Trina Flack, who has worked at Catch Des Moines for more than 17 years, most recently as vice president of sales, took the helm of Des Moines’ convention and visitors bureau on Aug. 1. Flack, 44, succeeds Greg Edwards, who led the organization for 25 years and retired in July. 

Flack, a 2017 Forty Under 40 honoree, recently sat down with the Business Record to talk about challenges, goals and her vision for the organization moving forward. 

This Q&A has been edited and condensed for clarity and length.

You’ve worked at Catch Des Moines for some time. Did you ever think about stepping into this role? What made you throw your hat into the ring?

Greg has been talking about retirement for a couple years. He turned 70 in June and there’s been this lingering conversation [about succession]. I previously was overseeing sales, including sports and event experience, so a big third of the organization. As part of that, you’re naturally involved in a lot of community conversations, funding conversations, some of the politics of all of it. With that existing role and the talk of his retirement, I was put in all of the future and important conversations, executive meetings and city council stuff and all of the things that would naturally set you up for success in this role. When he did finally decide that he was going to retire, you look at the state of our organization, the position we’re in in the industry, the position we’re in in the community. In one sense, you’re like, ‘I’m going to keep doing what I’m doing. I love going to work every day, and I love the impact that I make.’ And then, on the other hand, you think, ‘What if? What if it’s not me? What if it’s somebody externally?’ There wasn’t anybody else in the organization that was super excited about the prospect of stepping into the role. And we have a lot on the line. I know all the players, externally and internally, and so I felt like, for the good of the organization and for the good of our future, this was the best path. 

When you say we have a lot on the line, tell me what that means to you. 

When I look at what our strategic priorities are, they fall into three buckets. One of those is our staff. These are the people that have a whole lot of history and longevity and passion about Catch. We don’t have anything tangible that we sell, so everything that we do is with our people. In a period of transition, protecting our staff and the people that we care a whole lot about has to be priority No. 1. You hear all sorts of things about leadership changes and people coming in from the outside, and the shifts that go with that. So that’s one pillar, protecting our staff and taking care of our people in a transition period. It’s extremely important. 

Then you think about the community as the second pillar, and that’s everything from projects that we are working on in cooperation with everybody else in this community, from destination development to education about the importance of tourism to the relevancy of Catch Des Moines to funding. All of these are really big right now, and so being someone that has been at the table through all of these conversations and providing some continuity and the ability to provide a strong voice in each of the major issues facing our community is extremely important. Then, the third pillar is industry and understanding where Greater Des Moines sits compared to our peer cities and our competitive cities. Are we going to be the city that is just OK, status quo with where we’re at from a funding perspective, from a destination development perspective, from a what are we going after from a big business perspective, or are we going to really push the envelope and say, ‘If we’re going to continue to compete with an Omaha, a Milwaukee, a Kansas City, you name that city, what do we need to do?’ What do we need to be doing today that sets ourselves up to host whatever’s next, all those major events in the future. In looking at those three buckets, there’s a whole lot of priorities, and a lot of them overlap. 

How do we compete with an Omaha, Milwaukee or Kansas City? What does Des Moines need and what role does Catch Des Moines play in that? 

We play a role in that we drive business to the facilities, which also has an impact on everything else in the community, whether that’s from an individual visitor to a major convention or major sporting event. And if you’re going to live here, you’re going to visit here first. The amenities that are important to a visitor are also important to those who live here. We’re looking at all sorts of things in the efforts that we do with the lens that we’re a sales and marketing organization; what facilities are needed to host from a capacity standpoint, where’s the convenience element that it takes to get to that top three? We don’t have it and it’s not a deal breaker, but the five other cities that we’re competing against have capacity or amenities or walkability or lift. 

