- This is a production of WEDU PBS, Tampa, St.

Petersburg, Sarasota.

[music] - We each have turning points events that change the course of our lives.

Often it's a relationship, or it could be a career change, but sometimes it's a family tragedy.

There's no road map to guide us in facing these challenges.

You're about to meet the CEO of a fourth generation family business, who dramatically changed the course of her life after a family member died by suicide, and who's become a catalyst for change in the Tampa Bay area.

- Suncoast Business Forum, brought to you by the financial services firm of Raymond James, offering personalized wealth management advice and banking and capital markets expertise, all with a commitment to putting client's financial well-being first.

More information is available at raymondjames.com.

[music] - What happens when you take an innovative arts professional and make her a car dealer?

It's like mixing apples and oranges, right?

Well, that's Liz Dimmitt's world, after the suicide of her brother Lawrence in 2017.

Liz, who was a successful cultural and arts entrepreneur in New York City, pivoted and joined the family's fourth generation Tampa Bay auto dealership.

Since then, she's crafted a formula for balancing business, cultural and social change.

Liz, welcome to the Suncoast Business Forum.

- Thank you so much for having me.

- It's great to have you.

Now you're in the car business.

- I am.

- The family has been in the car business over 100 years.

You're also an arts entrepreneur.

You have a very innovative installation experience experiential exhibit called FloridaRAMA in St.

Petersburg.

Tell us about these two very different things.

- Well, they're very different in that the dealership has been around 2026 is 102 years.

And then FloridaRAMA is a startup.

So at FloridaRAMA, we're very much building the plane in flight.

And then at Dimmitt Chevrolet, um, the business model is established.

It's 102 years old.

We obviously keep up with innovation in the times there.

I have a very seasoned executive team and of course family members that are great mentors in the business.

While at FloridaRAMA, there isn't a business model that existed and we're sort of creating it as we go.

And it's always sort of something new and different every day.

But both companies are very much their success depends on a really great customer experience and word of mouth, marketing or recommendations.

So they're very consumer driven, both businesses.

So there are some similarities there too.

- It was the death of your brother Lawrence in 2017.

He was 32 years old, died by suicide.

That brought you back home.

How were you able and you and your family able to cope with that and make the decision that you need to change your path, and this is where you needed to be?

- I'm not sure that we ever sort of I made a decision.

I was going to change my path.

I just sort of changed the path.

But my family is very close knit and we have a very strong community around us.

So I think after the death of my brother by suicide, really being together and having friends, family and the local community and the incredible organizations and support systems we have here in Tampa Bay kept us going, and especially my brother's friends who remain a great resource and support system for our family.

But the business side, um, if something's just always been around in your life, you assume it's always going to be around.

And I have a background in business and have run several companies and just was here actually, when my brother happened to pass away and started going into Dimmitt Chevrolet and just really never stopped.

So I don't think I made a conscious decision or my family never sat down and said, who's going to do this now?

It was just a natural thing for me to do.

I had the confidence that I could do it.

Not that I knew it all, but that I could start to help and do it.

And then just started going in with my dad and being a part of the team.

But it was definitely an interesting time for me to go into a business where the people that I now essentially am their boss, have been in the business for 30, 40, 50 years and sort of know all the acronyms and all the things about the car industry.

Um, and I was new to it.

I mean, obviously, I grew up around it and knew a lot of the terms and things, but I didn't know the ins and outs of every day.

So that was really interesting and challenging.

But I think also at a time in the world where technology and social media and digital marketing were taking a bigger and bigger role, I sort of brought a fresh perspective, having worked more in those areas, and of course had run companies and been an entrepreneur before.

So it was, you know, running another company.

- After your brother's death, your family established a foundation in in his memory called, "Love IV Lawrence Foundation."

It has grown substantially since then.

Tell us about Love IV Lawrence.

- Love IV Lawrence, is a foundation that really focuses on destigmatizing talk around suicide and mental health, and really changing the conversation so that we can prevent other families from having to go through the tragedy that we experienced, and it really grew out of my brother's friends and our family wanting to make some sort of meaning or have some sort of something good coming out of my brother's passing.

And, you know, a death by suicide is a particularly painful kind of death that leaves lots of questions, lots of pain, self-blame, all those sort of things.

And we had to immediately sort of learn a lot about it so that we could cope.

And then also, there are all these great resources in Tampa Bay today that really taught us a lot right off the bat and came to our rescue and to support us.

And I think we just realized how important that work was and that we wanted to do more of it.

So I remember the day of my brother's passing, we all sort of convened at my parents house.

Everyone made their way there and asking my mom, you know, what do you want us to tell people?

Because it was very much, I think, a a parent's decision.

And she said in that moment, that first day, we're not pretending like this didn't happen to our family.

We're just going to tell the truth.

