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New EDA chief tries to do business amid scandal

There is no normal — even a new normal — for the executive director of the Front Royal-Warren Economic Development Authority, Douglas Parsons. Not while his predecessor, Jennifer McDonald, faces criminal charges and a civil suit alleging that she engineered a $21 million embezzlement scheme.

A veteran in economic development, Parsons took office in May. Ever since, he’s been trying to stay focused on restoring the public’s trust and getting back to business, despite the still-evolving criminal and civil probes, which have ensnared McDonald’s husband, several businesspeople and the late sheriff. 

A circuit judge recently dismissed misdemeanor charges of misfeasance and nonfeasance against the county supervisors, County Executive Douglas Stanley and current and former board members with the economic development authority. The judge said  the charges were not listed as crimes under the state code.

“Right now, we have around $41 million in debt, and we have $1.6 million in the bank,” Parsons says of the authority’s finances.

“As we continue to make debt and interest payments over the next few months, that money will dwindle. We’re trying to be as frugal as we can all the way around,” he said in a late October interview.

The authority has filed a $21.3 million civil lawsuit against McDonald, her husband, her mother and various associates to try to recover as much money as it can.

Despite the unprecedented turmoil in what may be one of the biggest embezzlement cases in state history,  Parsons says the news hasn’t been all bad.

“I don’t know of any deals or prospects that we’ve lost or [companies that] have backed out as a result of the troubles we’ve had here. I think people realize that there are issues here, but they don’t really affect their bottom line,” he says.

Parsons adds that assuring taxpayers that the authority is transparent and accountable has been a principal goal of his.

Sandra Peart, dean of the Jepson School of Leadership Studies at the University of Richmond, says a lack of transparency can lead to corruption.

“Leaders are more likely to behave ethically if there is transparency,” says Peart, who has written extensively about leadership ethics.

Hampton Roads task force ponders region’s name and identity

Coastal Virginia, Tidewater, 757, Hampton Roads.

What’s in a name, and what gives a region its identity and enhances its competitiveness?

A task force of leaders from the Hampton Roads region is hammering away at those questions as they ponder whether Hampton Roads should continue to be called, well, Hampton Roads.

Sometime in mid-December, the group is scheduled to distill an exhaustive list of surveys and studies into a rebranding and reinvention strategy.

As to what will actually happen at the mid-December meeting: “We haven’t locked down the specifics,” says Bryan Stephens, president and CEO of the Hampton Roads Chamber of Commerce.

Kurt Krause, president and CEO of VisitNorfolk, says that Coastal Virginia and 757, the region’s telephone area code, have been mentioned as potential alternatives for identifying the region in targeted marketing campaigns.

For instance, the informal 757 could be used in marketing to college-age students who responded well to the nickname after it was popularized on Twitter.

“Part of what we’re learning is this not about a name … but building an awareness of Hampton Roads,” says John Martin, CEO and managing partner of the Richmond-based Southeastern Institute of Research, which recently had its own rebranding and now calls itself “SIR.”

The task force hired SIR to look at the region’s identity, its name and its competitiveness.

“I think it’s healthy for us to look at how we brand ourselves, but I think that branding is bigger than a name,” says Deborah DiCroce, Hampton Roads Community Foundation president and CEO, and a member of the task force.

But it’s the idea of a name change that has caught much of the public’s attention.

“It’s easier to talk about the name, and maybe it’s more fun, I don’t know,” DiCroce says.

Hampton Roads has traveled a fickle path with names. In the early 1980s, business leaders were successful in changing the region’s identity from Tidewater to Hampton Roads.

The name debate aside, Martin says promotion of the area has been fragmented.

There has been “very little external marketing in a consistent way in terms of promoting the region,” he says.

Hampton Roads task force ponders region’s name and identity

Coastal Virginia, Tidewater, 757, Hampton Roads.

What’s in a name, and what gives a region its identity and enhances its competitiveness?

A task force of leaders from the Hampton Roads region is hammering away at those questions as they ponder whether Hampton Roads should continue to be called, well, Hampton Roads.

Sometime in mid-December, the group is scheduled to distill an exhaustive list of surveys and studies into a rebranding and reinvention strategy.

As to what will actually happen at the mid-December meeting: “We haven’t locked down the specifics,” says Bryan Stephens, president and CEO of the Hampton Roads Chamber of Commerce.

Kurt Krause, president and CEO of VisitNorfolk, says that Coastal Virginia and 757, the region’s telephone area code, have been mentioned as potential alternatives for identifying the region in targeted marketing campaigns.

For instance, the informal 757 could be used in marketing to college-age students who responded well to the nickname after it was popularized on Twitter.

“Part of what we’re learning is this not about a name … but building an awareness of Hampton Roads,” says John Martin, CEO and managing partner of the Richmond-based Southeastern Institute of Research, which recently had its own rebranding and now calls itself “SIR.”

The task force hired SIR to look at the region’s identity, its name and its competitiveness.

“I think it’s healthy for us to look at how we brand ourselves, but I think that branding is bigger than a name,” says Deborah DiCroce, Hampton Roads Community Foundation president and CEO, and a member of the task force.

But it’s the idea of a name change that has caught much of the public’s attention.

“It’s easier to talk about the name, and maybe it’s more fun, I don’t know,” DiCroce says.

Hampton Roads has traveled a fickle path with names. In the early 1980s, business leaders were successful in changing the region’s identity from Tidewater to Hampton Roads.

The name debate aside, Martin says promotion of the area has been fragmented.

There has been “very little external marketing in a consistent way in terms of promoting the region,” he says.

Bringing in the big bucks

Virginia’s top-earning CEOs brought home the bacon in a big way in 2018 and were instant millionaires many times over, with average total compensation rounding out at about $8.17 million and change, nearly a million dollars more than their average total compensation the previous year, $7.26 million.

