Through the Years

Pat White - Past Marketing Director

When jo kathmann inherited a murky situation with the bureau, you were one of her first hires. How did that make you feel?

“She realized when she took over and found out what the problems were, that she wasn’t going to be able to handle it without someone who was really good at marketing. I have to give her so much credit for foresight, one of the reasons that we worked so well together is that she had the vision of where it could go and where it could be, and kind of how we could get there - but I implemented it. Jo and I just clicked from the beginning.”

When you think about your role in the early 2000’s, what was your biggest task?

“To me, the biggest part of the job was to build relationships, that’s what I did pretty well, I think. I had good relationships with a lot of people, and some who when we first went in and talked to them about it weren’t interested at all. They just didn’t think we could do squat until they saw it happen, but we had to earn our stripes, I tell you. jo and I worked our butts off to do that, a lot of nights, a lot of weekends, a lot of meetings.”

Before you arrived at the bureau the Visitors Guide was done out of house. Why was it important to you for the bureau to take control of it?

“We completely revamped the Visitors Guide when we got here. I created the first media kit that had sizes of ads, pricing, and just information about what we want from our communities, calendar information. That kind of stuff was all in the folder and then I started passing those folders out to everybody we met with, and we started getting ads coming in, so it was a snowball effect. Then once we added all those extra counties, we had to figure out how to segment it so that regionally people would understand where they were. We didn’t want somebody thinking that they could hop in a car and in an hour be to Casey, it’s a little farther than that. But writing the stories was a lot of fun.”