Quirky, ambitious, tenacious, sweet.
If Micha Seal had a Webster’s Dictionary entry, these are the adjectives that would be used for her.
Her riverfront home, in New Port Richey, is decorated immaculately with flairs of her personality and a unique homage to her business. She even has a lap pool in her front yard, obscured by trees. The lifelong love of the water is further solidified when she explains that all but one room in her home has views of the water.
Fitting since her business, Watermelon Swim, is a collection of swim schools, located in the Tampa Bay area.
On track to exceed $13 million in revenue in 2024, and open three new locations, her business is doing much more than just staying afloat these days.
A TAMPA BAY GIRL
Seal is a rare find. She was born in Jacksonville but moved to St. Petersburg at six weeks old. Raised in Tampa Bay, she proudly declares she will never leave. A graduate of the University of South Florida, she didn’t even leave to go away to school.
Her grandparents were from Chicago and moved to Tarpon Springs, where they purchased Wall Springs, a freshwater spring and, you guessed it, taught swimming lessons.
Growing up in Tampa Bay, she recalls being a part of a resourceful family, always finding ways to provide for themselves. “We worked as a family,” she says. There were five children, and her father was a police officer with Tampa Police. A rewarding job for him for sure, one he retired from as a captain, but feeding a family of seven on his salary proved challenging.
“My mother was a true entrepreneur,” Seal says. “I was taught to work hard, young. I was probably ten years old, maybe younger.”
She refers to it as “pushing,” something she and her siblings were required to do. With cups around their necks and homemade nets in their hands, they would literally push the nets across the floor of Tampa Bay and collect wildlife. What they were fishing for, mainly, was seahorses. Her mom would dry them out and sell them, to make money.
The family didn’t shy away from getting a little dirty to make a living. Mom kept Seal, and her four siblings, occupied helping with the family’s side hustles. Once, they even became beekeepers – harvesting the honey to sell it and help provide for the family.
Water safety education runs deep in the family’s blood, with Seal’s mother teaching swimming lessons, as early as 9 years old, and continuing that livelihood throughout Seal’s life.
“I can’t give her enough credit for her entrepreneurial spirit. She was just fantastic at figuring out how to make money and the way she did it was something she really liked…except the bees. She really didn’t like the bees,” Seal says, with a chuckle.
Even still, with all the water life around her, Seal says she wasn’t always sure that would be her career path. She did help with her mom’s swimming lesson business, starting at age 15, and opened a seasonal location when she was 21 years old, which she ran for 15 years.
She eventually studied education, at USF, and considered becoming a nurse.
An interesting choice since being around sick people was a challenge for her. She didn’t become a nurse; it wasn’t in the cards. Seal was destined to make, literal, waves.
SWIMMING TOWARD SUCCESS
Seal and her, then, husband, moved to the Lutz area with their six children, one girl – her eldest – and five boys. “We knew that place was booming,” she says. Meanwhile, she was working with Mom, while the swimming business was flowing.
“I said, ‘Mom, let’s open our own location,” Seal recalls. “She and I became partners, and we went to Heritage Harbor, and we leased their pool. We ran that for four years and we grew it.”
The business outgrew that space after about three years, and they set out to build their own location.
“We couldn’t find anything, at first,” Seal says. “Properties we found were either too expensive or not large enough.”
Until one day, Seal was driving down Dale Mabry Highway, in Lutz, with her children in tow, in the cliché mom minivan she had, at the time.
“I saw a real estate agent putting a sign on the side of a property, so I turned around and pulled up on the side of the road,” Seal recalls. “I said, ‘Kids, don’t move. Do not get out of the car, do not breathe…do nothing,’” she adds, laughing at the memory of her five boys and one girl in the car, left alone. A thought that would give any mother anxiety today.
The agent told Seal it was a 1.3-acre property and added, almost comically, “But there’s no water here.” But with some work, which Seal was no stranger to, there could be a pool. And an indoor pool is exactly what Seal needed to build.
The stars were aligned that day. When the agent told her the price Seal’s response was, “You take that sign, put it back in your trunk and I’ll have a check for you tonight.”
SWIMMING OUTSIDE THE LANES
Seal had found the property she and her mother wanted and now, they needed to buy it. As emphatically as she had proclaimed she could, it was time for her to figure out how.
“Nobody believed in us,” Seal says. “We knocked on so many doors and visited so many banks. We kept trying. And then we finally found a mortgage company that would take a chance on us.” As soon as they could, the partners refinanced that loan and found a bank that continues to champion them and partner with them, to this day.
After the Lutz location came the South Tampa location.
While building the business, Seal admits times were hard, and those early years weren’t easy. While looking around the lovely home she owns now, she says, “It wasn’t always like this,” gesturing large, in the air.