One of the things that we lose to our competitors on would be convention center space; so, we’re talking about additional exhibit space and breakout rooms at the Iowa Events Center, or if there was talk of an additional convention center – that’s a huge capital investment and I don’t think we’re there yet today. I think just simply looking at expansion of our current space, additional hotel rooms and infrastructure around the Iowa Events Center. When you think more of an entertainment district, you look at a Kansas City Power & Light District or Milwaukee, which has made significant investment there, or Omaha that’s made investment there. The infrastructure surrounding the convention center — and I say that not to take business away from businesses that are a little further away — but in terms of growing that footprint, we saw that the addition of the [downtown] Hilton didn’t drive business [to the area] just with the Hilton. We’re using the Hilton as that kingpin to make all the other stuff work. 

We’re already making the investment in the Des Moines International Airport, but that’s another place that we lose. You think about airlift, whether that be from direct flights or number of seats that are coming in, the access from attendees to here. Those are some of the ones that we’re talking about a lot. We also talk a lot about, from a sports perspective, what that facility development is. It’s a tricky spot to be in within the region where, in order for us to host a big hockey event, it takes three to four sheets of ice, and we don’t have that capacity. Whether that be soccer fields or sheets of ice or baseball, softball or basketball courts, no matter what that is, it’s that balance of having a voice in each one of our communities to say, ‘Yeah, you’re looking at 10 courts in your next facility, but in order for us to host this next national tournament, we really need that to be 16 courts.’

Making sure that we don’t sell ourselves short, that these are the amenities or the capacities that are needed to host the major things and then getting our community to understand that. Can we invest together in something? That yes, Ankeny and Grimes and Altoona all each need enough soccer fields for their residents and those community leagues to play in. But can we also invest in that greater scale and look at things regionally instead of just our community? It’s that voice of, ‘OK, you’re looking at this from this perspective, but what if we looked at it from an event perspective?’ That’s the voice that we’re trying to offer within that economic development scope is that regional, larger perspective.

As a first step, if you could magically fill one of the gaps, what would you start with? 

Catch Des Moines represents 14 municipalities and it depends on which city you’re talking to. If you’re downtown Des Moines, I think the entertainment district is extremely important to all of that, and it really drives that convention business. It’s also going to be a necessary piece to how we look at bidding on NCAA events in the future. But if you’re in Altoona or in Ankeny, then we’re looking more at potentially a sports facility development in order to fill what’s more of the select service hotel product that’s there.

You mentioned sports. James Chung, who recently spoke at the Greater Des Moines Partnership’s Regional Summit, said that Des Moines could be home to a major league baseball team? What do you think of that idea?

I don’t know that I’m qualified to have a perspective on that, but I don’t see why not. I do think that the position that the Iowa Cubs are in is unique, so I don’t know that baseball is the right answer. I think that there are so many more layers than maybe what he’s seeing. I think that the capital investment and the corporate investment that goes into supporting a major league team looks different than what it is for a minor league team. I also think that Iowa is a little bit unique in the sense of the loyalty that comes with our universities and the college programs. I don’t know what the right answer is there. 

There seems to be a lot of enthusiasm about youth sports and sports facilities in general being built across the state. Do you think there is enough of a market here to support the youth sports facilities that are here and the ones in the works?

The youth sports market, we saw it take off even pre-COVID, but that was one thing that really kept our city alive through the pandemic. And parents are willing to spend a lot of money because they’re developing the next pro athlete. The abundance of want is out there from a sports perspective, and so I think we’re trying to take advantage of not having our people put all their dollars into Kansas City or Indianapolis [sports markets and tournaments] and spend up here instead.

I think that the youth sports market continues to grow as we see new product come online. The All Iowa Attack facility in Waukee is a really good example of that where the Jensen family has had such a huge impact on girls basketball, and they really made a name for themselves and the state and how they’re developing those players. That space is going to be full with just their events on. Then in looking at that space, there’s also an opportunity to put a couple volleyball tournaments in and a couple outside events in. Again, every time a facility opens, we seem to have no problems filling that space.

