Tampa Bay Partnership’s Rick Homans stepping down as president and CEO

One of Tampa Bay’s leading business leaders is ready to hand over the reins.

Rick Homans, the president and CEO of the Tampa Bay Partnership, will go away his post when his agreement expires in November, the business announced Monday. He’ll continue to be aboard whilst the group lookups for his successor.

“My wife and I have constantly thought that our lives are a series of adventures, and to open up the doorway to the subsequent 1, we have to near the door behind us,” Homans explained to partnership members in an e mail. “We’re psyched by the chance to re-picture and re-invent our life.”

Homans has led the Tampa Bay Partnership, a coalition of community business leaders whose aim is improving upon the excellent of lifetime throughout the area, due to the fact 2015. Prior to that, he used three decades as president and CEO of what is now the Tampa Bay Financial Advancement Council.

He arrived to Tampa Bay in 2012 immediately after extra than three many years performing in small business and governing administration in New Mexico. He served recruit Richard Branson’s Virgin Galactic headquarters to New Mexico, served in the cupboard of former Gov. Bill Richardson, and when ran for mayor of Albuquerque.

For the duration of Homans’s tenure at the Tampa Bay Economic Development Council, the Tampa Bay region lured additional than 12,000 new work through tasks like a new Amazon distribution centre in Ruskin, the nationwide headquarters of Significant Brothers Large Sisters America and substantial hubs for businesses like Bristol-Myers Squibb and USAA.

When he joined the Tampa Bay Partnership, he spoke of leveraging that results into harnessing “the ability of the region” to effect financial transform.

“There is a giant vacuum in Tampa Bay when it will come to uniting the business and political management in an powerful way,” he told the Moments in 2015. “I think that is the contacting of the partnership.”

To that end, he steered the partnership’s goals towards improving upon the area’s good quality of existence, studying everything from expertise recruitment to general public transit policy to race relations to the area’s reaction to the coronavirus pandemic.

In his e-mail Wednesday, Homans thanked associates for “working to reach the partnership’s bold mission and vision, and go the needle on the region’s performance.

“You have continuously questioned the challenging issues and pushed us to acquire on the rough challenges — and that is what has manufactured this career so frustratingly really hard and rewarding,” he wrote. I am so very pleased of what we have achieved jointly.”

Tampa Bay Partnership chairman Chad Loar will lead the lookup for Homans’ successor. In a separate e-mail, he informed users he options to appoint a look for committee that will devote months interviewing “a extremely-competent and diverse pool of candidates. As I obtain is normally the situation, huge adjustments can translate into huge opportunities.”

Homans’ statement echoed all those sentiments.

“The partnership is hitting on all cylinders, in fantastic fiscal affliction, and there will be no lack of proficient persons seeking to just take this job and advance the group to new heights,” he wrote.