Conducted by Redwood City, California-based executive compensation data firm Equilar, Virginia Business’ most recent pay survey of CEOs in Virginia looked at 40 public companies with annual revenues of least $1 billion.

But in an oddity, 41 CEOs were surveyed.

So, how is it that you have 40 companies surveyed, but 41 CEOs?

That’s because Richmond-based Markel Corp., a holding company for insurance, reinsurance and investment operations around the world, has two co-CEOs: Thomas S. Gayner and Richard R. Whitt III. Last year, Gayner received total compensation of $3,713,001 — $6,240 more than Whitt’s total compensation of $3,706,761. Both received a 14% bump in pay over 2017.

To determine CEO pay, Equilar tallies salary, bonus, perks, stock awards, stock option awards and other aspects of overall compensation.

There has been more scrutiny of CEO compensation since Congress passed the 2010 Dodd–Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act, which contained a “say on pay” provision, which gives shareholders the right to hold advisory or nonbinding votes on executive pay packages.

Under U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission rules, most companies also disclose the ratio of their CEO pay to the compensation of their median employee, in part to highlight the vast pay differential between top executives and those who work for them.

Despite those measures, CEO pay keeps climbing.

Top earners
When Equilar measured the change in executive compensation between 2017 and 2018 for each CEO, it included only those who have been in place for at least two complete years.

That’s so partial-year compensation and new-hire awards don’t skew the calculations. That meant that the 2017 compensation of seven CEOs wasn’t part of the equation.

Looking at it that way, the change in pay for top-paid Virginia CEOs rose 12.5% in 2018.

Virginia’s top-earning CEO in 2018 was Paul Saville of Reston-based NVR Inc., one of the nation’s biggest homebuilders and parent company of Ryan Homes.

His total 2018 compensation was $39.13 million, compared with $3.54 million in 2017.

In other words, a jump of 1,006% year over year.

(Don’t you wish your stock portfolio performed as well?)

The second-highest compensation bump percentage-wise went to John D. Gottwald, president and chief executive of Richmond-based Tredegar Corp.,  a manufacturer of plastic films and aluminum extrusions. Gottwald’s 2018 compensation jumped by 510% to $2.54 million. He  retired earlier this year.

What the neighbors make
The compensation paid to NVR’s Saville, the highest earner, easily eclipsed the compensation of the highest-paid CEO in neighboring North Carolina, Bank of American Chairman and CEO Brian Moynihan, who earned $26.5 million, according to an Associated Press survey of top earners.

However, Saville’s compensation falls far short of the largest CEO pay package in neighboring Maryland. David Zaslav, CEO of Maryland-based cable programming group Discovery Inc., reaped $129.4 million in compensation last year, making him the highest-paid chief executive in the nation, according to another Equilar survey. His pay was bolstered by $102 million in stock options and $14.8 million in stock awards, according to the entertainment outlet Variety.

Among Virginia chief executives, Saville had the highest base salary,    $1.9 million. But the largest portion of his compensation came from a huge equity award of nearly $35.4 million.

Performance pay
Performance-based equity awards contributed heavily to the total compensation of most of the Virginia CEOs surveyed.

Equity awards for the top earners averaged $5.45 million in 2018.

That amounted to about 67% of the average Virginia CEO’s compensation ($8.2 million) last year.

Saville’s equity award was even more than that — totaling 90% of his overall compensation.

“There is still a trend towards more performance awards. We found that … 73.3% of CEOs received a performance-based, long-term incentive in 2014,

compared with 87.8% in 2018,” says Charlie Pontrelli, senior project manager at Equilar.

But does the fact that a CEO receives a big performance award mean that he or she is a great manager?

That’s one of the big debates in finance academia circles these days, according to Derek Horstmeyer, an assistant professor of finance at the George Mason University School of Business. “Some people would hope that you pay based on how they do against their competition,” he says, while others might argue that “they’re kind of along for the ride. They’re getting some of these payouts because it’s been a great bull run for 10 years.”

As earnings rise so, too, do the equity awards of many CEOs, he notes. And CEOs’ contracts usually dictate when they can cash in on those awards.

“There’s a vesting schedule. You can cash out half of it in two years and the other half in four years, things like that,” Horstmeyer says.

Christopher Nassetta, CEO of international hospitality company Hilton Worldwide Holdings Inc. in McLean, received the second-highest equity award among Virginia CEOs: $15.8 million. His total compensation package totaled nearly $19.8 million, placing him third among the state’s highest-paid CEOs.

Bonus bounty
Overall, bonuses for Virginia’s CEOs were down slightly this year, however, dropping from an average of $1.5 million in 2017 to $1.4 million in 2018.

The largest bonus among Virginia CEOs went to Phebe Novakovic, CEO of Falls Church-based aerospace and defense contractor General Dynamics Corp., the fifth-largest U.S. defense contractor. Novakovic received $4.7 million, a dip of 11% from her 2017 bonus of $5.3 million.

She was the only woman among Virginia’s top-earning CEOs in 2018, and her total compensation of $20.7 million (down from $21.2 million in 2017) placed her second among all the Virginia executives surveyed this year.

The second-highest bonus went to CEO Wesley Bush of Falls Church-based aerospace and defense contractor Northrop Grumman Corp. Bush retired as Northrop Grumman’s CEO on Jan. 1 and was succeeded by Kathy Warden, who has been with the company since 2008.

 Warden joins Novakovic as the latest woman to lead a major defense company with its headquarters in Virginia.

The largest percentage bonus increase among statewide CEOs went to Anthony “Tony” J. Moraco of Science Applications International Corp. (SAIC), a government services and information technology support company based in Reston. His 2018 bonus climbed 132% to nearly $2.7 million, up from $1.2 million the prior year.

Moraco stepped down as SAIC’s CEO on July 31. He was succeeded by Nazzic Keene, another female chief executive running a major government contracting firm in Northern Virginia.

