Kim Scheeler is methodically putting the formerly flagging organization's operations and finances in order.
By JEFF HARRINGTON, Times Staff Writer
Published March 21, 2005
Late last year, as Kmart was scouring for a new national headquarters in a low-key search dubbed Project Expo, Tampa made the short list. The incentive package mustered by the bay area and Florida, however, came up $20-million shy of Michigan's successful package to keep the giant retailer.
Kim Scheeler, from his ever-optimistic vantage as president of the Greater Tampa Chamber of Commerce, views the episode not as the one that got away but a hint of greater things to come.
The chamber had reorganized its economic development efforts to persuade companies to relocate their headquarters here, he said, expressly to become a finalist for big relocation deals like Kmart.
Regional operations can be fleeting, as the bay area has learned over the past year after painful layoffs by Capital One and JPMorgan Chase. Corporate headquarters, by contrast, "are a little more stable," Scheeler says.
Leave it to Scheeler to preach stability; it has been his trademark as the chamber's chief.
When he came to the chamber four years ago from his job heading Hillsborough County's United Way, Scheeler found an organization operating both in the red and in disarray. His predecessor, Jay Garner, was forced out after struggling to boost the chamber's stagnant membership base, alienating insiders and outsiders in the process. Garner left behind fractured relationships with other business groups, some small businesses, the tech community and even the Port of Tampa.
The chamber had fallen from its historic perch as the nexus for corporate recruitment and economic development efforts throughout the bay area. "As the chamber went through its restructuring, a fair amount of that (leadership) ended up being shouldered by other entities, like the Tampa Bay Partnership and other regional chambers," said Tampa developer Bob Abberger, who recently was picked as 2006 head of the chamber's Committee of One Hundred, its economic development arm.
Today, the chamber's total membership remains hovering just under where it was when Scheeler took over: about 4,000.
Financially, however, the agency is in stronger shape after three profitable years. And perhaps the biggest positive from the Scheeler era is how much the consummate corporate fundraiser has been able to rebuild bridges and restore harmony.
"He's brought a sense of stability to the chamber and a focus on things that really need to be done," said Rhea Law, managing partner of Fowler White and a former chair of both the chamber and its economic development arm, the Committee of One Hundred. "There's a much more cohesive business community now."
To be sure, the chamber and its chief still have critics. Some chamber members think Scheeler is too conciliatory and too prone to endorsing the "flavor of the day" in economic development such as the current push toward bio-tech. A core of powerful executives still dominate the agenda. Some believe the chamber needs to invest much more in recruitment and be less concerned about whittling away at a six-figure negative balance plaguing its books since the 1990s.
But even critics give Scheeler credit for transforming the chamber from an autocratic to a collaborative agency. Consider its upcoming events schedule:
* For the first time, the Tampa chamber and Brandon Chamber of Commerce this year are cosponsoring a day for the business community to mix with the military at MacDill Air Force Base. They used to host separate days with the same theme. The Tampa chamber is still a competitor for members, but Brandon chamber president Tammy Bracewell said she feels comfortable picking up the phone to call Scheeler any time to talk about pooling resources.
* The Tampa Bay Technology Forum is working with the chamber for a "Titans in Technology" program this spring, bringing in a retired naval admiral to talk about the post-Cold War tech transformation of NORAD.
"To my knowledge it's the first time we've done anything with the Tampa chamber," Tech Forum president Andy Hafer said. "This might be some groundbreaking collaboration."
Groundbreaking in the sense that the 300-member Tech Forum not long ago was one of the chamber's biggest detractors. The tech group's Tom Wallace said the chamber was so focused on luring the next big call center or chipmaking plant that it was overlooking tech startups here. In one biting, now-famous speech, the forum's Antoinette Rodriguez wondered why chambers populate their leadership with older, white male bankers.
Growing "in smart ways'
Kim Kerry Scheeler, who came into this environment in February 2001, was tapped by chamber leaders to replace Garner without a search. At the time, some wondered if he might be an interim leader, underestimating his longevity.
