It was a diamond in the rough. It was a facility that hadn’t, well for starters, let’s start by saying it was a city facility. It was a city run facility. And so our budget at the time was $3 million. That’s all we had. We had 45 full-time employees. Read More
(Barbara laughs) So they hired you for the job, when was that?… Read More
1990. I started July 2nd, 1990. Read More
What was the zoo, you had been there, but tell me, what was the zoo like when you took over?… Read More
‘Cause if you have an aversion to change, you’ll fire me in the first six months.” He gets up, can’t read a thing. Good answer, bad answer, no clue. He gets up, walks out the door, he’s gone. So I laugh, and I look around the room and I said,… Read More
Like the whole dynamic of everybody, everybody’s sitting up straighter and everybody’s like, and I’m like, hmm, this guy’s important, but I don’t know who he is. And I’m tired and I wanna go back to my hotel room. And so he sits there, and they ask a few more… Read More
That’s a heck of a question to answer, right?… Read More
And I said, “Do you have an aversion to change?… Read More
Had lunch with the Zoo Society, met with all the people, and you’re exhausted, you’re brain dead, right?… Read More
And got the big old room, big old boardroom like this one. And you’re sitting there, and you’re at the end of the table, and you’re sitting there at your little interview, and there’s one chair right beside you that’s empty. And so Louise Brown’s at the other end, the… Read More
We were all downtown and so we all saw each other, right?… Read More
But we weren’t supposed to see each other, so they literally would drive up and pick you up on one side of the building, and then you’d go for your interview, and then you come back, and then they drop you off on the other side of the building. We… Read More
My last interview was with Louise Brown and her team. Four o’clock, five o’clock in the afternoon. You’ve been doing this all day long, eight solid hours you’ve been interviewing with different people. Read More
Like why hasn’t anybody taken this place and run with it?… Read More
I mean this is like all the pieces, parts are here. You’re in a city that has 14 Fortune 500 companies, foundations, everything you could think of, and yet nobody was taking it and running with it. And so I was kind of perplexed about that. But anyway, Chuck Wiggenhauser,… Read More
Put your resume together, send it to me. So that’s what I did. I said put my resume together and I sent it to her, and we had really clicked when we’d done the accreditation inspection, ’cause she was along on a lot of the inspection. And so anyway, I… Read More
Why, and what was the thought process then of deciding to leave the Riverbank zoo?… Read More
Well, I had done, during the time that I was at Riverbanks, I served on the accreditation commission for AZA, and actually ended up being on the AZA Accreditation Commission for 12 years. ‘Cause I was a three for, I was a three for. And so by the end of… Read More
An MBA, a basic MBA, gives you the terminology and the introduction to a whole lot of things, right?… Read More
So they teach you about finance, and they teach you about strategic planning, and they teach you about this, but they don’t teach you actually how to do it. They teach you the terminology, marketing. Marketing and PR. Actually, my focus in my MBA was marketing and PR, because I… Read More