Len Stevens in his own words

Northern Nevada Business Weekly sat down with Len Stevens, who announced last week he is retiring as CEO of The Chamber after 13 years of service to discuss his future plans and his time with the chamber.

Northern Nevada Business Weekly: Why did you feel now was the right time to retire?

Len Stevens: There’s never a right time or a wrong time. But obviously I’m getting older but still healthy in my mind. But the question I ask myself is “Is there other things you’d like to do” and the answer was “Yeah there’s other things I would like to do personally for my own personal growth and development. So I met with my staff and talked about it for the last few months. We talked about (staying) here for 2016, and going through the process of the search and looking for a new CEO, and we can do it where it’s not abrupt and it’s not having to get all this done at once. It gives them time to transition to a new person and it gives me some time to transition to things I’d like to do once I retire from the chamber.

NNBW: What did you enjoy most about working in your field?

Stevens: I think the most important thing is dealing with the people. Working the field when I started (at the chamber) in 2002, we had a membership of 200 maybe 300 businesses and got to know a lot of people and got to know the needs of members. I obviously had no background in chambers (affairs) but I do know you learn from others. We’re a service organization and you can provide the needs of your organization and finding out the needs of those in the organization. We did interviews, surveys, finding out what people needed and continuing to grow from a membership of 300 to over 1,500 in a five-year period. It was an exciting time for me.

Having lived in this community prior to working at the chamber really helped me because I had so many great friends and resources once I moved back here. We had some great board members with passion and very caring. We had a lot of great people and a lot of great resources for me.

NNBW: What was the most challenging everyday part about your position as CEO?

Stevens: I think the challenging part was to have the vision and carry out the vision. When I came to the Sparks Chamber in 2002, we were small. Only 13 percent of our members were outside of Sparks. Five years later 53 percent of our members were outside of Sparks. It was challenging, but it was more exciting than it was challenging because, people shared in that vision and helped to accomplish those goals. I was fortunate enough to have Lynn Tackman, who had already been with the chamber for 15 years as my sidekick. Her intelligence really filled in the gaps I needed to understand the knowledge of the chamber. She provided me with the direction that we needed to go. It was not so much a challenge, but a ride.

NNBW: What was the most significant accomplishment in your time with The Chamber?

Stevens: We were in a little 700-square foot office by the train station in the downtown Victorian Square in Sparks with and had no Website. We went up to Truckee Meadows Community College, met with people up there, and found somebody on a work-study program for $2.36 a hour to build our website. From there we continued to grow. We went from being the Sparks Chamber and going to a larger building and becoming the Northern Nevada Chamber to building our own offices of 2,000-square-feet at The Legends. We were the first known chamber ever to merge with the Hispanic Chamber. We had ESL classes, public meetings in Spanish. We had our own radio in Spanish for a little over a year.

The collaboration of the Reno-Sparks and the Sparks Chamber to bring that to fruition was a great sign for the community and that it would be more beneficial to our members to belong to one chamber rather than two.

NNBW: Is there something you wish you had done differently at The Chamber?

Stevens: The one regret is that we could not connect on the level we wanted to with the Hispanic business community. There’s a matriculation still taking place. We did some creative things to always try and grow and be inclusive of all business communities.

NNBW: You’ve had a varied professional career (head basketball coach at UNR, CEO of The Chamber, etc.). How different were the positions? Were there any similarities?

Stevens: Both careers involves teams. As a coach I am the decision maker. Everything is up to me. I decide what kind of players I’m going to recruit what system I’m going to run, manage the budget, those sorts of things. As a CEO, I’m working with a board and instead of myself making all the decisions you disseminate a lot of information to your board. We need a lot of information to set up a strategic plan and my job is to carry it out. The way they are similar is as part of a team everybody needs to buy in to eliminate as many hidden agenda items as you possibly can, to have total transparency, to have total trust and belief and to set on a path and have everybody buy into that path. My responsibility is the same as a coach in that you involve your team in the decision-making process. Why are you doing what you are doing. Communication of roles is essential in team building. When you have bad attitudes or people who do not buy in, you try to get those people focused on the big picture in order for the team to be successful. As a board, you need people who are intelligent with great resources to be involved. I need to make sure that a board is totally involved in what we do and what we are about to do. Our members need to be involved too or they won’t have the same passion for getting things done.