The RecPlex getting that $5 million from the state, there’s so much demand for that expansion already. We have Lost Business reports on, ‘We can’t have this because we don’t have the dates available,’ or ‘We’re not exploring this market yet because we don’t have enough flat space.’ When you think about volleyball, even though the Iowa Events Center or the RecPlex has big open flat space, there’s a certain number of pillars in it, and you can’t put enough volleyball [matches]. Or you think about lacrosse as a sport coming online, and cheer as a sport is a little bit limited in Des Moines from what we can host. We’ve got several cheer gyms here, but when we look at hosting those big regional, national events, we don’t have the capacity yet. So lacrosse, cheer, hockey, volleyball, any of these things, the potential is there. As we grow our footprint in space, we’ll continue to grow that business, as well.

What is the next big thing Catch Des Moines is working on?

We have over 100 groups that I would call in “lead” status now. We’re trying to get future years of National Speech & Debate [national tournaments], which was just huge for our community. The last two years, we just hosted a National Senior Games, and we’d like to have the opportunity to bring that back. We were starting the conversation with NCAA about 2029, 2030, 2031, so we’re really trying to look ahead at developing each of the markets and where it makes sense for us. 

The overall community and the relevancy comes from Catch Des Moines, when we bring those big ones, that can’t happen without Catch Des Moines. We’re trying to figure out where the opportunities are, where are we falling short, and why are we falling short? Being part of the destination development conversation, if we can’t host it today, could we host it 10 years from now? And what do we need to do today to make that happen and sharing that message in the community of what we can’t host but also what doesn’t happen without Catch Des Moines. 

Keeping our relevancy there, helping the community to continue to understand who we are. I think nobody really knows what a convention and visitors bureau is. 

It requires constant community education, and that impacts our funding, that impacts what we have the capacity to go after, it impacts what seat we have at the table. As we look at that big list of events, it’s the trickle down to, do we have the facilities to host them? Do we have the funds to host them? Do we have the support and understanding from the community? I think that we face a risk of our competitors continuing to develop their facilities. We face a risk of our competitors having more funding than we do. The business of buying events is real, and so keeping our viability there, continuing to buy that and our community continuing to see the need to work together as a region, to support that and continuing to have our name out there nationally, and to grow that recognition of our city and who we are in the country. 

We spent a lot of time in Washington, D.C., and the amount of meeting planners and organizations who still think that we are not necessarily a city, or that we’re not a city that has the capacity to host major events, is an obstacle that we’re overcoming every single week. 

I think my goal and vision is for our community to continue to understand who Catch Des Moines is and the significant impact that we make on this community and to continue to support us at a high level, so that we can attract all the things that continue to make our city what it is.

What does Catch Des Moines do to make some of these events happen?

Catch Des Moines has a hand in so many of these conventions and events, and so many people don’t even know about what we host. We’re responsible for over 300 events every single year, and that’s not the things that come here, like an Iowa State Fair, or even to some level, the state tournaments. That doesn’t even go into that number. Many of these events are 500-person conventions that are staying in our hotels and eating in our restaurants and visiting our stores. 

I think educating the community on what it takes to get those groups here. Many of the groups that we’re working on, we’ve been working on for more than 10 years, and that’s from helping them understand that Des Moines is a city, helping them understand that we have the capacity to host a major event, helping them to understand that their attendees would have a really good experience here. 

We’re the ones that are out meeting individually with organizations or at trade shows and major events, talking about the community. We put significant spending into advertising; much of that’s not even seen here, because we don’t want to waste the dollars on the community when we could be spreading that message throughout the country where it’s actually going to make an impact. 

It’s all of that throughout the sales stage and communicating too. Once we’ve got the proposal put together, we’re that key player between all the individual entities. We’re the conduit between the meeting space and the hotel and the transportation and everything else that it takes to make that event work and to welcome them here. So much of what we do isn’t forward facing and is behind the scenes, but without that support, without that funding, none of that happens. 

One of the things that James Chung had said, he put some real data behind what we’re feeling with soft skills and that secret sauce. The amount of people that are willing to find a way to “yes” really is our secret sauce. [National] Speech and Debate is an example of that. Ironman is a really good example of that. Even our community hosting RAGBRAI is an example of that. 