Stratospheric compensation
In at least one respect, Virginia executives could be considered to be underpaid — their compensation falls behind that of the nation’s top 200 executives earning the most.

Equilar’s survey for The New York Times of the 200 top-paid U.S. CEOs found that their median compensation was $18.6 million, an increase of $1.1 million from the previous year.

The biggest — or perhaps smallest — CEO compensation package of all time may have gone to famed tech entrepreneur and SpaceX CEO Elon Musk, who reportedly either received $2.3 billion in stock options or less than nothing last year from his role as CEO of Tesla Inc. (Musk disputed Equilar’s assessment, stating that he lost money as Tesla’s CEO and that he has not received the $2.3 billion in stock, which is dependent on meeting performance goals that have yet to be reached.)

But back to Earth.

The U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics reports that in 2018, the hourly earnings of the average private sector worker increased only 84 cents, a 3.2% raise.
The median household income in Virginia in 2017 was $71,535, according to the latest data from the U.S. Census Bureau.

Equilar’s research on pay for CEOs of 337 companies nationwide showed the median total compensation for CEOs totaled $12 million in 2018, a 7.2% increase from 2017.

The median pay increase for typical workers was 3% last year, according to the Equilar research.

Despite the upward spiral in total compensation for Virginia’s top-paid CEOs, not everyone shared in the abundance.

Some chief executives lost ground.

Percentage-wise, the biggest loser was Thomas J. Baltimore, chairman and president of Tysons-based Park Hotels & Resorts. His total compensation dipped 36%, from $11.9 million in 2017 to     $7.6 million in 2018.

S. Cary Dunston, chief executive of American Woodmark, a kitchen and bath cabinet manufacturer headquartered in Winchester, wasn’t too far behind. Year over year, Dunston’s total compensation declined by 33.8%, from $2.07 million in 2017 to $1.37 million in 2018.

The Virginia CEO with the lowest amount of total compensation in 2018 was Donald H. Layton of Federal Home Loan Mortgage (known as Freddie Mac), a public government-sponsored enterprise in Tysons.

His total compensation totaled $651,000 — the precise amount he received in 2017.  Layton retired as CEO on July 1 and was succeeded by David M. Brickman.

2019 Equilar Virginia CEO Pay Report

Front doors to the future

At 173 acres or so in downtown Richmond, the campus of Virginia Commonwealth University is smaller than the average Virginia farm (181 acres).

Now, plow a portion of 31,000 students, more than 23,000 employees and 2,500 full-time faculty members into the mix (not to mention a daily river of visitors, passersby, vendors and other city denizens), and you can see that sometimes even crossing the street could be a problem.

VCU understands that.

Which is why being able to walk safely across campus streets is one of the priorities spelled out in the university’s new master plan, the latest in a series of plans since VCU was created in 1968 after the General Assembly merged Richmond Professional Institute (RPI) with the Medical College of Virginia (MCV).

The notion of pedestrian safety is especially heightened on the MCV campus, where patients and their families are often on foot navigating streets and sidewalks on their way to treatment, the plan says. (During the 2018-19 school year, there were 47 accidents involving pedestrians at VCU, up from 29 the previous year.)

This is the first master plan in VCU’s history to set a unified vision for all of its properties  — everything from parking lots to hospitals to student housing — on the medical campus and the former RPI campus, now known as the Monroe Park Campus. One goal is to unify the campuses as never before, with increased joint programming and transportation links, among other initiatives.

Open doors
Many college campuses have grand gates marking their entrances. You couldn’t miss them if you tried. That’s not the case at VCU, however.

In fact, VCU’s master plan came up with an easier way to find the university’s front door — creating more than one.

“Our campuses [MCV and Monroe Park] are very porous and blend into the fabric of the city, and we like it that way,” says VCU Vice President for Administration Meredith Weiss, who helped oversee the master plan.

“Suburban and rural universities may have just a few entrances into campus, but we have dozens. The ‘Front Doors’ effort identified the major entrances into our campuses (both vehicular and pedestrian) and identified design solutions to let people know when they are on campus, without separating us from the city,” Weiss adds.

Over the summer, construction pushed ahead on the university’s first two “Front Doors” projects at Franklin and Shafer streets and Main and Linden streets. The Front Doors will make entering and crossing the campus safer and more walkable, Weiss explains.

Conceptual renderings of those first two Front Doors show wide, landscaped and clearly delineated pedestrian crossings that leave little guesswork about the separation between people and vehicles.

ONE VCU
VCU’s master plan incorporates all the goals you might expect any university to have: student success, national prominence and diversity.

And, with its well-known health system, VCU has a laser focus on providing health care at a high level to a region of nearly 1.3 million people.

While VCU has been in business for 51 years as a merged institution, the new master plan — labeled “ONE VCU” — marks the first time that the public research university side of the merger and the VCU Health System, borne out of the Medical College of Virginia, are cooperating on a master plan as part of a shared vision. The university’s board of visitors approved the master plan in March.

In a highly compact, densely populated urban campus like VCU’s, land is everything, and the cooperative master plan acknowledges that reality.

“It highlights the importance of working collaboratively to find the highest and best use of land on each campus to further the mission of VCU,” Weiss says.

As an example of this newly minted collaboration, the VCU administrator pointed to a university-owned surface parking lot, which VCU sold to the Health System. The health system, in turn, will construct a parking deck on the site to address the critical parking shortage for employees on VCU’s MCV Campus.

Parking in any urban environment can be a headache, and it’s no different on the VCU campus.

As the ONE VCU master plan was being developed over a year and a half, a parallel study was underway to determine the university’s parking needs.

The study found that VCU had an inventory of 12,370 parking spaces and leased an additional 2,550.

It also determined that while the university’s Monroe Park Campus had enough parking to meet future demands, the MCV Campus required an additional 2,700 parking spaces.

Part of that need will be filled by a more-than-1,000-space parking garage in the Health System’s new $349 million adult outpatient facility.

