Q&A: Randy Boyd talks accomplishments, future
Randy Boyd, founder of Radio Systems Corp., served as Tennessee's commissioner of economic and community development for two years until he stepped down in January. He announced that he will run for Tennessee governor in March.
Reporter Cortney Roark sat down with Boyd to talk about his time as commissioner and his plans for the future.
Q: How would you describe your performance as Tennessee's Commissioner of Economic and Community Development?
A: I wouldn’t want to describe my performance, because it was a team effort led by the governor supported by not only the great teammates I had within (economic and community development), but also the great teammates we had through all our partners from TVA to the Department of Transportation to all the local partners. All the team Tennessee partners performed outstandingly. We set records for most new jobs in the state's history with 50,000 new job commitments and $11 billion in capital investment, so both were new records. Also, last year we were ranked No. 1 in the United States for advanced manufacturing jobs, ranked No. 1 in the U.S. for foreign direct investment and importantly, the result of all that was we had the second highest median household income in the country. We increased our median household income by 6.4 percent, which is second only to Montana.
Q: What are some of the things that led to that success?
A: We’ve had a great state led by great leaders for a few decades now. As a result of that, we have the best balance sheet in the country, and we have the lowest debt per capita in the country. So when we’re talking to businesses about investing here, they want to invest in a partner that’s ran responsibly, and we can guarantee our promises better than any state in the country because of that great fiscal stewardship we’ve had over the last couple decades. Second, when we’re trying to attract businesses, maybe the most important thing they look at, is our talent pipeline. How can we guarantee them the workers of the future that they're counting on? And because of the Tennessee Promise, we can guarantee them the workers they need not just today, but five years from now and 20 years from now. No other state can do that.
Q: You’re running for governor. The past two governors had an extensive business background. How will you capitalize on that success?
A: I am a businessman. I’m not a politician, so I wouldn’t know how to operate as a politician. When I get into office, I’ll continue to operate the state government just the way I operated economic development and as the special adviser on higher education. We're going to continue to look for innovative new ideas to move our state forward. We’re going to focus on a state that has clearly defined missions. We’re going to have a culture that’s transparent and powers our associates, that’s collaborative and high energy. We did that in my last two terms, and I think as governor we’ll do the same.
Q: What three traits have you identified that make Tennessee attractive for business?
A: I would say the first, second and third would be the workforce. People come here because of the great talent that we have. But if I had to choose two others, the second would be our fiscal stewardship. We have the lowest debt per capita, no state income tax, and the best balance sheet in the country. Those things attract businesses. The third thing would be our great infrastructure. We have some of the best roads and infrastructure in the country.
Q: How involved are you going to remain in Knoxville’s development?
A: My children both live in Fourth and Gill, my wife and I have an apartment in the Old City, my wife has a business in the Old City and both my sons will have businesses in the Old City, so we’re firmly committed to the Old City while I’m running for governor, while I’m governor and after I’m governor. This is home.
Q: Are there any plans to relocate the Tennessee Smokies baseball team?
A: We have a contract that lasts until 2025, so we’re going to honor that contract. With anything we do, we want it to be a win-win for Sevierville and Sevier County. They’ve been great partners. If it wasn’t for Sevierville and Sevier County, there would not be baseball in East Tennessee today. I greatly appreciate that, and we want to make sure that anything we do is something that’s a win for them.
Q: How do you balance the interest of business and the transparency of the public’s right to know how much of their money is being used to entice business to Tennessee?
A: We just created something called Open ECD, a transparent portal that’s available to anybody to research anything we can possibly share. You can look at incentives, you can track them by company, by region, by rural or urban, you can track them by industry. So anything we have is now available on the website. It’s never been a secret (where the money goes). It was just hard to access, and we’re just making it easier to access. There are two levels of transparency. There's transparency of something that you can find, but it's hard to find. It's another level when we can make it easier to find. When I was ECD commissioner, I also knocked down all the walls and partitions, so we had one big, open office. It was, one, a style of management I prefer, but two, it was symbol of my desire to create a transparent culture. And that’s something that will continue at ECD, but I’m also hopeful as governor it will spread throughout state government.
Q: Can you explain why transparency is such an important aspect of doing business?
A: It’s always worked for me and my company. In my company, we have this philosophy, ‘openness, equality and teamwork,’ and for us to be successful, we need to have every individual on our team be empowered like owners. And to be empowered like owners, you have to have the information of owners, and that requires you to be transparent. In my company, every employee, if you just came to work for us, on day one, you will get financial statements even though we’re a privately held company. In 25 years of business success, I found the most important aspect to success is having empowered associates. Corollary to empowerment is information. If you don’t have information, its hard to be empowered.
