A fifteen-minute meeting that ran for years.

The best contracts almost never start like contracts.

In 2016, Michael was in Miami, waiting on his place at E11EVEN and taking side work while it came together. A friend called with a simple pitch: come take a meeting, there might be something here. The meeting was with John Dunlap, the CEO running Jungle Island — the zoological park out on Watson Island.

Dunlap didn't sit down. It was supposed to be a fifteen-minute introduction.

It ran two hours.

Somewhere in that two hours he understood what Michael and his partner, Christian Margesson, could actually do — and the thing that started as a courtesy meeting became month-to-month consulting. Month-to-month became a six-month contract. Six months became two years.

The work widened fast. It started with Food and Beverage — redesign it, rebuild it. Then Group Events. And inside that first year, it went further still: development, and the job of getting every department pointed the same direction. That last part is the one operators recognize. A property that size doesn't usually fail at any one department. It fails in the gaps between them.

Then Hurricane Irma hit, and the park was destroyed. Indoor and outdoor spaces gone. Animals that had to be relocated. A wild mess by any measure, and the kind of thing that ends most vendor relationships — because when a client is on the floor, the consultants are usually the first line item cut.

That's not what happened. They took it back to market. They helped rebuild the structure. They handed Group Events the historical numbers it needed to sell against — the unglamorous work that lets a wrecked property prove to a client it can still host the thing.

Later, after Michael had moved back to Las Vegas, they called again — this time to redesign the entire food and beverage program. From a different city, for a property he no longer lived near, because the relationship had outlasted the geography.

There's one more piece of that waterfront worth naming, because it outlasted the engagement entirely. Michael found the opportunity, developed it, managed it, and constructed the deal — then handed it to the operators who would run it. It opened in January 2020 as JOIA Beach, the restaurant and beach club on the Jungle Island waterfront, under Chris Paciello and Mio Danilovic.

That second name matters. Michael had met Mio Danilovic back in 2011, working on Hyde Bellagio in Las Vegas. Nine years later Mio took over a deal Michael had built in Miami and, by Michael's own account, beat its first-year target several times over. A few years after that, Mio co-founded N1CE — where ITM came in on the founding team and remains a partner and equity holder today. Two cities, fifteen years, three companies, and the same relationship running underneath all of it. JOIA Beach is still open.

Here's the part worth keeping. Nobody signed a long-term deal at the start. There was no pitch deck, no RFP, no procurement process. There was a fifteen-minute introduction that someone decided to extend to two hours, and then a decade of the same answer: do the work, do it well, be the person they call when the roof comes off.

That's the whole model. You don't win the long relationship in the first meeting. You win the right to the second one.