Does your city need a facelift?
Visionary designer and marketing guru Roger Brooks may be your man.
Roger Brooks comes across as a born promoter. He prides himself on turning ordinary places into extraordinary ones, and has worked his magic in nearly a thousand communities ranging from Whistler to Sweden and the Greek island of Crete. He is now developing radical plans to transform Squamish and the North Vancouver waterfront.
It’s almost impossible to write a job description for exactly what he does. For the communities that hire him he is a fresh eye, a whirlwind of ideas, an audacious salesman of those ideas, an agent for change, an ignition switch for local governments who are stymied and a cannonball who gets things rolling. He is like a magician who waves a magic wand, transforming dullsville into a place you’ve just gotta go to.
He grew up about as far away as you can get from some of the urban landscapes around the world that he has hustled to transform over the past 30 odd years.
He spent his teenage years on San Juan Island — population about 3,000, just over the U. S. border and some 20 km east of Victoria — graduating in a class of 30 from Friday Harbor high school. Rabbits and eagles outnumber people on this patch of paradise far from the bright city lights.
Those growing- up years “made me appreciate the politics and the struggles that rural or smaller communities have,” said the 60- year- old, Seattle- based community booster.
Fresh out of high school, it didn’t take long for Brooks to realize that he had a knack for sales. He was hired by Sears in the 1970s in the Seattle area, where he spent seven years managing divisions like shoes, women’s accessories, luggage and jewelry. Those were back in the days when Sears was a going concern on the retail landscape.
Always on the hunt for fresh challenges, he started arranging music for wedding receptions and other events. One thing led to another and in 1979 he started working full- time as a tour manager for Concerts West, which he says was the largest concert company in the world at the time.
In this job, he zigzagged up and down the western part of North America, travelling in advance of the bands to help set the stage for them and get them on stage once they arrived. Then he quickly decamped, moving on to the next location. Everything from security to lighting to backstage passes were on his to- do list.
There were no cellphones, no laptop computers and no Internet.
“We managed these road tours with rolls of dimes because that’s what telephone booths cost,” recalled the irrepressibly upbeat tourism expert and marketing man in a phone interview while on the road.
He worked with the big names of the day — Fleetwood Mac, Earth Wind and Fire, the Eagles and the Doobie Brothers, and the Moody Blues when they were travelling with a 17- piece London philharmonic orchestra. “Think about the logistics of that!”
He also handled the wildly successful Saturday Night Fever tour by the Bee Gees.
Brooks) didn’t just meet the goals that we set for the short term. He exceeded them. MIKE PENCE FORMER OCEAN SHORES CITY MANAGER
“Talk about mirror balls and lights. We had semis just full of lights because that was the height of the disco era.”
The album became one of the top sellers in music history.
It was one of the highlights of Brooks’ career in the music industry. For him, the Bee Gees were like a blast of fresh air. They were down to earth, had family with them and often said a prayer before going on stage.
The concert industry can be pretty ugly. It’s extremely hard on the performers, road crews, drivers and promoters like Concerts West.
After three years, Brooks had ulcers. While there were good experiences, there were more bad ones.
Right about then members of the band Paul Revere and the Raiders, which hailed from the American northwest, told him this crazy business was going to kill him and he needed to get out.
Around this time, too, he got wind of a group of guys up in Canada who were trying to get a resort called Whistler off the ground.
Big vision
Turning his back on the crazed rock-’ n’- roll life, he headed north in 1981 to see if he could help, radically switching gears, trading one highoctane career for another.
The way Brooks tells it, a group of developers had big visions of creating a splashy resort in the mountain town of 678 people. They hired Brooks to go to Vancouver and see if he could sell the idea to investors. In Vancouver, they thought he was crazy — the road up there was too dangerous, the mountain had a low- elevation base of 2,500 feet, it was sitting on a garbage dump and it was too far from Vancouver, they argued.
Reluctant to take no for an answer, Brooks became resourceful, tapping into the Asian money flooding into the city at the time and knocking on whatever doors he could.
One of the companies he approached was Intrawest, a U. S.- based luxury adventure travel company. It wound up taking on the development of the Whistler Blackcomb resort, which now sits on a lofty pinnacle, having been repeatedly named the No. 1 ski resort in North America.
Today, when Brooks walks the streets of trendy Whistler, he feels a special fondness, knowing he had a part in its creation. It was the launch pad for a new career that would see him focusing on resort and travel marketing for 10 years and then on public- sector travel, including product development, branding and marketing for another 20 years.
“Whistler will always have a special place in my heart.”
The adage that he could sell ice in the Arctic is often applied to Brooks. Brooks doesn’t disagree. But he points out that it is easy to sell something when you believe in it. He said he has turned down jobs because he doesn’t believe in them. And he leaves no doubt that he believed in Whistler, just as he now believes in his grand vision for North Vancouver, a vision that includes a covered 17,000- square- foot skating rink and a waterfront ferris wheel similar to the one in Seattle.
“If I came back to North Vancouver and I saw kids out there on a skating rink on a rainy day in February, it would bring tears to my eyes. I hope that will happen.”
‘ Enthusiastic eyes’
Having been a city councillor in Lynnwood, Wash., for 24 years, Jim Smith, who worked with Brooks on three separate occasions and in widely varying ways, said the type of service he provides can be crucial for a community.