Q: How do we keep manufacturing jobs here and how do we gain more jobs?
A: As I mentioned, we were ranked No. 1 is advanced manufacturing growth, so while other states are decreasing in manufacturing, the state of Tennessee, in the last five years, manufacturing increased by 15 percent, and advanced manufacturing increased by 30 percent. How we’ve been growing those jobs and how we’ll continue to grow them is the same reason. We have to continue to provide trained workers. As I go across the state, the biggest challenge manufacturers have today is finding those skilled workers. While we do need people with four-year degrees in engineering and masters degrees in engineering, what we need even more desperately is people with welding and robotics and mechatronics type certificates that they can earn at our Tennessee Colleges of Applied Technology and our community colleges. We have this goal of Drive to 55, which is by 2025, 55 percent of our population having some post secondary certificate or degree. Today, its at 39 percent. Sixty percent of that growth comes form people getting certificates or degrees at technical or community colleges. So our success is predicated by us being successful getting more people into those schools and getting trained.
Q: What are some of the steps that will aid in reaching the Drive for 55 goal?
A: First off, we made it free. The governor and I in 2014 passed the Tennessee Promise, which makes technical and community college free for all high school graduates and technical college free for adults. This year, the governor passed a new bill that will make community college free for all adults. We’re the only state that has free technical and community college for everyone, so that’s a key part of it. The next part of it is physical access. There are places across our state that it's a 45-minute to an hour drive to the local technical college and if you’re, for instance, in Mountain City and you have to drive an hour to Elizabethton, you’re not going to go. So we have to make physical access better. In some places like Knoxville, there are certain courses like welding that have a waiting list. We’ve got to eliminate the waiting list. We can’t have students wanting to get a certificate in a particular field, manufacturers desperate for those workers, and us not be able to provide the training that they need. To be successful to get to 55 percent, we have to get adults to go to college. Many of them are working, so we’ve got to meet them where they are. We’ve got to be able provide more online programming. More weekend programming so we can accommodate their lifestyles.
One of the things we have yet to solve is graduation rates. Now we can get students into college, but they’re not graduating at the rate that we need. So at our community colleges as state average, the graduation rate in six years is 26 percent. Southwest Community College in Memphis, their six-year graduation rate is 8 percent. We can't get to 55 percent with those kind of graduation rates. I’m now chairman of a new organization called Complete Tennessee, which is focusing on trying to understand why we’re not graduating at a higher rate and then hopefully implementing policies will be effective to solve that.
Q: You mentioned earlier that teamwork was key to your time as commissioner. What is that team's legacy?
A: One, I think it's creating a clear mission about what we wanted to do. We wanted to be No. 1 in the southeast for high quality jobs. That was a saying before I got there. Now we have metrics. And I think giving the team a very clear, tangible metrics driven mission was one thing. A second thing was creating a culture of transparency and teamwork and empowerment. I’m hopeful that culture will continue on beyond my tenure there. A third thing I hope will continue is our initiative around rural development. Our state has been incredibly successful, but that’s based on the averages. When you start drilling down, there's great disparity across our state. You’re only as rich as your poorest neighbor, and we have a lot of neighbors that are struggling. So one of the focuses of the department is trying to make sure that those people that have been having the economic success of others have equal opportunity to be successful.
Q: What do you wish you had done differently as commissioner, if anything?
A: I wouldn’t say I would have done anything differently, but there is so much left to do. We wanted to be No. 1 in the southeast for high quality jobs. I left with No. 4. If I get to be governor, I’ll come back and make sure we’re No. 1. We set as a goal to have zero distressed counties in the state. We have 17 today. We reduced it from 21 to 17 in my two years. I wish it was zero. We did have a goal of landing a large manufacturer in the Memphis Regional Megasite. While we had a lot of prospects and made a lot of progress toward the development of the site, we didn’t land the business. I’m confident that somebody will end up landing it before I get to be governor. Once I’m there, we’ll make sure the entire site is populated with major manufacturers.
Another thing I wish I had gotten done is helping create an environment for small businesses that lets them be more competitive. We are stifling small businesses across our state with too many rules and regulations. One of the things we were able to do during these last two years was eliminate unused laws or tax incentives. We eliminated 10 of them about a year ago. If I get to come back, one of the things I would love to focus on is rather than passing two-three new bills a year, maybe we actually start reducing them. Do we really need 2,000 new laws a year? What if we took a year and reduced laws? I think that might be a welcome relief, definitely for small businesses.