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Project manager
Amos helping Coast to become premier destination
It’s a toss-up which is longer: the list of business services “Cathye is especially good at pulling people together, organizing
that Cathye Ross Amos can provide or the list of community them and directing them in an initiative,” McKenzie continues.
organizations where she volunteers. The one thing her résumé “She’s used those skills to bring the Coast through early recovery and
doesn’t take into account is her dynamic charisma. is now helping us become a premier resort destination.”
“Her superb skills paired with her warm personality make her a Currently owner of Ross Business Partnerships, Amos handles
great leader,” says Duncan McKenzie, general manager of Hard Rock project management, marketing campaigns, event planning, and
Casino Biloxi. McKenzie worked with Amos for five years at the workforce development for regional and national companies. As a
Grand Casino, where he was general manager and she headed up the concerned citizen, she serves on a raft of nonprofit boards, including
marketing department. the Coast Chamber, the Mississippi Coliseum Commission and the
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Mental Health Association. While Amos seeks out opportunities
to learn in each new endeavor, she finds that sharing her
knowledge offers its own rewards.
“I love working with young folks who are just at the
beginning of their careers,” she says. While she advises them to
broaden their horizons by taking on unfamiliar job challenges
and meeting new people, she also encourages them to nurture
their personal and family lives.
“Business is good,” she says, “but balance is better.”
Amos began her rise in the business world in Jackson, after
she graduated from the University of Southern Mississippi with
a business degree. She worked in management training and
community relations for Blue Cross and Trustmark Bank before
becoming assistant director of operations at the Hinds County
Economic Development District.
Relocating to the Coast in 1995, Amos was named vice
president of marketing for Grand Casino at just 31 years of
age. She moved on to the Isle of Capri Casino as senior director
of marketing before launching her own enterprise in 2008.
Through it all, Amos held on to her own sense of balance,
instilled by a mother who “let us find our own voices early in
life.”
“She is totally unselfish,” Amos adds. “I learned most from the
things that she did, rather than what she said. If she said she’d
do something, she was 100 percent committed. She’s been my
most important mentor. In fact, I still call her for advice.”
But even her mother couldn’t have known the challenges
of the self-employed. Recalling her own jump from corporate
executive to small business owner, Amos says the transition
seemed easy — at first.
“It took me three or four months to find out how hard it was,”
she says. “When your own money and your own household are
at risk, you find out what it’s about. I get it now.”
Her experience as an entrepreneur has given her empathy
for small business owners trying to make the leap into the 21st
century.
“Technology is going to dictate that companies change,” Amos
asserts. “No matter what industry it is, they’ll have to take a
fresh look at how they do business.”
As for the local economy, she foresees the Coast coming back
“bigger and better than before. We’ll be more diverse because of
the lessons we learned from Katrina — ones that we don’t care
to repeat.”
Amos offers another observation stemming from her own
experiences as a relative newlywed (she married Gulfport
attorney Rick Amos in 2007).