Roy Williams marks 50 years in economic development, 20 in Oklahoma City

As he moves toward retirement later this year, Roy Williams, President and CEO of the Greater Oklahoma City Chamber, also celebrated two milestones this summer – the 20^th anniversary of his arrival at the Greater Oklahoma City Chamber and his 50^th year in the economic development profession. We sat down with him to learn more about his career and some of his accomplishments.

VeloCityOKC: Let’s start with how you got into the economic development business at the very beginning of your career?

Roy Williams: Well, I'm kind of a rare animal in this and my explanation, I think will bear that out. When I was a junior in college, at the ripe age of 20, at Texas Lutheran University in Seguin, Texas, I was in our business club. There was a speaker who came and spoke who was with the Texas Department of Commerce. He talked to our group for a couple hours and I think a light came on that really intrigued me about community development, economic development, organization management. And with his help, I actually interned my junior year at the Texas Department of Commerce. And my senior year, I interned at the Austin Chamber of Commerce. So 90 days after my 22nd birthday, I started filling out job applications to work in economic development before I graduated.

One week after graduation, I was named president and CEO of a chamber of commerce in west Texas. So that sort of officially launched my career, and very few people in my position really aspire to this when they're in college. I mean, they tend to fall into it in some way, shape or form, but I knew at the age of 20 that economic development, organization management, community building was what I wanted to do. If you track my career from that point on, everything falls into that line. When I worked at chambers, it was because they were lead economic development organizations. And I also led state agencies. I led regional economic development programs, but everything was geared around economic development as the core mission of the organization I worked for, or that I led.

VeloCityOKC: What is it about economic development that attracted you to sort of that function, and maybe give the audience a little bit of a primer on what is economic development? What are primary jobs? What are we trying to do when we're talking about economic development?

Roy Williams: A lot of people use the words, community development and economic development as being the same thing, when in fact they're very, very different. If you look at a community and your objective is total community development, you really have to understand what are the components of that? And there's a physical component, a natural component, an economic component, and a social component. Well, those three components -- the physical, the social and the natural -- you can't impact those without having resources. And that comes from the economic environment, and the economic environment is impacted basically by jobs.

The confusion comes from the fact that not all jobs really impact the environment the same way.

There are really two different kinds of jobs:  primary jobs, and secondary jobs. Primary jobs create wealth, secondary jobs circulate wealth.

If you don't have a focus on primary jobs, you don't create wealth. Primary jobs add value to goods or services and export those services outside of your market. Secondary jobs just circulate within the market. If you want total community development, you have to increase the number of primary jobs to create the economic environment that provides the resources to develop the physical, natural, and social components.

So that became my passion, that if I want to make my community better, I've got to make sure there's a focus on economic development. But then I also know that the other components of total community development don't just happen because you have a good economy. That alone doesn’t create a great community. You have many, many other issues you need to face, but job one is to make sure you have an active initiative of primary job creation that gives you resources, so you can go worry about the social, political, and natural environments and make them as good as they can be.

VelocityOKC: You grew up in Texas and spent the first 17 years of your career there, but then you came to Oklahoma to join the Oklahoma Department of Commerce. What attracted you to Oklahoma, in general, and Oklahoma City specifically at that point in your career?

Roy Williams: It is interesting because that first job in Ballinger, Texas is the only job I've ever had that I applied for; and I applied for a bunch of them, because when I got out of school, I needed to make a living. I was only in that job for nine months and was recruited to central Texas, and my goal in life at that time was to go to work for the Texas Department of Commerce, which I couldn’t do until I had three years of experience. That was their requirement. About nine months in west Texas, and after two years and three months in central Texas, I called my contact there and asked if they had any openings. They didn’t, but he recommended me for a new program in the governor's office in Texas. I was one of three people hired to run a statewide business retention initiative. And of the three of us, one of had east Texas, which was me, one had west Texas, one had south Texas and our goal from the governor's office was to identify 4,000 new jobs that companies in Texas would pledge to create. Less than a year into the program, we had pledges for over 40,000 jobs; 10 times more than what the goal was. With that success, I moved over to the Department of Commerce to be a domestic business recruiter, which is really what I wanted to do.  I did that for a couple years and then had an offer to move to east Texas to start up and run a regional economic development program in Huntsville, which I did for about 12 years.

