Charles Wood: One of the best things you can do is kind of help them build their network in the community. You know, I think for us, that ability to get connected, build out a pretty significant network, really makes the community a lot stickier to that individual. The other thing we’ll do a lot of times early on if we’re working with somebody to try and recruit them to the community is we’ll help them if they’ve got a trailing spouse. And so if you have both people in a relationship that have connectivity with an employer or nonprofit or whatever it is that really helps keep folks there.

 

Amanda Ellis: That’s the voice of Charles Wood sharing some of his secrets of attracting talent to Chattanooga, Tennessee. 

 

My name’s Amanda Ellis, and you’re listening to Livability: Inside America’s Best Cities, a brand new podcast for chamber, economic development and talent attraction professionals. We bring you insights from America’s most promising places on how your community can be a better place to live, work, and play. 

 

In this episode, Charles Wood from the Chattanooga Chamber of Commerce shares insights for marketing your community, how remote work has affected talent attraction, and how your unique community attributes can fuel your talent attraction efforts.

 

To learn more about this show, visit livabilitymedia.com/podcast, and for more content like this sign up for Livability’s monthly Let’s Talk Talent, talent attraction newsletter, also at livabilitymedia.com. Now let’s jump in.

 

Amanda Ellis: Charles, thank you so much for joining us today on the Livability Podcast. We’re super excited to hear from you on how Chattanooga became the awesome place that it is today and some of what you’re doing to attract and retain talent. So to kick off before we get more into that, can you share just in a nutshell, how did you get into the field? So I know you just hit I think your 10 anniversary with the Chattanooga chamber and have worked all over the Southeast, but I don’t think people usually grow up thinking I want to be an economic developer when I grow up. So how did you get here? What brought you into it?

 

Charles Wood: Yeah, I didn’t grow up thinking that, I kind of backed into it and I was fortunate enough to go to a university that offers a graduate program in economic development though. So outside of delivering pizzas and parking cars while I was in college, this is really all I’ve done since graduating has been in the economic development field and got to spend seven years working in Texas and five years in Pensacola before ending up in Chattanooga. So it’s been a lot of fun.

 

Amanda Ellis: Gotcha. Well, I have to confess, I had really no idea what economic development was until I worked at a chamber, which full disclosure for our listeners, I am actually also based in Chattanooga, which is my hometown. And Charles is actually a former colleague of mine at the Chattanooga Chamber where I worked prior to joining livability. As a community, Chattanooga has experienced an amazing transformation over the last few decades. It used to not be a place where people went to enjoy downtown or where people who grew up here felt that they wanted to stay and pursue local opportunities here. But now that is definitely not the case. Now we have a vibrant young professional community, booming entrepreneurship scene, arts and culture happenings, more and more jobs coming in, all the good things. So Charles, can you talk a little bit about what were the main ingredients in those sweeping changes and what can other cities do to replicate their own big positive changes?

 

Charles Wood: Absolutely. The first thing I’d say is Chattanooga has had this arc of redevelopment and reinvestment in itself over the last 30 plus years. So it is not something that happens overnight and you don’t just get to wake up as a community leader and say, you know what? We’re going to head on a different trajectory and we should be done by next week. So for Chattanooga a big part of the transition was around investing in it itself, heavily investing in downtown, supporting a number of different partners in the community to make that happen and gearing up what I would say really are anchors in the community. And the goal was always around if we build a great city for Chattanoogan’s, then other people will want to come here. And I think particularly powerful in Chattanooga’s story is we were at a period of decline in the ’70s and ’80s.

 

We lost population, the children of the people who were here when they finished school, they left and they only came back for the holidays. And we’ve really transitioned to a community that now when our kids are graduating, they’re looking at how they can stay here. And so that’s really a big transition. And then in addition to that, we’re of course, grabbing additional young talent from around the country, which is really a testament to a lot of the investment that went into the community 30, 40 years ago.

 

Amanda Ellis: Yeah. So speaking of grabbing talent from around the country, you can’t really have a conversation at this point about talent attraction without remote work coming up. So I wanted to hear your thoughts on why does attracting remote workers matter and how does it benefit of a community when those workers don’t necessarily have ties to local employers?

