RAPID CITY, SD — Yesterday, the Brazos Partnership, a cross-business organization operating in the Texas Triangle, the area between Dallas-Fort Worth, Houston, San Antonio, and Austin announced that Elevate CEO Tom Johnson would be stepping down from his position in Rapid City to join the Partnership at its headquarters in Bryan, Texas.
The announcement was a shock to a number of residents, and was quickly met with a release from Elevate, making Johnson’s departure official. “Under Johnson’s leadership, Elevate Rapid City advanced major initiatives including the launch of the David Lust Accelerator, the Emergency Bridge Loan Program, Elevate Magazine, and two successful multi-million-dollar capital campaigns. During this time, the organization also supported wage growth exceeding $1,000 per week, strengthened labor force participation beyond the national average, secured $200 million in housing infrastructure funding, and helped recruit and expand dozens of companies while advancing workforce and leadership programs across the region,” read the release, which calls Johnson’s tenure “Highly impactful”. (via Elevate Rapid City)
Johnson, ever-moving, previously worked as Director of Community Engagement and Economic Development at Colorado State University, as well as spending years on the Wyoming Business Council. Though his passion for business has been a driving force in his career, he considers himself a writer, and has a regular practice of writing at least one poem every day, in spite of his busy schedule.
This morning, the Rapid City Post Spoke to Johnson on his career and the future, as well as his time in Rapid City.
Q: You arrived in 2019 to lead a brand-new concept: merging the Chamber of Commerce and the Economic Development Corporation. Looking back, what was the biggest “growing pain” of that merger?
I think just the end, I think mostly I felt you know, I felt that the community was ready for change, and that they were excited about the opportunities and wanting to try to get national attention to Rapid City and put Rapid City on the map, nationally, so there was a lot of excitement around it.
The other side of that is, you know, there’s a lot of you know, anticipation and of what could happen or how it might not happen. So I think, you know, it’s very natural for communities and people to be, you know, worried, and I think there’s a certain sense of the unknown with change. And so I think even though folks were excited, people were unsure, “is this going to work? Is this going to do what we want”?
Change for anybody, whether it’s a community or a person is always something that I think takes a certain amount of faith; to jump into the void and hope that appears, and the fortunate thing for us is that we jumped and then that did appear. We ended up becoming something that I think a lot of communities in the country looked to and wanted to copy, so it worked out. Sometimes you know, you just get lucky. And I’m just lucky that the community picked me and put their trust in me for the last 6 and a 1 years to do this stuff – so I mean, it’s incredibly fortunate.
Q: In broad strokes, how do you feel you’ve changed the business landscape in Rapid over these past years?
We went from, I think, a community where we were coming out of that kind of small city mindset to get on the national stage, making it into the top-10 lists of best places in the country for a young professional, then best places to live and places to start a career, and I think we just got attention on the area as a place to do business.
I think in particular we were really strong in the innovation and entrepreneurship side building the incubator in downtown: the David Lust Accelerator, creating the Innovation District, that’s in addition to the merger, but I think the merger allowed us to take the resources and go in one direction, and I think that allowed us to put our focus on putting Rapid City on the map.
Rapid City now is no longer just this place out in the middle of the Black Hills where, you know, you go to see Mount Rushmore, it’s a legitimate opportunity for businesses and workers to come here and experience a quality of life that’s second to none, and seeing the business environment that if you were here 10-20 years ago you you would be really impressed with that – and in fact, we get that comment all the time, someone who’s come back after ten years saying “Wow, this place is really taking off”.
Q: Navigating the Pandemic: You led the organization through the COVID-19 pandemic early in your tenure. How did that crisis shift your priorities?
Yeah, I think every person who was in a leadership role had their lives changed in January of 2020. We didn’t know what was going to happen, and I think we were lucky because of the merger, which allowed us to use our resources and shift those resources to move quickly.
We were able to move a whole of our events and training online, very, very quickly because of the merger, we were able to do these bridge loans for anybody in the community during the shutdown, for businesses having to let go of their employees, we bridged that to the PPP at the federal level, and I think that comes from the merger, the fact that we were able to merge it allowed us to move resources in an agile way.
So I think we were able to navigate the pandemic a lot more successfully than a lot of other nonprofits. I think the merger allowed us to have a certain amount of space to move very quickly, and I think just our access here in west or South Dakota to folks like Senator Thune and others at the federal level allowed us a lot of ability to understand what was coming.
Q: One of your legacies is the push for the Innovation District and the $20 million business incubator downtown. What is your “elevator pitch” for how this project will change businesses in Rapid City and the Black Hills more broadly?
