Dale Kooyenga will take over as president of the
Metropolitan Milwaukee Association of Commerce on Jan. 2, 2024, as part of a planned leadership transition.
MMAC announced the timing of Kooyenga's promotion on Tuesday at its 162nd All-Member meeting, held at the Bradley Symphony Center in downtown Milwaukee. The former state legislator will succeed Tim Sheehy, who is retiring from MMAC after a 31-year career as its 11th president.
Plans for the leadership transition were
initially announced in January, when Kooyenga joined the chamber as its first-ever senior vice president.
Kooyenga started his career as a certified public accountant at KPMG before serving as CFO of Stonehouse Water Technologies and then of Mpirik, both based in Milwaukee. He served in the Wisconsin State Assembly from 2011 to 2018 and in the state Senate from 2018 to 2022 as a Republican from Brookfield. He’s currently a lieutenant colonel with the U.S. Army Reserve.
As he prepares to take the lead at MMAC, Kooyenga sat down with BizTimes associate editor Maredithe Meyer to discuss his priorities and approach to solving the top issues facing the region's business community. The following is a transcript of parts of their conversation:
BizTimes: How have these past 10 months been since joining MMAC, and what has the succession planning process entailed?
Kooyenga: “There's been several prongs to the strategy to learn more about MMAC and the over 2,000 companies that we serve. In no particular order, we have 85 board members and I've sat down with about two thirds of them at this point for conversations on what does the Milwaukee region's balance sheet look like? What are our assets? What are our liabilities? We also have CEO and CFO roundtables, and I have met with them for a similar conversation as far as what the regional balance sheet looks like. What is MMAC doing that you are a fan of? And what can we do to better serve the business community?
“I've visited other cities – I’ve been to Dallas, I'm going to Kansas City, I just got back from Madison – just learning from other chambers as far as what their structure is. There's no chamber structured exactly like another, but I've heard consistently that the way we have it structured here in Milwaukee is the absolute ideal, that (MMAC) is built with a great structure as far as economic development, the more traditional chamber role and what we do with the Region of Choice efforts.
“Tim has just been a great mentor. I mean, Tim has been in this position for 30-plus years. He's been at the chamber for 40 years. Tim and I will sit down on a bi-weekly basis and just kind of go through the business of business in Milwaukee, who’s who in the zoo and what are the issues and some of the history of the issues, and we've been developing that great relationship and having those conversations. We'll continue to have that through 2024, but even beyond ‘24, I know for the rest of my career he's someone I could call and bounce ideas off.”
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From those conversations with Tim, board members and roundtable groups, what have you gathered as the most important issues or initiatives you plan to prioritize as chamber president?
“MMAC has been the national leader in education reform. If you look back in the early 1990s, it was really the chamber alongside Howard Fuller and then some courageous elected officials who said we need to try a new way of doing education. Milwaukee was the first city to do school choice and that's because we had the first chamber that wanted school choice and the first former public school superintendent who was open to new ideas, and that was Howard Fuller. There has been tremendous progress and accomplishments that MMAC’s done in education, but we still have a long way to go. The reality is that even looking across the different sectors – public, public charter, and private schools – the numbers still reflect that we have a long, long way to go on education.
“From a talent perspective, one of the region's biggest challenges – and this is an international issue but it's going to play out here as well – is demographics. When you have a working-age population that is not even going to grow by a percentage point over the next couple of years, what are you going to do to grow an economy? An economy only grows one of two ways. It's either through productivity gains – and that can come in a variety of forms – or it comes from population growth. Population growth can also mean getting more out of the existing population. And it's not from a pure, ‘Oh, we need more labor’ standpoint, it's also from a wholeness-of-life standpoint. I truly believe that meaningful work is a core aspect of leading a meaningful life. We owe it to kids in our region that are being failed by school systems and being failed by their families to create other structures and support systems around them in order to have more individuals who are able to have careers and meaningful work, and meaningful work also goes with a proper system of education and leads to meaningful relationships.
