March 5, 2014 at 12:29 p.m.
DeMet ready to take chamber to the next level
New executive director says experience prepared him for new position
DeMet ready to take chamber to the next level
That's the message new executive director Dana DeMet had for the community when he sat down with the Northwoods River News Monday during his first day on the job.
The chamber announced late Friday afternoon that DeMet would succeed Lara Reed as its new leader. DeMet was already hard at work Monday getting to know the office personnel and meeting with chamber board members and area business leaders.
The position at the chamber represents a homecoming for DeMet, who is a 2004 graduate of Rhinelander High School. He grew up in Harshaw and was home-schooled with his four siblings until eighth grade when he enrolled in the School District of Rhinelander.
After graduating from RHS, DeMet studied journalism and mass communication at UW-Madison, graduating in 2008.
From there, he began traveling the country with Teach for America. He was mainly stationed in rural North Carolina, teaching English and math before spending a summer helping train new teachers in the program.
After two years with Teach for America, DeMet moved on to Palantir.net, a Chicago-based web development firm.
There, DeMet rose to the position of business manager.
"We did a lot of work for non-profit and educational sector clients - a lot of universities and colleges in the entire United States - as well as museums or other non-profit clients," DeMet said.
"I came in initially as an office manager/administrator but I spent my second year there working more as a business manager."
It was in that role that DeMet first learned what it means to be in charge.
"I was really in charge of a number of different things. When I eventually left Palantir, I was replaced by three different new positions, so that gives you an idea of the breadth of things I was dealing with," he said.
"It ranged anywhere from maintaining my day-to-day logistics and operations that I had as the office manager, but then I was also working with supporting our ongoing clients, so if we built a website for them ... I would oversee those projects as well as working in new business development."
Those two experiences, DeMet said, have prepared him to help the chamber reach the next level.
At Teach for America, DeMet said he learned what it means to be a leader.
"My leadership skills were definitely honed during my time with Teach for America. It doesn't matter whether you were teaching kindergarten, middle school or high school, Teach for America itself instills a very strong sense of service and leadership. You really learn how to be an effective leader," DeMet said.
"It really instilled in me working with a sense of purpose and a goal and how you really achieve those goals - putting quantifiable measures on that so you know how far along you are to reaching that goal, looking at the end how successful you were and then looking at what you can do next time to achieve even more."
At Palantir, DeMet said he learned different aspects of business and logistics and how to successfully cultivate professional relationships with businesses.
"It was definitely more of a logistics and business sense that I developed - contract negotiations, vendor relationships, professional writing - really building and maintaining professional relationships between businesses," DeMet said.
He said he will be using those skills to help build off of the solid foundation already in place at the chamber.
"It's definitely going to be all about working hand-in-hand with the board of directors and our membership to establish real quantifiable goals, goals that are going to result in success for our businesses in the Rhinelander area as well as the greater community," DeMet said.
"I've been gathering a lot of information already from our board president, Brett Aylesworth, as well as other people in the chamber as to what those goals have been in the past (and) how successful were we in achieving them."
With that information, DeMet said he will have a better idea of how to keep the chamber moving forward.
"What I want to be able to do is take it to the next level. We've already achieved quite a bit over here in the last few years and what I see is the opportunity ... to really grow our involvement with our membership base, really give them a true value of why you would want to be a chamber member ... and growing that membership base and definitely increasing our involvement in the community," DeMet said.
"I don't really see this just as a role to support businesses in the area. When our businesses are successful then our community members are going to prosper and our community should be better as a whole."
Apart from his goals for the chamber, DeMet said he's grateful to be back home. Not only does the area have vast resources to accommodate his personal hobbies - biking, cross-country skiing, snowshoeing - but returning to his roots was a "natural step" in his life, he said.
"It feels really good to be back," DeMet said. "Returning to the area is really a natural step for me because I've always considered it home. I've always called it home. I've lived in other places, but I always made every effort that I could to get back."
It's that love of the community that will fuel his work at the chamber.
"I'm really happy to have this position where I'm really cemented in the community and working with everybody in it," DeMet said. "I'm excited to start working. I think this position has a lot of opportunity for growth - not just for me personally, but expanding the base of our membership and our involvement in the community and really affecting a positive change in the area."
Marcus Nesemann may be reached at [email protected].
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