COVER FEATURE

A new direction

Amidst turmoil, the Central Wisconsin Convention and Visitors Bureau hired a new director. So far, so good.

Tim White stops in the middle of a sentence often

during a recent interview at Whitewater Music Hall. “Oh that’s a great band, I saw them live,” he’ll comment, before continuing his thoughts.

White is the new director of the Central Wisconsin Convention and Visitors Bureau. He’s been charged with turning around the organization after a major fallout involving the previous director. It’s no easy task.

Or is it? New contracts are being put in place, the books have been opened, so to speak, information once held under lock and key suddenly seems forthcoming and municipal leaders suddenly seem bullish on an organization they’d bristled at only months ago.

A recent meeting of the Room Tax Commission might have given viewers a hint as to why. White laid out his plans for Wausau, and one thing was immediately apparent: White is on another level. His plans are something totally new to the Wausau area, and he’s bringing a different mentality to the organization as it rebuilds. And rebuild he must, as the organization was left in pretty rough shape.

Music roots

White’s love of music is apparent as we talk from the couches at Whitewater Music Hall; and it’s immediately apparent that this isn’t your typical CVB director.

It turns out White spent time in the music industry in the 1990s. He managed artists for and later owned Chicagoland label Fundamental Records, a label that included Henry Rollins and Black Flag amongst its stable of artists.

There’s more than a cool factor there. White says he learned how to connect an artist with an audience, and dove into the tech side of the industry. He put together a cloud-based tool to help artists keep track of their shows and appearances which made booking much simpler. They also built specialty stores for artists to sell to their fans; the way White describes it, it comes across like an early version of Patreon. He describes an artist who writes 60 songs a year. “Most of those won’t make an album, but there is a rabid fan base that wanted everything he did.”

He also ran a media school in Chicago and was a pastor long before that. He has done work with CNN and ESPN. His LinkedIn profile goes on and on - as in, you’ll get sick of clicking the “show more experiences” after a while.

White came here originally to do business coaching through the Greater Wausau Chamber of Commerce. But when a recruiter for the CVB director position saw his resume and reached out, White thought “what the heck?”

It turned into a months-long process, and sometimes a confusing one. The fact that the CVB bought a new building for a new location didn’t come up until White’s first day. The organization bought the old Shakey’s building in Rib Mountain, which is in pretty rough shape. Whether it can be renovated or will just be a complete rebuild is yet to be determined, White says.

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▲ Tim White, the Central Wisconsin Convention and Visitors Bureau’s new director.

Calming the storm

That White has turned around the opinions of municipal leaders so quickly is no small feat. Relations were bad.

Prior to an incident with the city involving Expedia, the previous director Dick Barrett drew the ire of some Wausau leaders. Barrett attempted to move the organization’s pond hockey tournament from Marathon Park to the Wausau Airport. But there was a problem, a harbinger of bigger ones to come.

At an airport meeting about the potential move, Parks Director Jamie Polley pointed out that the CVB had not paid its bill for the previous year’s tournament. That rattled the Airport Committee, which rejected the idea of hosting the tournament there (there were other reasons having to do with the logistics of holding an event at an airport, but the non-payment was a major concern).

So when the city learned that the CVB under Barrett’s watch had accepted room tax dollars from Expedia and kept that quiet until city leaders learned what had happened and demanded their money, the fall started. Municipalities pulled out of their contracts with the CVB, with Wausau leading the charge.

Barrett retired in January. Talks about new contracts with the CVB started after that.

Some board members, including the former board president (who lived in Minocqua), also left; or rather, some of them were nudged on their way out. That cleared the way for new leadership to take hold.

It didn’t help matters that one of the first actions the board took when the Expedia incident occurred was threatening to sue the city for pulling out. That set up a stage for a difficult situation as many municipal leaders felt antipathy toward the organization.

Which is why it’s impressive that White came in and built trust so quickly. “He’s come in and he’s taken a very thorough view of the organization,” Mayor Katie Rosenberg told City Pages. “That’s really important. He’s had some strong things to say about the leadership of the organization and I think that’s hard for some of the board members who have been around longer than me.”

Rosenberg says White is someone who wants to “get %$&$ done,” and is transparent about it. “He’s not playing politics,” she says.

Another thing Rosenberg points out is that he’s really “elevated the staff” — meaning instead of treating them like minions, “he gives them credit, he invites them to the meetings, he brings them along. Which is something I don’t think they had before.”

Rothschild Administrator Gary Olsen made no secret about his misgivings about past CVB practices, but told City Pages he’s optimistic about the change in leadership.” We have been impressed with Tim White so far also,” Olsen says. “We still want to wait to be sure everything is moving in a positive direction before we start negotiations again with the CVB, but we have been impressed and like what we see so far.”