And I think having a family of note, or that people knew about and had seen our name around say, you know, this.

And it was said in the paper at scion of the family, which is such an interesting word to have said about your brother, but, you know, to have us to talk about my brother.

Yes, he died by suicide.

And mental health is a part of this story, obviously, and embrace it.

And I think talk about it right from the beginning gave a lot of other permission to do this.

Other people, the permission to do the same.

- There are very few people who can trace their family's history back 100 years, as you can on your father's side, the Dimmitt side of the family, much less 175 years.

Like your mother's side, your mother was a member of the Lykes family, which goes all the way back to the 1800s in the Tampa Bay area.

Let's talk about your formative years, about growing up and your family.

- Both sides of the family love Florida, and I spent a lot of time growing up exploring state parks, being outdoors, enjoying the Florida lifestyle and environment.

But both sides of the family have artists in it and very creative backgrounds.

So arts, Florida, history, the environment have always been big things.

And then I am one of four siblings and grew up having lots of local cousins.

And then my family have a, you know, my parents have multigenerational families that they've been friends with.

So we have sort of built in family friends, and their children were sort of and my cousins were great peer group, and they still sort of are today.

- After high school, you went to the University of Georgia, and a few years later you transferred to Georgetown in Washington, D.C.. Tell us about college.

- So I definitely I mean, I started out wanting to go to like a big fun party school and did that, but I knew from a young age that I wanted to move to New York and end up in New York City.

I went to New York for my uncle, who was an artist, wedding in fourth grade, and I remember being in the Guggenheim Museum and looking up in the rotunda and thinking, this is what a city is like.

This is what living in a city is like.

And I'm going to come live here.

So when I was at Georgia, I was having lots of fun and it was great, but I was a finance major.

And you were getting recruited to Charlotte or Atlanta from Georgia.

And I knew I wanted to go to New York.

So I sort of made my way a little bit farther north.

And then I went to Georgetown, and I met people who work in finance in New York City to this day.

And that also made me sort of question.

I thought from the beginning, I'll be an investment banker, and this is what I'm going to do.

And then I met people who are investment bankers and didn't quite have the same outlook on life as they did, but graduated from Georgetown and eventually made my way to New York.

- You're starting your career in New York City, one month after 911.

What was your perception of what was available?

What were you going to be able to do?

- It was a strange time to move to the city, because all my friends that I already knew, and the whole city had just been through this incredible event.

And as a country, we had all gone through it.

But New Yorkers obviously went through it in a different way, and I wasn't a part of that.

But the whole city was sort of mourning and it was still very present, like the smell was still there.

It was still felt kind of dirty.

But from the job front, there all of a sudden were no jobs downtown at the big banks, like.

So I looked in midtown for a job, and it took me about three months to find one.

And I found one in wealth management at a boutique wealth management company, which wouldn't have been what I. I just looked for a job, not the job at that time, but that job ended up being a sort of catalyst to learning about alternative investments and sort of is a part of the story that got me here today.

And there were a lot of big bankers and a lot of sort of big, important York people were Where our clients.

And so they had specialty real estate.

A lot of collectibles, from watches to cars.

Wine was just being thought of as a real alternative investment.

The word alternative investments was just sort of coming into favor.

But we had to analyze the value and actually have investing strategies for assets that don't have clear value.

And I sort of took on a lot of that analysis and investigating, you know, what they were worth and what the business strategies were behind them.

Because I loved the stories.

I loved the idea that people were collecting these things and they were so into it.

But they're smart business people.

So they had a reason that they were doing it and it made financial sense to them.

But then there was also the passion and the fun side and a bit of a lifestyle side to it.

And, you know, a bank doesn't have an art collection just for benevolence, like there is a business strategy there.

So I just got curious about the whole reason why you would have a cultural strategy.

I didn't know that term at the time, but that was what was happening.

- So after your first jobs in in wealth management and in alternative investments, you enrolled at New York University and got your master's degree.

Tell us about that.

- So I got my master's degree in Art Administration, which is really art business.

And I focused on the for profit side of the art world.

And it was fascinating.

Most of my instructors at NYU were cutting edge cultural professionals, and they getting to know them and what they taught sort of gave you access to museums, galleries, music, theater, performance, because they worked in those areas.

And all of a sudden you got to know everything had sort of a pass to New York's culture that was really unique and interesting.

And I loved it, and I, I liked being in school.

I like learning things.

I really thrived there.

But then also still had my financial friends and all these people that I'd been working with who, you know, you pay the premium to live in New York City because it has art and culture and cool things to do.

But you don't necessarily know how to access it.

So I started a company while I was in grad school providing access to the arts, and it was tours and events and basically helping my financial friends and professional friends that didn't work in the arts see where the cool things were to do.

See experience in New York.

- How did you determine there was a market for what it is you were doing?

You were creating events.

Right.