Henry Bellman, the governor of Oklahoma called me in 1988 and said, "Would you consider coming to Oklahoma to run the Department of Commerce?" And I said, "I don't know, never thought about it. Don't know anything about Oklahoma." But one thing led to another, and I came. Then, Governor Bellman did not run for reelection. He was a Republican and David Walters got elected, and David was a Democrat, but David said, "Hey, I like what you're doing. I want you to stay. I want you to keep running Commerce if you will." And I stayed. 

Then in 1992, a recruiter called me and said that the Greater Phoenix Economic Council is looking for a chief operating officer. Now, the Greater Phoenix Economic Council is one of the oldest regional economic development organizations in the country, and one of the most successful. I joined them for a number of years before moving into consulting.

A good close friend of mine, that I'd known since college days, joined me to form a company called EDGE, Economic Development Generating Excellence, and we did consulting work. We ended up working for about 200 different clients in about 25 states. We worked for cities, counties, universities, state agencies, and private developers. We did some personnel recruiting for economic development organizations, and we also did corporate site location consulting work for Fortune 500 companies, and even did some contract work with the state department.

VeloCityOKC: Tell us a little bit about your international work, and then return to organization management.

Roy Williams: While I was at the Oklahoma Department of Commerce, we created about 15 different international offices across the world to extend our reach. Then, I did more of that work as a consultant. Our consulting business was based out of Phoenix, so most of our work was in the western part of the US. We were trying to break into the east so I decided I would open an office in Columbus, Ohio, and one of my clients ended up being the Columbus Chamber of Commerce. I helped them build a strategy for a regional economic development program. Then my business partner threw me a curve ball by taking the job as secretary of commerce in Nevada, then Columbus has offered me a position, so I left consulting behind.

I was in Columbus until 2002 and a recruiter called me and said, "They're looking for an executive vice president of economic development in Oklahoma City." And I said, "Well, I have no interest in that." I was in Oklahoma in '88 to '92. And Oklahoma was in a depression, and so was Oklahoma City. There was nothing going on. Everything was dead. And in the four years I lived in Oklahoma, I think I went downtown maybe three times. And that was to see a friend who was at the Chamber of Commerce. I said, no, I'm not interested. And so about two weeks later, they called me back and said, "Will you rethink this?" And I said no.

VeloCityOKC: Still no.

Roy Williams: It hadn't changed, two weeks, Oklahoma City didn't change. And they kept bothering me. And finally they just said, "Look, we won't pressure you. Just come down here on your leisure. We'll pay for it and just look around and see what has changed."

So, I came in and what I saw, because MAPS had been passed, I saw that things were happening.

Bricktown had a canal in it, the ballpark, the arena was under construction. The selection committee was five phenomenal community leaders, and they shared with me their vision for Oklahoma City and what they wanted to do here and what their commitment in doing that was. To me that's always the thing that you pay attention to, are people bought into it? Are they willing to put skin in the game and are they committed?

They assured me that they were. And they also said, "If you take this position, and you're successful, within about a year and a half, you could succeed to the presidency." Which that all happened. I also remember that they asked me, they kept asking me, one key question and that was, "So, what would you do if we were to hire you to do this?" And I said, "It's simple." I said,

"I would quit marketing this organization as the Oklahoma City Chamber of Commerce, and it would become the Greater Oklahoma City Chamber of Commerce."

"And we would stop focusing on a city and start focusing on a region and we would build that region and we would bring in all the regional partners and we would have a much better story to tell and a much higher likelihood of success of achieving what you want to do." And they said, "Okay, when do you want to start?" So that's what it led to, my joining the Chamber in August of 2002.

VeloCityOKC: That regional economic development strategy was important to you. Tell us why that is so critical to success.

Roy Williams: Well, I learned as I worked with the corporate real estate community and site locators when you dissect how the process works that it really isn’t a site selection process. It's a site elimination process. And ironically, what companies end up with is the least worst site. We call it the best site, but what they do when they cast their net to look at regions, they're looking for labor supply. They're looking for suppliers that they need to be successful in the work that they're in, and they're looking potentially for customers.

