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Consortium of Colleges on the Creative Coast to connect education at six Sarasota-area campuses
A joint effort among Southwest Florida’s most prominent institutions of higher education will allow Sarasota students to earn credit on six different campuses and count them toward a single degree. The Consortium of Colleges on the Creative Coast, or C4, will connect some 20,000 students to resources around the region. “Collaboration among regional higher education institutions and local foundations allows the consortium to take on new initiatives that will expand and improve the quality of life and educational landscape here–further positioning Manatee-Sarasota as a preferred college and university community,” said Dr. Larry R. Thompson, president of Ringling College of Art and Design. The consortium includes New College of Florida, Ringling College of Art and Design, State College of Florida Manatee-Sarasota, the University of South Florida Sarasota-Manatee, Florida State University at The Ringling and Eckerd College in Saint Petersburg. The effort will be supported by philanthropic organizations including the Charles and Margery Barancik Foundation, Community Foundation of Sarasota County and Gulf Coast Community Foundation. While the consortium was formed two years ago, the foundations on Tuesday announced support for a new effort to allow campuses to take classes as various institutions. “When the collective strength of these institutions’ faculty, programs and leadership is assembled and leveraged, our region has the resources of a major research university,” said Mark Pritchett, president and CEO of Gulf Coast. “This consortium has developed plans that we think can attract more quality students, provide a stronger workforce and help diversify our economy. This can be a real economic development ‘calling card’ for our region.” The most notable announcement thus far is allowing cross-registration for students at any of the institutions. In the new system, students will still seek a degree at a home campus, but can take classes on a space-available basis at other schools in the consortium. The schools together have a combined 20,000 students registered for the semester starting this month. “That’s a significant number of students that can benefit from our collaborative work,” said Dr. Carol Probstfeld, president of State College of Florida. On a more administrative level, the colleges have also participated in emergency management training together and will look at other pooled resource efforts. Read more in tomorrow’s edition of SRQ Daily. 
Chris Tomasso, Cracker Barrel and Hard Rock veteran, named as president of First Watch
First Watch, a breakfast-centric restaurant chain based in Bradenton, just promoted Chris Tomasso to company president. Tomasso, formerly chief marketing officer, had led marketing efforts for other national restaurant chains including Hard Rock Cafe and Cracker Barrell. Full press relase below the fold: "First Watch announced today that Chief Marketing Officer Chris Tomasso has been promoted to President of First Watch effective January 1, 2016. Tomasso joined the First Watch executive team in 2006 and has led the company’s marketing and strategic branding efforts during a decade of significant growth for the company. Tomasso, a 23-year restaurant veteran, will be responsible for overseeing all restaurant operations in addition to First Watch’s marketing and culinary functions. Prior to his tenure as Chief Marketing Officer, Tomasso served as the Vice President of Marketing for Cracker Barrel Old Country Store, Inc. and Vice President of Worldwide Marketing for Hard Rock Café International. “Chris brings a unique combination of strategic brand vision and tactical operations knowledge, and he has served as a trusted advisor to me since he joined First Watch nearly 10 years ago,” said Ken Pendery, CEO of First Watch. “He has always embraced our culture and has helped lead First Watch through years of brand evolution and aggressive growth. I’m confident that we will continue on the path to success and maintain our dynamic culture with Chris in this new role.” Chris was named a Top Private Company CMO in 2012 by ExecRank and serves on the Board of Directors for the National Restaurant Association’s Marketing Executive Group and the Marketing Advisory Board for Share Our Strength’s Dine Out for No Kid Hungry. He has also served on the Board of Directors for the University of Central Florida’s Alumni Association. First Watch specializes in award-winning, made-to-order Breakfast, Brunch and Lunch. A recipient of more than 200 “Best Breakfast” and “Best Brunch” accolades, First Watch offers traditional favorites, such as omelets, pancakes, sandwiches and salads, and unique specialty items like Quinoa Power Bowls, Avocado Toast and the Chickichanga. First Watch was named a 2015 Top Consumer Pick by Nation’s Restaurant News and has received other recognition including being named a 2013 “Next 20” Emerging Brand by Nation's Restaurant News and a 2014 Top Franchise Value by FSR Magazine. First Watch is the largest and fastest-growing daytime-only restaurant concept in the U.S. with more than 270 restaurants in 26 states, including more than 135 First Watch restaurants, 116 The Egg & I Restaurants, 20 The Good Egg restaurants and one Bread & Company restaurant in Nashville (with another one under construction).
