Jeanne Dailey Honored with 2017 Pinnacle Award

850 Business Magazine:

Pinnacle Award Honorees 2017 - Program honors community-leading ladies
BY STEVE BORNHOFT

Karen Moore awakened early in her great lake house, left her husband and his parents behind and, after completing a milk run of a flight itinerary, touched down in Panama City, Florida, 19 hours after departing Traverse City, Michigan. It would all be worth it to the president and founder of Moore Communications Group for the morrow would bring an event that Karen considered highly important.

“There was no way I was going to miss this,” she said, shortly before Rowland Publishing’s fourth annual Pinnacle Awards presentation was about to begin on Aug. 15 in the St. Joe Community Foundation Lecture Hall at the Holley Academic Center on the Panama City campus of Florida State University. “Mercy, I am so honored to be a part of this group.”

The Pinnacle Award is reserved for women who have distinguished themselves both professionally and as community servants. Moore readily qualifies, given her record of service to numerous nonprofit and public entities, and as someone who has built a business once confined to a cottage on Lake Ella in Tallahassee into one of the largest independently owned communications firms in the United States.

Members of Rowland Publishing’s management team introduced the 2017 Pinnacle winners to an audience of about 150 persons.

2017 PINNACLE AWARD HONOREE: 

Jeanne Dailey
CEO/Founder, Newman-Dailey Resort Properties

Jeanne Dailey grew up in a small town near Toledo, Ohio, and went to an art school in Adrian, Michigan, but she wasn’t content to remain a struggling creative for long. She joined a friend at East Carolina University and earned a business degree. Both moved to Destin following graduation in 1983. There, the friend arranged job interviews for her including one with Randy Newman—a developer, not the musician—for whom she went to work. 

Dailey moved quickly to get her real estate license and then set up a rental management company in connection with Newman’s Woodland Shores Townhomes development. In 1985, she and Newman established Newman-Dailey Resort Properties and, three years later, Dailey purchased his interest in the business. 

“No one had heard of Destin when I moved there,” Dailey says. “We had one traffic light and one grocery store. I had the opportunity to raise my children in a small town environment and my business and the community grew up together.” 

Dailey’s parents, Bob and Phyllis, were big believers in community service and, once her kids were in middle and high school, Dailey became involved in community organizations, motivated in part by self-interest. Two issues ere of great importance to her: beach nourishment and proposed limits on short-term vacation rentals.  The Destin Chamber of Commerce favored the former and opposed the latter and Dailey become a member of the chamber’s board of directors. 

The Chamber worked to identify and educate people who wanted to run for office. In so doing, it overcame a disinformation campaign that led beachfront property owners to believe that they would lose property to the government if a beach nourishment project were approved.  Ultimately, the nourishment project as approved and the limits on short term rentals were not imposed.

Click here to read full article in 850 Magazine's October issue.