Another thing that’s very much alike is that it’s my responsibility for my staff either in basketball or with the chamber to help them achieve their goals; to help them grow and develop so that five, six, seven, eight years from now they’re not doing same job they are currently doing. It’s my job to help get them the tools to achieve and advance either collectively and individually.

The other difference is in coaching if people don’t fit or buy in you can make those changes. With a board it’s a little more difficult. The board is all professionals and they’re all very intelligent and have experience. With a basketball team, they all don’t have that experience. They’re 17-, 18-year-old kids so you’ve got to communicate better. You have to be strong and not assume anything when you’re working with young people

NNBW: Did you use anything from your coaching experience that applied to The Chamber position?

Stevens: You try to communicate as best as you can and build trust. That is an important aspect in any leadership role. People need to see your passion and focus and what you’re trying to accomplish. In any leadership role, you need to eliminate as many adversarial situations as possible, because the focus then becomes fixing those situations rather than what the goals and objectives are. Trust is everything to me. If we don’t trust one another it is difficult to achieve what we want to achieve.

NNBW: Was it a difficult transitioning from different career paths?

Stevens: It wasn’t tough to transition and here’s why: Everything I’ve done in my life has been a challenge. I’ve never looked at anything I’ve done in life as a job. It’s a great experience. I see life as a game. You try to see what you can get out of yourself for all these years. I’ve had good experiences and I’ve had bad experiences. I don’t see anything as a transition, but an experience. What I don’t know I seek. I’m the greatest thief in the world of stealing people’s ideas on why they’re successful. There are other people out there who have a lot to offer. I see everybody I meet as a resource. I want to know everything about them and why they are successful, so if I don’t have that in my makeup, I want to steal it and use it.

NNBW: What do you see for the future of The Chamber and even the future of the Truckee Meadows as a whole?

Stevens: What I’ve seen in our community is so relevant to what’s happening in our chamber. When I first came on board, the number-one goal was networking, connecting business with business. The way we communicate issues such as an urgent need for workforce development. The chamber has to evolve with the needs of the community. The chamber also needs to be involved with other entities of the community. For example, I’m on seven or eight committees such as downtown redevelopment in Reno or Sparks. Unlike many organizations we’re extremely diverse because people join the chamber for so many different reasons and membership is so diverse. From the mom-and-pop small business up to school districts, to casinos and banks with a large number of employees, a company’s needs are different.

The Chamber has to take the lead in what those needs are and looking ahead to be involved in that.

NNBW: Not only are you CEO of The Chamber, you also do color commentary for UNR men’s basketball games. How did you juggle the responsibilities of the two positions, not to mention other everyday tasks?

Stevens: I’m fortunate that I’m only doing home games. I love to watch basketball games. I’m a basketball junkie and tape about 25-30 games a week. I get to work with (play-by-play analyst) Ryan Radtke, who is a pro’s pro and made it so easy for me. It is one of those things where we had great chemistry from the start. It happened by accident when they first asked me to do to commentary that I was only supposed to do one or two games and Ryan and I hit it off so well. If I had to travel, there’s no way I could juggle this, because I have other things like spending time with my grandkids and I love to play a lot of golf. My first priority in my career is The Chamber and everything else is secondary. I have to have everything planned or I can’t do it.

NNBW: Why was there a need for two chambers (Sparks and the Reno-Sparks)?

Stevens: We saw an evolution in time where we saw a lot of separation between the two cities. That has changed and I think The Chamber has played a big role in that, in bringing all the businesses together. Hopefully we’ll never see that again.

NNBW: Was there a healthy competition between the Sparks Chamber and Reno-Sparks Chamber before they consolidated?