SRQ speaks with the Grow The Dream Show team
Entrepreneurs love talking with colleagues about the nature of running a business, so why not record and broadcast those chats? That’s what the team behind the Grow The Dream podcast—Grow The Dream founder David Johnson, consultant Josh Muccio and The Thomson Group founder Rod Thomson—decided to do, and now the podcast has been ranked by Hubspot as the No. 2 “Podcast You Should Be Listening To.” SRQ got the Dream team to talk some more. Why did a podcast seem like a good way to speak about growing businesses? How did you make sure that the podcast would have a listenership? Muccio: We know that business owners are extremely busy, and may not have the time to research marketing trends and how to apply it in their business. So we decided that podcasting was the right medium for helping out business owners to think more strategic with their marketing efforts. Listeners can passively listen while driving, working out, cooking dinner, or even while at work. So it's a great vehicle for self improvement. Podcasting is great for listeners, but an extremely challenging medium for creators. So guaranteeing listenership is difficult. We ultimately believe that by providing great content and bringing on top-notch guests, we’ll be able to grow our listener base over time. Though, being featured on the HubSpot blog certainly helped accelerate things. Johnson: Podcasting is undergoing a bit of a renaissance lately. Nearly all of us carry smartphones everywhere we go that have always-on internet connections. Netflix and DVRs are so much a part of our everyday lives that we’re completely comfortable with the idea of “on-demand” media and have, in fact, come to expect it. At the same time, mobile apps for discovering and listening to podcasts have improved dramatically, and the number of listeners is exploding right now. Consequently, as a content distribution channel, podcasting is very appealing. All three of us understand the value and importance of content marketing. We all advise our business clients about it and, to one extent or another, provide content marketing services to them to help them grow their businesses. Since business owners tend to be very busy people who wear a lot of hats, we felt like a podcast designed specifically with them in mind would be an ideal way to deliver value. The content can be consumed while they’re driving, working out, and in some cases even while they work. The perceived value is very high — especially if the podcast has good quality audio and is reasonably entertaining while also informing. In our own business, my team and I have, for many years, written blog content for business owners and their teams. We’re always looking for ways to deliver more value, and since I have a background in radio and in audio production, a podcast has been on the drawing board for a long time, What I needed was the right combination of co-hosts to add other perspectives, expertise, and the “on-air” interaction that can make a topic really come to life. Thomson: Our entire economy is going through a huge change, shifting to an on-demand economy characterized by the Uberization of services. In that vein, podcasts are a perfect fit. Frankly, I’ve been surprised that they are not just enduring — being a somewhat ‘older’ technology — but that they are actually exploding in popularity. It makes sense. People are coming to expect to get more and more on demand, at their own timing and pace. And podcasts are a perfect vehicle for that. Topically, there are a lot of small businesses that just don’t have the revenues to have a marketing team or even a dedicated marketing person. It is either the owner or someone else who is wearing many hats, and marketing is one of them. The Grow The Dream Show podcast (growthedream.com/show) can really speak to them, as well as marketers and business people in general.
