It’s Superbowl Sunday and I am writing this message to you. Talk about dedication, lol!
As a former football player, I can tell you that what looks like a sprint is actually the culmination of many years of hard work and dedication. To get to the big game, the players and coaches have been working on developing their skills on the practice field and during the regular season, as well as spending endless hours in the gym. For the ownership and management of the Philadelphia Eagles and the Kansas City Chiefs, playing in the Super Bowl is the culmination of many years of draft picks, trades, training camps and player development. No one gets to the game without the entire team putting in the work.
While it is a different type of work, it also takes years of preparation to reach the pinnacle of our careers where our employers count on us to help them navigate the future to create lasting value for our owners and our employees. Whether you work in a large public company, or a small privately owned one, I am confident saying that the goals are aligned. Everyone wants to see their company grow and provide opportunities for their employees to grow alongside the company.
If you attended our last event, you heard from Vivekanand Jayakumar about the uncertainty our economy faces in 2023. There are three schools of thought right now. The first is that there will not be a recession in 2023, the second is that there will be a small and shallow recession in 2023, and the third is that we will see a deep recession in 2023 and it will be unlike anything that we have seen before.
While Vivekanand falls into the second camp, he did note that we are currently seeing some things that we have never seen before and the tools in the Fed’s hands are few and may not be effective against some of the things that we are seeing now. Particularly looking at employment, the economy shed a massive number of jobs when COVID first hit. However, we have recovered those jobs in a relatively short amount of time, yet we still have recession fears.
As a comparison, it took many years to recover the jobs lost in the Great Recession. The stock market has similarly recovered, and we are taking every bit of good news, no matter how small, as evidence that the next bull market is on the way. All of that has occurred despite the Fed’s aggressive action of raising interest rates which is supposed to be cooling things down. If you missed the last meeting, you missed an interesting and deep discussion of how this time it truly may be different.
I can understand why people may have missed the event. We all have a lot going on right now even without the economic uncertainty. It is year end, audit season and tax season and I am sure many of our members are burning the midnight oil. It is easy to see how heading out to an FEI event can seem like the last thing that you have time to do. Unfortunately, the missed opportunity may only be revealed through hindsight of an NFL player skipping a workout, or team management skipping taking a serious look at an upcoming player.
I encourage everyone to take the time to attend all our meetings. If you don’t – just like the player or team management above – there is a chance you could miss out on an idea or concept that could help your company navigate the future and not realize it. That idea may come from our speaker, or it may come from one of your fellow members during the networking time around the official program.
Your next opportunity to attend a meeting is scheduled for March 21. The event is going to be held at the Tampa International Airport. The plan is to hold it on the rooftop area on the spectacular new office tower they have constructed, however, there may be some scheduling conflicts and thus the tentative date. Your Programs Committee is hopeful that they will have the date locked down by February 17
th, so watch your inbox for the final confirmed date.
Thank you, as always, for your membership and your continued support of your chapter. I look forward to seeing everyone in March.
Rob Taylor
President
FEI Tampa Bay Chapter