Hecht’s new role at GNO Inc. will mean change | Business News

As the president and CEO of GNO, Inc., Michael Hecht averages about six media interviews and two groundbreakings or ribbon cuttings a week, plus a handful of keynote speeches and panel discussions.

And that’s not including the actual work of doing economic development — pitching site selectors on the advantages of south Louisiana, lining up incentive packages for potential companies and closing big deals.

“I actually did a pie chart of my current job, and it came out to 115%,” Hecht said. 

Now, after 18 years as the metro area’s de facto ambassador, chief salesperson and top economic development leader, Hecht, 55, announced last week that he is stepping down at the end of the year and will assume the newly created position of CEO emeritus — a role designed to ensure a smooth transition with his successor, while enabling him to continue working on “big picture” projects that have defined his tenure at GNO, Inc. of late.

Hecht said the decision to step back from the day-to-day grind of TV morning show interviews and late-night strategy sessions was his alone, at a time in his life in career when he is seeking more “personal flexibility.”

It also will free him up to launch his own governmental relations and consulting business, which he said will not present a conflict of interest with his new emeritus role at GNO, Inc.

“We will be careful how we structure it,” Hecht said. “But I think the reality of it is I will be in a position to drive a lot of business to the city, region and the state.”

Hecht insists he is not leaving his native New Orleans, at least not immediately. As CEO emeritus, he will be a paid employee of GNO, Inc. for up to three years.

Still, it will be a significant change for an organization that is now on the fast-track to fill his position by the end of the year, when his new role becomes effective.

Two sources familiar with the search committee process said the names of a potential replacement are already floating around and that the organization is seeking in its next leader someone who is from the city or the region, or at least, very familiar with its quirks, strengths, weaknesses and the key people who make things happen.

“We are starting the selection process almost immediately, and we want it to be as efficient of a process as possible so I will have time to work with the new person,” Hecht said.

Models for transition

As envisioned, the CEO emeritus role will be modeled after the monthslong transition that occurred between the tenure of longtime New Orleans & Co. CEO Stephen Perry and his successor Walt Leger, according to one board source.

The existing model at the Audubon Nature Institute is another example. After longtime CEO Ron Forman retired in 2025, he moved into a role as CEO of the Audubon Foundation, leveraging his relationships in the community to focus on fundraising while his successor Michael Sawaya took over day-to-day operations.

Hecht said as an emeritus, fundraising will be a key priority as will be supporting the new CEO with introductions and knowledge transfer.

He’ll also be working on a new “5×5” initiative focused on growing the region’s stagnant population. Its goal is to increase the region’s population 5% a year over a five-year period. 

And he’ll continue to focus on the large, special projects that became his signature during the previous mayoral administration, when GNO Inc. stepped up to fill what many in the business community felt was a political leadership void.

Looking back on it, Hecht says those projects — spearheading efforts to ready the city for the Super Bowl in 2025, trying to unite competing ports in support of the Louisiana International Terminal Project, helping form the NOLA Coalition to lower the city’s crime rate in 2022 and seeking solutions to catastrophic insurance rates — have been the highlights of his tenure as CEO.

Baton Rouge also searching

The changes at GNO Inc. come as the Greater Baton Rouge Economic Partnership, formerly the Baton Rouge Area Chamber, is also looking for a new leader.

In May, GBREP President and CEO Lori Melancon was removed after a short and rocky tenure at the agency. Since then, Trey Godfrey and Jayson Newell have been sharing duties as interim co-CEOs.

The changes also come as Gov. Jeff Landry’s administration is playing a more active and aggressive role in economic development than the state did under Gov. John Bel Edwards.

Under Landry’s Louisiana Economic Development, the state has landed mega deals that include AI data centers in north Louisiana, Hyundai’s planned steel mill near Donaldsonville, and more LNG export facilities in southwest Louisiana.

LED Secretary Susan Bourgeois said bringing in two new leaders at the same time at the state’s two largest economic development organizations opens for the groups to reestablish a close working relationship that had flourished for several years before cooling more recently.

“This really presents an incredible opportunity to focus on the super region again,” Bourgeois said.

A little over a decade ago, GNO Inc. and the Baton Rouge Area Chamber, the former name of the economic development agency, began jointly marketing themselves as a “super region.” With just 80 miles between them, their relative proximity made them natural partners.

Besides, even with nearly two dozen parishes and a couple of million people between them, they were still much smaller together than mega-metro areas like Houston, Dallas and Atlanta, with which they were competing.

Together, they took canvass trips to Tampa-Orlando in 2013, and Tucson-Phoenix in 2015, both of which offered practical lessons on how to collaborate in order to improve economic competitiveness.

They also jointly traveled to Panama in 2016, after Louis Armstrong New Orleans International Airport landed direct air service to Panama City, where they focused on opportunities in shipping and logistics.

Looking back on it a decade later, it’s not clear what, if any, concrete business deals resulted from the trips. But Hecht said they were opportunities to build relationships across the region and to broaden the way locals think about south Louisiana.

Those ties also helped forge the collaboration that came a few years later, when the two organizations teamed up to seek federal and state funding for passenger rail service between New Orleans and Baton Rouge. Though the goal has yet to be realized, both organizations learned what can be done when they work together, Hecht said.

Under the organization’s new leadership, he hopes to reaffirm those ties.

“We had an amazing relationship with BRAC under Adam Knapp (the longtime head of BRAC who stepped down in 2023),” said Hecht. “I would hope and expect in the next iteration of GNO and BRAC that this tight relationship will continue.”