What sort of preparation goes into an episode of Grow The Dream for each installment? Muccio: Not as much as we would like. But ultimately it ends up being 8-plus hours per episode if you combine all of our efforts. Johnson: Each of us lives, breathes, eats, and sleeps digital marketing every single day. We each specialize in unique areas, of course, and to varying degrees we work on offline marketing for our clients as well. So at the end of the day, we prepare for the Grow The Dream Show in our day-to-day work. Questions we get asked by clients, struggles and challenges we have to overcome, and campaigns we roll out that succeed or fail all inform the discussions that we have each week. On the occasions that we have a guest, we certainly read up. As an example, we recently had Jay Baer on the show, who is at the top of the content marketing business right now. I read his New York Times bestseller, Youtility: Why Smart Marketing Is about Help Not Hype, in advance of the interview to be better prepared. But all three of us had been reading his blog and had listened to some of his podcast episodes beforehand, so we were comfortable enough to just dive in and start asking questions. When it’s just the three of us, we will often have a dialogue via Slack, which is a communications tool we all use in our businesses. Early on in the process, we set up a Slack “team” for the show, and we use it to compile notes, send each other articles and links, and so on. Then before we record, we’ll have a brief dialogue — usually over the first round of the (coffee) Brew of the Day. Thomson: We live the topics we discuss on a daily basis. So in that sense, we don’t often need to do a lot of prep when we tackle a specific marketing/messaging/communication issues. When we have guests, however, which we are planning to do much more of, we then try to be well-versed. Great guests, with large social identification, can help grow the podcast organically, so we really want to make sure it is a great show and they will want to promote it through their own channels. I know many podcasts end up with one guy doing much of the tech heavy-lifting. Is that the case with this podcast? What are the tech challenges the show has to deal with? Muccio: Tech is probably the hardest part of launching a podcast, but luckily we’ve got The David Johnson [@TheDavidJohnson on Twitter] taking the lead on the tech side of things. Publishing the episodes has a minor learning curve and a lot of busywork, but the real challenge is the audio editing. You’ve got to have a decent mic setup, the right recording gear and then ultimately the post-recording work is the most challenging part of creating a high quality show. Johnson: Because of my background in radio, I tend to handle the audio production bits. Also, I’ve produced two other podcasts in the past and have also advised a handful of clients and helped them get started with podcasting. So, I’ve learned my way around the tech side of it from those experiences. That said, Josh (@JoshMuccio on Twitter) has also been producing another podcast and is launching a third. He’s also got no shortage of tech experience given that the first business he built and sold was so successful because he knew how to generate traffic via Google search. So when we got started with the Grow The Dream Show, we had a conversation to just agree on the tech details that needed to be decided. Ultimately, we have a pretty decent division of labor. Rod (@Rod_Thomson on Twitter) also has extensive experience with talk radio — both as a guest and as a co-host. Add that to his many years of experience in print media and as an author of a couple of books, and he’s by far the best at keeping the discussion on track and helping extract value for our listeners out of the conversations we have, especially when we have guests. From a tech standpoint, podcasting really isn’t all that complicated. We use WordPress to publish the episodes to the web, and beneath that are a layer of tools that include high-availability, high-bandwidth hosting of media files (we use Amazon S3 for this), stats trackers to report on the number of downloads, and then a combination of 3rd-party tools and some custom coding to deal with the RSS feed itself (which can sometimes be problematic for podcasters). I guess it could sound complicated, but we deal with this stuff everyday, so for us it wasn’t hard to get it up and going. Thomson: Not surprisingly, I’m the least techie. I simply learn what I need to know throughout my business. David does the heavy lifting with the podcast, drawing on plenty of experience in the field, and Josh is quite technologically capable in his own right.
Do you work to make the topic of each episode timeless? Muccio: We try to include principles of marketing in every episode. But we do spend some time chatting about the latest tools & other current news that affects business owners looking to grow! So it’s a mixture of both in each episode. Johnson: When we first got started, we made a very intentional strategic decision to avoid spending large amounts of time dealing with overly “current” topics that would have a limited shelf life. This is actually really challenging because Google changes their algorithm — in fact we did a show devoted to the “mobile-friendly” change back in April — and Facebook is constantly rearranging the furniture, so to speak, where businesses are concerned. These are just a couple of examples, but things are constantly changing in the world of digital marketing. At the end of the day, we have to address some of the time-sensitive areas that our listeners face as business owners trying to be effective. But even when we talk about something that we know will change, we always try to tackle it from a strategic perspective that will continue to deliver value over time. This is one of the reasons why I really like this team — each of us may take a slightly (or widely) different approach in a given situation, but we all ultimately see eye-to-eye when it comes to the strategic and philosophical reasons why we make the decisions that we make in our work. This hopefully allows us to be more relevant to our audience and deliver unique value as a team that we could not do individually. Thomson: Evergreen content is the best for most podcasts because of varying listening habits. Many podcast listeners, including myself, tend to binge listen to different shows, either new ones that are discovered or ones that we just have not got to for awhile. In monitoring our podcast downloads, we can see that listeners do just that, as the download count on early episodes continues to climb. Therefore, it is important for us to be as timeless as possible — although that can be a challenge when talking about specific tech issues.
