But I'd love to hear your origin story in terms of how you ultimately got into the important role you serve now.

Yeah, it's funny how life takes you in the direction that you're supposed to go, right? I'll shorten 25 years of my career into a couple of sentences.

But I started as a rising senior at FSU, much like any rising senior did, looking for an internship.

And I was given a list of approved internships that my major would allow.

And on that list was what was at the time the Florida Restaurant Association.

And like many college students, I had been working in the hospitality sector for some time, bartending, waitressing, all of those things.

And I thought, that sounds interesting.

capital.

Can you walk me through what the bill actually proposed and, like, what would've happened if it had passed?

Yeah, absolutely.

So in Florida specifically, this really started to pick up momentum several years ago.

Um, anytime you have a piece of legislation that is this significant, there are normally signals that it's coming, right? There's chess pieces that get put onto the chessboard, and so it's our job as lobbyists to both see the field clearly, but also start working with legislators to prepare accordingly.

So we had known, and I had been talking to my own society board about this as well as the, the national entities for a couple of years before the bill actually was filed.

Um, it did look a little bit different than what we initially thought it might look like, but the spirit and the, the core function of what they were trying to do was filed.

So if we flash forward to early April of 2025, the bill was filed.

How did, how did you, uh, how did you stop it?