Ep. 101: Jeff Brault, Vice President of Global Public Affairs at Hornblower Group, on Owning Your Lane, Solving Problems, and Building a Career That Wasn’t on the Map

Jeff Brault, Vice President of Global Public Affairs at Hornblower Group, the operator behind the NYC Ferry, Statue City Cruises, and Alcatraz City Cruises, joins host Karina Jimenez to trace a career he calls circuitous: from early ambitions in pro sports, to helping run his family’s construction company, to building a public affairs career almost entirely by carving out roles that didn’t exist yet. Jeff shares how deliberately becoming a “jack of all trades plus”, picking up projects across an organization rather than staying in one lane, made him harder to replace and positioned him for repeated promotions over nearly seven years at Hornblower. In this episode, Jeff unpacks how to treat small or unglamorous early-career assignments as proving ground rather than beneath you, how to know when you’ve earned the right to advocate for a promotion, and why quietly doing great work isn’t enough if no one knows about it. He also gets candid about AI, explaining why he doesn’t yet trust it to do the relationship-driven, people-centered work at the heart of public affairs and community engagement, and how he uses it selectively, as a research and brainstorming partner, never as a replacement for his own voice or judgment. Jeff and Karina also dig into what real community engagement looks like beyond a single photo-op, including how his team connected with roughly twenty-five thousand people across more than four hundred events in New York City last year, and why he measures his own success by whether the people he’s worked with would say he was in the trenches with them. For the next generation of professionals, Jeff’s advice is to build a reputation as someone who actively solves problems rather than just talks about hustle, be a genuine and engaging presence with the people around you, and remember that showing up for your team when things go wrong matters far more than any amount of posting about hard work.