 

Charles Wood: And that’s something that certainly that there have been a lot of changes that have happened because of COVID. And I think one of really the monumental shifts in the workforce has been this release from being tied to where your employer is, right? And so there are thousands and thousands of people who started to be able to really choose where they wanted to live with the emphasis on live and be able to work from those places. And so from a community standpoint, certainly if you’re adding another person who is bringing their job with them, that’s the equivalent from an economic development standpoint of recruiting a very small part of a company, right? And so it brings with it the wages that come with that job and then the reinvestment of those wages in the community.

 

And if it’s only one person, obviously, the impact is probably not that big, unless you’re a very small town, but it is really a mechanism to bring in outside capital, outside revenue, through that one salary, into a community that didn’t have that opportunity to receive that in the past. And so there are lots of communities that are out there that are incentivizing remote workers. Certainly, Tulsa has grabbed the headlines for that in a big way, but for Chattanooga, I think in particular, it’s really been impressive to see the number of people who that have really picked our community because of the lifestyle that’s here. We’ve been excited to see it.

 

Amanda Ellis: Yeah. So one thing that hasn’t come up yet that I did want to have you at least quickly talk about was Chattanooga Calling, I know that your team launched the Chattanooga Calling Initiative during the pandemic. And can you just give us a little bit of info about that and what it’s accomplished for you all?

 

Charles Wood: Sure. So Chattanooga Calling is a website that we built out around talent attraction, but also creating a level of connectivity for employers and employees during COVID. When really we were, I think, into 2020, we launched this site with the idea that you would link people who their jobs were impacted by COVID so they lost their jobs with companies that were hiring. Right? And so if you think about the hospitality sector and the restaurant sector, there were lots of service employees that lost their jobs, but there were also industry sectors that needed to scale up, right? So grocery stores were one of them. And so we used the site to scrape a job engine, which is indeed it basically pulls all of those jobs in the Chattanooga market onto one website. And then basically employers are able to go in and then kind of connect in a geographic sense and then link to their career pages as well.

 

So the idea is really to build up that tool. And then we worked with our partners. We have some great communications and media partners that gave us a lot of in kind space and time to tell the story of Chattanooga Calling and really direct people there. So it’s been a great tool. It certainly was a great tool for COVID. It does have a component to it around the community and what it’s like to live here and neighborhoods and cost of living and all those kind of things as well, which is helpful, particularly for people who are relocating to Chattanooga from somewhere else.

 

It does a good job of telling some of the stories of people who have relocated here and have been working remotely even before the pandemic hit. It’s just meant to be a way to help tell our story, but be really specific around the talent aspect of Chattanooga. And so the name itself, right? Chattanooga Calling, what is your calling? If you think about from a career perspective and your personal mission, but also, Hey, this is Chattanooga Calling, we’d love for you to consider our community as a place to build a great life.

 

Amanda Ellis: Yeah. It’s such a catchy name.

 

Charles Wood: I know. I didn’t come up with that. I wish I knew who did, that was not me.

 

Amanda Ellis: Such a good one. So I know that Chattanooga is a bit unique and that we take a regional approach to economic development through the greater Chattanooga economic partnership, which engages 16 surrounding counties to ours, and also crosses three different state lines with some counties in Tennessee, some in Georgia and a few in Alabama, how has that impacted Chattanooga’s talent pool and the talent pool of the surrounding region?

 

Charles Wood: Well, yeah, so the first thing I’d say and we’re fortunate, we’ve got great partners across the 16 counties. So we cover five in Northwest Georgia and then two in Northeast, Alabama, and the remainder nine in Southeast Tennessee. And when people move to your community, the reality is those kind of political lines are really imaginary for the average citizen, right? They have very little impact on their day-to-day. They may drive over them three, four times a day, but that’s not really an impact. And so the economic opportunity that presents itself at a regional level for individuals that are moving is really critical, right? I mean, especially if you’ve got a trailing spouse where maybe you’re bringing your job with you as a remote worker, but the reality is they may not be able to do that based on what they do.

 

And so working together as a region is helpful from that perspective. And then the other thing I’d say that is a little unique for Chattanooga, and there are certainly lots of other places across the country that are in this position, but we’re an hour and a half roughly depending on traffic from downtown Atlanta and downtown Nashville. And so for remote workers, what that means is you can live in Chattanooga five days a week, but you might work in Atlanta one or two days a week, or in Nashville. And so that gives those employees access to companies like Google and Amazon and Oracle, Salesforce, that have they’ve got operations in those two very large markets, but they’re not requiring their employees to be in the office five days a week. And so that for communities that are in somewhat close proximity, right within a couple of hours of a major market, that certainly puts them at an advantage for attracting remote workers.