Overall, VCU’s goal is to increase the number of parking spots for patients and visitors on the MCV Campus from 980 to about 3,100.

VCU also is working closely with the city’s transit system to provide free bus service to students and employees over the next three years through a multimillion-dollar contract in the hope of getting more cars off campus and off the streets.

Dedicated bike lanes also are a priority, in conjunction with the city’s Bicycle Master Plan.

The city government, for example, opened a protected bike corridor that runs 15 blocks along Franklin Street from VCU’s Monroe Park Campus to the State Capitol.

The university’s growth has in­­creased the number of vehicles entering and leaving the campus on a daily basis, further contributing to congestion, says Larry Little, vice president of support services and planning for the VCU Health System.

“What we’re trying to create on the medical side for the first time is almost like a ring road, where we put our services, or a lot of our services, on the corners of our campus so that folks can go there, park there, leave there and they don’t have to come through the middle of campus,” Little says.

In addition to the adult outpatient facility, VCU Health System is also building a $350 million, inpatient children’s hospital on the MCV Campus that is expected to open in 2022.

Parks and an athletic village
On suburban and rural college campuses, green space is a given — long, rolling lawns, wide-open vistas, verdant viewsheds that stretch to infinity.

By contrast, VCU has a lot of hard surfaces.

To help mitigate the corridors of brick, glass and concrete, the ONE VCU master plan redefines the core of both the university’s campuses with additional green space.

“One of the things we heard on the MCV Campus is that people go down to the State Capitol when they need a little bit of a reprieve from the city or from their jobs, because it’s the closest large green space,” says Jeff Eastman, the university planner.

On the Monroe Park Campus, students have for years used — on a cooperative basis — the city-owned Monroe Park, which has just reopened after two years of renovation. The park is managed by a public-private partnership with directors nominated by the city’s mayor and VCU’s president.

Eastman says Monroe Park has served the university well over the years, but now VCU needs its own parklike green space so it can schedule programs without trying to juggle the demands of a city park.

VCU’s plans call for creating an “iconic” green space on the Monroe Park Campus between the existing Cabell Library and a new student commons and wellness center, as well as expanding a small park on the MCV Campus.

More on-campus housing along the Grace Street corridor is also part of the ONE VCU plan. Administrators say student demand calls for an additional 700 to 1,000 beds on campus.

Currently, only about 16% of the university’s 24,000 undergraduate students live in college-owned, -operated or -affiliated housing, according to the most recent survey by U.S. News & World Report.

Among other things, the master plan recommends further study on the creation of a residence for the university president — VCU currently has no presidential residence — and it envisions an athletic village that would accommodate a new tennis center, practice fields, a baseball stadium and field house.

While there is no mention in the master plan of where the athletic village might be located, Gov. Ralph Northam’s 2018-20 biennial budget gives VCU the right of first refusal on a 20-acre site on Hermitage Road, a few miles from the university. It’s currently occupied by the state Alcohol Beverage Control Authority, which plans to move its headquarters and warehouse to Hanover County by 2021.

In July, the state ABC closed an $8 million deal on a 40-acre site in Hanover County near the Interstate 295 and Pole Green Road interchange.  News reports have suggested that VCU is considering building its athletic village on the site of the former ABC headquarters, which also might include a new stadium for Richmond’s minor league baseball team, the Richmond Flying Squirrels.

But Pam Lepley,  VCU’s vice president for university relations, says, “There is nothing new to report since the budget was passed.”

STEM growth
On the Monroe Park Campus, the master plan calls for construction of a $121 million STEM (science, technology, engineering and mathematics) education building on the site of the existing Franklin Street Gym, which is slated for demolition in 2020.

The university’s fast-growing College of Engineering also is highlighted in the master plan.

A $93 million Engineering Research Building is currently under construction at the northeast corner of Cary and Belvidere streets in Richmond, with completion set for 2020.

The College of Engineering also is on track to grow to 2,000 students by 2020, a 39% increase over its enrollment in 2013, when Dean Barbara D. Boyan took over, outlining an aggressive agenda for growth.

Boyan had three goals: “Increase the number of students, increase the research profile and increase faculty. We’ve been able to do that,” she says.

Over the next five to six years, the College of Engineering plans to enroll 3,000 undergraduate students, the majority in computer science and computer engineering, aided by the construction of a new building dedicated to helping students train for the digital economy.

But like every other growth decision on the tightly packed VCU campus addressed in the university’s master plan, the College of Engineering will grow only if it makes the best use of the land that’s available, even if it means tearing up what’s already there.

Executive Dean John Leonard says the engineering college already has found the spot for its future digital economy building.

“It’s a parking lot right now,” he says.

Give a little, take a little.

No hidden figures

Growing up in Kingwood, West Virginia, Cheryl Ringer, the chief financial officer of nonprofit Blue Ridge Hospice in Winchester, realized that she had an aptitude for math and liked to solve problems.

That’s a common denominator in the early lives of several female CFOs nominated for the Virginia CFO Awards, which were presented by Virginia Business in June. (The winners are profiled on Pages 79-83.)

Nationally, female CFOs still are a rarity at major corporations. A recent issue of the Journal of Accountancy says women occupy 12.6% of CFO positions at 673 large companies, according to an analysis by executive search firm Crist|Kolder Associates.

That trend, however, may be changing, if Virginia is any indicator. More than half of this year’s Virginia CFO Award nominees (19 of 35) are women, including two of the four winners.

The Virginia Society of CPAs doesn’t track the number of female CFOs in the commonwealth, but 43% of its 13,500 members are women. 

Former board member
In Ringer’s case, her early interest in problem-solving led to an accounting major at Shepherd University in Shepherdstown, West Virginia.

Following stints at West Virginia and Virginia accounting firms, Ringer developed an expertise in nonprofit accounting and was hired by Blue Ridge Hospice as its CFO after serving on its board of directors.

