Susan Slappey was born and raised in Jacksonville and comes from a long line of Jacksonvillians. Her ties to the area can be traced back several generations. Her great grandmother was from Mayport, and her family ran the lighthouse in Mayport. Her grandmother on her mother’s side was in the first graduating class at Fletcher in 1938. Slappey is a Bishop Kenny graduate, and is CFO at MDM Commercial headquartered in Ponte Vedra Beach. MDM Commercial is owned by Steve Austin, who also has strong ties to the Jacksonville community.
How long have you been with MDM Commercial?
I’m coming up on six years.
Tell me about the company, what do you do?
MDM Commercial is a distributer of commercial grade televisions, primarily. We have two divisions: healthcare and hospitality. We’re headquartered here in Ponte Vedra, but we have a sales force all over the country. The hotel sales force is mostly here. We have about 16 people in the office here and we’ve really grown a lot in the last couple of years. From the medial side, we do a lot of business with hospitals and we provide more than just the T.V.s, we provide some services. We have engineers on staff and they’ll go in and kind of help design the room layout for the patient room T.V.s and the common areas like the lobbies that have T.V.s, so we try to provide a lot more service than just a T.V.
What do you enjoy doing in your free time?
This time of year, we spend a lot of time going to Tallahassee going to football games. My husband and I are both FSU grads and he’s from Tallahassee, so we get over there quite a bit. I like to fish and go to the beach. We have a little house on the river in St. Johns County — we like to spend a lot of time out there on the water.
Tell me about your family.
I have two daughters that both live here – Erin graduated from Florida State and Carli graduated from Ole Miss. My husband, Mark and I have been married 31 years next week. He works for Synovus Bank.
Do you belong to any clubs or organizations?
I’m a 2003 member of the Leadership Jacksonville class. I served on their board of directors for about six years. I’m involved with my church. One of my past big volunteer events I worked on was the Greater Jacksonville Kingfish Tournament. I spent many years working on that. I do volunteer work through MDM with the Ronald McDonald House, Steve’s a big supporter of the House and has provided T.V.s for the rooms and we’re getting ready to provide T.V.s for the expansion rooms. As MDM, we do meals at the Ronald McDonald House. This year, we’ve gotten involved with Beaches Habitat for Humanity and we built a house, so we had a house building day. Steve is very committed to the community.
