]

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