“It was a small nonprofit company at the time, only a $3 million company,” Ringer says. “I was their treasurer for about three years, and I went to the CEO and said, ‘You need a CFO.

You don’t need a bookkeeper. You need a real CFO.’”

She was offered the job — but declined.

“Then, a few months later, I decided it was a great thing to do, public accounting and helping other people solve their problems and giving them advice,” Ringer says.

She could not know that the job would unleash her creative and entrepreneurial spirit — all in the interest of solving what she says is one of the biggest challenges for a nonprofit institution.

“As a nonprofit, you have to find various ways to raise money and to have different funding sources,” Ringer says.

When she was on the hospice’s board of directors, she was alarmed that 90% of its revenue came from Medicare. “What happens if Medicare dries up?” she recalls thinking. “You have to have alternative funding.”

That new revenue source turned out to be a thrift shop.

“Sixteen years ago, we had a lot of [families] who wanted to give back after we’d taken care of their loved ones. But they didn’t have the financial funding. So, they wanted to give us stuff — clothing or the contents of their houses,” Ringer says. “So, we did some research and found that in Florida hospices were using thrift shops as a funding source.”

For Blue Ridge Hospice, she says, opening a thrift shop was a huge leap, and it fell to her to help make it work.

She spent many of her days helping run the 4,000-square-foot shop and many of her nights performing CFO duties.

Operating a thrift shop to help fund a hospice was a risk, but the venture has turned out well, Ringer says. “Now we have eight thrift shops and a warehouse — it’s huge.”

The shops — most of which average 10,000 to 15,000 square feet — also are part of a recycling program that takes unwanted computers, monitors, telephones and other electronics, keeping them out of landfills while producing a cash flow.

It’s no small-time operation. Ringer says the shops gross about $3 million a year. Recently a couple — both of whom had been served by the hospice — donated their home and two cars.

Today, Blue Ridge Hospice, which has a staff of 250, brings in about $18 million in revenue annually — six times the amount when Ringer started — and provides end-of-life services to about 1,500 people every year, up from a few hundred 16 years ago.

Ringer says the hospice combines her advocacy for service to the community with a solid professional career.

“I think the future of hospice, and any nonprofit, is driven and will grow based on the desire of the community,” she says.

Finding a balance
Richmond Ballet CFO Tracy Coogle initially thought about pursuing a career in medicine, but after taking a university-level biology course, she realized it wasn’t a good match for her.

Trying to figure out what she wanted to do with her life, she enrolled at Reynolds Community College in Richmond. Her boyfriend, who later became her husband, suggested taking a few business courses. One of those classes was entry-level accounting.

“My friends said, ‘Tracy, something is wrong with you if you like accounting,’” she remembers. “But I found something that I really enjoyed. It really clicked with me. I kind of discovered it by accident, and I’m grateful I did.”

Coogle was a full-time employee at Crestar Bank when she attended community college. She continued working at the bank part time after transferring to the University of Richmond to major in accounting and marketing.

Another fortunate “accident” occurred when she took a course at Virginia Commonwealth University to earn a college credit in government and nonprofit accounting.

“It was another focus area of accounting that I wouldn’t have known about otherwise,” Coogle says.

When Crestar merged with SunTrust Banks in 1998, Coogle was asked to transfer to Atlanta. But she had a young daughter — the first of two — and she didn’t want to move.

“I love Richmond,” she says. So, she became a consultant and worked from home.

“I found that accounting is really a flexible career,” she explains.

While her daughters were little, Coogle took part-time contract accounting jobs for a range of nonprofits.

Before joining the Richmond Ballet, she worked in top financial positions with the Virginia Repertory Theatre and the Richmond SPCA.

Additionally, she has been a volunteer, leader and board member of the Girl Scouts of the Commonwealth of Virginia for 17 years.

Over the years, Coogle has learned a lot about life and a lot about herself.

“I thought I was going to be super mom,” she says. “That is [a] myth. You can do one thing well or several things not as well. For me being in a nonprofit, I can take advantage of the flexibility. You have to find the balance that works for you — keep looking till you find that balance.”

Following a role model
Teresa Kraus, CFO of the Virginia Symphony Orchestra in Norfolk, grew up thinking that accounting was a natural career for women.

Her mother was chief accountant of a chain of home improvement stores in Pennsylvania.

“She was very innovative at the time. … She actually brought in an IBM mainframe, which was the size of an entire room. She computerized the company,” Kraus recalls. “She was my role model.”

“Our family had six girls, no boys. Half of us went into business and half into medical.”

Kraus’ first job was in insurance accounting, and she was once the controller of a small company. But she always was drawn to the nonprofit world, she says, where “you have the feeling you’re working for an organization where what they do really does matter.”

A lot is taking place at the Virginia Symphony. It will celebrate its centennial season in 2020-21. In addition, its music director, JoAnn Falletta, is retiring next June after leading the orchestra since 1991.

The symphony also recently began a fundraising campaign to establish an endowment.

Donors want to know that their money is being spent wisely, and Kraus says one of her jobs as CFO is to show that it is.

“It’s always a financial challenge in arts organizations,” she says, noting that one of her most satisfying duties is providing the professional expertise to meet those challenges.

Driven and industrious
Tracy Nguyen, CFO of Fairfax-based Highlight Technologies, helped the technology services company grow from $8 million in annual revenues and 60 employees in 2014 to $35 million in revenue and 230 employees in 2018.

Nguyen likes working for the woman-owned business that serves federal government customers. A lot of her satisfaction comes from helping the company grow while keeping a sharp eye on the budget.

Good financial controls, she says, help keep the company competitive while providing a wide range of benefits for its employees.

Her best advice for women who aspire to CFO positions is to be driven and industrious.

“That’s what I do,” she says. “You just have to work hard to get where you are.”

