Lewis B. Freeman
Founder, Lewis B. Freeman & Partners, Coconut Grove
Accounting clients: Former Miami Dolphins Coach Jimmy Johnson and former UM Coach Butch Davis.
Consulting client: The Miccosukee Indian tribe.
One-liner: "Literally, I've represented doctors, lawyers and Indian chiefs."
July 4th plans: Aruba.
As Lewis B. Freeman tells it, he was treated like a plague carrier after addressing the crowd at a Miami dot-com networking function. Gee, wonder why. All he promised was that within a year, "most of your companies will be dead." Indeed, Freeman, the receiver for the failed Mortgage.com in Sunrise, saw so many dot-bombs dropping that he co-founded bizturnaround.com to consult on rescue -- or liquidation -- plans.
It's the latest adventure in the career of the 52-year-old lawyer, CPA and Eagle Scout. Eight years ago, he stepped back from the accounting firm he founded, Freeman, Dawson & Rosenbaum, to focus on forensic accounting, fiduciary assignments and receivership work -- merging his bent for sleuthing and street smarts to retrieve money for claimants.
When Unique Gems, a Miami Ponzi scheme, collapsed in 1997, Freeman was called in. He is the receiver at Professional Resources Systems International -- an alleged internet Ponzi scam in which 46,000 people paid $300 each to a Boca Raton company for a private intranet.
Freeman's 25-person Lewis B. Freeman & Partners is a smorgasbord of talent, including the recent addition of lawyer Charles Harper, formerly the Securities and Exchange Commission's top man in Miami. Freeman runs a low-cost service and makes good calls on whether creditors will get more by a quick windup of a venture's affairs or by protracted suits. Freeman can "read between the lines, intuit how the problem developed and find a solution," says J.R. Rosskamp of money manager Veritas Partners.
Says the cheerfully bombastic Freeman, "I'm either a physician or a mortician."
Law: Flight to Quality
Rhea F. Law
Partner, Fowler White Gillen Boggs Villareal and Banker, Tampa
Favorite development: Westchase in Tampa.
Quote: "It's an extraordinary place to live. I feel like Westchase was my baby -- and the gestation period was so painful."
Lawyer Rhea F. Law has piloted an F-16, has been a passenger for two landings on an aircraft carrier, fired a canon and otherwise, as part of a Department of Defense civilian orientation program, "played with some of the toys" of the military. "I've been blessed in my life to be able to experience these things," she says.
Doing aerial rolls in a fighter is a long way from Law's day job as a high-profile land-use lawyer with Fowler White Gillen Boggs Villareal and Banker in Tampa. The 51-year-old Tampa native began her second career -- her first was in grants administration at the University of South Florida -- 22 years ago. Looking for a career in tax law, she backed into permitting issues and has become expert in winning approvals for large-scale real estate projects.
As such, she has been aligned with developer interests, though she's quick to say the clients with which she deals share her interest in "things that make sense" for themselves and the community. Developers understand customers are drawn to quality, she says. "When you hear people talking about sprawl and adverse impacts from development, they tend to be looking at things that happened some time ago" when developers didn't share a commitment to quality community building.
She has a few community-building credits of her own such as chairing the Greater Tampa Chamber of Commerce board of governors in 1999. This year, she chairs the economic development Committee of 100, is vice chair of the Tampa Bay Partnership and the first woman president of the University Club of Tampa.
None of those jobs can match the rush from an F-16, but they evoke the same thought: "My life is greatly blessed with all kinds of things," she says.
Professional Services: Relief Work
Linda P. Daniel
Founder, Human Assets Associates Inc., Pompano Beach
Client feelings: "They all hate insurance. They hate it."
Recommended reading: Biographies of strong women Anne Morrow Lindbergh and aviator Beryl Markham.
Outsources: Some bookkeeping.
Human resources consultant Linda P. Daniel saw her opportunity when a client struggled with regulations on hiring the handicapped, family medical leaves, Immigration and Naturalization Service paperwork and other federal requirements. "When I saw them getting very stressed, I asked, how would you like to outsource the entire department?"
Outsourcing human resources is on the rise, says the Society of Human Resources Management. It reports 69% of HR executives in 2000 outsourced at least some work, up from 58% in 1999. Daniel is riding that trend -- with a multinational twist. She designed and implemented the HR system for Bermuda-based Global Crossing's Global Marine Systems Federal unit in Fort Lauderdale and integrated it with the parent's system, says Roger Mitchell, Global Marine's operations vice president. She also set up HR for multinational Mosaic Software, an ATM software firm with offices in Deerfield Beach.
A native of Abingdon, Va., Daniel worked in benefits planning for the Tennessee Bankers Association before moving to Florida in 1988 and taking up pure HR work. She recruited nurses from Canada and the United Kingdom to work as temp nurses for a staffing company and later was HR director for a home healthcare firm and a telecom startup. In 1999, she founded Human Assets Associates. "I really felt like I was on the cusp of outsourcing," she says.
Still very small -- only $130,000 in revenues in 2000 -- she pitches herself as paying her own way by finding clients savings on expenses like insurance. Daniel, 52, also tries to convince companies that HR isn't some extraneous spending. "You're really protecting the liability of the company," she says.
Law: Three on the Rise
Mahlon H. "Tripp" Barlow
Partner, Bush Ross Gardner Warren & Rudy, Tampa
Age: 37, a native of New Haven, Conn., raised in Lakeland.
Law degree: University of Florida, 1990.
Bailiwick: Commercial litigation -- businesses suing businesses.
Challenge: "Keeping juries awake."
Big score: In 1999, Barlow won a $48.5-million verdict in a trade secrets case against Perdue Farms.
How he's different: Barlow sometimes works on contingency, meaning that like personal injury lawyers, he only gets paid if he wins.
Consideration: "Is the defendant going to be solvent down the road?"
July 4th plans: Anna Maria Island.
Roger Rovell
Partner, Kalish & Ward, Tampa
Age: 47, Orlando native, raised in Lakeland.
Law degree: Stetson University in 1980 and master's in tax law from the University of Florida law school in 1983.
Recognition: Named in The Best Lawyers in America as one of the best in employee benefits law.
Path to employee benefits law: Rovell could stomach a law class in deferred compensation. "Nobody else could abide it," he says.
National reputation: Rovell advises more than 150 professional employer organizations (PEOs) nationally on employee benefits law, setting up 401(k)s and the like.
Quote: "Florida is the PEO state ... the fertile crescent."
One reason why: Unlike many states, Florida has a statute specifically recognizing PEOs as employers.
July 4th plans: Windsurf in the Gulf.
John Moore
Partner, Rossway Moore & Taylor, Vero Beach
Age: 40, raised in Vero Beach, graduate of Vero Beach High School.
Law degree: University of Virginia, 1986. Moore's also a CPA.
Small fish, big pond: Moore was a political appointee in the first Bush administration. The importance of a government job, he says, "is inversely proportionate to the length of your title. You have the president -- and I was deputy assistant secretary for housing operations at the Department of Housing and Urban Development."
Home again: Moore returned to Vero Beach in 1993. He specializes in estate planning and tax work.
Big circles: Representing as many as 50 U.S. investors who allege fraud by insurer Lloyd's of London.
National travels: Moore lectures on accounting and finance for lawyers and estate and tax issues for non-tax lawyers.
Balance: Moore's active in the United Way of Indian River County and at Holy Cross Catholic Church.
July 4th plans: Watch the fireworks from a boat on the Indian River.