Marketing strategist. Textologist. Actor. Video game character. OK, I knew at least two of those. Builder of exceptional dwellings and retail environments. Yea, I knew that, too. Lover of red wine and chocolate. Skydiving. Definitely! Because I've got photos of his skydiving in the "Send Me to Santa Barbara" fun fact book!

He's Timothy Gibbs, and he's well-known for playing the dashing Dash Nichols on the '80s daytime soap "Santa Barbara," among other soaps roles, as well as portraying Will Adams on "Father Murphy," and even for being the original model for the Max Payne video games (no, it wasn't Marky Mark!). Now Gibbs has something else on his resume: His new business, Gardenia, just officially launched. Billed as a "progressive branding and marketing laboratory committed to increasing sales figures, cultivating brand awareness and growing legacies" for each of its client's companies, products and services, Gardenia springs from two years of planning and months of work, Gibbs says.

The new company is essentially a merging of Gibbs' existing business ventures, which include a New York-based construction company he founded in 1997, Jefferson Rilke Hopper Davis, with offices in Arizona and Tennessee.

"I named it after Thomas Jefferson, and Rainer Maria Rilke is a famous poet. Miles Davis the performer, Edward Hopper is an oil painter," Gibbs told me in February in the interview for the book. "An interior design construction company that I named after those four artists, with Thomas Jefferson as an architect."

Gibbs does have a manager and an agent and does still do auditions these days, but he certainly stays busy, besides. "I split my time up a lot," he said. "I spend a lot of time in different parts of the country and outside of the country these days a lot. My business is sort of at the spearhead of what’s happening economically speaking, so it's much slower these days and it’s changed the way I do business."