‘A culmination of my career’: Q&A with Greg Wathen, Evansville Regional Business Hall of Fame inductee
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In May, Greg Wathen was one of four laureates inducted into the 2023 Junior Achievement Evansville Regional Business Hall of Fame.
The former president and CEO of the Economic Development Coalition of Southwest Indiana spent more than 14 years with the organization and helped form the Evansville Regional Economic Partnership in 2021, where he served as president until his retirement in 2022.
Wathen spoke to Inside INdiana Business about his journey to becoming an economic development leader in the Evansville area and what the laureate honor means to him.
You didn’t start out pursuing a career in economic development. Tell me about your seminary experience in high school and college.
I’m from Tell City, Indiana, but I didn’t graduate from Tell City High School. I graduated from Divine Heart Seminary in Donaldson, Indiana, near Plymouth, which is below South Bend. After graduation, I went on to the college program at Loyola University in Chicago.
I felt I had a calling. My dad’s first cousin was a priest with the Passionists, and he always talked to me a lot about it. I thought that would be something I could do well. I always found myself being around people and enjoying people but also knowing that families had lots of challenges, and that’s something I felt like I could play a role in.
As I went through college, I decided—especially with Vietnam ending and other challenges—I needed to take a break. They were pushing me to make a decision, and that’s when I decided it wasn’t for me.
Your next move was becoming a disc jockey and working in radio. How did that happen?
I came home, looking for a summer job, and I heard someone on WKCM [in Hawesville, Kentucky] and thought, “That’s pretty terrible, I can do a better job than that.” I went over there and said, “I know I can do this.” They put me on the air on weekends. Then all of a sudden, I ended up doing it full time, and I also did sales. I eventually gravitated over to WGBF in Evansville.
So your first business experience was in radio sales.
Yes, I did sales for both stations. In that instance, you’re trying to sell something that’s on the air, and you’re trying to help companies build a brand. It was a pretty good baptism by fire to get into that industry. It didn’t really suit me well, but I had an opportunity. One of my clients was the NAPA stores. They asked me to come over to the distribution center. I took the position in Mount Vernon, Illinois. It was a great experience because it allowed me to learn how to work on my own because I had a territory and had to meet specific goals.
How did you make the move to economic development?
I got into economic development in Louisville after holding several marketing positions. I was working for a large marketing public relations firm that’s no longer in existence. Louisville decided to build a brand new marketing effort for economic development because they had always done it through the chamber. I made a pitch for their marketing services, and the next thing you know, they offered me a job. And I said, why not?
I always felt economic development was more or less strategic marketing. So it was a great transition for me.
Tell me about your first day with the Economic Development Coalition of Southwest Indiana.
It’s 8 in the morning. I’m with a group of guys at Whirlpool. We’re in this meeting where Whirlpool is telling us, well, if you can’t do X, X and X, then we’re going to leave. I came home that night, and my wife said, “How was the first day?” I said, “I hope I didn’t make a mistake. I think we may lose Whirlpool.” And within two years we did. But we were planning for that very thing.
We knew with Toyota and others coming into the marketplace, the production workers would find other jobs because there was a huge demand. But the engineers, our greatest fear was we’re going to lose that talent. One of the first things we did was attract Haier, a Chinese appliance manufacturer. Their first research and development tech center was in Evansville in the U.S., which allowed us to keep a lot of those engineers in the marketplace.
What was your biggest accomplishment at the coalition?
One of the first projects that helped us realize we could do this was the AT&T call center, which was a converted Sam’s store on the east side. The project had stalled so I flew down to Dallas—probably within three or four days after Whirlpool—and met with some of the folks there.
We made a recommendation to tweak a certain incentive that we could utilize, and here’s a way to utilize it, which no one had ever talked to them about. And with that small change, we were able to get the project, which ended up being about a $25 or $28 million project initially that employed about 700 people.
What was your role in merging the coalition with the Southwest Indiana Chamber and the Growth Alliance for Greater Evansville to create the Evansville Regional Economic Partnership?
I was the president and CEO of the coalition, Tara Barney was president and CEO of the chamber and Ellen Horan was president of the growth alliance. A couple of us got together and said, let’s look seriously at potentially merging these organizations. I knew there was a risk for someone like myself because everyone’s always afraid: What happens to me? I wasn’t worried about that. I was thinking, if we do this right, we’ll have the right infrastructure in place for the region to thrive going forward.
If I played any role at all, I was one of the voices saying: Here’s how this has to work, or we won’t ever get it done. Because one of the things we did when we merged the coalition is we took a community development entity, which was a quasi-governmental agency, and we put it underneath the community development side of what we did, and we privatized it. And that helped us.
We had already secured with regional cities and everything else $120 million worth of grants. So we had a lot of experience. We said: We know what we’re doing here, and if we come together, we can do this again as a broader region. It was the efforts of the coalition that got us to look at working on a regional basis. If we work together, we’ll see some success because we’ve already demonstrated it.
A great example of that is the new sports complex that’s being built in Warrick County. Evansville was thinking about doing their own, and we brought everybody together and said, let’s just do one. If we wouldn’t have created the coalition and subsequently the E-REP, you wouldn’t have that kind of collaborative environment. You would’ve seen two different facilities, and more than likely, both of them wouldn’t do very well.
What does it mean to be inducted into the Evansville Regional Business Hall of Fame?
It was quite a surprise. You don’t start your career thinking like a sports player where you want to be in some kind of hall of fame. You look at: Can I make a difference in someone’s life? Can I make a difference in the community in which I live? Can I make a difference for my children? For me, it’s a culmination of my career and representative of those individuals that helped me along the way, because this truly is a team effort.
It would have meant a lot to my parents because they never understood what I did. Especially with my recent retirement, where a couple of my kids came in, and then this announcement, some other family members were there for the hall of fame. To be inducted with Mark Schroeder, William McCurdy and James Bridwell Igleheart—they really made history, those guys did. To think that I would be in with that crew, it’s pretty humbling.