Jeff Spence is the CEO of TriLegacy Group LLC, the development company that is behind the $860 million, 10-year, three-phase Shipyards project and is the master developer of the 20-year, four-phase $857 million Cecil Commerce Center. Together, the projects make TriLegacy the largest private developer in the city’s history. Last week, Spence — who was born in Virginia and went to high school in Georgia — met with Daily Record staff writer Mike Sharkey to talk about those projects and several other topics.
Question: How did your family end up in Jacksonville and why did you stay?
Answer: My father [Carlton, chairman of the Spence family companies and TriLegacy] worked for Colonial Stores, part of the Big Star grocery chain. He transferred around the Southeast during his 27-year career with them and they moved him to Jacksonville. He was born in Norfolk, Va., along the coast, and when they moved to him to Florida near the beach, he decided he wasn’t leaving again. We moved here in 1973 and we like it because it has a great, wholesome family environment and it’s near the ocean. We love water. The city has been good to our company. It was a good place to start our operating businesses in 1974 and there was no reason to leave.
Q: What was the first family business?
A: We were a food brokerage company in 1974 and shortly thereafter, the same year, he started a food distribution company, both of which we still have. In about 1980, we went into cold storage warehousing and grew that. We still operate all of that. We went into transportation in the early 1990s and stevedoring at the Port Authority in the mid-1990s.
Q: How did you move into cold storage and transportation from a small food brokerage business?
A: We had a lot of clients we were selling products to that needed a place to store things. They also, from time to time, needed someone to transport or move goods around. It was an interesting vertical integration for us to be able to offer more services to the people buying and selling. As time marched on, the real core of our growth has been in the services side, which is the warehousing, transportation and the logistics end. Jacksonville was an area poised perfectly geographically to handle Southeastern distribution, but also in a great position for international business. We do a fair amount of international business.
Q: How much international business do you do?
A: Percentage wise, I would say half of what we touch today starts or stops outside the United States, the other half is domestic-oriented. I don’t have a feel for the tonnage, but about half of what we do is international-oriented.
Q: How is ICS Logistics doing these days and how much are you still involved on a day-to-day basis considering the scope of the two other projects?
A: The company is doing very well; it is a growing, thriving business. What we did last year, considering the energy that was going to be required to for the real estate side of our family, we went out and brought in some great people, like Terry Brown, the new president of our logistics company, and a new CFO and did some internal reorganization to allow myself to focus more on the whole rather than running the logistics company. Terry is doing a great job, he’ll continue to do a great job and he’s better at it than I am. I found somebody that is smarter than me — which is not hard — and turned him loose and it’s worked out very well. From a day-to-day operational standpoint, I’m not as involved in the logistics business as I was, but it’s been handed over to very, very capable, competent hands and he’s doing a good job.
Q: How do you go from shipping frozen chickens all over the world to an $860 million development on the river?
A: First, you do it very slowly and carefully, which we’ve managed very, very well. Over the last 25 years or so, we have built a fair number of facilities for our own use. So to some extent, it’s very different to what we’ve done in the past. To some extent, it has similarities. We’re still constructing things, we’re just building things for other folks rather than our own use. When we bought the piece of property, we took our time — six or seven months in 1999 — and began educating ourselves on it. Quite frankly, we began assembling a world class team of people that had done this stuff a lot. We viewed ourselves as the visionary and the catalyst and back-fed the team with people that had a tremendous amount of hands-on experience and it’s worked very well.
Q: How did you build the team?
A: It’s hard to explain how we found them. Some were word of mouth. Henry Lambert with the Shipyards — we found him early on in the game, we kind of found each other. He’s done millions of square feet of this sort of stuff in his career. A lot of the people we brought on board beyond Henry are some folks and relationships he had — architectural people, master landscape people, Sasaki, Sandy & Babcock. It’s going about figuring out what kind of talent you need and what specific skill sets you require and then going out and finding people that have not only the skill sets, but also can share the vision and share the passion for the projects we have in Jacksonville.
Q: The Shipyards is a three-phase, 10-year project. How badly would you like have a crystal ball and look into the future?
A: Not very badly.
Q: You are that patient?
A: Both of these projects we are involved in require patience. We have a vision and we’ve created a model that reflects the vision that is very well thought out. I’m convinced the pace we’re on will fulfill the vision that the people we have on our team share. I think the timing and the marketplace is right. I think Jacksonville is in a position to appreciate and absorb the kind of things we are doing now. That was probably not necessarily the case 10 years ago or 15 years ago. I think there’s a momentum in Northeast Florida now that is very unique and I think that overlays well. Will it be different than what we projected? I’m sure there will be parts and pieces of it that won’t be exactly like the model, but we’ve built our model with flexibility in mind. Downstream, if certain elements of our business plan are not on the mark, a flexibility is built into it to alter it, to modify it and meet whatever needs we’ll have eight years from now.
