(Unedited) Podcast Transcript 507: Thinking Bigger About Regional Economic Development
November 6, 2024
This week on Talking Headways we’re joined by Julie Huls, CEO of Waymaker Group. We chat about economic development strategies for mid-sized cities, the impacts of the pandemic on regional thinking, and what a future of Mega Regions means for cities trying to attract talent.
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Below is a full AI generated unedited transcript:
[00:02:39] Jeff Wood: Julie Huls welcome to the Talking Headways podcast [00:02:46] Julie Huls: Good afternoon, Jeff. Thanks for having me [00:02:48] Jeff Wood: Yeah, thanks for being here. Before we get started, can you tell us a little bit about yourself? [00:02:52] Julie Huls: Yes, let’s see. I’ll start way back in the day. I was actually raised in the upper Midwest and got to Texas as they say, as fast as I could. [00:03:01] I spent about the first half of my life. There on the prairies of central Illinois and moved to Austin in the late nineties, got my undergrad from the University of Illinois and came down to get my master’s degree from UT Austin. And believe it or not, those two geographies have played a really central role in influencing what I do today to make a living. [00:03:25] Which is I started a company called way maker group almost 10 years ago now. And we focus on technology based economic development. [00:03:35] Jeff Wood: So you get to Texas, it spurred your interest in something that made you think about technology and urban development and cities and all that stuff. But was this something that was interesting to you when you were younger? [00:03:44] Like when you were a kid, I asked this question all the time, I find that people’s origin stories are always interesting and how they got into something. Maybe it’s something you came to later, but also maybe it’s something that you came to when you were younger. [00:03:54] Julie Huls: I have to be honest, I never had any notion that I would end up in some technology related field. [00:04:02] And yet here I am, I have 2 degrees in business and communications and started my career in that field. And then I got a little bored with just doing communications and made a hop skip over to real estate development. So I’m very passionate about that. Also, placemaking is something that also plays very central to us today at Waymaker Group. [00:04:24] And then the real estate market crashed in 2008, and I was recruited to lead the Austin Technology Council, which was an industry group that started, believe it or not, decades ago in Austin. And that was really a great pivotal point for me, right? In terms of really getting into the nitty gritty of economic development and also really understanding the dynamics and the exponential impact of technology, right? [00:04:51] And the impact that tech has on our day to day lives on our cities, on our states, on our economies. [00:04:59] Jeff Wood: Why do so many cities care so deeply about economic development? It might be a simple question, but that’s a basis of why we’re here almost. [00:05:06] Julie Huls: Yes, it is actually something that touches every aspect of our day to day life, right? [00:05:14] Cities should be focused and the good ones are in very intentionally focused, not even just on economic development, but today they’re getting more and more focused on centering their economies around. Technology right in the impacts of technology. I think we’ve realized as a society that technology is not only not going anywhere. [00:05:35] It’s really only becoming more and more pervasive. And so it touches everything, right? It touches everything from housing. It touches everything from, GDP, right? It touches everything from job creation. Higher education institutions today are focused on technology and technology growth. And it has also, in recent years, become a very critical national security policy and focus for not just our country, but for states and for cities. [00:06:05] Technology clearly touches everyone and cities that are really smart. Understand that if they don’t really adapt these pro technology policies, that they’re going to have a large swath of their citizens that are going to be left behind. [00:06:19] Jeff Wood: That kind of points to like the quality of life issues that come up too. [00:06:22] Julie Huls: No question. And one huge component that I somehow left out is workforce development, right? We are also at almost a crisis point in this country because our educational systems have been so completely geared around our formerly industrial, almost exclusively industrial economies and before that our ag economies. [00:06:44] Right? And so that’s a part of the country that I came from. I was actually raised on a farm and worked in a farm. Was impacted very much firsthand by the sort of declining both agrarian and manufacturing economies in the upper Midwest. And when you ask, why should cities care when there are certain major economic. [00:07:04] Elements that are in decline, you start to really your citizens suffer, right? From a lot of different perspectives, workforce development, as I mentioned, housing, and as you say, day to day lifestyle and living. [00:07:19] Jeff Wood: One of your major focuses is economic development in mid market cities, which often don’t get the same attention as the superstar cities do. [00:07:26] What are you currently seeing in this specific market that’s maybe different than five, even 10 years