“I look at the chamber, and I look at what the opportunity is to keep doing and do more of. It really goes back to someone I follow very closely, and that’s Arthur Brooks, who just wrote a book with Oprah Winfrey (called ‘Build the Life You Want: The Art and Science of Getting Happier’). The two aspects (of the book) are meaningful work and meaningful relationships, and that's what we want to do. We want to do that through programming, through economic development and bringing opportunities here. We want to do that through advocating for public policy, at the state, federal and local level. And all that comes back to creating a cool culture, a cool vibe, where people feel like, ‘This is the place I want to have a career, this is the place I want to raise my family, this is the place I want to retire, this is the place I want to invest.’ And we've been doing that, and we want to do a lot more of that.
“So that's really what I'm learning, not so much about MMAC or the chamber world, but learning about the people in this diverse community and learning their perspectives and then creating a strategy. Later on this year, early next year, we’ll take these conversations and then transcend them through a strategic review process saying, ‘OK, this is what we need to do, this is what we don't need to do anymore,’ And then create a path going forward.”
When was the last time MMAC underwent a strategic review?
“Six or seven years ago. This time, we're also doing a SWOT analysis with Marquette University as part of that. So, we'll take the hundreds of conversations I'm having with CEOs and other stakeholders, we'll take the SWOT analysis from Marquette, and then we'll comb through articles in BizTimes, for example, and Wisconsin Policy Forum reports and all these other sources of information to look at where we’re at, what lanes we’re in, what lanes we’re not in, and then with the resources we have, tackle those issues.”
Was the Region of Choice initiative something that came out of MMAC's last strategic review process?
"Yep, that was part of it. People recognized that the minority community in Milwaukee was not represented in the executive and the leadership of the city, so that was a process by which we said, 'OK, if this concerns your business and you want to work with us on ideas and solutions to move the ball forward on this important issue, then we have a team here that can work with you on that and then we could collectively look at your data, look at your metrics, and track whether what we're doing is making an impact.'"
What are your expectations for the continuation or the evolution of MMAC’s Region of Choice initiative?
“That's a great question, because the Region of Choice pledge will run its course at the end of this year, so what we'll do as part of the strategic review committee is we'll look at what the next chapter of working on those issues are. ... We've arrived at no destination. I mean, there's no doubt that Milwaukee has a long way to go to make sure that everyone in our community feels a sense of ownership and that every decision maker and leader in our community has a larger binder to look at talent, as opposed to their traditional networks of who they and their families have associated with over the years. That's really what it's about, saying there are a lot of stovepipes in our community, which are great – it's great to have communities of different individuals and ethnicities and cultures that have family together and have their own business together and form a community within a community – but there's also an opportunity to look at the leaders across those communities and say, ‘Hey, if you're looking for top HR talent, here are a lot more different options. If you're looking for the top talent for CFOs or CEOs, here’s a lot more different options.’ So that's really what we're about – with our events, with our introductions, our publications – is giving everyone in Milwaukee a larger view of Milwaukee. And I think that's very along the lines of Region of Choice. The question is, where do we go from here? And ultimately, we’ll be driven by our members.”
MMAC represents businesses across a politically divided region in an even more politically divided state. As a former GOP lawmaker yourself, how are you approaching that dynamic as you take the reins of a non-partisan organization?
“Your assessment of the situation is absolutely correct in that we represent southeast Wisconsin, and southeast Wisconsin includes the most conservative of the conservatives in western Waukesha County and the more liberal elements from Milwaukee. We’re a nonpartisan-bipartisan organization, and what we're going to do is identify the adults in the room, and we're going to put adults in the room, and we're going to solve problems. And you just saw this play out (in the recent approvals for increased Milwaukee sales taxes and more shared revenue from the state for local governments).
"Nearly everyone thought, by this time, the City of Milwaukee would be talking about what libraries they were going to close, talking about how many police they were going to lay off, fire stations they were going to close. They thought Milwaukee County would be talking about what parks not to maintain anymore. And where we're at today is, there's not a single library being closed. The parks are going to be in great shape. We have two infamous pension plans that are on a track to be closed over time. The police and fire are adding to their force. How did we do that? The mayor, the county exec, leaders in the Legislature, the governor, the MMAC and our partners like the Greater Milwaukee Committee, we put folks in a room and said, ‘You have problems, we have problems, let's acknowledge that these problems were created in generations before us and the people that created those problems are nowhere in the room. How do we just get in a room and talk through how there's a win-win in this for everybody?’ And we did that. And it was historic, and it made a huge impact.
