One Connection at a Time: 'Proximity is power'

Anna Jane English drove four hours from Oxford to Vicksburg for a hotel grand opening she had no professional reason to attend. She was a college student picking up work, one of four people hired to walk investors and lenders through The Mulberry: the former Harrah's casino and Margaritaville hotel on Mulberry Street, reopened on the riverfront as 41 hotel rooms with 52 apartments above them.

The owner handed out clipboards with the property information on them. There were four people and three clipboards.

English memorized hers and gave it away.

Later that evening the owner found her working the room empty handed and asked where her clipboard was. She told him she had given it to someone who needed it, because she already knew what was on it.

Two weeks later he called and offered her a job. She said no. She had been on a law school path her whole life.

He asked again.

Activation is a development discipline

The role she eventually accepted came with an unusually direct brief: lease the apartments upstairs, and create new revenue streams for the hotel.

She built a day club around the resort style pool. DJ, cabana rentals, bottle service, security, a dress code enforced at the door, one every two weeks. Then she turned to the interior, where the restaurant doubled as a gallery, and programmed Italian wine dinners with a sommelier walking guests through each pairing.

They sold out, and then they sold out again. Within a year the events were a profitable revenue line that had not existed before.

What she took from it is now a position she argues in development meetings.

Seasonal demand softens. The building does not shrink. What thins out in the slow months is not the asset but the reason for anyone nearby to walk through the door, and a reason is something a developer can build in from the beginning rather than bolt on later. That thinking runs directly into how Bellamare approaches its ground up work: a project is not finished when it is occupied, it is finished when it has a reason to be returned to.

The company was three people and a five hundred square foot office

What she joined was smaller than it looked from outside. Bellamare Development at the time was three people. English signed the lease on the first office herself, because there was not one yet.

Sunny Sethi had started the company on a premise he had been explicit about from the beginning: if he was going to build another company, it had to be transformational, or there was no reason to build it.

That premise is what moved her off the law school path for good, and it is still the filter the company applies to what it takes on.

Bellamare now develops across mixed use, hospitality, retail, and multifamily. The portfolio includes The Gallery, an entertainment and arts district under development in Madison, and Channel South, a mixed use waterfront district in downtown Gulfport. On the hospitality side, the company's eight hotel Mississippi portfolio, 685 rooms in total, is now operated under a management partnership announced with Valor Hospitality Partners.

As Vice President, English works across the front half of that pipeline: pre development, entitlement, design coordination, tenant curation, and the sequence that carries a site from an idea to an opening date.

Managing people twice her age

At 23, already working in development, English went back to the hotel for six months as interim general manager. It meant rebuilding an operation while managing a staff considerably older than she was.

It produced the lesson she returns to most often about leading people, which is that recognition is not one thing.

Some people on that team responded to being told plainly that they had done good work. Others responded to a gift card. Others to a high five. English describes it as a love language of leadership, and her method for finding it is unromantic: ask the person directly what actually lands, and ask them the same about correction.

The same instinct shows up in how Bellamare hires. There is no job application for the development team. There is a coffee chat, and then a role shaped around what the person is actually good at rather than a slot they are asked to fit.

The gap that became Marée Creative

English founded Marée Creative, and serves as its President, to work in a space she had watched go unoccupied from both sides of the table.

Developers develop. Designers design. What almost never happens is one party carrying a project across both. Someone who has signed the lease, understands the pro forma, knows what the build out actually costs, and can also brand the business that opens inside it.

Marée Creative is a creative placemaking and brand strategy firm, and its distinguishing feature is where it sits. It operates inside a development company rather than consulting to one, which means the creative work is made by people who have closed land, run the numbers, curated tenants, and opened doors. The scope runs from place vision and district planning through brand identity, hospitality and F&B branding, investor and leasing materials, tenant curation, and the programming that fills a place once it opens.

The firm's own line for it: our work begins where other creative agencies end.

Most branding engagements deliver a document. Marée's argument is that a document is not the outcome anyone is actually buying. The outcome is a leased building, a full calendar, and a place people come back to, which requires staying through execution rather than presenting and leaving.

The name carries the same logic. Bellamare ends in the sea. Marée is the tide: the same water, in motion.

What the record looks like

English is unusually direct about the parts of her record that did not work. An app designed and pitched in college, then shelved, only to watch a version of the same idea succeed years later. A streetwear label built with a local artist, with the shirts printed and the launch invitations already sent, that never shipped because the contracts had not been signed before production started.

The lesson from the second one was specific and expensive: sell the vision, and paper the agreement, before you buy the inventory. It is the kind of thing that transfers cleanly into development, where the sequence of commitments is most of the job.

What she tells people who want in

Real estate development is not a career path most people are shown. English was not shown it either. She grew up in Mississippi, went to Ole Miss, studied business and entrepreneurship, and had no one in her family in the industry.

Asked how someone without connections should go about finding a way in, she does not describe a strategy so much as a sequence.

Show up where the people you want to learn from already are. Chamber meetings, luncheons, industry events, grand openings four hours away that you have no particular reason to attend. Follow up while you are still fresh in someone's mind. Then offer to do something genuinely useful, including the unglamorous parts.

Her argument is that the offer almost never gets made, and its rarity is exactly what makes it work. Successful people are assumed to have every gap already filled. Most of them do not, which is roughly the whole story of a college student who memorized a clipboard and gave it away.