You were making introductions.

You were you were a catalyst.

You were a go between, but you were also organizing you.

How did you pull all this together into what became a career?

- Well, I already knew, obviously, that wealthy people would pay for arts, culture and all that stuff because I'd been analyzing their investments in it, and then my friends would do the same.

And then I wrote my master's thesis on corporate art programs 2.0.

So why companies were investing in arts and culture and why that added to the bottom line.

I mean, there's a real business strategy there.

So I was writing my master's thesis on that while sort of doing it on my own, but also that was giving me access to all the big companies.

I worked for JP Morgan Chase and their corporate art program.

I worked for Ronald Lauder and Estee Lauder's corporate art program.

I got to see all those more traditional art programs and have access to them and learn from them, and then sort of evolve that into an actual corporate art program for Gawker Media, which was an online digital media company at that time.

- After NYU, you joined a private equity firm that invested in the art market, am I right?

- Yes.

So I did that at the same time.

So I was recruited to work for a private equity fund that was investing not in art itself, but in the infrastructure of the art market.

So I spent a lot of time analyzing the art industry.

And the art industry has finance, software, media, technology, logistics, um, all the industries that exist.

They exist specifically for the art world.

And so I spent a lot of time analyzing the art industry and then helping a company to make investments in it.

- So after that, you became a controller at a major art gallery.

You also were working for a media organization, and on the side you were doing arts events and other things related to culture.

Yes.

Tell us about that.

- Well, they all sort of go together.

I mean, so they they fit together and complement each other.

But I really thought that maybe I wanted to have an art gallery, but I didn't know anything about what that actually meant on a day to day basis.

So I knew I could get a finance job at a gallery.

So I applied for the job as a controller at a big blue chip, you know, international gallery called, "Lehmann Maupin."

I bought accounting for dummies the night before I started at that job and asked my friend, who is an accountant, you know, a lot of questions, so I could go in and, you know, really know what I was talking about because I was going to have to keep their books at that job.

I very quickly got promoted to be the director of the whole gallery, and they were opening up a gallery in Hong Kong at the time, and it was just a really fascinating time in the growth of the gallery and in the art market itself, expansion into Asia and really looking for mainland China billionaires to invest in art.

That's why you went to Hong Kong to access them.

So it was a very interesting time, and I worked at the gallery for about two years.

But in that time I really knew that the gallery model was not what I wanted to do.

Um, it's a great model and I love galleries and galleries, but it was sort of limiting in that you only got to work with a set amount of artists, and I didn't want that constraint.

- At what point do you feel you were making the transition from having all these different endeavors to becoming a cultural strategist?

- Well, I made up the term, "Cultural Strategist," but then I saw it just this last week, you know, and some business articles that I was reading.

But really, I mean, when I was doing my master's thesis on corporate art programs and looking at the art industry and then looking at all the other industries and how they are involved in arts and culture for financial reasons.

Um, I really thought, well, aha, I can help these companies do that because I understand business, I understand finance, and then I understand culture.

So I will help.

I will pitch myself as a cultural strategist and help companies drive business strategy in the bottom line by activating a cultural strategy.

And I coined that term and made up some bios and, you know, wrote it all out and then started to actually do it.

And that's where Tampa comes into the story.

And specifically getting to work for the Vinik and the Vinik Family Foundation really sort of pitched myself to the Vinik and Strategic Property Partners as someone that could help them drive traffic to Water Street by activating a cultural strategy, but they were sort of the perfect people to tell this to because they got it already and loved arts and loved, um, and were very smart about what they were doing in Tampa and already talking to the best and the brightest, from architects to placemaking firms to Gensler to everyone.

I just sort of fit into that story.

But I did have to go pitch myself to them and get in there and start doing it.

So it was really fun and a natural progression to all of a sudden get to do it for my hometown.

- Tell us about some of the large scale cultural installations, art installations that you did here in the Tampa Bay area, particularly for the Vinik family.

- The first large scale installation I did for the Vinki was called The Beach Tampa, and we took over Amalie Arena.

It was called Amalie at the time, uh, for three weeks and worked with a company called Snarkitecture out of New York to build a 10,000 square foot beach scene and ball pit like balls like you see at Chuck E cheese and the ball pit.

But these were all monochrome and white.

And then we invited the public to come in it for free over three weeks and just have an incredible time.

And then from there we worked on Art of the Brick, which was a Lego installation, a Lego sort of 15,000 square foot installation.

And then we brought Yayoi Kusama's, Infinity Room to the Tampa Museum of Art.

And then we did Lucy Sparrow's Tampa Fresh Foods, which was an entire two scale grocery store where everything was made out of felt and everything was for sale.

- It was in 2017, while you were working on some of these large installations for the family, that your brother Lawrence committed suicide and the world changed.

- The world definitely changed.