So, no one city is going to have all of those attributes. It's going to be a region. All of us know that when we go to work in the morning or afternoon, we don't stop at the city limits and say, I'm not going to cross that line. When we go shopping, we don't say, I'm not going to cross that line. And companies are not different. People will drive 30 miles to work, so when you're selling your product to a company you should sell knowing that they're looking at a much larger footprint than just your city. And it's difficult sometime to get elected officials to think outside the box and not think we can only put our resources inside of our city limits and not think about catching bigger fish and participating in a regional effort.

The other thing is, when companies express an interest in an area, they don't want to talk to 30 different economic development people.

They want to talk to one, and until they understand the geography and decide they like this part of region a little bit better, that's when a local economic developer can get engaged and start talking about their community. And we're the entity that does that work. As a result, clients don't have to wonder, "Well, who do I call in this town?" It can be really confusing for clients because the chamber's not always the economic development organization. You can't always call the city because the city may not be the economic development organization. To someone in New York, or California, or Germany, how do they navigate that? It shouldn't be their problem. This is a more client-centered, customer focused way to do business.

VeloCityOKC: As you are thinking about the groundwork you helped to lay and are looking toward the future, what excites you most about what's ahead for Oklahoma City?

Roy Williams: First, I think about MAPS 4. We built a bunch of great amenities. It's really driven our city in a great direction, but let's not ignore some of the other social issues that need to be taken care of, and we are using MAPS as a tool to do that.

We're so involved in criminal justice reform, and we see all the different things that lead to criminality. It's good to see the voters say, "We're willing to put up money to try to address some of these really hard issues." It's easy to go out and build a building. It's hard to address homelessness. It's hard to address mental health and alcohol and drug abuse and diversion and all that. But we're doing it.

We're putting money into these things to try to take care of people in our community who have been neglected in the past.

And I think that's a real positive sign in the growth and development of the city.

If it weren't for the MAPS process, we probably wouldn't be doing this. Because no other cities are addressing this multitude of issues in a manner that we're addressing. And so they're piecemealing it. They're trying to figure each one out individually. Well, we put them all in a big box and we're going to go after all of them at once and really try to tackle some hard stuff. I think it's going to really change the psyche of the community and it's going to really help improve the attitudes of people within the community, and the health of the community.

VeloCityOKC: Why do you think that this whole process has worked in Oklahoma City? What has made all this sort of come together and happen the way that it has?

Roy Williams: There are several takes on that. One is something that we hear from cities who come here on visits, and they constantly say they have never seen community leaders always talking on the same page, always saying the exact same thing, it's as though they've been scripted by the Chamber. And they haven't been, the reality is they are all engaged. They're all involved, they're all committed. So, they know what they're talking about. They're not guessing as to why. And this goes back to when we were talking about when I first came here, and what attracted me here. It was the leadership, that the leadership had made a commitment that this is what it was all about, that they're all in. And they were going to be there for the long haul. And that is Oklahoma City's secret sauce. It is that the public sector, by that, I mean the city, the county, the school district, legislative leaders in the business community don't do anything as renegades. We do them together.

The chamber's relationship with the local governmental entities just couldn't be tighter because we rely on each other so much. That doesn't happen in every city. That doesn't happen in a lot of places.

In a lot of places they're enemies, not friends, but here, the relationship and the confidence and the trust is unparalleled.

A lot of cities leave here, shaking their heads saying, "Well, we're never going to do this in our town. It won’t happen because we don't have that culture."

The other element is we don’t ever say let's move off the road and rest and sit back and enjoy this. There'll be someone passing you real soon when you're sitting on this side of the road. This isn't even a marathon. It is a never-ending race. And you can't ever sit back and pat yourself on the back of how great of a job you did and stop to smell the roses. There are too many competitors out there who want what you have or want what you want.

This is all very fragile. The relationships can break down overnight. Mistrust can occur when you're not transparent and honest. It’s all about truly committing to something for the long haul. And in a lot of places, you can't do that because that trust has been broken and can’t be mended. We've just been fortunate that we've gone 30 years now, where the voters have trusted the city to deliver.

It's easy to forget history quick, but to really understand, "Why is Oklahoma City doing what it's doing? Why are we getting ahead?" It’s based on trust, and not resting on or laurels. The minute that stops, that’s the minute it all changes.

This article is an excerpt of a recent conversation with Roy on the AudaCity podcast. Click here to hear the entire recording.