On a personal level, the pandemic started in style for Derek Miller.
It was the second week of March 2020 when he and his wife boarded a Delta flight to Orlando in Los Angeles. The Miller family had just had a few days vacation at Disneyland and now Derek, the President and CEO of the Salt Lake Chamber, was on his way to Florida to hold working meetings with the US Chamber of Commerce.
At the gate, he and Laura were told that they had been promoted to first grade.
“Uh, OK,” they said.
They got in and sat in their extra-wide, extra-comfortable seats and waited for the rest of the plane to fill up. And it never did.
“We were the only two passengers on the entire plane,” recalls Derek Miller. “I asked a flight attendant what was going on. She said this was the so-called cruise flight, where people from California fly to Florida to build their cruise ship. Nobody was on a cruise so nobody was on the plane.
“That’s when I thought, ‘Oh, wow, this is serious. It was like being outside the twilight zone. “
When he returned to Utah a few days later, the entire country – including Disneyland – was on lockdown.
“It’s hard to recreate the feeling of insecurity back then about how much we didn’t know,” says Miller, who remembers making his way to the darkened chamber offices at 400 South Lake on his first day in Salt City. “How bad is it going to be? Are we staying in business? Will someone “
He didn’t see another person in the elevator until May.
A year later, the CEO of the trade association can afford to tell his war stories, because not only the Salt Lake Chamber – which, contrary to its name, is a national organization with over 8,000 member companies in all 29 counties of Utah – is still standing also the vast majority of its members.
Miller reports that the Chamber’s membership renewal rate has reached an all-time high of over 90%, as has new memberships.
Granted, the Chamber doesn’t include all of Utah’s businesses, but it does make up over a quarter of them, and almost all of the largest. For more evidence that Utah weathered the COVID-19 storm better than most, Miller points to two impressive statewide indicators:
• Utah’s unemployment rate of 3.5% is the fifth lowest in the nation.
• The state actually saw positive employment growth last year, creating 47,000 new jobs, making Nevada the highest percentage in the nation.
Miller quickly adds the disclaimer, “That doesn’t mean everyone is okay. If you’ve lost a job, if you’ve lost a company, that’s 10 out of 10 on the pain scale, ”regardless of what the statistics say.
But overall, rough as it was, it could have been a lot worse.
Derek Miller, President and CEO of the Salt Lake Chamber. Lee Benson, Deseret News
According to Miller, it was vital for Utah to start the Economic Response Task Force just days after the lockdown (chaired by Miller), followed by the Utah Leads Together campaign, which promotes the interests of health and business world were combined.
“I’m so glad Utah avoided the ideological battles that took place elsewhere,” he says. “Very early on, we expressly reaffirmed our goal of jointly managing both the health and economic imperatives. The people who were involved in putting this plan together really believed that they weren’t mutually exclusive, they were mutually supportive. “
There were other key factors preventing companies from going under: the federal government’s wage protection loans; the more than 10,000 Utah companies that have pledged to take on the Utah Department of Health’s promise to stay open; and perhaps most importantly, companies’ willingness to adapt and work together.
As an example, Miller points to two local outdoor equipment companies: DPS, known for its bespoke skis, and Petzl, known for its comfortable headlights.
The problem was that the pandemic stalled the demand for bespoke skis and comfortable headlights.
This could have been the case if DPS hadn’t retrofitted its manufacturing facility to make plastic face shields that are badly needed by doctors and other healthcare workers, and instead of making ribbon for its headlights, Petzl hadn’t worked with DPS to do make yourself comfortable headbands for the shields.
Suddenly, two companies, learning from each other through the Salt Lake Chamber webinar briefing sessions, moved from the wrong to the right end of the supply and demand chain.
“These were two companies in need in Utah that said, ‘This is not what we do, it’s what we do now,” says Miller. “They connected and solved their problem.”
“We still have a lot to do, a lot to do,” says Miller. “But I think it’s a surprise where we are right now – a pleasant surprise. And it wasn’t a coincidence. It wasn’t like we let the river carry us everywhere. Lots of people went to great lengths. There are many people who deserve a pat on the back, and we will never know all of them. In a way, we all are. “
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