I was in town working on the Art of the Brick, the Lego installation, and it was August of 2017, and I got the call that Lawrence had died and died by suicide.

And then I was in Florida, and I just never really went back to New York City or to the companies and things I was doing there, and just sort of stayed here and started going into the dealership.

I immediately had a career change, but I didn't really know that was happening.

I just started doing it.

And then all of a sudden I worked at the dealership and, um, you know, it started happening.

But Lawrence's death by suicide also gave me the gumption, if you will, to sort of think life is short, and I also have to do something that I love and that I really care about, and that I'm going to go out there and put myself out there in a big way and do something big on the cultural level, which ended up being Florida drama, where, you know, I'm creating a large immersive art installation here in Tampa Bay that celebrates Florida arts and culture and Florida history, and just all the Florida magic that there is.

- From a creative standpoint.

How did this come about?

- Really finding great partners to work with locally, who had the know how and the passion.

And then from working with artists, I mean, I could put together with our team the sort of idea.

And here's how I loosely think the business model will work.

But, you know, we had an open we actually raised our funds and the Vinik's were my primary investors, and they hadn't signed the check yet.

And it was March of 2020 and the pandemic hit.

And I thought, well, I don't know if this will still happen, but of course they followed through and sign the check and we had money all of a sudden.

And then, um, really also at that time, so many people were moving to Florida and there was just so much, um, momentum and growth around Florida always that a lot of new people and new ideas were also coming in.

Will we have this established arts community?

And so I didn't have to create the art, but I sort of gave it a bigger stage on which to come together.

And, you know, more is more, in my opinion, and more art begets more art.

So it's like all restaurants being on the same corner.

For me FloridaRAMA having, FloridaRAMA having multiple artists together in one big space just makes it that much more impactful and made it sort of like an arts clubhouse in the Warehouse Arts District, which already has lots of artists, studios and creative entrepreneurs in it.

So giving them a stage in a bigger platform to show the incredible things they were already doing alongside other artists who are doing incredible things is just such a joy and so much fun.

And then just sort of pushing it all along to a sort of a new business model where artists are actually compensated as a tourist attraction or an event and all those things.

So we commissioned artists, paid them to create an incredible experience, had a cohesive narrative to sort of tie it all together in a sort of vision or look feel of what we were going for.

And there's FloridaRAMA.

The pandemic provided us with extra special talent during that time, because the theaters and their stage designers and Feld Entertainment and all these places laid off everyone, and they weren't doing anything.

So all of a sudden, there was these incredible people who could make scenes and, you know, help us build it out or knew about traveling this and that, who were available to work with us.

So we got to work with incredible professionals.

Um, and we just had to have faith that one day the world would open back up and that people would be able to come again.

But, um, it was a really interesting time where people were hungry to get to do something fun and creative, because the world was sort of sad and shut down.

- You grew up here in the Tampa Bay area.

Families been here for generations.

You had an opportunity to go to New York and have a great career in the arts.

Tragedy brought you home and now you've stayed.

Do you see opportunities multiplying, increasing in this area for people who either are here or have gone away and come back that you might not have seen otherwise?

- Absolutely.

I think this is, you know, the west coast of Florida or Florida in general is Renaissance.

This is when it's all sort of coming together and happening in Florida, and so many exciting things are happening.

It's nice to get to be here and be a part of it and say like, can I participate?

So I think this is a really exciting time for Florida.

We have to make sure people can still afford to live here and grow in a responsible way.

But there are so many fun things happening, so many smart people moving here, so many smart people that already existed here and are coming home to or have always been here.

And I think that's sort of the pandemic actually brought so many people and new talent to Florida who have decided to stay.

So I think this is a really exciting time for Florida and Tampa Bay in particular.

With so much growth and talent and opportunity, where people are really open to new ideas and new experiences and bringing the best and the most fun here.

But we already have, again, like the pieces of the puzzle here and so many incredible performers, musicians, spoken word journalists, writers, visual artists here that I just like to help bring them together to make things more fun and give the public different ways to engage with culture.

And I think FloridaRAMA, we started with the visual arts because you had to sort of build the set or the stage, but now we get to expand into other types of art.

And I think over time, I mean, we have the technology piece to keep on developing.

We could have geographical expansion.

There's a lot more Florida stories to be told.

And then we're looking at starting to do some more pop ups this year and other things.

So we also do a lot of events and programing, so it's just a lot of fun.

But of course, that's only one of my two jobs.

And the other half of the week I work at Dimmitt Chevrolet and, you know, sell and fix cars.

- Well, I'd like to thank you so much for being our guest today.

- Thank you for having me.

It's a true honor.

- If you'd like to see this program again or any of the CEO profiles in our Suncoast Business Forum archive, you can find them on the web at wedu.org/sbf.

Thanks for joining us for the Suncoast Business Forum.

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