You look at Rapid City, and I think one of the things that the board and the community did during the merger was they realized we can’t be like everybody else – we have to be like Rapid City.
In the old days, I think Rapid City would have looked to Sioux Falls and to East River and said, “okay, what are they doing over there? They’re taking cornfields, they’re plowing those cornfields they’re doing business and industrial parks, and then we’re going to take land and use it as an incentive for a company”. So there’s this sort of land-banking business park model that everybody across the country does. That works for a lot of communities when you’re closer to markets, but when you’re a Rapid City, and you’re 5 or 6 hours from anywhere, you have to use a different strategy; you need to use your assets to attract people.
And what do we have better than anybody else? Outdoor recreation.
We have world-class hiking and mountain biking, a cool downtown – You want to leverage that for more technology related companies. So building an incubator is a better strategy than a business park for a Rapid City, because it takes advantage of proximity to downtown the proximity to the Black Hills. All the outdoor recreation attracts companies and workers that are more entrepreneurial on technology, these are smaller companies so you’re not getting as many jobs every time you hit on one of these, but it’s a better strategy for Rapid City that doesn’t have a lot of land that you can just plow cheaply for business parks. You’re using your outdoor recreation and your mountain town as an attraction tool, leveraging your downtown technology.
I think that’s why the incubator in the innovation district has been a success, and can continue to be a success for the next 10 years, honestly. I just was lucky enough to be at the front side of this, Rapid City will continue to benefit from this for the next 10-20 years.
Q: You’ve been vocal about keeping local talent in South Dakota and raising wages. Do you think you’ve successfully moved the needle on that issue? How so?
If you look at where our average weekly wages are, when this Elevate experiment started in 2019, we were behind Sioux Falls and Billings and Bismarck. We were, around $730 a week here. At this point we’re above $1000 think we’re at $1050-ish/week, we’ve raised wages by, I think over 40-45%.
As a community we’ve outpaced Sioux Falls and Bismarck and Billings in terms of our raw growth of wages, so we’re going fast, so we’re going our wages faster than our competitors in the region. That’s an absolutely good thing – If this community’s ever going to make a run at getting a Costco, and some of the things that I know everybody wants here, those incomes have to continue to rise or those companies won’t come here.
And you know, some of that is a little bit of luck as well, you know, when you run into a pandemic, and you see a little bit of inflation too. You’ll see you’ll see some of that across the country, but I think we also recognize that one of the things we were able to do as a merged organization was they educate the community on the need for wages as a talent-attraction tool. I think our businesses have responded by raising their wages both in the entry-level sectors like hospitality but also in sectors like Healthcare.
Q: The Housing Crisis: You’ve cited housing as a top barrier to growth. As you depart, what is the advice you’d leave for local leaders who are still grappling with the “housing crunch”?
I think one of the things that Elevate was successful in is working with the Black Hills Community Foundation and the city on getting some grant dollars to continue to provide housing, and grant dollars to put into housing trust funds across the Black Hills, so we’ve got the ability to put some of those dollars into place still, even though we’re seeing a slowdown in housing market across the country, that’s probably not going to affect Rapid City as much.
That said: we still need more houses. in the last 5 years, I think because of some of the work we’ve done we’ve built a lot of multi-family residences. We’re probably a little bit overbuilt on the multifamily, we still need a lot of single family at this point. I think, developers in the region recognize that, and I think they’re going to continue to invest in housing, so I think we’re going to be okay. In the next six months, in terms of housing we might see a slowdown, so still the big picture here is that Rapid City needs housing.
Q: It’s known that you write a poem every day; Has the landscape of the Black Hills influenced your writing over the last five years?
Yeah, I’ve still been publishing poetry and you know, the last 5 years and I’ve probably published… I don’t know, 50 or 60 still in the last few years. I try to write one every day and sometimes I can’t quite get there, because this job is pretty demanding, but yeah, the Black Hills have been really a great source of inspiration for me.
I’ve written I think dozens of poems about the Hills and I think I probably overused the word “wildflower” too much! I mean the outdoor environment here has been really inspiring. This there’s a reason that the Lakota people believe this is the center of the universe, it’s a magical place, get up every day, and if you’re in the Hills, you feel that awe and magic. It just gets into your bones, and it allows you I think to be really creative.
I think I’ve written some of my best work in the Black Hills, so I have to tell you, yeah, it’s been a magical experience, and the people have made it even better. I’m sad to leave, but I think one of the things in life you have got to recognize about yourself is when you get really comfortable — that’s the time for you to go put yourself out on an island again, and do something completely new to challenge yourself again.
