Good Liquid Brewing Company, Waterside Place, Lakewood Ranch, FL | Thursday, May 14, 2026 | 6:00 PM
A carefully curated evening that introduced Top Recommends to highly recommended business owners and professionals across Sarasota and Manatee County.
Top Recommends, a Bradenton-based community for trusted local businesses, operators, and professionals, hosted its first live event on Thursday, May 14, 2026. Founder Craig Wallace, partnered with Meghan Garfield, brought together a hand-picked group of business owners and operators at Good Liquid Brewing Company in Waterside for an evening built around peer conversation.
The beautiful energy in the room stayed strong from 6:00 PM, with conversations still going past 9:00 PM. Attendees traveled from across the region. Some guests even arrived from Bradenton all the way down to Venice.
Every attendee will also be featured in a dedicated article on toprecommends.com, spotlighting their business, their work, and why they come highly recommended in the local community. Craig booked roughly 15 follow-up interviews on the spot, with each guest sitting down for a short conversation that will shape their feature.
Based on the response from this first event, Top Recommends plans to host a networking meetup every month going forward, with the next one expected to roughly double in size. A separate, more focused parents networking event is also in the works, co-hosted with Meghan Garfield and centered on holistic, education-minded families across Sarasota and Manatee County.
A Carefully Curated Room of Top Recommended Businesses
This wasn't an open networking event. Every request to attend was personally reviewed by Craig, who built the room around a single standard: highly recommended business owners and professionals the community trusts. The kind of operators and professionals neighbors refer to friends, clients send their family to, and other local pros call when they need someone who actually delivers.
These are the people quietly making a difference across Sarasota and Manatee County. The goal of the evening was to put them in the same room, build real relationships between them, and create the kind of connections that lead to better referrals, better partnerships, and a stronger local business community over time.
More Than a Year in the Making
The May 14 gathering served as a soft launch for Top Recommends, which has been in development for more than a year. The evening marked Craig's first step in re-engaging with the local business community ahead of the official rollout, and the room was assembled with care: highly recommended business owners and professionals the community already knows and trusts, each one personally reviewed and confirmed by the hosts.
The evening was also a chance to hear directly from both hosts about the work they're doing in the community. Craig introduced Top Recommends and the vision behind the platform, and Meghan shared more about Mindful Leaders Academy and the impact she's building in Lakewood Ranch.
Meet the Hosts
Craig Wallace, founder of Top Recommends
Craig is the founder of Top Recommends and runs Growth Marketing Experts, a marketing practice working with businesses across Sarasota, Manatee, and the surrounding Gulf Coast. After more than three years as a CMO, he moved into independent consulting and now leads client work spanning SEO, content, paid media, web, and AI automation.
He started Top Recommends to formalize something he had been doing informally for years: connecting trusted local operators to each other and to the businesses they actually use.
Meghan Garfield, founder of Mindful Leaders Academy
Meghan is the founder of Mindful Leaders Academy of Lakewood Ranch, a learning community based at Harvest United Methodist Church in Lakewood Ranch. The program is built around student-led, collaborative, project-based learning across music, art, literature, STEM, social emotional learning, and physical fitness and nutrition.
Meghan also runs HomeGrown Minds, her private education consulting practice. She holds a master's in instructional design and educational technology from the University of Tampa and brings more than a decade across classroom teaching, instructional design, and higher education to both businesses. Learn more about Mindful Leaders Academy at mindfulleadersacademylwr.com.
About Top Recommends
Top Recommends is a community for trusted local businesses, operators, and professionals across Sarasota and Manatee County. Founded by Craig Wallace and based in Bradenton, the platform helps consumers find businesses they can actually trust while giving local operators a place to be recognized for the quality of their work. Top Recommends also offers services that help businesses become top recommended in their industry and across the Florida community.