ago? [00:07:32] Julie Huls: Yeah, great question. I will tell you, Comparatively, five years ago, I think our country was just beginning to wake up to the power that our middle tier cities hold for decades. As we all know, we’ve been really focused on the technology development and technology investments and really 5 major cities, all of which are along the East and West coast. [00:07:58] Right? And it has been almost as if our middle tier cities, if you weren’t Boston or Seattle or Silicon Valley, you were really almost left behind. And so we are now, frankly, having to play catch up. And I will say in the last 5 years, we’ve not only started to wake up, but I would say just in the last 12 months. [00:08:19] We at Waymaker have seen a tremendous resurgence. There has been a number of new federal programs that you’re probably aware of that have been very proactively investing economic development and technology dollars into these mid tier cities. And so I think, let me tell you, the dust is flying out there. [00:08:42] We have a lot of new projects that are being built as we speak today within these very cities. [00:08:48] Jeff Wood: Yeah, we’ve recently seen a lot of numbers and improvement that show like many of the left behind places are starting to get some investment. The 1 trillion in investments from, you referenced this, but like the CHIPS Act, the infrastructure bill, the Inflation Reduction Act, and even the recovery monies that many cities got as well. [00:09:06] Julie Huls: That’s right. [00:09:06] Jeff Wood: It usually takes a long time to see the impacts from these investments, but I think we’re starting to see some now and there’s been recent items in, and I know that in landlines from the Lincoln Institute of land policy, as well as the New York times and others who have discussed, those numbers are starting to tick up in some of these places that didn’t see really big recoveries after the recession. [00:09:23] And after a lot of the industrial policy left them behind in the eighties and nineties. [00:09:27] Julie Huls: You’ve got it. You hit the nail on the head. I think the reason why we are seeing such a quick turnaround in terms of impact has to do with the fact that our higher education institutions, our municipalities, our economic development corporations, they have been ready. [00:09:44] I think that we have all been feeling the pain. Of maybe being a little late to the technology party. And I think we’ve had to come to reconcile that. Again, we really have to very proactively adopt these pro technology policies. It should also be said that. When we, within the technology based economic development world, use the term technology, we really mean a very wide spectrum of technology. [00:10:11] I think there is a a sort of almost misunderstanding with that nomenclature in that when folks hear, scientific economic development or technology economic development, they think really strictly only of, Occupations that are highly skilled that are impacting those local economies. [00:10:30] And in our case, and really, even in these middle tier cities are talking about everyone, right? We have to really, I think, also make sure that we are focused on very inclusive technology, economic development in today’s world. I [00:10:44] Jeff Wood: mean that the words are, the definitions get bandied about a lot, technology, innovation, there’s such kind of coveralls for a lot of different things. [00:10:52] And also if you put geographic modifiers on them, like a district, right? Like an innovation district or a technology district that changes, the way people think about them as well. And so I’m wondering what you think about that language, that, that use of those terms to describe something that certain folks in economic development have an idea of what that is, but then people outside of that sphere might not. [00:11:12] Julie Huls: Yeah, I think we have a lot of education work to do, right? Or I think we have maybe an awareness campaign, if you will, that we need to do. I think the term technology is intimidating just to be really brief about it. And I think that we really have to our cities, our city planners, our district planners, research parks are another good example. [00:11:33] Our higher education institutions are starting to understand that they have to very much proactively go out to recruit. Entrepreneurs, small business owners, and other key strategic partners that maybe have a broader definition of technology that they’re using. We know for a fact that the more diverse a district is, and the more diverse a city is, the more successful they are typically economically. [00:12:00] And that’s really what we’re going for in today’s world. And our funders, we mentioned a minute ago, the federal funding that’s starting to come down the pike. Our federal funders have. And so within a lot of these technology based programs, especially the ones that have the higher programs and the higher dollar amounts attached to them, you’re finding that you cannot even qualify for some of the bigger programs unless you have a coalition, a very diverse coalition that is attached to that effort. [00:12:29] Jeff Wood: So do cities have those coalitions in place to start to organize around, getting money? One of the things that with the infrastructure bill specifically, and we talked about this on the show before is that, it’s nice to have money that can go to anywhere who applies for it, but the folks who apply for it have to be specialized sometimes