Mission driven

John Allen began a program helping veterans of special operations forces transition to civilian jobs because of a need he saw firsthand.

A 30-year-old Virginia Beach resident, Allen is a former Navy SEAL who suddenly found himself looking for a new career outside the military.

Allen joined the SEALs in 2010. On April 19, 2014, he was on his first deployment when his team was attacked in Afghanistan.
In an online narrative, Allen recalls the moment:

“I watched a hand grenade come over the wall in front of me, bounce off my right shoulder and land in the mud between the six of us. I had enough time to realize that we were most likely going to die before the explosion sent thousands of pieces of metal flying in every direction.

“I vividly recall the searing sensation in my legs and hip as the shrapnel slashed through. I was knocked to the ground in a heap, shoulder badly dislocated, and bullets flying overhead as our enemy tried to finish us all off.”

Luckily, no U.S. servicemen died in the attack — an airstrike was called in and helicopters evacuated the wounded. Allen and nine of the 24 members in his platoon received Purple Hearts.

By the beginning of 2016, pain from his wounds and a desire to spend more time with his family led Allen and his wife, Amanda, to decide that it was time for him to leave the SEALs.

His long-term plan was to go to business school and earn an MBA. He already had earned a bachelor’s degree in philosophy and English from the University of Massachusetts at Amherst.

His military contract called for him to serve through 2018. But in 2017 what Allen describes as an obscure Navy policy required him to either separate early from the military or re-enlist for an additional two or three years.

“All of a sudden, I had to make this huge life decision,” Allen says, describing a conversation that he had with his wife. “I knew we weren’t going to stay in. She knew I had to go find a job. She was pregnant with a second kid — full-chaos, full-panic mode.”

A fateful message
Then fate intervened. Allen saw a LinkedIn message from an executive trying to connect with special operations forces members and jet-fighter pilots transitioning to civilian life.

The executive was Jordan Selleck, the CEO and co-founder of DebtMaven, a New York-based deal management platform for debt financing. One of Selleck’s friends was a former fighter pilot who was having trouble adjusting to life outside the armed forces.

So, Selleck posted the Linked­In note, asking others about their experiences in making the switch.

Allen replied immediately. “My response to him was like insane,” he recalls. “It was nine pages long. I told him, ‘I don’t know what I’m doing; I need help.’  I was desperate.”

What people don’t understand, Allen says, is that moving from military to civilian life is a big jump.

“Whether you’re a fighter pilot or a Navy SEAL or you’re a chef, it doesn’t matter,” he says.

Selleck and Allen teamed up to bring corporate executives and other business leaders together with special operations forces veterans from various military branches.

Elite Meet created
That partnership led to the creation of Elite Meet in 2017. The first event was March 30 that year.

Selleck leveraged his business contacts, while Allen used his connections with service members. Money was raised and the Elite Meet event was held in New York with 50 people attending. Twenty were veterans.

The $50,000 needed to stage the event and pay for the veterans’ flights and hotel rooms came from a variety of sources, including the SEAL Foundation and Hope for the Warriors, another veterans organization.

“Within 72 hours of the event, five of our [special operations forces] attendees had job offers,” Allen recalls.

Since then, Allen, now CEO of Elite Meet, has been raising money and making contacts to organize events to bring together other elite veterans with executives from business and industry.

Elite Meet has hosted more than 50 events, most of them single-day meetings. More than 250 veterans have received at least one job offer through the program.

“At its core Elite Meet is just this: a highly curated network on both sides. Your veterans are chosen to be here for a reason and your professionals have been chosen to meet those metrics,” Allen says.

“The idea was, they want to meet each other even if they don’t know it yet. It would create an immediate interaction, and both sides would wow each other. It’s all about highly curated matchmaking,” he says.

‘It’s a powerful event’
Nick Creasey, the former member of a U.S. Navy special operations team now living in Delaware, says all the stars aligned during that first Elite Meet event.

“So, we got to New York City. They flew us up there, they put us up at a Marriott, and then we had an event the following day,” he says. “It was just several different speakers, a lot of different breakout sessions where we could just go mingle and talk with the professionals in the room, and we ended up going to have dinner and drinks with the same professionals.

“I personally met my current CEO at one of the very first breakout sessions, and we just hit it off. It’s a powerful event,” Creasey says.

Today, he is managing director, strategic partnerships, at Resourcive, a Mount Vernon, N.Y.-based firm that focuses on cost reduction and network improvement for multilocation companies.

His CEO, Tom Gesky, says he wasn’t quite sure what he was looking for when he attended that first Elite Meet event.

But when he saw the elite veterans attending the meeting, he got the answers he needed.

“I have come to realize that in the business world, mental toughness and mindset is really, really important,” Gesky says. “These guys have it. They’re not into politics in the office. They are really focused and they have integrity.

“These are characteristics that are fabulous for any company’s culture,” he says.
So far, Gesky has hired four Elite Meet members.

Part of company culture
Kyle Hall of Chesapeake, a former Green Beret who is now director of operations at Resourcive, says hiring former Special Operations veterans is now part of the company’s culture.

He points to one of the characteristics of  special operations forces veterans that often hinders them in their job searches: an unwillingness to mention their individual accomplishments, part of the team mentality built into their training.

“In the Green Berets, for example, one of our monikers is ‘quiet professionals,’” Hall says.

Gartner Inc., a 15,000-employee research and advisory company based in Stamford, Conn., is another firm that has formed a good relationship with Elite Meet.

“Gartner values a set of qualitative traits such as executive presence, will to win and lifelong learning,” says Sarah Spenelli, the company’s senior recruiting specialist.

“Based on our prior experience hiring military talent, and in partnership with our Veterans Employee Resource Group, we know that Special Forces military personnel embody these traits at a much deeper level. Elite Meet has helped us to hire several individuals who fit this profile,” she adds.

Allen, the Elite Meet CEO, says the organization is still in its startup stage, with only three full-time employees.