“I know there is a real need in communities throughout the Pacific Northwest in both the U. S. and Canada for a separate set of enthusiastic eyes, to not just do things the same old way but to come up with creative and reasonable ways of doing things better.”
Smith, who now works primarily in the mortgage business in Lynnwood, said he knew Brooks as a kid at Friday Harbor high school. Brooks brought bands to the high school through Smith’s booking agency.
Brooks wound up working for six months for Smith’s band-booking agency, auditioning bands in a lot of garages and basements, getting his feet wet in the industry, before moving on to Concerts West.
After Brooks switched careers, he was hired by Smith and the other Lynnwood city councillors in a remarkably different role — on a tourism marketing contract.
“He’s a go- getter, very personable,” said Smith. “I think he does very well in the areas he puts his mind to.” Others believe in him, too. Mike Pence, who now works in Kalispell, Mont., as administrator for Flathead County, worked with Brooks for several years in a redevelopment project for Ocean Shores, Wash., a resort community of around 5,500.
“He brings sunshine everywhere he goes,” said Pence, describing Brooks as a great sales man and a dynamo who creates action. “He is really positive. He has a lot of great ideas.”
At first, Brooks comes across as being so gung- ho, people like Pence, who was city manager for Ocean Shores at the time, thought “yeah, right, are we going to really pull this thing off?”
Brooks “didn’t just meet the goals that we set for the short term. He exceeded them.” He added, “We all worked together as a team but Roger was the guy who really made it all happen.”
Brooks said the team recruited $ 300 million in new development to make it the “northwest’s favourite seaside destination,” tripling the tax base in just three years .
Pence said Brooks’ true forte is working in communities that have a void in economic development. “He can take these sleeper communities and wake them up.”
Bad fi rst impression
While he knows how to make a dynamic sales pitch, Brooks is also not afraid to be blunt when telling communities about their shortcomings.
He told the city of North Vancouver that the dark, cavernous concrete building into which SeaBus passengers arrive leaves a bad first impression.
He has been hired by them to come up with an implementation plan, which is fine by him.
“We’re about making something happen, not writing plans,” he said in the interview, pointing out that he can make observations that a politician would avoid for fear of a backlash.
Sometimes he has to make unpopular recommendations. In the case of North Vancouver, that involves the giant stern of the ship Flamborough Head, an oddity standing bolt upright on an overgrown North Vancouver waterfront site.
Some people were adamant that the towering Second World War relic be tacked onto the side of a building inside a newly formed plaza on the site that is at the heart of the revitalization plan.
Brooks refused to incorporate that idea, saying “this is about people and the scale just doesn’t fit.” He suggested it could be made into a standalone attraction with funding for it coming from the private sector or local shipbuilding enthusiasts.
He points out that you are never going to make everyone happy. “By the way, North Vancouver has been trying to make everyone happy for the last 10 years and nothing has ever happened.”
In his presentation to North Vancouver city council, he begged them to instruct staff just to make it happen. “The second you go back out there and say ‘ Public, what do you think? What should we change?’ you are never going to get anywhere.”
Brooks rattles off a long list of communities where he has worked. In B. C. alone, that includes Creston, Castlegar, Nakusp and Nelson, which is still using an assessment done 15 years ago.
Besides working now in North Vancouver, he is masterminding a revitalization plan for Squamish, which he sees as having enormous potential.
The job varies, depending on what a community has hired him to do. In many cases, he is hired to go in for three days to secret shop as though he were a new visitor. He goes in with a checklist of 65 must- haves, including items like activities to do after 6 p. m. and way- finding signs.
Not all of his plans have been a smashing success. He was stumped about what to do with Adak, Alaska, a former U. S. navy base located on an island accessible only by air from Anchorage on twice- weekly flights. It was equipped with large warehouses, so he floated the idea of fish farming, but some 20 years later he is doubtful that anything happened. From a quick check of the community online, it appears his doubts are correct.
Avid traveller
His plan for Lynnwood never got off the ground, although Smith said that wasn’t Brooks’s fault. “I’m afraid we had some problems with the administration at the time.”
One of the key factors in his success with Ocean Shores was that Brooks moved to the community for more than three years to become part of the team. Because his stay in a community is often brief, “we found out that if you don’t have the champions there to push it forward once we’re gone, it could die,” Brooks said.
Being on the road 250 days of the year, he admits he isn’t much of a homebody, although he has a wife, three grown kids and three grandchildren all living in the Seattle area.
His wife travels with him about 25 per cent of the time for his work, then they go on vacation together. This August, they are headed to Scotland. Brooks just can’t seem to get enough of travel.
When he really wants to unwind, he goes diving in the Caribbean. “I can’t assess things under water, so that is one of my favourite places.”
Now 60, he plans to continue working full throttle for another 10 years. Even then, he doesn’t plan to fully retire. A featured speaker at tourism events, he plans to continue to take on speaking engagements.
He gets tired of airports, security checks and customs and immigration, counting the border between Canada and the U. S. as the worst, but once he has arrived, he happily sets out on a path of discovery.
He comes up with plans, big plans, then proceeds to sell them. They don’t always materialize but they often do, at least in some form.
From concert promoter to tourism and community promoter, you can’t fault the man for lacking passion.
“I will always be a champion for making places better.”
All eyes will be on Squamish and North Vancouver. Will his ideas make them better?