in certain ways to be able to write the grants, to have the staff, to have the capacity to be able to even go out for the money. [00:12:52] And so it leaves some of the folks behind that might otherwise benefit. [00:12:56] Julie Huls: Yeah, and I think, of course, it depends on the agency depends on the program. I would say that the Department of Commerce through the Economic Development Administration has some programs that have a pretty high reward. [00:13:09] There’s also a pretty high risk, right? That those higher reward programs are obviously going to be more competitive. The National Science Foundation also has the, regional innovation engines program. We’ve been working really closely with the number of those, first winners over the last 12 months or so. [00:13:28] And yes, to your point they’re competitive. They have higher rewards or higher price tags, but they are also very competitive. And so to answer your question, do most of these cities have coalitions? I would say that the overwhelming majority of the cities that are going after those larger programs do have coalitions. [00:13:45] Do. I would also offer that they are in various stages of development, right? In some cases you have very loosely, very informal coalitions, and in others you have very mature and very formal coalitions. And I would say also in both cases, depending upon the region. depending upon the complexion of that region’s bevy of innovation assets, depending upon the leadership. [00:14:09] I will tell you, leadership is probably the thing, the component that is the toughest to get right. So if you’re fortunate and you’re living within a region that has a coalition and a great technology landscape, let’s make sure you also have some tremendous leadership. This is tough work, right? [00:14:26] And these investments. Take 10 to 20 years to really, see return. [00:14:31] Jeff Wood: The leadership point is really is not lost on us in the transportation world because the places that actually do expand their transportation networks and, find the money to do it are the ones that usually have a good mayor or a good champion locally that makes it happen. [00:14:43] Otherwise you might have something on the ballot, but it usually, loses out or fizzles out because there’s no leadership in place to keep it going. Cause these are large investments. These are large. Long term things that, have to be, set out in a way that through the political process every two years, four years or whatever, it can’t get beat up and deep six every time there’s an election. [00:15:02] Julie Huls: That’s exactly right. We very recently added succession planning or succession counseling. Part of our practice, because the leadership piece is so important, and there’s so much transformative change happening within every single one of our institutions right now. It’s not uncommon for a key leader to leave a market or leave a particular coalition for it for a different opportunity. [00:15:27] And so we’re really counseling a lot of our clients to make sure that you have 1 or 2 individuals within that institution that you can identify to be a long term champion to your point. [00:15:38] Jeff Wood: This is like a, not a societal question, but like a culture question, some of these cities and the mid tier that you’re talking about that aren’t the superstar cities, they already have natural advantages, almost like the Austin’s or Nashville’s or Milwaukee’s to a certain extent. [00:15:53] I’m curious how much is there a tiered system as you get below the superstar cities about which, cities can actually take advantage of their already existing natural characteristics to improve themselves and make themselves hubs for a next generation technology or, workforce development or anything along those lines. [00:16:09] Julie Huls: I would say that there isn’t necessarily a population minimum, if you will. I would say that in some of the, almost rural populations, let’s say 100, 000 or fewer, you are going to have to be a little bit more creative, right? Because in most cases, these coalition driven or technology driven efforts really do require, The staying power and the deep resources that typically come out of institutions, whether it’s a technical college or a community college, or a successful in terms of tax base municipality or county. [00:16:47] You are going to have to be probably a little bit more creative, but in some of the really small markets, we’re seeing that they are leaning into their creative side. And so they’re becoming, for example, artists havens for. Artists or they’re leaning into their, outdoor lifestyle. That’s really become also very popular in recent years. [00:17:06] A lot of the smaller markets are touting that, especially in today’s world, because a lot of our creative talent and technical talent can work from anywhere they’re leaning into promoting their natural, natural beauty, their natural lifestyle assets. [00:17:22] Jeff Wood: Yeah I’m just interested in places like Las Vegas and Austin and Nashville and places that have Las Vegas already had a draw to a certain extent, right? [00:17:29] They’re already, moving in a certain direction. Austin, I was there from 1998 to 2005 and it felt like a dynamic place already. And I’m sure it was even before that, because of all the technology investments that had made and the existence of Dell and IC squared and all those other places. [00:17:42] And so I’m just curious about the culture of these places too. Like what, having