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In the winter, when the well-to-do from all over the Northeast visit Florida
for charity balls, the board hosts dinners and parties for prospective
relocators and local captains of industry. Last year, Smallridge and
company sponsored a soiree aboard a $70 million yacht that featured Veuve
Clicquot, caviar and live jazz. Guests—who included the CEOs of a national
IT company, a major finance company and a land developer, venture
capitalists, hedge fund managers and the creator of Goldman Sachs’ prime
brokerage division—took private tours with the captain of the yacht.
Smallridge is also working with former hedge fund CIO Dr. Rainford Knight
to develop a club for local investment managers called SocialAlpha that
encourages bankers in Palm Beach County’s ritzy social scene to get to know
each other. Even Florida governor Rick Scott has gotten involved, sending
personal letters to friends and prospects from the Northeast (the governor is
a former Greenwich resident and businessman) to convince them of
Florida’s merits.
Smallridge and Governor Scott are hoping to induce a snowball effect, and
so far, it seems to be working. Every financier who moves south chips away
at the primary reason to remain near New York City—the fact that everyone
else is there. That’s not to say it’s been easy. Florida is still Florida, and
popular opinion has not been kind. Even Palm Beach, which has for the
most part dodged the insults hurled at the rest of the state, is known for its
residents’ apocalyptically bad driving and worse Hawaiian shirts.
“There was a fair amount of trepidation,” says Al Rabil ITI, managing
partner and CEO of Kayne Anderson Real Estate Advisors, who made the
move from Armonk, New York, with 20 coworkers this summer. “But once
everybody got past the stereotypes and actually came and looked, that
changed.” He says most of his employees weren’t looking for bottle service
and models anyway. The majority of those who have reached the upper
echelons of financial management are married with children, and the appeal
of a semi-tropical paradise with luxury restaurants, year-round recreation,
and sophisticated socializing in a community far more tight-knit than
Manhattan (yes, that’sDonald Trump over there) is not lost on them.
Porter’s tour of Billionaire’s Row was part of a modified version of one of
the Business Development Board’s red-carpet tours that I took as part of
researching this story. I ate breakfast at the clubby Top of the Point
restaurant with some of the area’s prominent financiers. A waiter in a
captain’s outfit served lobster rolls while a CPA, a lawyer and the executive
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