At TOBA Leadership Institute, Gary Hartfield works to elevate future business leaders

Gary Hartfield is in his 24th year in the assisted living facility industry.

He started as an undergrad in engineering — but he quickly found that wasn’t his course. In the '90s, as the first Black person to work in Florida Southern College’s admissions office, he pioneered multicultural learning programs and found a passion for helping others and small businesses grow. That steered him to an MBA, and he opened Serenity Village in 2002 with one and a half employees and eight residents.

By 2019, that grew to 110 employees and 200 clients.

While it sold a portion of the business in 2019 to downsize, it serves clients in Pinellas, Hillsborough and Polk. A Serenity Village unit also provides industry and insurance consulting and matches insurance and financial needs to coverage products.

Outside of his business, Hartfield leads the Tampa Organization of Black Affairs Leadership Institute, which will seat its fourth annual cohort next February. He also leads The Refinery, a biannual community gathering.

How did you find the assisted living business? I felt good about my entrepreneurial skills. I'd just finished my MBA. I started doing the research around 2000, and I worked on it for about a year and a half or two years. Working with my sister, we wanted to buy and build a larger facility in my hometown, and that didn't work out. I couldn't raise the capital to inject into the half-million-dollar project. But on Dec. 21, 2002, we closed on the first assisted living facility in Seminole, in Pinellas County, for $200,000.

About 16 hours later, my father called me to tell me my sister was dead. I'm in corporate America. So the idea was for my sister to run the business and for me to be a strategic part of managing and growing it.

We've just achieved a major milestone, and it's Christmas, and instead of celebrating all this, we have to bury my youngest sister. She took an overdose of OxyContin and was a recovering cocaine addict. She had five years clean. 

So tough. An origin story you didn’t expect. Definitely not how we planned. 

You were an undergrad at Florida A&M for electrical engineering. Why wasn’t that your path? Two things happened that ever affected my trajectory. One: I'm standing on the side of the road, and there's a pay phone, and I go to call my mom. It's starting to rain, I'm trying to register for classes, and I don't have the financial resources. I'm figuring it out. I'm building the plane as I'm flying, but I want to go home and back where it's comfortable. I want to go where everybody knows my name, and I'm the smartest guy. I thought to myself, if I tell my mom everything that is going wrong, she'll allow me to come home.

As I start telling the story, I'm crying, and she's listening. I can't register, and my account has a hold. I need $500 for my books, and I can’t recover if I get behind in chemistry and physics. She listened and got quiet. She said, “You know what I want you to do?” And I'm thinking in my mind that she's going to tell me to pack up my things.

She says. "I want you to stand." Then she said, "And after you've done everything you possibly can do, I want you to stand anyhow. Keep standing."

There was no turning back. There are no excuses — which only probably fostered fortitude. Yes. I said, OK, I've done that. I've endured and I'm here, and I did OK. This is what changed the trajectory of my life forever and probably for all of my descendants. For me, this is when I transitioned from being a boy to becoming a man.

Slowly but surely, you steered toward entrepreneurship. With the MBA, I spent most of my time working on projects for entrepreneurs in the area. I'd do financial analysis; I might do a financial plan or an HR manual or work on different consulting projects. I loved that part of it. The financial piece really helped me to understand that going through an MBA program, most people think you're going to learn how to run a business. You learn the theory of economics, finance, management and so forth. But learning how to run a business is absolutely not part of that. So with those entrepreneurial projects I was involved in, I got a chance to do their financials. I understood profit and loss and I'm looking at real PnLs and balance sheets and how all of this ties together. Then if the organization is doing well, how do we present this to a lending institution or an investor to say, 'Hey, it's a large organization. These are the quick ratios and liquidity and cash flows.'

I attended the TOBA Leadership Institute graduation and experienced much energy and entrepreneurial spirit. What was the program's rationale? The idea came out of the murders of George Floyd and Ahmaud Arbery, Breonna Taylor, and the list continues. During that time in our country's history, for the Black community, there wasn't anything necessarily new about these tragedies. What was new for the country was that now, people were capturing this issue on their cell phones.  

We are supposed to be the beacon of hope and leaders for the world regarding democracy, civil rights, human rights and everything. We're not living up to that. How do we change that? We change that by having a diverse pool of talent to draw from. That's not going to happen by happenstance. So we have to be intentional about building a pipeline.

Are you seeing that pay off as your alumni go to work? We are. From conception until now, five Ph.Ds have completed the program. Two JDs. One who earned a federal clerkship in Washington, D.C. One earned the distinction of being the first dean and tenured professor in the College of Education at the University of Tampa. One young lady followed in my footsteps and applied and was accepted into Leadership Florida. We have another couple submitting their applications, hopefully, to go through Leadership Florida as well.

What we're doing is, with all intentionality, trying to build pipelines where now they're expanding their opportunities, reaching back and helping others, opening those doors, making sure that you have representation in the boardroom, policymaking, or even if they choose to run for elected office, that they bring a level of consciousness to whatever it is they turn to.

What should our readers know about B2B opportunities in your space? B2B opportunities will be related to the actual facility and partnerships with people who understand the landscape of what's required by AHCA in facility layout. In Florida, we have a unique issue from June through November, unlike any other place other than the Caribbean, which is hurricane season. You have to make sure any facility that you have not only is prepared, but if you're working with individuals that are fragile and you go without power for five to seven days, it's [dangerous]. What's your generator look like? You have to think through your contingency plan for managing staff and their families because you have to have staff there. 

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