an already big. Sort of environment for just a population that would, take on something larger. That’s just interesting to me, too. [00:17:53] Julie Huls: Yeah, Austin actually was brilliant and I have to give a lot of the forefathers of the technology movement in Austin credit for this. [00:18:01] They were very intentional and very clear about promoting. The creative scene in Austin, right? That seems very natural and a, it’s made as an assumption in today’s world. But, 30 years ago, that was not necessarily something that was traditional in economic development. And so they were brilliant about, leading with technology recruitment. [00:18:24] Through the likes of, South by Southwest, which, by the way, he’s been around for 30 years. A lot of people don’t know that. They think it just sprung up out of nowhere. They were also brilliant about promoting around the Austin city limits festival and even the show before it was a festival. [00:18:40] And so I think we have to really Props to folks in Austin. They knew that if they were successful in attracting the right kind of technical and creative talent, they were going to be successful in really positioning Austin as a tech hub and as a destination for all kinds of other talent. [00:18:58] Jeff Wood: Speaking of talent in terms of like local. [00:19:00] Journalism and newspapers. I feel like that’s a frustrating thing for me. And one of the reasons why is because a lot of the national newspapers, they have really great writers and really great stories that they can go into different places and they’ll pluck something out. That’s really interesting. But I do find it harder when it gets to like the local papers or the local scene. [00:19:16] And sometimes, the weeklies. That used to exist in a lot of cities where a place where that happened. And now it’s dropped off the deep end because of a lot of consolidation and things like that. But I’m wondering about whether these places that you work in are missing that storytelling ability because of the lack of the papers have all consolidated the process for, creating a buzz is not there as much anymore. [00:19:36] Julie Huls: That’s exactly right. You hit another nail on the head, Jeff. This is another really significant deficit that we see a lot of communities and even coalitions and regions have as they come into really positioning, newly positioning their markets for technology success. Obviously, technology is a, it’s a global contest, right? [00:19:58] It is not just a local contest, but I think, because we have lost within these. And I think for all of us, middle tier cities, the ability to tell great stories, we’ve gotten out of the habit. It’s one of the first recommendations we made to every single one of our clients, right? Let’s make sure that you have deep resources and sustaining messaging as it relates to why technical talent, creative talent should consider or even, technology companies should consider your market. [00:20:29] It’s a lost art, that is for sure. [00:20:31] Jeff Wood: Yeah, I was just reading a piece in actually Texas Monthly about how Frederick Law Olmsted maybe got some of his inspiration from the hill country. And so like little things like that, which catch your eye, it builds the mystique of a place almost a little bit more. [00:20:46] Julie Huls: And character too, right? I think that is another reason why we are in the middle of this housing transformation, right? I think, again, as folks are able to do anything from home these days, what we’re finding is that, especially in some of the earlier generations, you want to be affiliated with the community that has character, right? [00:21:09] And whether that means being part of an artist. Haven or being part of a historical neighborhood. I think that’s something that’s very appealing versus Being attracted to a market for other assets that are a little bit more traditional in nature [00:21:24] Jeff Wood: You mentioned housing affordability we recently had professors chris redfern and anthony orlando on the show and they Have a paper out that talks about how california and texas are actually a very similar housing market And that Texas is actually catching up to California in terms of an affordability because they’re running out of land and by running out of land, running out of land to sprawl into and I think because, there, there’s not a lot of places for big homebuilders to build a lot of tract housing. [00:21:47] So the housing costs are going up because they have to go inwards. And so a lot of cities around the country are going to catch up to this really soon. And the housing affordability issue is a major one. And so I’m wondering. These midsize cities actually have something valuable in that they have cheaper housing than the coastal cities or the superstar cities, but it might not be that way for much longer if they’re not careful. [00:22:06] Julie Huls: I completely agree. And it also has to do with housing supply just across the board. But I can corroborate the story about housing prices in Texas. It’s been, I’ve been here again, 25 years and it’s. It’s been quite the movie to watch and to be a part of. I’ve lived now in Austin and San Antonio and Dallas, and it’s been it’s quite shocking. [00:22:26] And I make the comment all the time that I’m not sure how people afford to move here. It is something that worries me. I think also it’s very telling that. Up until probably the last two years or so, economic development professionals and organizations