There are so many times where it would be easy to say, ‘We can’t make that happen. That’s inconvenient, that’s too expensive, that’s not going to work in our community,’ whether that be the business community, our local entities and public safety city officials, all of our event spaces could be like, ‘That’s not convenient.’ Everybody finds a way to ‘Yes,’ and that’s what it takes. 

What benchmarks and indicators do you watch to gauge the economic health of the community?

We get the weekly STAR report and that tracks hotel occupancy and rates. We have so much history on that, so we’re consistently looking at year over year, or patterns month to month, days of the week that we’re seeing growth and slip. We also look at what’s called Future Pace, which is on the sales side, that tells us the number of conventions and holes we have to fill. We can drill down on a heat map that’s month to month that tells us more than five years out that, for example, June of this year looks extremely slow. We gauge not only that historical-looking daily, weekly, monthly data, but we can also drill down to different parts of each individual community. We can look at it to see there’s a ton of development in X area, and it’s really impacting the rooms in this other area of town.

One of the metrics we’ve really noticed since COVID is that our business travel is not back. We used to be able to have this base of business during the week and that’s not the case anymore. That’s just really never recovered. We’ve got a graph of weekend leisure travel, and that number has increased since COVID. People are traveling more. We can drill down to say we ran X amount of advertising in this market, and now we’ve seen an increase of visitors to that market. 

You mentioned some slipping in the number of visits. Can you talk more about that?

I think business travel is one piece of that. A lot of markets have really recovered in their business travel [since COVID]. Kansas City is a good example; their corporate base is more science and medical, though, whereas our corporate travel here is heavier insurance and financial. They seem to have found a different way of doing that business, whether that be a Zoom call or whether that’s a one-night stay instead of a two-night stay. That business doesn’t require the same amount of travel as what it used to. 

I also think that there’s something to be said about how Wells Fargo doesn’t employ the same amount of people here, so naturally, that travel looks a little bit different. As corporate business has shifted a little bit, that naturally impacts travel, too. I think we lose a level of convention business as new product [hotels and convention centers] expand and come online. We’re seeing that impact; 2027 is that good example, where there’s a few new convention centers opening within the country, and we’re really paying attention to those decision timeframes for planners and where some of that business is shifting based on that new product. 

How do you want to lead Catch Des Moines into the future?

I want to lead with heart and be a good communicator, and I think that that matters internally and externally. It’s using my voice where it’s important, and sharing all the pieces that are really important to today and the future. But also, care about people as people, and understand that everyone, whether that’s our internal staff or whether those are external stakeholders, are bringing something with them to the conversation. This isn’t what they care about solely. There are all these other things that are playing into their day and their viewpoint, so being a human and understanding all of that, and finding a path forward through that.

What new attractions do we need in Des Moines to attract visitors and residents?

I will always support new attractions, but I don’t know that we’re lacking. That’s one of the stories that we tell regularly, is that we have all of the major amenities of any major city or capital city. We have a science center, a zoo and really strong art and good restaurants. We have all the basics, so continuing to invest in and support the ones that are here is important.

I keep waiting for someone to say we need a Six Flags downtown. 

Or a Target. We were just talking the other day about whether there should be a bowling alley downtown or a movie theater. But all of our metro communities have those. I think we also have to continue to act as a region and say we can’t support more than one zoo, or we’re not going to be able to support more than one Science Center. So how do we really look at that? I think ICON is going to be a really good thing that comes online next as that’s going to open up, not only to those individual travelers and people that are going to want to participate or want to watch, but there’s a handful of events that we’ve already identified that we could go after [related to ICON]. 

Is there a holy grail event that you’ve been going after for a long time?