Q: Have the manatee and other marine issues been satisfied and can you now proceed with your marina plans?
A: I’m told the manatee issue is settled and the buoy river marking conversations and discussions are all settled and done. In the scope of our work here, it was reported that our project was being held up because of that issue. Truthfully, we weren’t prepared to put a marina in for a year anyway. You wouldn’t want the slips in ahead of the condos. In our time line, we felt confident that if it took six months to resolve it, it would be resolved. It wasn’t in our way necessarily, so we weren’t being held up. All that being said, I think we’re comfortable with the resolution that was agreed upon that not only affects me, but affects other people downtown and the city down to the Mandarin area.
Q: Considering the scope of the Shipyards, what made TriLegacy want to get involved with Cecil?
A: Cecil is another project that requires a lot of patience. It requires some unique planning and some unique thinking. I was as intrigued as our family was and our team was intrigued with the complexity of Cecil, but also the real benefit Cecil, as a commerce center, could create an economic engine, not only for Jacksonville proper, but for all of Northeast Florida. We felt like it would take a fairly unique, perhaps unconventional approach, to do that. We were intrigued by that and we figured we could give it a go.
Q: Do you consider TriLegacy a unique, unconventional company?
A: I think it is. We certainly are referred to as real estate developers, which is fine. But we’re unlike a lot of large real estate developers that are in Jacksonville. I don’t look at ourselves as an apple to apple comparison to those companies. I felt like Cecil was the type of project that any one single company, in-house, maybe would have challenges dealing with because of the complexity of it — you’ve got aviation, you’ve got manufacturing, you’ve got some retail, you’ve got distribution. You’ve got all those elements in Cecil. We felt like, from the beginning, the City’s master plan for Cecil was a good, solid plan and we could embrace it. We do. We felt like, considering it was such a diverse project, we thought we needed some diversity on the team, people with some very specific skill sets and backgrounds. I think it would be rare to find a single organization that would have all those assets in-house. Our philosophy, again, was to do something similar to what we did with the Shipyards, which was to team up with the best people and resources we could find. We feel very comfortable we’ve done that.
Q: You spent several years outside of Atlanta and have said that there’s a big difference between how that area is growing and how Jacksonville is growing. Can you explain that?
A: I won’t say that Atlanta didn’t grow smartly; I will say Atlanta is in a constant state of growth. When I think back to Mayor [John] Delaney’s vision of the Better Jacksonville Plan and one of the planks in his platform of trying to get that passed was, ‘If we don’t do this and plan ahead of time, look to Orlando, look to Atlanta, look or Tampa, we could end up like some of those communities.’ I think that was very visionary. Growth is inevitable and I think it’s important to manage that growth. I think we keyed on Mayor Delaney’s vision and you have to be patient and you have to plan to get the results you want. It’s just not going to happen and you have to plan for it to happen. One of the reasons we like the Cecil business is because it does have that element of preplanning and long term planning in it. You have to visualize traffic and visualize how that impacts other parts of the city. What you don’t want is a tremendous number of acres that create massive amounts of traffic for peripheral areas by not having planned highways, water and electricity. I’m fairly confident that all the players involved with Cecil — the City, JEA, JAA and the JEDC and ourselves — together you’re going to get a great product that’s going to be a great economic driver for our community.
Q: TriLegacy is doing the Shipyards and Cecil, two huge developments. Is that it for a while or does the company have its eye on other areas of town?
A: My father made a commitment to the mayor and the JEDC that we would tackle these and we would not have ourselves diversified and our focus diluted by anything other than these two projects. I think that’s the way it will end up being. Obviously, there are other things around that I find interesting, but today we have a lot to say grace over. I say there’s things that would interest me, but nothing I would want to get into. I think it’s important to do these right and one of the reasons the Shipyards is materializing the way it is we have, obviously, a lot of people who want to buy this and want to buy that. Maybe it would be simpler, maybe it would more economically beneficial to us. But the Shipyards needs to be looked at as a community. It needs to be done well and you get one shot to do it right. I think that same thinking holds true for Cecil. I think you need to have patience, and we do. I think you have to make sure as you move forward that you don’t lose your focus. I think it’s important to do these two projects very, very well.
Q: What do you do to get away from everything?
A: I love to travel, but I don’t get to do that much of it right now. I love all kind of outdoor sporting activities. I love boats. I go fishing and hunting. I enjoy the time away at our farm up in Georgia, which is not that much time now. But when we get there, I like to download and relax.