didn’t necessarily cover housing or other critical topics and assets and resource categories like child care. [00:22:50] And the fact that both child care and housing and transportation for that matter are, now all three part of, Traditional economic development priorities, I think, says it all, right? We’re not going to have healthy economies until we can really make sure that we have an adequate housing, adequate and affordable housing supply. [00:23:10] Jeff Wood: I wrote recently actually in my newsletter that I’m like thinking about this as well as like these investments, these place based investments, industrial policy and whatever else, those are actually like investments in access and the giving people access to places where they can go and make a living and start a family and all those things. [00:23:25] And I feel like that’s, related to the transportation policy. Discussion that we have all the time related to how people can get to the places where they want to go. It’s not necessarily mobility, but it’s actually access. It’s people getting to the destinations where they want to go. And so thinking about like making tracks in smaller cities, I feel like there’s a really important discussion to be had about where we’re deficient around the country and giving smaller places access. [00:23:48] And I think discussions about high speed rail and connecting the dots on a map are really huge because some of those places can be opened up just by, access versus being able to drive somewhere in a car as slow as we used to go. And now as airports are, or airlines are starting to consolidate a little bit, and also they’re starting to cut off some of the places where they used to go and not serving them anymore. [00:24:09] That even makes it more imperative that we create a system where places can have access and get connected to the major markets where, you know, people They, are part of this huge U. S. satellite, right? [00:24:19] Julie Huls: That’s exactly right. I actually love this topic because it feeds into something else that we’ve been talking a lot about at way maker group. [00:24:26] And that is the topic of super regions, right? When you talk about access to rail access to transportation, access to resources, housing, child care, et cetera. One of, I think, the most interesting trends within our country has to do with really how we began to get more intentional about tying the assets of a couple of major urban markets together, right? [00:24:50] How can we, for example, build and be really focused on building a supercorridor between, let’s say, Austin and New York? We’ve also at Waymaker been working for a number of years in Wisconsin, and we’ve served not only folks in the Madison area, but in particular markets that are in between Milwaukee and Chicago. [00:25:11] And I think increasingly, as we think about. Urban sprawl suburban sprawl access to transportation. We’re going to have to get smarter. I think about how we plan these super regions because it is becoming less affordable to live in most of our urban markets. And that is also again, not necessarily the lifestyle that the next generation is looking for. [00:25:33] Jeff Wood: I brought this up several times on the show because I just think it’s so interesting, but South Korea and Seoul, stuff is expensive and they have such a problem with their birth rates that they’re actually discussing building six high speed rail lines. So that as a, solution to some of their problems with fertility. [00:25:49] So I find that’s really fascinating, to think about that perspective of, we have a lot of workers that work in Seoul. We have a lot of people who need housing and want to have. Children and grow families, but they can’t get home in time. And how do we facilitate that? We need faster trains. [00:26:04] Like that thinking is just so interesting, right? [00:26:07] Julie Huls: We need more of that thinking over here in this country, in particular in Texas. I wish they would be a little bit more organized here in Texas. [00:26:17] Jeff Wood: What has the pandemic done to this discussion? [00:26:20] Julie Huls: Oh my goodness. Turned it. On its head, economic development will never be the same technology based economic development was not even a thing before coven. [00:26:31] We are now really having to hustle when we think about workforce development, not just policy, but implementation. We have a number of our middle tier cities to your point that are getting really smart and really proactive about building workforce development. Training centers that will meet the needs be, they will be assured to meet the incoming and the future, even technology training needs of our industry partners, right? [00:26:58] We are in the middle. I can’t say middle. We’re just starting the process, this massive and multi decade process of reshoring ideally. Everything from biopharmaceutical manufacturing to semiconductor manufacturing, and that process is obviously not going to be overnight. And so there is a lot of work. [00:27:21] There’s a lot of work to do. And I don’t know that economic development will ever be the same. And that’s okay. It just is. means that we are opening our minds to thinking more broadly about things like access and workforce development and education, etc. This topic and COVID touched every aspect of our lives. [00:27:43] Jeff Wood: Yeah, and I’m always interested in just the idea of people, mostly white collar workers, to be honest, but people being able to go and move