He says the organization’s future depends on employers and donors who see the value of bringing together some of the military’s most well-trained veterans with business executives.

“We want our members, as they take up spots in business, to support the community they came from,” he says.

Dressed for success

In 2014, Sue Farrell decided that service members leaving the military needed well-made clothes for their job interviews.

Farrell, a longtime Richmond-area real estate agent, began her first clothing drive close to home. “I started with Joe’s closet,” she says.

Joe was her late husband, Joseph Farrell, former CEO and chairman of what was then called The Pittston Co., now known as the Brink’s Co. He passed away in 2013.

Farrell says her husband’s closet was filled with corporate attire — upscale suits, trousers and accessories.

And, so was born an effort to honor her husband, a Navy veteran, that has blossomed into a mission for Farrell.

The clothing program, called Boots to Suits, is available to transitioning veterans, both men and women.

After Farrell emptied her late husband’s closet, she enlisted close friends and acquaintances to search their closets for minimally worn clothing.

Besides gathering clothing for veterans, Farrell is a constant fund­raiser, utilizing everything from a Dominion Energy golf tournament to gifts from anyone sympathetic to veterans’ causes.

The money goes for new shirts and other clothing that fill in the gaps from donated apparel. Funds also are needed to pay employees who work with Farrell and for rent on a building that provides storage and dressing rooms.

“On average, it costs about $300 a vet,” Farrell says of the total cost of preparing a veteran for job interviews, not including general operational costs.

She has a goal of outfitting about 500 veterans a year, including wounded warriors and, in some instances, the spouses of injured veterans who have become the family breadwinners.

Farrell says veterans come from military installations throughout the state to select clothing and have fittings.

Some tailors in the Richmond area donate their time to measure the veterans and ensure that their clothing has a perfect fit.

One of them is Franco Ambrogi, co-founder of Franco’s Fine Clothier. He is an Army veteran, and his son was a Navy pilot who lost his life in service to his country.

For his part, Ambrogi says serving veterans is a gift for him, as well as a patriotic service.

“I’ve always believed in America,” Ambrogi says. “And the people who put their lives on the line for America deserve something better than just a slap on the back and ‘thank you.’”

Farrell also works with the Virginia Department of Veterans Services and other groups as part of the Boots to Suits program.

“This fall we will celebrate our fifth year, and it’s been magic,” Farrell says. “I’m not a veteran, but I fell in love with one, and that was Joe.”

Building a better workforce

Barry DuVal, president and CEO of the Virginia Chamber of Commerce, says his organization’s job is to help the commonwealth become the best state for business.

“The way to do that is to have the best workforce,” he says.

DuVal believes one avenue for achieving that goal is capturing the expertise, enterprise and energy of veterans who are looking for civilian careers.

“That’s where Hire Vets Now came from — having the goal to train more veterans for civilian careers, connecting veterans and their spouses to jobs,” DuVal says.

The program seeks to make contact with service members before they leave active duty. They can learn about job opportunities from chamber members and companies participating in the Virginia Values Veterans (V3) program

Networking events at the military installations allow service members to meet with employers.

In large part, Hire Vets Now emerged out of conversations among members of the chamber’s Military and Veterans Affairs Executive Committee, DuVal says.

“We had a pilot program in 2018 that resulted in about 445 service members attending. That was nine events, 445 attending,” he explains. “This year we have 16 events scheduled. We expect over 1,300 to attend in 2019.”

The Hire Vets Now program works closely with the Veterans Transition Assistance Program (VTAP) at the Virginia Department of Veterans Services.
Alison Foster, VTAP’s program manager, says that the number of veterans transitioning into civilian life has numbered 12,000 to 14,000 annually during the past two years.

VTAP’s goal, Foster says, is to reach transitioning veterans 12 to 16 months before they leave the military. “People who start planning early have more success,” she says.

Yorktown-based ITA International is one of the Hire Vets Now success stories.

The defense contractor has grown from a single employee in 2005 to more than 400 today.

“About 75% of them are veterans,” said Mike Melo, a former naval officer who is the company’s founder.

Melo says the challenge for transitioning veterans is understanding what the civilian marketplace is looking for. One of the challenges for civilian employers, on the other hand, is understanding the mission-oriented mindset and diverse skills that veterans bring to the table, he adds.

Nationally, veterans are being quickly absorbed into the civilian workforce. In April, the Department of Labor said the veteran unemployment rate in the U.S. was 2.3%, the lowest level since 2000.

Kenneth M. Sullivan, the CEO of Smithfield Foods, announced an initiative in 2016 to make veterans 10% of the company’s domestic workforce. That would be about 4,000 workers.

Schwanzetta Williams, the company’s director of talent acquisition, says she’s not a veteran, but her son is a member of the U.S. Coast Guard and her father was an Army veteran.

Those connections, she says, have been invaluable.

“It’s helped me to gain a broader understanding of some of the challenges our military veterans have as they transition out of the military,” Williams says.

Troy Vandenberg, Smithfield’s military talent acquisition manager, says Virginia’s commitment to hiring veterans and helping them transition to the civilian sector is second to none.

“I definitely think Virginia is leading the way,” Vandenberg says.

EDITOR'S NOTE: The print version of this story misstated the name of Smithfield Foods President and CEO Kenneth M. Sullivan. 

Test flight

Look to the skies.

Birds, fireflies, mosquitoes and other winged creatures from the natural world increasingly will be joined by swarms of drones as companies race to develop an autonomous drone delivery industry.

Ground zero — or maybe now it’s sky zero — for Google will be the New River Valley area in Virginia.

Virginia Tech has been working with Alphabet, Google’s parent company, on Project Wing, the nation’s first FAA-approved commercial delivery service using long-distance aerial drones out of sight of operators. (The drones have a delivery range up to six miles.) The service is expected to begin operation there this year.