One of the things that we’re really talking about with the shift of state basketball going to Ames is that beginning of March time frame, which is championship season. Do we have the ability to bring a Big Ten wrestling or March Madness, one of those major championships, here? I also think that our community is a dream community for students and youth, and National Speech and Debate was a really good example. Are there others? Is there a Destination Imagination? Is there some of that that is also student-group focused, that we could bring in?

Greg Edwards’ voice could often be heard on local radio stations as he listed upcoming events in Catch Des Moines commercials. Now, you have taken on that task. How is that going?

Everybody’s made it really easy. I would say that the Des Moines Media Group team made it amazing. Greg loved to be the face of Des Moines, and I think that was one of the hardest things as he transitioned into retirement. For me, that public-facing media stuff is not my favorite. I definitely prefer that in-the-weeds, behind-the-scenes work, so it’s been a shift. We know it’s important that the community sees me and knows me, but it’s probably one of the hardest things for me to do.

What’s going really well in Des Moines right now?

I think the community collaboration, the understanding of the importance of events. One thing that we’ve learned, especially over the last year as we’re having all these really hard funding conversations, is that even in a situation where our communities are making some really tough decisions about their budgets and that impacts Catch, it doesn’t mean that the support isn’t there. I think we are feeling some overwhelming support and understanding of Catch and the business that we’re bringing in. That’s what I would attest to as somebody that’s been in this role less than two months. There’s overwhelming support from the community, and I don’t take that for granted at all. I think that people being willing to have a meeting, to have a conversation, to say, ‘How can I help?’ To think about the future, even if they can’t say, ‘Oh, yeah, where do I sign up? How do I make that happen today?’ I think getting that understanding and support is a very important step to all of it.

What are some of the challenges in Des Moines right now?

Funding. At Catch Des Moines, our funding got cut from 28.6% of hotel/motel tax to 25%. I understand it and we get it, the hard spot these cities are in. That is over $800,000 to our budget this year. That’s real money. That’s a number of bid incentives, that’s sales efforts, that’s a whole lot that we cannot do and we’re going to have to figure that out moving forward. 

That’s going to have a huge impact on what we’re able to bring in and host moving forward. 

I don’t think that the cities are doing this out of lack of support for Catch Des Moines. I think that we’re facing a whole lot of hard conversations. It’s figuring out the decisions that are happening at the state level that are directly impacting the cities where I don’t think people even realize are going to impact their daily lives. It’s figuring out how to work together, or finding work arounds and solutions. It’s going to be one of the most important things that we do moving forward, because the decisions we make today are going to be 10 years from now, where we’re sitting there thinking, ‘Well, we couldn’t do anything about that,’ and now it’s going to take us an additional 10 years to catch up. It’s all self-inflicted wounds at this point, so it’s very hard.

If you’re talking to a lawmaker or a person outside of Central Iowa, how do you explain the importance of Catch Des Moines to them?

It’s not even about Catch Des Moines outside of Central Iowa. Most municipalities have some sort of convention and visitors bureau or chamber of commerce or tourism organization for driving visitors. As we continue to grow that visitor base, those people are putting money into our economy that isn’t being paid for by our residents. If COVID taught us anything, it’s that our communities are not sustainable on residents alone. I do think that there is a general understanding at the state level that a significant amount of growth for the state is happening in the Greater Des Moines region, and that is positively impacting the rest of the state. I think that’s important. 

I will also say that I’m not sure that I will ever have the support of rural lawmakers. I think that their constituents and what they’re hearing is significantly different than what’s happening here. My bigger concern would be, how come we don’t have the understanding from the people that live here? It’s the lawmakers that live here that I think need to really understand the impact of some of these decisions, or that an organization like Catch Des Moines is making. We are competing against states that have major tourism funds, [like] Texas that has a $3 billion event fund, and that’s part of why they were able to lure the PGA from Florida. It is significant dollars that are going into tourism investment in other states. Our neighboring states, like Illinois, have a major tourism fund. Texas does. There’s funding there, not to the level that these other states are, and it’s not usable yet. We’re still in some of that drafting language. I think that broader support and understanding of what tourism means for our state matters.