Her daughter, and oldest child, Frankie Beatty-Todd, regional vice president for Watermelon Swim, agrees. “I hated going to the grocery store [during that time] because I didn’t know if the credit card would work. It was embarrassing.” But already being a fighter and knowing how to earn a living to feed a slew of hungry children, Seal knew that although she was swimming upstream then, soon the tide would turn in her favor.
Seal and her mom/partner then purchased Wesley Chapel. And Micha purchased Riverview, on her own.
It was around this time, in the evolution of the family swimming business, when Mom was ready to retire, and Micha’s vision began to shift. Seal made the difficult decision to swim in her own lane, while her family members swam in theirs.
“Their business model was very different than mine. Their billing structure was different, their lesson plans were different, all of it was just different,” Seal says. “They ran a seasonal school. I ran a year-round school.” Both were successful, in their own right, but Seal knew rebranding was the best option for both entities to continue to grow and continue the mission to teach more children.
This was Micha’s toughest decision to date. Considering the family ties, and the deep respect she will always hold for Seal Swim School, it was a challenge. It was an emotional process, for everyone. Understandably so, everyone involved was protective of their business “babies.”
At the end of the day, once the ink had dried on the paperwork and enough time had passed, a family-first mentality prevailed, and they moved forward as one, big, happy family.
Establishing a business, solely under her own oversight, without using her Seal name, required some creativity and sensitivity. And a business made in the water needs a name that reflects that, even if a little quirky.
SWEET LIKE WATERMELON
Around the time that Seal was navigating the new waters of her business, the global pandemic of COVID-19 hit and swimming lessons came to a halt, completely.
“I still remember the day when President [Donald] Trump came on the television. Our phones were ringing off the hook and people were canceling left and right. But when he spoke, we knew we had to close the doors,” Seal recalls the day. A lot of us remember that day, it was the day the world, essentially, shut down. “We had to close for three months, bringing in zero money.”
The next day, Seal and her team got back to work and figured out ways to stay busy and stay in business.
“I started trying to do everything I could to make sure that we could sustain our business,” Seal says. “I got every loan we could…we got creative, and we kept everyone working.”
Seal’s trainers did research and pivoted to creating training videos for clients. With all the children home, all the time, and parents attempting to work from home and monitor school from home, reports of drownings spiked, creating an increased need for swim safety education.
When it was time to open the doors again, and welcome in-person lessons, Seal’s team was better trained than ever before.
“It really prepared us because, when we opened back up, we had a really well-trained, experienced and dedicated team,” Seal says. “It was our first big experience together and we felt like a family.”
Seal has had this leadership mentality from the start. She personally developed a management training program, which she says is one of her proudest accomplishments.
“We train [our managers] on leadership skills, soft skills and every area in the swim school. We have them read books, we take them to conferences, we bring speakers in to train them,” Seal says. “Spotting talent within your organization is critical, and very important, but to actually be able to develop it, that’s how you keep your team, by continuing to develop them and make them feel valued.”
With her team in place, her journey to establishing her own business, under her own unique identity, her way, needed a name.
“I was out on my boat with the kids,” Seal remembers. At this time, those six children all wanted an invite on the boat, and they had “love interests, significant others and friends, whoever…” Seal says with a chuckle. “We needed a bigger boat.”
As she envisioned what her next (maybe two-seater) boat would look like, she pictured it.
“Pink seats and green on the outside, with black lettering, watermelon colors,” she describes. “Those are my favorite colors. And the boys were like, ‘Pink? We are not going to go on that boat.’ And I was like, ‘Score! Perfect!’” So, Watermelon Swim was born.
It’s poetic for Seal’s story. There’s water, there’s sweetness and a few seeds.
Seal sums it up candidly, “Someone once told me that I couldn’t have it all. They said, ‘You can’t have a large family and run a successful business. And I said, ‘Watch me,’” Seal says. ♦
MORE READING: A PASSION FOR WATER SAFETY
Seal’s passion for water safety runs deep.
“The reason my business keeps growing is because I believe everyone should have an opportunity to take swimming lessons,” Seal says.
Servicing more children is always the goal.
“We do a lot of water safety education in the community and on our dime, we go out to schools and libraries and mom groups, anybody that wants to talk about water safety. We have a free water safety program,” Seal says.
Seal is in the final steps of publishing a book on water safety.
“Year after year, Florida is number one, in the country, for drowning, with Pasco and Hernando always ranking the highest in the state,” Seal says. “Continuous and formal swim lessons, like the ones we provide, reduce the risk of drowning by 88%.”
Between charitable community givebacks like pumpkin patches, food drives and holiday drives, and community-driven water safety education programs, Seal estimates that Watermelon Swim gives back about $1 million, annually, to the Tampa Bay area.
Photos by Evan Smith
