CEO OF THE YEAR
Michael Sawaya is the hardest-working New Orleanian on two wheels.
Since 2018, he has served as the president of the New Orleans Ernest N. Morial Convention Center, a domain that spans about 3 million square feet — the sixth-largest convention center in the country.
It’s a lot of ground to cover, especially now, when the center — which boast approximately 400 full-time employees — is in the midst of $557 million in capital improvement projects that reach even beyond its walls.
A problem solver by nature, Sawaya long ago adopted a trusty companion to get him where he needs to be — a Segway. It’s an item he says is invaluable to his management style, one that has helped earn the convention center a top regional workplace designation for eight years running. In 2021, that recognition expanded further, to a National Top Workplace honor — the only convention center in the country to hold that title.
“If I don’t get around and say hello to people and look them in the eye and tell them I appreciate what they do, then they’re not committed to the vision that we have,” he said. “Then they don’t deliver the best every day when they walk in the door, and they don’t go out and recruit people like them to join us. I continually ask them to tell me how they feel — what they like and don’t like and how we can continue to improve.”
It’s that nonstop focus on the next achievement that drives Sawaya, who was drawn to New Orleans from San Antonio, where he was serving as executive director of the city’s Convention and Sports Facilities (CSF) Department. The job included overseeing operations at both San Antonio’s convention center — where he directed a $325 million expansion — and the Alamodome — a 64,000-seat multipurpose indoor stadium where he led a $60 million expansion.
“Frankly, I looked back one day and said, ‘I’ve done everything I set out to do and I enjoyed it all so much,” he said. So when a recruiter came to me about an opportunity in New Orleans and I saw the possibilities here, I thought nowhere in the world is there a convention center in a central business district on a river with 40 acres of undeveloped land that it owns and controls. I thought, what an opportunity to do something really wonderful in a city that is all about hospitality. It just seemed like an opportunity that I couldn’t pass up.”
When Sawaya first stepped in the door of the aging, 1984 facility in his new role, his message was crystal clear.
“I told everybody that it was the decade of delivery, and that it was time to stop talking about what we were planning to do and start getting some things done,” he said.
What followed was the creation of the convention center’s first-ever capital plan. But while $557 million may seem like a hefty price tag, Sawaya offered some industry perspective.
“I look around the country and I see cities who are spending billions to reinvent what they have,” he said. “That is what we are competing against, so we always have to have an active reinvestment plan.”
Of that $557 million, Sawaya said about $180 million in improvements have been completed thus far.
“That includes things like the linear park, all the restrooms in the building, the lighting in the exhibit halls, all the technology in the building,” he said. “Currently, we’re working on the meeting rooms, and we’ve completed the first phase of a modernization of the public areas surrounding those meeting rooms.”
There’s also the roof.
“We are about three-quarters done with replacing our 40-acre roof, one of the largest roofs in the country.”
Other planned improvements include exterior upgrades and the addition of public art, something Sawaya feels passionate about.
“We have no real public art in our building,” he said. “We have got to have an expression of our community’s culture in our building so that people know that they’re in New Orleans.”
The plan also includes $26 million to be invested in an adjacent mixed-use development, a project that has taken shape under the name the River District, the groundbreaking for which took place Nov. 29. The $1 billion project will include the new Gulf South headquarters of Shell and a Top Golf.
“About two years ago, we went through a public process to select a master developer. We spent a couple of years trying to negotiate the right agreements and layout and map out what the future looks like and how that all gets developed to make sure that that neighborhood is set up, and that the city had all the things it needs to support the development.”
Sawaya said the convention center will continue to be an integral part of the development process.
“We have a master development agreement,” he said, “and every deal on each parcel has its own ground lease, which the [convention center] board will have to approve for the tenant to go forward.”
One part of the plan that hasn’t moved along so smoothly is the addition of a headquarters hotel.
“We’re the only city in our competitive set that does not have at least one headquarter hotel, either attached to the building or adjacent to the building,” he said. “So, it’s something that we absolutely have to do. It’s among my very highest priorities.”