White met with leaders of the CVB in Portage County, to study what’s working for them. Leadership had good things to say there. This from Executive Director Sara Brish:

“Tim White brings a tremendous amount of leadership skills to the table based on his impressive resume. Tim did

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his research before coming to the organization. Once he was hired, he’s had many conversations with community stakeholders. His research and those conversations have allowed him to build a solid 30-day, 60-day, and six-month plan to rebuild the organization which I am really excited about.”

The plan

White has big plans for the CVB’s new headquarters. He sees it as a visitor center, a real landing spot for the Wausau area.

But he sees the CVB’s role as much larger than just visitation. White told the city’s Room Tax Commission and repeated to me that he sees the CVB playing a strong part in recruiting talent to the area and promoting the Wausau area as a place to live and work, not just to visit.

The Greater Wausau Chamber of Commerce has been working on that idea, banking a lot of their efforts on Ironbull and promoting the area as an outdoor, extreme sports mecca.

That’s not a bad thing, White told City Pages, but White takes a much broader approach that encompasses all the area has to offer. White speaks of adventure as a significant part of travel and living, and that means different things to different people. For some it might be hiking Rib Mountain or snowmobiling in the woods; for others it might be a day taking in the museums. For still others, it might be both of those things, or something different entirely.

That’s what makes his approach interesting. Instead of a top-down model, White is building a bottom-up model. His vision for the CVB’s new website is essentially that the community builds it. It will allow for various organizations to promote themselves and what they have to offer to visitors and would-be transplants.

He’s also not naive about where to market the Wausau area. Past marketing efforts often targeted like-sized communities, but more effective is to offer something different to someone in another community. Larger cities where people might be getting sick of the hustle and bustle are good marketing opportunities; especially in an era when people are more likely to be able to work remotely. “I’m part of the philosophy that it’s not ‘either or,’ it’s yes and,” White says.

Although White is clear he’s not the demographic he’s targeting, White is a boomeranger - someone from the area originally who moved away and then moved back. It’s a common phenomenon I wrote about in my early days at City Pages. Because Wausau lacks a 4-year university, there’s a tremendous brain drain. When you set up a system in which your best and brightest must leave to pursue their fields, your only hope is that they come back. And some do. A common pattern I noticed is that people leave college, settle into a career, meet someone and have kids. When those kids reach school age, their parents start remembering Wausau as a great place to raise kids and they start making plans to move back. (That’s improving somewhat as more educational offerings are becoming available, through North Central Technical College’s ever-increasing educational offerings, UWMC becoming a part of the four-year UWSP campus and the ability to take classes online through remote universities. But still, the lack of an in-person, complete 4-year university is a problem.)

White’s point is that as a new visitor or transplant would experience what he did: there is no one good landing page that really rounds up all the area has to offer. And no topdown version could ever cover it; it would be someone else’s vision of what the area is. What’s unique about what the CVB site will be, is that the community’s businesses and services and amenities will be invited to promote themselves on the website, making it a more accurate representation of the community with less gatekeeping.

The days of the CVB creating sporting events is over, White says. They’ll take a supporting role in not just sporting events but all the events in the area. That’s a departure from how Dick Barrett saw the role; sports seemed to be his primary interest.

If you want an example of all this, look to Stevens Point. White says he met with the Portage County Convention and Visitors Bureau folks and he has great things to say about how they’re running their organization.

He points to the Green Circle trail map, which is populated by businesses and attractions along the way with plenty of information for visitors. Much of that is user-generated, exactly what he has in mind for the Wausau area.

Promoting value

Coming from Chicago, White says he sometimes stares at a check after nice meal and wonders if they missed something on the bill, because it’s so inexpensive. With the primary markets of the Twin Cities and Chicago, the ability to stretch one’s dollar, the thinking goes, should be an attractor to those folks.

But that’s not always obvious. People in larger cities often think of places like Wausau as having nothing to do. A recent tweet from someone in a coastal city said they couldn’t live in a city with fewer than 200,000 people because they wouldn’t be able to get a latte or go to a yoga class. (Wausau at under 40,000 has many places for both of those things.)

Value is an important part of the sell when it comes to the Wausau area — both in that there is value in what the area offers, and that it can be had at an affordable price. That means promoting a broad category of offerings, not just sports.

Telling a story

One thing that Wausau has lacked for the most part is telling a real story about the area. It’s something Gerald Mortensen did to some extent with his Why Not Wausau? campaign. He saw what many have since talked about: Wausau has all these great outdoor amenities and a growing cultural scene. Why isn’t anyone talking about it? In other words, why not Wausau?

White talks about the Storybrand brand of marketing — the idea that you’re making your customer the hero of the story. Like Mortensen, White is planning to tell Wausau’s story. And he’s got a pretty good idea of who to tell it to and to what effect.

But the first part has been restoring trust. And so far, White has made huge strides in that department.

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