What is your organization, and what does it do?
I work for Central State’s Fair and Central State Fair Incorporated. We are not county employees, although we sit on county grounds down at the fairgrounds. We produce the Central State’s Fair and we produce the Black Hills Stock Show. The rest of the year we produce about 280 days worth of activity at the fairgrounds, and it’s everything from weddings and proms to to teen roping and motorcycle races, auctions, and graduation parties.
What are the differences between running an organization in the Black Hills and another area?
Well most fairs, there’s big, huge state fairs with 300,0000 attendants. They’re typically state funded, but they also generate a lot of cash, but you find them in large urban areas. The challenge for us is we’re not in a large urban area, not even like Sioux Falls, which has a 1,000,000 people within a drive distance of theirs just in short order. We’re in the Black Hills and we’ve got about 300,000 people we could draw from if everybody in every corner of the western South Dakota and and eastern Wyoming decided to come for stuff. So we work hard at drawing people from a long ways away for both the fair, and of course, the Black Hill Stock Show; The Black Hill Stock Show, much farther than the Central States Fair.
Most fairs produce a single fair year, and then they may or may not have a lot of rental activities throughout the rest of the year. They might do some trade show events and things like that, but certainly not to the level of creating two major events. It’s like producing two fairs a year and no other fair that we’ve come across does anything like that.
How do you feel the world has changed over the time you’ve been at the Central States Fairgrounds?
When I started we were horrifically in debt. But we had the support within the community. I mean, everything from the volunteers and our board of directors and the people that come out and support us with help and labor and serving on boards and serving on committees. Those guys specialize in rodeo events. A lot of them came from the rodeo world, and they’re excellent help when we come to put on the Black Hill Stock Show. So getting that expertise from them, from the livestock committee, the horse committee, from the open class during the fair, the competitive exhibits, that use of volunteer expertise has been huge for us. I think the other thing is the county has recognized the value that we bring and the city has recognized the value that we bring to the community by producing and hosting these events.
You know, one of the other things that is coming faster and faster all the time is advancement in technology. Everything from how we run our ticketing systems and our websites, to how we gather our information for reports and track data. We didn’t use to advertise on Facebook. It wasn’t around when I started here. We barely had cell phones, you know? Just so many things have improved. From a technology standpoint, that has made us a better organization and a better provider of service and events for our customers.
What’s the internal culture like and how do you feel it compares with similar organizations?
From a hierarchy within the organization, I’m the general manager. We work on a horizontal line, and that means that all of my staff has an equal say in what their thoughts are, about how we produce events, what we produce, how the events need to flow. There’s no dumb ideas. Well, that’s not true. There are sometimes dumb ideas, but at least you get the freedom to express them and not help be held against you when you do that in our organization. But it’s important that my maintenance crew weighs in on how we go about hosting events because they’ve got to prepare for those events, you know, from one day to the next. And as does my ticketing people and everybody else. So we operate on a group think basis, we probably have more arguments that way than any other organization. But I think in the end, we always end on the right decisions about how to move our organization and our events forward. And I think that’s important. And it’s really because I have an absolutely fantastic staff.
How do you interact with the local community?
The economic impact is huge. It’s been reported between 3 to 52 million, but never in these economic impact reports. Have they looked at what does the vendor traffic do while they’re at the Black Hills stock show? Because if those dollars were brought back in, and of course, we have vendors from, White Owl, and we’ve got vendors from Sturgis, and we’ve got vendors from New Underwood. So not just Rapid City, throughout the Black Hills and throughout the state, and elsewhere, but they certainly bring a lot of year long tax revenue, into the state coffers for an economic impact.
What plans do you have for the future of The Central States Fairgrounds?
Improve not only the events that we host, but the facilities. We’re not a county entity. The county does provide us with some annual financial support, but we typically have to earn about a $1,000,000 a year just to break even on maintaining facilities and upkeep of the facilities. So that’s where the help from our sponsors comes in. We’ve got some great sponsors that support us with equipment and with service, fundraising, and expertise; and the support we get from the community is absolutely outstanding. We just need to continue to work with that and look towards how we get the long range plans for the fairgrounds to also meet up with our financial abilities.
