Nov-2017

2 3 T From the Editor “People will come, Ray. . . They’ll walk out to the bleachers; sit in shirtsleeves on a perfect afternoon. . . And they’ll watch the game and it’ll be as if they dipped themselves in magic waters. . .The one constant through all the years, Ray, has been baseball. America has rolled by like an army of steamrollers. It has been erased like a blackboard, re- built and erased again. But baseball has marked the time. This field, this game: it’s a part of our past, Ray. It reminds us of all that once was good and that could be again. Oh...people will come Ray. People will most definitely come.” So said James Earl Jones’ character, Terence Mann, in the 1989 Kevin Cost- ner film, Field of Dreams, a paean to baseball and an America that may only have truly existed on the silver screen, or perhaps just a bit, in our finest mo- ments. And today, when the steamrollers seemed to have picked up steam, the Fall Classic, the World Series, has once again reminded a fractious country of all that once was good and that could be good again. Because in Los Angeles, on the first day of November, the Houston Astros, a scrappy young team that had dwelt for years at the bottom of the standings, one with the 18th lowest payroll in the MLB, rose to the top of the heap, and beat the L.A. Dodgers, a teamwith the best pitcher in the game and the most money in the bank. And in so doing, they followed a plot line that has been part of the Amer- ican ethos since its beginnings, when a ragtag bunch of rebels in homespun cloth defeated the greatest army in the world and proved that nothing, truly nothing, is impossible. What does all this have to do with a business magazine? Well, apart from the fact that major league sports is a giant business in our nation, as well as a signif- icant part of our culture (see this month’s feature on Petco Park, home of the San Diego Padres), the miraculous rise of the Astros from the basement to the apex of the game mirrors the many stories that we at Business ViewMagazine hear every day from formerly small firms that have risen to the top of their sectors because their leaders, through a combination of grit, intelligence, and plain hard work, have built strong companies that defied the odds, as well as the naysayers who said that it couldn’t be done. Virtually every company profiled in our pages began with an idea that things could be better, that products could be improved, that customers could be more satisfied, that there were smarter ways to do business; that even though success wouldn’t happen overnight, with patience and determina- tion that, if they built it, over time, the “people would most definitely come.” And like the Astros, they plotted and planned, they hired the best people, they refined their processes and procedures, and they succeeded. The term “national pastime” was first applied to baseball, way back in the 1850s. And in 1925, a year when the Pitts- burgh Pirates came back from a four-run deficit to defeat the Washington Senators in the seventh game of another World Series, President Calvin Coolidge declared that, “The chief business of the American people is business.” In our country, today, both notions still ring true, and both still remind us that if the Houston Astros can win the World Series, and if a company that starts from scratch can build itself into a major player, than nothing, truly nothing is impossible. On the third day of November, the triumphant Astros paraded through Houston, champions of a city that sorely needed something to believe in. They are not heroes, per se – that designation must go to the many selfless first responders and other citizens who put themselves in harm’s way to help rescue those who were caught up in Hurricane Harvey’s malevolent maelstrom. But they are the harbingers of hope. Soon, the “Boys of Summer” will fade away, as they always do, and the city of Houston will have to soldier on, alone. But no one can ever take away the memory of victory that they left behind; when for one brief, shining moment an entire population put its misery aside and dipped itself in the magic waters of baseball. Al Krulick Editor-in-Chief Editor-in-Chief Al Krulick Associate Editor Lorie Steiner Director of Advertising Lauren Blackwell Research Directors Paul Payne Brendan McElroy Josh Conklin Lisa Curry Joanna Whitney Digital Strategist Scott Mosquera Creative Director Dana Long Vice President of Business Development Erin O’Donoghue Vice President of Production Aimy McGrew Vice President of Publishing Andre Barefield CGO Alexander Wynne-Jones COO Brian Andersen Executive Publisher / CEO Marcus VandenBrink USA Canada Caribbean Oceania Email for all inquiries: info@businessviewmagazine.com WWW.BUSINESSVIEWMAGAZINE.COM 12559 New Brittany Blvd Fort Myers, 33907 239.220.5554 CONTACT US