SMOA and SAF Compromise on Rudolph CanopiesA compromise has been reached between Sarasota Museum of Art officials and the architectural community with regards to the canopies designed by father of the Sarasota School of Architecture, Paul Rudolph,... More »
2016 Town Hall Lecture Series Line-Up RevealedPictured: Shimon Peres With former chairman of the Federal Reserve, Dr. Ben Bernanke, closing out the Ringling College Library Association Town Hall 2015 Lecture Series this morning, the RCLA has released... More »
Ringling College Reports Avante Garde SuccessPictured: Captain Creative and The Imaginator. Photo Credit: Stephanie Lederer. Ringling College of Art and Design has reported that this year’s annual An Evening at the Avante Garde gala set... More »
Dan Ceaser, Incoming Temple Beth Sholom Head of School, To SpeakThis Thursday, March 5, at 6:30pm Dan Ceaser will be delivering a presentation at the Temple Beth Sholom Upper School Media Center to discuss his plans regarding his incoming tenure as Head of School,... More »
Alfstad& Opens New Exhibit Today, Reception With Artist TonightNewly opened Alfstad& Contemporary Art Gallery opens its second show today, debuting a collection of large-scale constructions, paintings, drawings and serigraphs from Ringling College professor and... More »
Saint Stephen's Episcopal School Opens a Lakewood Ranch Kindergarten and First Grade School
Gay Marriage to Start in FloridaSame-sex couples in Florida could be able to apply for marriage licenses as soon as Jan. 5, following a decision by the 11th Circuit Court of Appeals. The court denied the state’s motion for... More »
Allyn Gallup Remembered as Sarasota Art LeaderSarasota today bids a regretful farewell to a cultural titan. Allyn Gallup, owner of Allyn Gallup Contemporary Art Gallery and one of Sarasota’s most cogent and outspoken voices in the... More »
Scott Holding Lead, Pot Amendment Fails, Conservation Amendment Passes
Buchanan, Rouson, Pilon retain House seats
Whitmore wins, Cantrell likely upsetting Aranibar
UTC Unveils Opening Day DirectoryTaubman Centers today released a complete list of stores and businesses that will be in The Mall at University Town Center when the shopping destination opens next Thursday. The list includes stores dealing... More »
Caragiulo to Call for Snyder Appointment on City CommissionSarasota CIty Commissioner Paul Caragiulo on Tuesday will raise the issue of re-appointing City Commissioner Shannon Snyder to a board both had to resign from to run for higher office. Caragiulo on Tuesday... More »
Sarasota, Manatee Realtors Consider MergerLeadership for the Sarasota Association of Realtors and the Manatee Association of Realtors voted today to merge the organizations. Members for both groups will decide if such a move should take place... More »
Carpenter, Kennedy Win Manatee School Board. Aranibar, Cantrell Head to RunoffSchool Board member Karen Carpenter beat challenger Frank Brunner to win re-election with 57.39 percent of the vote, and newcomer Charlie Kennedy with 50.52 percent beat Rodney Jones for an open seat.... More »
Gallen, Smith in recount territory in Manatee County. DiSabatino wins.One major race in Southwest Florida was too close to call Tuesday night. Manatee County Commissioner Michael Gallen trailed challenger Charles Smith, a Palmetto City Commissioner, by just five votes when... More »
Marsh, Ziegler head for Sarasota School Board runoff. Goodwin, Brown win re-electionTwo Sarasota School Board members coasted to re-election on Tuesday night, and a third is preparing for a November runoff. Bridget Ziegler, who was appointed to the School Board by Gov. Rick Scott earlier... More »
Gonzalez, Caragiulo, Maio win in Sarasota
Town Hall to Tackle Mental Health from Sandy Hook to Robin WilliamsFrom the Sandy Hook shootings to the death of Robin Williams, a remarkable number of national news stories have put mental health in the headlines. Locally, the topic had been an underlying issue in the... More »
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