Yesterday, Mayor Grover Robinson presented Rishy and Quint Studer with a key to the city for the many ways the couple has helped the community by improving Pensacola and contributing to the city’s quality of place.
Mayor Robinson praised the Studers for bringing the Pensacola Blue Wahoos to Pensacola, investing in the community with Brain Bags for new families and starting Entrecon and CivicCon to encourage entrepreneurship and better civic conversations.
Official Press Release:
Mayor Grover Robinson Honors Quint & Rishy Studer with a Key to the City of Pensacola
Quint and Rishy Studer have been recognized by Pensacola Mayor Grover Robinson for improving the quality of life in Pensacola.
On September 26, the mayor presented a “key to the city” plaque to the couple to for their many good works for the community. He says the couple came to the community in the 1990s and “embraced it, investing in our citizens and making Pensacola better.”
He pointed to their role as founders and owners of the Pensacola Blue Wahoos baseball team, the founding of the nonprofit Studer Community Institute and its work with early learning and age 0-3 brain development, establishment of the Pensacola EntreCon business conference and partnering with the local newspaper to launch the CivicCon speaker series.
The award’s inscription says it is meant “to recognize and appreciate the many accomplishments, improvements and programs started and supported by the recipients that have made a significant impact in creating, improving and sustaining the Quality of Life in Pensacola, Florida.”
The mayor also pointed to the work SCI does to encourage entrepreneurship in the community and he says it is a better community because of the civic conversations inspired by CivicCon.
“While I had planned to do this recognition in the Spring of 2020, I was glad to have had opportunity to recognize the Studers before the end of my term for all they have contributed to improve Pensacola and its Quality of Place,” said the mayor.
Quint Studer is a lifelong student of leadership, and he is a teacher at heart. In fact, he began his leadership journey working with special needs children—a job he loved and held for 10 years. He entered the healthcare industry in 1984 as a Community Relations Representative. He then went on to hold leadership positions at Mercy Health System in Wisconsin and Holy Cross Hospital in Chicago, Illinois, where their initiatives in patient care led to their winning Hospitals Magazine’s Great Comeback award.
In 1996, he became president of Baptist Hospital in Pensacola, Florida, leading that organization to the top 1 percent of hospitals nationwide in patient and employee satisfaction.
In 2000, after numerous requests by organizations for assistance, Studer Group was formed. Over the years the outcomes firm won multiple awards, including the 2010 Malcolm Baldrige National Quality Award. By the time the firm was sold in 2015, it had 250 employees and had helped more than a thousand healthcare organizations move toward higher performance.
Quint has a great love for teaching his insights in books and has authored nine of them in addition to The Busy Leader’s Handbook which reached number 5 on Wall Street Journal bestseller list. His bookResults That Last also made the Wall Street Journal bestseller list. In The Great Employee Handbook, he shares insights from working with thousands of employees during his career. His book, Hardwiring Excellence, continues to sell thousands of copies annually as a guide to excellence for organizations.
In 2015 he sold Studer Group to focus on channeling his passion for leadership into community development. As the founder of Studer Community Institute, he has been integral in revitalizing Pensacola, which has seen 34 percent growth in property values in the past five years and has won several awards for its thriving downtown. He captured this story in his 2018 book, Building a Vibrant Community: How Citizen-Powered Change Is Reshaping America.
He and Rishy also focused on restoring underutilized buildings at the corner of Main and Palafox streets and opened what is now the Bodacious Shops, which includes a restaurant and event area. The couple also developed the Southtowne and Savoy Place apartment buildings to encourage other investments in the downtown area. They have since sold those and other properties as they only wanted to be catalysts for development and not continue to be developers.
Studer Community Institute put together the story of Pensacola’s resurgence and entered and won the 2019 Strongest Town Contest, hosted by nonprofit organization Strong Towns. The competition is designed to spotlight communities from around the world that are building enduring financial resilience at the local level and actively embodying the Strong Towns approach to economic growth and development.
A core part of Quint’s strategy centers on leadership skills training for entrepreneurs and small business leaders. SCI holds training and development workshops and small business roundtables every month. It also hosts EntreCon, a conference held in Pensacola each November just for entrepreneurs.
To learn more, please visit www.studeri.org and www.vibrantcommunityblueprint.com.
