By Paul Bonnette
Many know Taylor Williams as the Marketing Manager for Dolly Parton’s Panama City Beach attraction, Pirate’s Voyage Dinner and Show. However, much like the show itself, there is much more to Taylor than meets the eye. Motivational Speaker, Marketer, Influencer, and Mental Health Advocate, Taylor uses her voice to share messages of positivity and hope everywhere she goes.
Taylor knows Bay County well. She’s not only a lifelong Bay County resident, but she also has family roots here going back four generations. Although Taylor has a skill set that seems tailor-made for her work with Pirates Voyage, she started on a very different career path.
“I am a 4th-generation Bay Countian, born and raised; my whole family still lives here,” Williams tells Life Media. “ I have had a very interesting career path, because I went to Gulf Coast State College for Dental Assisting. I was working at a local movie theater all through college. I love Oral Health, but I realized I loved Real Estate. So, I went to work for a husband-and-wife realtor team as their transaction coordinator and did that for three years. I learned so much about real estate. “
It wouldn’t be long before Williams started feeling the pull to be in the family business, where she would first discover her love of marketing while working as an agent with her mother in homeowner’s insurance.
“It’s still in the Real Estate world, and it was more of a career,” explains Williams. “When you are in insurance, you have to sell yourself and I got really into that. I liked the marketing side of things, so I started deep diving, learning and taking online courses, and really fell in love with that.” During this time, she was actively putting together a business plan of how she wanted to start marketing herself differently, and saw that Setco Title & Insurance Company had a job listing. Williams applied and got the job, a position she stayed in for five years. She also did business development and marketing for 3 separate offices (and loved it). This experience helped her learn the ins and outs of marketing.
During this time, Taylor’s love of marketing would soon collide headlong with another love, the Queen of Country Music, Dolly Parton.
“I came and saw Dolly Parton’s Pirates Voyage on June 1, and I am a life-long Dolly Parton fan. My lullaby every night for my entire life was my mom reading “Coat of Many Colors.” I have a VHS copy of Dolly Parton’s Live in London and these concerts. Dolly was a big deal. I wasn’t looking for another job… fast forward to the job of Marketing Manager becoming open. I’ve been here since August, and we are now hitting the one-year anniversary for Pirates. It’s been a dream job. It’s exactly what I wanted it to be and more.”
For many people, that dream job won’t always live up to the hype. However, Williams discovered it was better than she imagined, all because of the people.
“My favorite part of this place, as much as I love the actual production, is the people I work with. It’s so extraordinarily rare to have 100+ employees like we have and the management team we have. You can see the genuine kindness and the smile on people’s faces. You can tell it by the greeters, face painters, servers, bartenders, because when you have positivity like that…I feel like I’m with my people here.”
For Williams, these opportunities give her a voice for her other passion, spreading positivity and mental health awareness. Last year, she started a non-profit based around mental health called the “Cool to be Kind Foundation”.
“I was in a really low place around COVID, a lot of people were,” remembers Williams. “ I am in a wonderful, beautiful place now because I took the time to care for myself then, and I still do every day. It’s a choice to choose to keep going and to choose to see the positive in life. It’s something anyone can do, choosing that mindset.”
Williams has been hard at work getting her message of positivity out into the community, including an event in 2023 called the Positivity Symposium, where she was a keynote speaker. The event raised $3000 for Suicide Prevention, Awareness Response & Education (SPARE). For Taylor Williams, her goal is to share her message of joy, positivity and hope. Whether that is helping guests make lifelong memories at Pirates Voyage or through her non-profit work, it goes to show there is more to her than meets the eye.
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