Chad Chancellor: I want to thank Research Consultants International for sponsoring today’s podcast. They are a globally renowned lead generation firm that helps economic development organizations create real prospects. They’ve helped over five hundred economic development organizations. Let me tell you exactly what they do.
They facilitate one-on-one meetings for economic developers with corporate executives who have projects soon. They can facilitate these meetings to where you travel to the corporate executive’s office and meet them there or you meet them at a trade show or even have a conference call, so you don’t have to pay for travel.
Chad Chancellor: Welcome to this week’s episode of the Next Move Group We Are Jobs podcast. I’m Chad Chancellor, co-founder of Next Move Group, and today we’ve got Nicole Sedlacek with us. I hope I said that right. Did I say it right?
Mike Kirchhoff: Sure. We’re about 90 minutes southwest of the Loop in downtown Chicago. So, at the intersection of I39 and I80 is roughly the center point of our three counties.
Chad Chancellor: Okay and I know you were in Missouri before. I think that’s where I got to know you.
Mike Kirchhoff: I was.
Chad Chancellor: So, talk about your path there to Illinois.
Mike Kirchhoff: Oh, my goodness. Let’s see. When I was in Missouri, I was at the EDC of Kansas City, Missouri and from there– I’ve been about six years in Missouri then to Illinois. I was in Champaign–Urbana, Champaign County for a while. I spent the last four years in Iowa; about half an hour north of the Quad Cities and then from there to here.
Chad Chancellor: Okay. All right.
Mike Kirchhoff: And that’s only about half of my career.
Chad Chancellor: Well, that’s good. I want to ask you about that. So, most people stumble into economic development. You are one of the ones I think are meant to be in economic development. So, give us your story about how you got into this.
Mike Kirchhoff: Well, in college, I was a triple major and so one of my majors was economics and then I had two business majors. And so, economic development in a lot of respects is a perfect marriage of those three disciplines and so, I was thinking in college of management consulting focus, right? And when I got into Illinois state government as an intern for one of the governors that didn’t go to prison–
Chad Chancellor: Well that tells us who it was
Mike Kirchhoff: I worked in the Thompson administration and I came to be aware of the state agency for economic development and so I kind of angle to get a job at the agency and I helped develop new programs for the state based on best practices from around the country and that was my very first job.
Chad Chancellor: Right.
Mike Kirchhoff: And then I was recruited to work at a power company in Illinois. I spent some time there and then I went into community economic development because I wanted to be certified. That’s a generalist exam and so I wanted some community economic development experience and so I worked in two communities; two small places in Illinois the last being Jacksonville, Illinois. I had a two-county group just west of Springfield, Illinois and I was recruited in Indianapolis and run the Regional Economic Development Focus for the Indi Partnership and it’s from there that I went to Kansas City.
Chad Chancellor: I see, yes.
Mike Kirchhoff: So, 30 years.
Chad Chancellor: Wow!
Mike Kirchhoff: It’s like every place is a different lifetime.
Chad Chancellor: Thank you.
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