 

Amanda Ellis: So shifting gears a little bit. So I know that Charles, you have spent some time helping out as a coffee barista around town because your son is a local entrepreneur who owns local drive through coffee shops. So first we want to know your best tip for making a great coffee at home since we’re all making a lot more coffees at home with many of us working remotely these days. And secondly, tell us how you feel like entrepreneurship affects a community’s talent pool and not so much how it benefits the community in general, though, it obviously does in a lot of ways, but more specifically the connection with talent, attraction, retention and job creation.

 

Charles Wood: Sure.

 

Amanda Ellis: So coffee tip and then the rest of it.

 

Charles Wood: Ah, and you didn’t put this in my questions earlier. So this is a good question.

 

Amanda Ellis: I know, surprise.

 

Charles Wood: So I would say, and I learned this from my son, so don’t think that I had this great idea, but so the first thing is, number one, you should get your coffee locally. If you’re a coffee drinker, no offense to the big boys at Folgers, but try and buy fresh roasted coffee beans from a local roaster, that’s number one. Number two is store those coffee beans not in the freezer and do not grind them until you are ready to drink that coffee. So those are the three things I’d say, buy local, don’t put your coffee beans in the freezer, and don’t grind them until you’re ready to brew the coffee.

 

Amanda Ellis: Good tips. As a Keurig user, I feel very called out right now.

 

Charles Wood: Yeah. And it is very convenient.

 

Amanda Ellis: Yes, it is.

 

Charles Wood: Especially for the one coffee drinker, but my recommendation would be on the weekend you can do like a pour over, which is really good. All right. So that’s my coffee pitch. On the entrepreneurship side and particularly related to talent, one of the things that we really try and communicate to our entrepreneurs is there are some ways that people kind of measure the success of a startup. If it’s a high growth company, how much venture capital have you attracted? What’s your rate of scale? You know, how fast are you able to grow revenue and grow your customer base? But from a community standpoint, I think one of the most important metrics of success in an entrepreneurial market is are your startups attracting great talent? Because a lot of businesses, frankly, they’re not going to have a 20 year or a 30 year lifespan.

 

The odds are they’re going to be around for five year, maybe they’ll be around for 10. And what happens inside those companies is really the people that come in, the talent that comes into those companies, they learn how to build a business. And so the odds are whenever that business moves on, they’re going to go do it again, and they’re going to start their own company, they’re going to work for another startup. And so the talent that those startups attract is really important from an ecosystem perspective as far as how a community can continue to build its entrepreneurial ecosystem and really build a base of folks who have great experience and have learned the hard way oftentimes when you’re scaling a company. And so the example I go to in Chattanooga is we had a logistics company called Access America. They were a 10 year overnight success story.

 

They grew to about half a billion dollars in revenue over 10 years. And they sold the company and somebody asked me, they said, well, this is bad, right? I mean, we’ll lose those jobs likely. And that’s kind of the end of the story. And I’m like, no, that’s actually the beginning of the story because number one, you have three founders that now have a lot of money and can go do this again. And then second, they had attracted hundreds of people to work for their company that learned how to build a business and were encouraged to be entrepreneurial while they were there. And so now we’ve got, I think, half a dozen to a dozen companies that came out that are spin-outs, that were started by their employees that they’re reinvested in.

 

And none of that happens without attracting great talent to Access America at the beginning of that process. So the entrepreneurial environment, a lot of people don’t think of the talent aspect other than how do we help our startups find good people, but it’s also about the long-term impact that some of those folks have when they recruit them in.

 

Amanda Ellis: Yeah. So bringing new people into the community of course is great. And we’ve talked about that a good bit during this conversation, but what about talent retention? Do you feel that is sometimes overlooked by communities? And can you give a few examples or thoughts on what Chattanooga’s doing to retain, promote, upscale versus just bringing in new faces?

 

Charles Wood: Yeah. And the retention piece is a little hard from a community standpoint. If you think about what is your role as an economic development professional or community leader in retaining people in your community. And sometimes if it’s someone who has a particular skill set, an individual that you really want to see stay, I mean, one of the best things you can do is help them build their network in the community. I think for us that ability to get connected, build out a pretty significant network, really makes the community a lot stickier to that individual.

