About Jay

About Jay

Communicator. Team builder. Florida native. Retired restaurant critic.

I’m Jay. I’ve spent nearly 30 years helping organizations earn the thing that’s hardest to earn and easiest to lose, which is people’s trust.

A utility asking a million customers to believe the lights are coming back on. A hospice asking a family to believe they’re making the right decision at the worst moment of their lives. Enterprise software companies asking skeptical buyers for 20 minutes.

Different rooms, same job.

Most recently I led B2B marketing for the Business, Technology and Operations unit at E Source, a research and consulting firm serving North America’s largest electric, water and gas utilities. Before that I spent seven years at JEA, where I grew a digital communications team from two professionals to 11 and where our work earned the utility J.D. Power honors for outstanding digital customer experience. Earlier, nearly two decades in communications leadership at Community Hospice and Palliative Care and five foundational years in corporate communications and services marketing at tech firms CMSI and CA Technologies.

I’m a native Floridian and I’ve spent the last three decades in the Jacksonville area, which I’d argue is the state’s most underrated livable stretch of paradise. Respectable direct air service to my favorite domestic getaways and two hours to my OG home base of Orlando.

I’m an introvert at heart whose happy place is a riveting podcast or a nonfiction audiobook in my home office while a relentless Florida summer thunderstorm rattles the windows. And yet, paradoxically perhaps, the part of this career I’ve never gotten tired of is the people part: meeting them, connecting them to each other, building networks that outlast any single job.

As the heading suggests, for seven years I also reviewed restaurants as a community writer for the Florida Times-Union. One of the better side hustles available to a person who never misses a meal and loves to explore the criticalities of aperture.

What drives me is a stubborn belief that most organizations approach truth and transparency with good intentions but in a slow, hedged, written-by-committee manner. I’ve spent a career arguing for the clearer version: the earlier notification, the sentence a real person would understand. It’s not glamorous work and it rarely wins awards, but it’s the difference between an organization people tolerate and one they trust.

That’s in large part why I’ve stayed involved in this profession beyond my own desk. I hold and maintain an Accreditation in Public Relations and I’m a past president of the PRSA North Florida Chapter. I’ve served as a member and chair of the University of Florida College of Journalism and Communications Public Relations Advisory Council, and I currently serve on the WJCT Public Media Community Advisory Board. Public media, in particular, feels worth defending right now.

I’m also a husband and a father, a University of Florida graduate, and a fan of both the Gators and the Jaguars. Dual commitments that at least these days require a lot more fortitude.

I like meeting new people for captivating conversations. If you’re game, click below to connect on LinkedIn.

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