The Turning Point
As amazing as those years in my hometown were, promoting a community that, despite all its warts and flaws, I loved, I came to a crossroads. Coming off the best year the DMO had ever had (including winning that three-year bid for the Nationals), my Board offered me a 0.0% raise.
Incensed, I went to the Chicago Tribune want ads, hoping to prove to my Board that I was under compensated. Mind you, this was before the Internet, and I scanned the newspaper classifieds for other nonprofits to prove that I was underpaid. I would then cut the ads out and tape them to a piece of paper and then use a copier to produce the document that I would share with the Board to attempt to prove my point.
I wasn't expecting to find an ad for a Destination Marketing Organization because, quite frankly, there weren't a lot of us out there. It was still a very young sector.
But there it was. An ad for the Greater Madison Convention and Visitor Bureau. I knew nothing of Madison. My experiences in Wisconsin were always summers in Door County. But, I thought, “hey, there aren't that many of us that have experience running a DMO, I should at least get a cursory interview.” It was as innocent as that. I was happy in my home town. I just wanted my Board to recognize my talent with a raise.
And that's how the story really begins to build steam. I get a call to interview. I don't take it seriously. This is just my maneuver to get a raise. And then, I experience Madison. OMG. I so wanna be here.
My interview doesn't go well because I was so unprepared. But, amazingly, I get a call back.
After ultimately being selected, I was having lunch with one of the search committee members during my first week on the job. I asked her, “what the hell? I was horrible in my first interview. How did I get a call back?”
She threw her head back, laughed and said, “one of the members of the committee is pretty anal. We had agreed we would call back the top three but we only really liked two and she kept pushing that we needed to stick with the plan and and bring back three. And somebody said, why don't we bring that punk from Illinois back to find out what's wrong with him…because he clearly doesn't covet this job.”
And there you go. The butterfly effect. Someone, completely unknown to me, retrieved me from the dung heap of rejected candidates to set me on my path to help realize a Frank Lloyd Wright designed Convention Center in Wisconsin's capital city…which set me on my 30 year journey of consulting in the Destination Marketing world.
Wow… whoever you were, I thank you.