While Sawaya credits the pandemic shutdowns with enabling the convention center to accomplish some renovation projects twice as fast as they could have if they had been open for business, it also threw a major snag in the hotel plans.
“When the pandemic hit, the financial investor for the hotel said, ‘We don’t think it’s a very good time to build a hotel, so we’re going to go buy a hotel somewhere,’” he said. “So that went away, and we began looking at — regardless of the fact that we own property — where’s the absolute best place to put a headquarter hotel? We identified a property that we don’t own, and we spent a while trying to convince an investor to sell his property and be a partner with us. That didn’t work out.”
Undeterred, Sawaya sought out another opportunity and says he hopes to report good news in the very near future.
“I am in current negotiations with a hotel developer to bring a sizable hotel headquarter project to the forefront,” he said, “but I can’t go into details quite yet.”
Sawaya has long been excited by hotels.
Sawaya grew up in Little Rock, Arkansas, where he and his sister and brother were raised by a single mother. He graduated from the University of Arkansas after paying his way through school with hotel work.
“My family has always been in hospitality, either in the restaurant business or in the hotel business,” he said. “My aunt and uncle had a motel in Cape Cod, Massachusetts, and they invited me to come up there and work in the summers when I was young and impressionable. I was 14 and coming of age and didn’t really know where I was heading in life and that break gave me exposure to something that became a lifelong passion of mine — hospitality.
Six months after graduating from college, he received the shock of his 23-year-old life.
“I went to work one day, and they said, ‘You need to be in Tulsa tomorrow morning.’ I said, ‘For what?’ and they said, ‘We’ll let you know when you get there.’ I got there and they said, ‘This is your new hotel. You’re going to be the general manager. I remember my first response was, ‘Well, I don’t know how to do that,’ and they said, ‘You’ll do just fine.’ I went home that Wednesday, hired someone to take my place and trained them, and was at work in Tulsa on Monday morning.”
Early in his career, he earned a reputation as a fixer.
“I ran 12 hotels in 19 years. I was the troubleshooter,” he said. “I was the one who went into hotels that were having issues and did a situation analysis, found out what they needed to turn it around, and then moved on to the next one. That work even brought me here to Louisiana in 1984. I had a hotel in St. Francisville for 100 days.”
Over the years he also developed his own leadership style.
“I used to say in my last job, if I could dream something up, and find a way to pay for it, they let me do it,” he said. “I think leadership is all about trust in a lot of ways.
“I’ve been fortunate because I’ve had to prove myself in whatever position I was in. And once you do that, and people know you deliver and they know they trust you, then they give you more room to work. My leadership style is very much based on trust.”
With the convention center, he said that feeling of trust is something he’s been fighting hard to build in the community.
“I’ve spent a lot of time since I arrived in New Orleans going around the community and making presentations about who we are, what we do and what the effect of it is,” he said. “I am the public face of this building that most people in the community don’t come into, because they don’t have a reason to, but we’re a major enterprise that affects all of our lives and we have to make sure that resonates with the residents here.”
Sawaya also wants to ensure the convention center resonates with potential clients, and that means bringing practices into the 21st century.
“I walked into a building that wasn’t even recycling,” he said. “Sustainability has long been a priority for most facilities around the country, and we were way behind. Not only did we say, ‘We’re going to make improvements,’ we made it a goal to be among the best.
Last year, the convention center was awarded LEED Gold certification.
“We’re the largest facility in the country, in the world, actually, that has met the standards for LEED Gold,” he said. “Going from worst to first, that was a monumental accomplishment, but being able to get everybody on board to understand the importance of that, to make the right investments to make sure the board supported what we were doing, I think that that represented one of our largest challenges, one that we’ve fortunately overcome.”
Currently the plan is for the capital improvements to be completed in 2025, but Sawaya said he has no plans of his own to move on.
“I saw a quote once that said, ‘America is not America without New Orleans.’ There’s just no place like it,” he said.
In addition to riding in a few Carnival parades, Sawaya said he’s happily immersed himself into the culinary culture of the city.
“As of last week, I’ve been to 339 different restaurants. Yes, I keep count,” he said. “Nobody knows as much about different restaurants as Ian McNulty and I.”