“We're not going to be taking up partisan positions. We're not an extension of the Republican Party, we're not an extension of the Democratic Party. We are the business community, and the politics of the business community is doing what's best for the business community. And those are really wide arms. This is going to our four strategies, which are livability, equity – everyone's an owner of Milwaukee – growth and talent. So if it has to do with livability, equity, growth and talent, we're going to fight for it. And I know the equity word is really charged up for some folks politically, but folks shouldn't overthink it. It simply means that everyone in our community has an ownership stake in the success of our community and we want to make sure that everyone feels like an owner in this community. It's that simple. That’s why we're going to put Republicans and Democrats in the room, and we're going to solve issues with them just like we've been doing for almost centuries. Tim is really good at that and I think, from a personal perspective, one of the reasons I was hired was people saw that I do that, I'm good at that. I don't like playing those partisan games. I like to solve problems, and problem solving is going to have to include both parties.”
Some business owners in the city of Milwaukee may be worried about whether the impending sales tax increases could drive customers or business away. What’s your response to those concerns?
"We’re sympathetic to that. We’re definitely more in the camp of let's cut taxes than raise taxes. There's only been two times that MMAC in its history has advocated for increased taxes, and that was for the Miller Park sales tax and more recently for the sales tax associated with the problems I just talked about.
"The reason our members were for that is because they saw the crime tax as being much more of a burden long term than the sales tax. What I mean by crime tax is we want to tackle what we're seeing across the nation in big cities, and that's a rise in crime, and if there's a rise in crime, the mayor's not going to get his increase from 600,000 residents to a million. Businesses aren't going to continue to invest down here. We have to tackle the crime problem. If you connect the dots, those pension issues not being taken care of without an additional revenue source would have led to cutting more police. And if they would have cut more police, that crime tax would have gone up, so we couldn't afford the cost of not supporting and protecting services, and that would have been the result if we didn't secure that additional revenue. Businesses were for that solution, but we're sympathetic that some companies in the retail space didn't like it, but they also understood and I think they'll be able to be in a better position because we're seeing a return in the amount of foot traffic coming downtown, and we're only going to be able to capture that if we address these issues."
Economic development requires a mix of going after big projects/corporate investment and fostering entrepreneurship/supporting small businesses. What are your thoughts on the role of MMAC and Milwaukee 7 in balancing those efforts?
"Well, they're both important. In particular, M7 is focused on corporate expansion development. M7 has been and is more focused on the large, industry-shaping, region-shaping movement of companies. MMAC, similar to M7, has been interested and involved in the startup space in many different ways, through messaging, MKE Startup News, different events. We have a lot of startup companies and early-stage companies that are members and specifically on our board. That’s part of the diverse nature of our board is we have people that not only represent big corporate businesses but also represent (the startup) part of our ecosystem, like Andy Nunemaker, Chris Abele and Dana Guthrie. As part of the strategic review, we're going to give a lot of thought to what more we can do in that space. My background is CFO consulting; I worked a lot with early-stage companies, so I really want to talk about what MMAC can do to further cultivate and create that type of atmosphere with our partners like Milwaukee Tech Council and BrightStar.
"A healthy startup community is going to attract businesses that are looking to be around young talent and, on the flip side, startup companies want to be where the money's at. I don't know of any communities that have a really healthy corporate environment but not a healthy startup community. And I don't know of any cities that have a healthy startup community but not a healthy corporate environment. They go hand in hand. But they are very different strategies, and different resources."
What other leadership philosophies do you bring to MMAC’s top seat?
“Not to sound cliche, but it's amazing what you get done when you don't need to take the credit for it. That's a lesson I learned in the military, politics and the business world. And the heart of that is when you're talking about wins, the wins are typically a large team of people, and so really forming those teams across our community to get those wins. I really like developing teams. Right now, I have command of 200 soldiers in the U.S. Army Reserve. I've led soldiers in combat, I've led politically on a lot of different issues, I’ve led in the business world. We have an amazing team at MMAC. Oftentimes, the leader of an organization gets a lot of attention, but really, it's the team at MMAC that are just flawlessly executing our events, they do a really good job on our comms and our magazine, the M7 team is just crushing it with historically large investments in the region. The success of the organization is the success of our team. And team is defined both internally but also our team is defined by our board members and our members. And that's why Milwaukee consistently punches outside of its weight class, we're a very team-oriented community.”
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Dale Kooyenga.
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