Virginia Tech is one of several major state research universities that have been exploring the use of drones – for everything from delivering groceries to carrying, and administering, an injection to reverse an opioid overdose, to bringing critical parts to Navy ships at sea, even in hostile territory. 

As one example of how drones can be employed, Project Wing delivered hundreds of lunches to Virginia Tech students in September 2016. The event marked the first large-scale drone delivery to members of the general public.

The Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) has estimated that as many as 1.6 million commercial drones will be in use by 2021.

Virginia Tech’s delivery-drone partnership with Alphabet “will be the first time for the general public to begin what I think will be a totally new revolution in how they engage with aviation,” says Mark Blanks, director of the university’s Mid-Atlantic Aviation Partnership (MAAP) test site. “It will be the first time ever the average Joe Public will be able to receive goods in a whole new manner.”

As currently envisioned, delivery drones would hover about 20 feet off the ground and lower packages on tethers to customers.

A large part of the effort has been led by MAAP, which operates an FAA-designated test site for unmanned aircraft systems.

Started in 2013, MAAP serves as a bridge between federal regulators and industry partners to develop safety procedures and protocols laying the groundwork for expanded unmanned aircraft operations.

From 2014 to 2016, Virginia Tech received more than $2.6 million from the state Federal Action Contingency Trust (FACT) fund to establish the MAAP unmanned aircraft test site.

“Then we became self-sustaining because the value proposition was significant for industry,” he adds, noting that its funding primarily comes from industry and government grants.

Virginia Tech has a history of developing FAA-accepted safety guidelines to ensure that drone flights can safely operate beyond the visual line of sight of the drone operator and flying over  people — two critical elements necessary for the delivery-drone industry to operate successfully.

Virginia Tech research also includes a project to incorporate autonomous algorithms and machine learning in using drones for search and rescue missions, funded by a $1.5 million grant from the National Science Foundation.

Drones can be used to fly over dangerous terrain or explore large areas to help first responders on the ground narrow the parameters of their search, says Ryan Williams, an assistant professor in Virginia Tech’s Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering.

In another drone-related research project at Virginia Tech, Blanks and MAAP worked with insurance giant State Farm to gain an FAA waiver to allow aerial drones to survey property damage caused by hurricanes Florence and Michael.

To the rescue
At Virginia Commonwealth University in Richmond a group of seniors in the College of Engineering have developed a preliminary model for an “ambulance” drone designed to deliver and administer a lifesaving injection of the opioid-overdose reversal drug Naloxone. A remote drone operator guides the injections with the aid of a camera mounted on the front of the drone.

“There needs to be more testing; [the ambulance drone] needs to be commercialized,” says Erdem Topsakal, chairman of the department of electrical and computer engineering, who appealed for business investment to fund the project beyond its preliminary stages.

The U.S. Army Night Vision and Electronic Sensors Directorate has sponsored the project.

“It opens up other smart health care at the edge,” says Nibir K. Dhar, the directorate’s chief scientist.

Topsakal and Dhar say that the ambulance drone has obvious implications for civilian health care — especially in congested cities or rural areas where emergency personnel may be unable to respond in a timely manner. The drone also can be used in military situations. “If you’re in the middle of a battlefield and a soldier is losing blood, something can be injected to stop the bleeding,” says Topsakal.

Delivery on high seas
At Old Dominion University in Norfolk, researchers and students worked with the Navy seeking a way for an aerial drone to carry small ship parts or packages weighing as much as 30 pounds to vessels on the high seas.

But there’s a caveat: “What they want is to be able to locate a ship in an environment when they don’t necessarily have radio communication with a drone” and they don’t have a GPS signal, says Thomas Alberts, professor of mechanical and aerospace engineering at ODU’s Batten College of Engineering & Technology.

Drones typically utilize GPS technology for navigation, Alberts says, but a GPS can be susceptible to cyberattacks or outside interference, “so they want to avoid that scenario.”

Using drones instead of manned crafts to deliver parts and components to a ship could also save lives, especially in hostile areas.

For a prototype to navigate without the aid of GPS, a group of ODU students employed a larger and more expensive inertial measurement unit (IMU) than is typically used on drones. The drone’s path is calculated using data from the IMU, measuring distance traveled by the drone and its directional changes. Once the drone is within camera view of a target vessel for delivery, an image-recognition process identifies the ship as well as a symbol marking the drone’s shipboard landing spot.

The ODU project wrapped up in late June. It was funded for a year through a $60,000 grant from the Office of Naval Research.

Insect-size vehicles
Research scientists at the University of Virginia’s School of Engineering & Applied Science have been studying butterflies and other flying insects as they examine the possibilities of developing small robotic air vehicles.

These micro air vehicles (MAVs) would be so minuscule that they could fly through cracks in rubble to search for earthquake victims. They could also be employed to explore radioactive environments.

Other U.Va. research involves autonomous underwater vehicles that could be deployed for long periods of time to collect data for scientists or as a surveillance tool for the military.

The underwater vehicle research has been led by Hilary Bart-Smith, a professor of mechanical and aerospace engineering, with $14 million in funding from the Office of Naval Research.

Early protypes for two micro air vehicles — one the size of a dragonfly — as well as an autonomous underwater vehicle created to look and swim like a manta ray  — have already been advanced.

But far more work lies ahead.

“The fundamental science takes years to discover the secrets of flying and swimming,” says Haibo Dong, a U.Va. aerospace engineer and associate professor who has been working on both the MAVs and the autonomous underwater vehicles.

Blanks of Virginia Tech says drones are on the minds of many these days — industries, independent scientists, universities and the general public.

“I think it’s primarily because of the great potential they offer to many different aspects of life in general: the ability to revolutionize the way many types of businesses function, the ability to possibly save lives, to save money.

“It’s a transformational technology,” Blanks says. 

Virginia Business Special Projects Editor Veronica Garabelli assisted with this report.

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