Scheeler, 50, didn't have a chamber or economic development background. He was first and foremost a fundraiser. But he had the contacts and the conciliatory style his predecessor lacked: amiable but not overwhelming; droll; big-picture oriented.
That doesn't necessarily make him an easy read.
He's a longtime registered Democrat and his wife, Donna, contributed $500 to Democrat Bill McBride's unsuccessful gubernatorial campaign against Jeb Bush. Yet he has the ardent backing of numerous Republican business leaders, and he objected to backing a business incubator saying that as a "devout capitalist" he believes small businesses shouldn't get government-sponsored space for an enterprise they could run out of their own homes.
In interviews, Scheeler carefully chooses his words but eventually gets to the point.
That's not unlike how he runs the chamber, some observers say, taking his time to hear from all sides before moving ahead.
Faced with a flat membership when he took over, for instance, Scheeler took several years of planning and analysis before deciding on an overhaul of the membership structure going into effect this year. Instead of base membership dues based on company size, the chamber has shifted to membership tiers.
Small businesses with fewer than five employees can sign up for a $350 annual membership that entitles them to formal networking, an after-hours event and one business program or seminar. More money leads to greater benefits, including invitations to CEO Summits and an annual leadership retreat.
Scheeler didn't want to roll out the new membership structure until 15 of the bay area's biggest companies signed on in the top tier as chamber partners, contributing at least $15,000 apiece.
Law backed the slow approach. "It takes a consensus of the business community, and it's not always real obvious what is going to work," she said.
In a nod to the problems fellow chambers have had growing membership, Scheeler is setting modest goals. "I still want to grow it," he said. "I just want to grow it in smart ways."
That means worrying more about keeping members than adding new ones. The annual retention rate of chamber members has risen from the mid 70s, when he arrived, to 83 percent, Scheeler said.
TECO Energy president John Ramil, the immediate past chamber chairman, said Scheeler couldn't address issues such as membership without first shoring up the chamber's finances.
"We had some chamber executives that didn't have the financial discipline you needed to have to run the thing," Ramil said. Scheeler, he said, helped the chamber "live within its means."
In 2000, the year before Scheeler arrived, the chamber ran an operating deficit of $985,000. That was cut to a $200,000 deficit in 2001. It made a small profit each of the last three years.
Meanwhile, the organization's "net asset balance," a balance sheet item representing overall indebtedness, was at a high of $330,000 in 2001. By last year it had been cut to $150,000.
Some chamber members attribute the turnaround to Greg Orchard, who joined the chamber as chief financial officer several months before Scheeler arrived.
In a separate staffing shakeup, the chamber's longtime staffer liaison to the Committee of One Hundred, Robin Ronne, was demoted last year to focus strictly on recruitment and expansion of financial services firms. Scheeler recruited Myron Hughes from Memphis to lead a more diverse recruitment effort, particularly targeting bio-tech.
The move came amid growing complaints that Ronne was focused solely on chasing financial services firms such as Citigroup and JPMorgan Chase.
"I think we've got the critical mass on financial services," Scheeler said. "We need to try to build other clusters as well."
Recent relocation announcements have been relatively small - such as a Massachusetts software company bringing 35 jobs to Tampa - but they fit with chamber goals of securing higher-paying jobs and headquarters.
The chamber celebrated its biggest victory last week, as New York's Depository Trust & Clearing Corp. opened its "southern business center" in Tampa. The settler of financial transactions already has created 400 jobs in Tampa with an average salary of $72,000, more than twice the metro area average.
Speaking to a throng of employees and VIPs, DTCC chairman and CEO Jill Considine praised "one of the hardest-working chambers I've ever come across."
Scheeler, filling in because chamber chairman Sam Ellison was ill, stuck to common themes. In brief comments, he twice mentioned cooperation with the city, county and state as key to the deal.
Then he presented Considine with a snow globe of the Tampa skyline to gaze at "on a really cold, snowy day in New York," he said, and think of Tampa.
Times news researcher Cathy Wos contributed to this report. Jeff Harrington can be reached at 813 226-3407 or harrington@sptimes.com