other places and live other places and support a different economy than maybe the one that already has maybe all the riches. And so that’s an interesting kind of thought too, is there’s only like a, still a small percentage of people that can actually do that, but they can have a great size impact on the places that they go. [00:28:04] Julie Huls: No question I think it’s so much more common as 1 example to have a number of jobs, right? It used to be obviously that we would clock in and clock out very locally. We would have 1 occupation and the more. We are out there. The more mobile and truly mobile. I think a lot of our professionals have become as a result of covid. [00:28:26] You’ll see 1 individual 1 white collar worker, juggling 3 or 4 different occupations at any 1 time, which is something we didn’t see before. [00:28:36] Jeff Wood: That’s interesting because over the pandemic, I saw people get in trouble for that, right? For working two different jobs for getting the same salary at both jobs. [00:28:42] But, they could, I guess they could do it because they’re not under the supervision or they didn’t have to go into an office or something like that. And so you can work for a transit agency and in Chicago and Seattle at the same time, and nobody would be the wiser. [00:28:56] Julie Huls: Nobody would ever know. Yeah. I think, Employers are starting to wise up to some of the strategies, but I think generally speaking, a lot of employers just understand that at the very least, they’re going to be other demands. [00:29:08] I think it also just taught us that it can’t be all about work all the time. I think we’ve reprioritized family life and balancing our lives, which is nice. [00:29:20] Jeff Wood: How much does climate change and kind of the energy investment space play into all this? We have all these new industries that are just like growing in these places where you maybe not didn’t expect them, the battery belt, as they call it now, Southeast and the former Rust Belt, places like Atlanta and Georgia, where they’re building, Rivian cars and stuff like that. I’m curious what that has done to the discussions that you have with midsize cities about what economic development can be. And these Industries about climate change, which, they are very divisive sometimes in terms of politics. [00:29:50] Julie Huls: I’ll tackle the latter one first. Climate is something we haven’t started talking about in economic development. And I should say differently. Maybe we’ve started the conversation. I would love to see us advance the conversation a lot faster than we are. I think there is no question that the impacts of climate change. [00:30:11] Clearly, they’re already impacting geography. They’re impacting the decisions that are important. The decisions that employers are making in terms of where to or where not to expand. And scientific talent is making decisions based on climate impact and we are not as proactive. As a country, as I would prefer to be, and I worry. [00:30:32] That part of that is because we do have so many other transformations that we’re in the middle of managing and navigating, right? As a society, as it relates to energy, I will tell you, I never anticipated and I’m actually really proud of our middle American cities and our middle tier markets for embracing. [00:30:52] Brand new technologies and not just that new concepts and ways to create and invent around energy solutions. I, again, was born and raised on a farm in central Illinois, close actually to the University of Illinois. And, that agricultural driven culture is pretty traditional and there’s some cultural values, right? [00:31:14] That don’t always involve being super open to change or super open to technology. And the speed with which a lot of our middle tier cities have embraced new technologies, right? The battery technologies, semiconductor technologies. We’re having conversations now with folks in the middle of us about quantum technologies. [00:31:31] We’re still trying to define what that means, but. I’ve been delighted. I don’t know if that means that COVID really did have such a horribly severe impact that we’ve been forced to open our minds. I don’t know that it matters, but I have to give folks in the middle U. S. big props for being open to new solutions and new speeds, right? [00:31:51] Technology does not move at the same speed as agriculture or manufacturing, and so we’re making a lot of adjustments in these middle tier cities. [00:32:00] Jeff Wood: My two year old has a book quantum physics for babies, and I think I understand it that I’m still it’s [00:32:05] Julie Huls: very, it’s very [00:32:09] Jeff Wood: simplistic, right? [00:32:10] This is a, this is mass. This is, this ball has masses ball. Doesn’t have mass, those types of things. But it’s funny to think about I’m still trying to figure that stuff out. [00:32:17] Julie Huls: Yeah, we all are. [00:32:21] Jeff Wood: Do you all discuss the insurance crisis at all in this kind of overall arching kind of economic development sphere? [00:32:27] Julie Huls: In terms of climate, [00:32:29] Jeff Wood: climate and just things are getting more expensive and so it’s getting harder to replace them. Rates are going up, those types of things. [00:32:36] Julie Huls: That’s another great question. [00:32:37] We, the short answer is not necessarily no. I think that has to do with, again, just the energy that it’s taking for all of our markets to transform themselves, right? I’m sure these conversations