Stevens: Obviously when there are two like businesses, there is competition, but I think both of us listened to our membership and become more or less the same size. Our members who belonged to both chambers were asked to go to two different events or had two different programs, or sponsorships, or membership dues. So the best thing for our business community was to bring the two together and eliminate the idea of territorial chambers and have one common goal to make northern Nevada the best environment we could make it.

NNBW: What was the process like to merge the two entities?

Stevens: It was not an easy process. Having 57 board members, having two offices for the first 18 months, having two different workforces with the fear of job loss was real. We have the same kind of issues that other companies have that merge. It takes time and we were both in tough economic times. We made decisions that were for the good of the staff. Trying to combine the attributes of both chambers and eliminate things we needed to be changed. When you look at it, it was so healthy because in the room you had a great number of board members that were so diverse and great ideas to open up and share. To be a part of that was absolutely amazing. Now people don’t talk about merger. It’s like we’ve been one forever. Dick Bostdorf with AT&T was a great leader during the merger and awesome mentor to me during the merger.

NNBW: Why did you come up with the chamber’s current name?

Stevens: We wanted to be simple to recognize we were the Reno-Sparks Chamber or Sparks Chamber. But we wanted something more clever and simple. I don’t know how many names and domains we purchased (chuckles) in the beginning. I look at it now and how clever and identifiable. It tells our story. It’s tells we are The Chamber-Reno-Sparks-Northern-Nevada. Mike Draper and his team did a great job coming up with the symbol and the tagline. I don’t think we’ll see a change for along time.

NNBW: What advice would you give anyone who wants to get into public service or would like to get involved with The Chamber?

Stevens: In this job you have a multitude of responsibilities. It all comes under the umbrella of service. If your thoughts or your beliefs take precedence then you’re not doing your job. To me, that’s personal. Every mistake I’ve made is because I didn’t gather enough information to make an informed decision. That a responsibility every decision maker has to have is to gather as much information as possible.

NNBW: What was the best advice anyone ever gave you?

Stevens: My dad would say every time I did something that was questionable, “How would you like it if that was done to you?” That was in my head all the time.

NNBW: How will you spend your retirement? Is there another career path you’d like to pursue?

Stevens: I like to watch basketball games and like doing color commentary on the UNR basketball broadcasts. I like to look into something like that. Another I’d really like to do is helping the growth and development of businesses from a leadership standpoint or employee development in some capacity. I’ve had some opportunities to work with people in other chambers outside of our community such as rural areas in helping them with programs and developing boards and those sorts of things. I can do it whenever I want. I can take one or two days one week and do three days the next week. I have 14 grandkids and I want to spend time with them. I don’t want to slow down until I’m not able to physically.

NNBW: Do you have a favorite vacation spot?

Stevens: Me and my family and friends go to Mexico and lay around, and play a little golf, play cards and just relax. I also like to go on golf trips.

NNBW: If you had one moment in time to cherish for the rest of your life either professionally or personally what would it be and why?

Stevens: The thing I cherish most is my wife putting up with this for over 50 years. For example when I was high school basketball coach in 1979, I was making $19,000 a year at Jesuit High School in Sacramento, my wife was public health nurse. I had a job offer at tiny St. Marin’s College in Lacey, Wash. I had to take a $7,000 pay cut to take that job. My wife gave up a great job and a beautiful home. When we first went up to that college, she took one look at it and cried. She said what are you doing to us.” It was tough, but she and my kids did it. Things I did could not have been done without that support.

NNBW: Why did you choose a career in northern Nevada? What do you like about living/working here?

Stevens: I knew when I retired from coaching that this is where I wanted to live. The environment, looking back when I came here in 1986 (as head basketball coach at UNR) and where we are today, it’s absolutely amazing, but I have a son and a daughter who live here, I have grandchildren who live here. It was the perfect place for me to come with the intention to retire. That lasted two months and I was encouraged to interview with the chamber and I was fortunate enough to get hired.

The first time around, I found the people in the community were amazing. When I decided to retire from coaching basketball, I knew I would be comfortable here. I’ve been blessed to be put in this situation.