 

The other thing we’ll do a lot of times early on if we’re working with somebody to try and recruit them to the community is we’ll help them if they’ve got a trailing spouse. And so if you have both people in a relationship that have connectivity with an employer or nonprofit or whatever it is that really kind of helps make the community a lot stickier and keep folks there.

 

The other thing I’d say is we have started to really invest a lot of effort into skilling up our workforce and engaging education partners with our private sector. And so I think those are the other things that become really important. We’re blessed in Tennessee with Tennessee Promise and Tennessee Reconnect, which basically provide free college tuition at community colleges, either for folks that are graduating out of our high schools or for folks that graduated out a while back and want to go back and get new certifications and upscale, which is what Tennessee Reconnect is, and that can be done at no cost. So that’s a big picture statewide initiative. And then we’re working on a few things at the local level as well. So one of the things that really our workforce department at Chattanooga state community college has led and been really involved with as a program called skill up, which basically is an earn and learn training model where you have you take folks into a training program.

 

That’s typically a couple of months, ideally it’s not long term, they are paid a wage. We try to be in the 12 to $13 an hour wage while they’re learning, because most folks, frankly, can’t quit their job to go back to school. So having that earn and learn model, and then having an employer waiting at the end ready to hire those folks as they earn a credential and get that training level and are ready to go. And it’s a challenging program to scale. It’s not inexpensive. We’ve got a number of great community partners that have invested in that program with us, the Regions Foundation as one, several of our other local community foundations have been involved in then of course, employers have been engaged in that process. So I think that idea of how do you create opportunity for individuals to really develop their skill set, change trajectory, right? They may be in a service sector or in an industry sector that just doesn’t meet their individual needs. And, and this creates a path really that allows for economic mobility.

 

Amanda Ellis: Yeah. And you’re so right about it. It seems like if people don’t get the opportunity to go to school or upscale in some way immediately after high school, it’s just really, really difficult to do it later in life, as you have other commitments and obligations and all of that. Any advice for other communities who might want to tap a more regional approach to some of their efforts, but maybe they’re not sure where to start.

 

Charles Wood: Yeah. It’s challenging to build those regional partnerships. And I think that the first thing I would say is you got to go make friends. It helps if you make friends early when you get to that community. And so spending time certainly with your economic development counterparts at a regional level is really important, building that level of trust is really important. And then for us, candidly, I mean, we’re the 800 pound gorilla from a regional standpoint, we are the larger city. And so having one or two smaller communities in the region really being leaders and pushing for that regional level of support is really important because it minimizes the perception that the big city is coming in to take over and try and tell everybody what to do. And instead, it really leans hard on those smaller markets around the major market to show the impact and the benefit of working together.

 

So I think those are just a few things that are really important as we’re working at a regional level. And the other thing, frankly, is just how you carry yourself. I mean, I think as an economic development professional, you try and stay humble. You get to work on a lot of good things, but I think if you keep a low ego, it’s a lot easier to work with communities and other economic developers in your region. And so those are just a few things that I would recommend if communities are looking at working together at a regional level.

 

Amanda Ellis: Yeah. Well, Charles, thank you so much for lots of great insights today. That’s almost all of our time, but to close it out, I have one more fun question, which is, what is one bucket list item that anyone who visits Chattanooga should sure to do?

 

Charles Wood: Ooh. I’m a big believer in customizing the visit, but if you come to Chattanooga and don’t get on a trail, whether that’s on a mountain bike or going hiking, then you have definitely missed a part of who we are as a community.

 

Amanda Ellis: Awesome. Thanks so much, Charles, for joining us today. I hope you have an awesome rest of your day.

 

Charles Wood: Thanks, Amanda. It’s been great, I really appreciate it. And appreciate the opportunity just to get to share a little bit about Chattanooga with the folks who are listening.

 

Amanda Ellis: Thanks for listening to the Livability podcast where we take you inside America’s best cities. At Livability, we highlight the unsung awesomeness of small and mid-size cities across the country. We also partner with communities to reach their target companies and potential residents through digital content and print magazine programs. If you enjoyed this episode, please follow, rate and review this show wherever you listen to podcasts. You can learn more about us at livabilitymedia.com. 

 

Have an idea for an upcoming episode, email me at [email protected]. Until next time, from Livability, I’m Amanda Ellis sharing the stories of America’s most promising places.