But with respect to the poetry: yeah, it’s been quite a source of inspiration, and I’ve loved every second of it.
Q: You’re headed to lead the Greater Brazos Partnership in Bryan, Texas. What was it about that specific opportunity that signaled it was the right time for you to move on?
It’s a five-county region, in the Texas Triangle, it’s Northeast of Austin, an hour Northwest of Houston and then an hour and a half Southwest of Dallas or so. It’s in this sort of regional triangle, where there’s a lot of activity goes on, so it was a great opportunity for me.
It was also the home of Texas A&M University, which is an amazing research institution with, I think the largest population of students in the country, and that was just really appealing for me. I’ve previously worked at Colorado state, so going back to university and in an environment there was exciting because their universities are really exciting places.
It doesn’t mean that I was wanting to leave Rapid City necessarily, but just was a great opportunity. Rapid City is an amazing place, as I said before, it’s a magical place, the people here are amazing and wonderful. The best days of Rapid City are ahead of it.
I think any part of your life you’ve always got to push yourself, and when you’ve been in a place five or six or seven years, you need to push yourself again and you always have to be reinventing yourself and trying hard and new things. That doesn’t mean you don’t love a place and you don’t want to keep in contact with a place or come back to a place; it just means that you’ve got to keep work pushing yourself. So Texas is the next step for me to really push myself and try to do things that maybe I haven’t done before. I’m excited about that, but also that’s mixed emotions too.
Q: What lessons or strategies from your time in Rapid City do you hope to implement in Texas?
I think what being in Rapid City teaches you is the power of relationships — so a lot of The Times people will say “Rapid City is really far away from other places” and it is! It’s 5 hours from Sioux Falls, 5 hours from Fort Collins – the Denver region, 5 hours from Billings, 5 hours from Bismarck so that can be isolating, but what that does is it magnifies the power of relationships.
What I learned in Rapid City is, if you look at the university environment here, you’ve got a world-class university of South Dakota School of Mines with a new president, Dr. Tandy, who’s amazing. They’re graduating every year, 300 of the best and brightest students in the world, and those students are going out. Graduates are going on and working for world-class companies like Microsoft and Google and other places Northrop Grumman, just to name a few; so you recognize really early on that Rapid City is not that isolated, that these world-class people are doing world-class things all across the globe and they’ve been in Rapid City. The moment you realize that, you can leverage those relationships back here to help Rapid City and the Black Hills, and it becomes this powerful formula for success. A lot of folks don’t do that in the country.
So it becomes a superpower, when we think about it that way. Your isolation actually becomes a superpower, because you can take this relationship and leverage them back to Rapid City, and I think we’ve been able to do that really successfully.
I’m going to take that lesson to where I’m going now and leverage that in another environment, the largest university in the country. I’m going to try to leverage those relationships there, so that’s really exciting to have come to that skillset and realization in the Black Hills, and I am so lucky to have just stumbled upon that realization halfway through the job and realizing, “oh my gosh, we’ve got world-class people coming out of Rapid City, and they want to come back and they want to help us”!
Q: When people look back at the “Tom Johnson era” of Elevate Rapid City, what do you hope they remember most about your contribution to the community?
[Chuckles] I hope they think of me fondly.First of all, I hope they think of me as a guy who had a lot of passion for life. Who had a lot of passion for building this organization, that I just had a lot of passion for people here. I think of the staff at Elevate and the board, and I would hope that they would all tell you “This guy, he wears his passion… honestly, he wears his heart and on his sleeve, and he cares deeply about people and the community”. Hopefully people will recognize that passion translated into us creating a world-class organization that is the envy of a lot of organizations across the country.
And the reason I know that is that we get calls every week from large cities, small communities, rural areas, asking us “how are you doing that? help us merge our organizations like you guys are doing, you’re doing such a great job there”. That’s a testament to this community and the staff.
Hopefully folks will remember that there was a guy at one point, they might not remember his name. But there was a guy here that played his part, and he brought a ton of energy and passion to do that, and get that done. I hope folks remember and say there was a guy who cared and he made the world a better place, he left the organization and the community in a better place than when he got here.
And that’s all you can ask of people that we do this work for, our kids that are being born in Rapid City right now that are graduating from middle school. There are people we’ll never know and the work we do will benefit them.
I think that we think about that in this profession, in this role specifically. That’s the definition of servant-leadership is that you’re here to make the world a better place. That the work you do is going to be realized by generations of kids and people that you have never met yet and who will never know you, but whose lives are better because of you being here even for that spark-and-a-flash of a moment of seven years.