are being held, obviously, but as a practice for us at Waymaker Group, we haven’t really covered that one. [00:32:57] Jeff Wood: What’s some of your favorite work that you’ve done or work that maybe has surprised you? [00:33:01] Julie Huls: I am very passionate about Education and about workforce development, and I think it would go back to something I just pointed to, which is the pace with which leaders in within regions leaders within communities are stepping forward. [00:33:20] So courageously. If you ask me. me to embrace technologies and new ways of thinking and new ways of being and doing in a manner that I’ve never seen before. I was really nervous, especially before COVID that we as a country had really gotten super stuck in our ways. I was really worried that, I had the ability starting in the seventies and eighties in the central prairies of Illinois to witness the Negative impact of not embracing change, not embracing technology, and frankly, have been driven by that ever since I was worried that we had gotten stuck on that gear. [00:34:00] And I’m very happy to report that. I was very wrong. COVID and or other global forces, I think, have unstuck us. And I’m really proud of the work, for example, that is happening in Oklahoma City. I think even Milwaukee is doing some really cool things. We’ve worked in markets that are smaller even than a middle tier city, right? [00:34:20] Kenosha, Wisconsin has about 100, 000 people. It’s one of the markets in between Milwaukee and Chicago. And they are, as we speak, Week building a 100 acre innovation district, and I couldn’t be prouder. They have really embraced the future in that regard, and those are just a handful of examples. I love that. [00:34:40] We also are really starting to connect. The importance of education, right? The education doesn’t start when you’re a senior in high school and with the decision about whether or not you’re going to go to college. I think we’ve had that conversation until we’re blue in the United States face. But I’m really happy that the communities that we’re working now, middle tier in particular are getting wiser right about the importance of early education, introducing. [00:35:13] Access to technology, the importance of, gaining STEM related skills earlier and earlier along the continuum, I think, is just really going to continue to impact our country in a really positive way. [00:35:25] Jeff Wood: What’s next for you all? [00:35:27] Julie Huls: Super regions. We, I think, are starting some interesting conversations in 2 parts of our country about, and these conversations are taking place also with federal agencies about how we can combine the technology assets and the human talent assets within 2 urban areas to, essentially design a super region where those Two urban areas work together to build brand new infrastructure, very bold very expensive infrastructure that would encompass everything, Jeff, from transportation to workforce development, job creation obviously is going to be a big part of that involving industry. [00:36:11] But we’re really excited about those conversations. And we, I know that it is the future of this country. [00:36:18] Jeff Wood: I think we could see it in other countries as well. My wife and I just went to China to visit her parents and the greater Bay area, as they call it, is a region of 80 plus million people, which is two times California, right? [00:36:29] And there’s just such a large amount of infrastructure investment. There’s such a large amount of people investment. It’s really interesting to see that perspective even though it’s, it’s a hyper density in Shenzhen and Hong Kong and Macau in Zhuhai and Guangdong, but it’s just Such an amazing kind of confluence of investment and people and all those things. [00:36:48] And we obviously aren’t going to be copying all of that, that goes on in that part of the world, but we can take, cues from what they’re doing and turn some certain places like the Texas triangle into a mega region that is just as connected and just as important and thinking about the future of. [00:37:04] Julie Huls: Exactly. The [00:37:04] Jeff Wood: people that live there. [00:37:05] Julie Huls: That’s exactly right. I think there is actually quite a bit to emulate there. We certainly need to make it our own. I think we have some of the best higher education and research institutions in the world. And so we certainly want to make sure that we’re taking advantage of that. [00:37:19] But I think for far too long, we’ve been a little myopic, and in terms of thinking about our communities and singles. And so I’m very excited about that. And I think there’s just a lot of. Nice work we can do. [00:37:35] Jeff Wood: Julie, where can folks find out more about him Waymaker Group and what you all are doing? [00:37:39] Julie Huls: Folks can visit our website, which is waymaker group.com. There is a section on that website that will allow you to sign up for future newsletters from us, and we love to hear from you. We love really making sure that we have a finger on the pulse of everything happening within these middle tier cities. [00:37:59] Jeff Wood: And where can folks find you if you wish to be found? [00:38:01] Julie Huls: I am on LinkedIn, so feel free to reach out to me that way. You can also email me at jhuls, J H U L S at waymaker group. com. [00:38:12] Jeff Wood: Awesome. Julie, thanks for joining us. We really appreciate your time. [00:38:15] Julie Huls: Thank you, Jeff. I really enjoyed it.
