Chamber President Chip Cherry and a Decade of Growth for Huntsville

Nearly 10 years into Chip Cherry’s tenure as president and CEO of the Huntsville-Madison County Chamber of Commerce, the city of Huntsville has experienced continuous growth with no end in sight.

Future job growth is predicted to be 40.9%, compared to the national average of 33.5%. Before the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, the city had issued 590 commercial construction permits in 2019 including the massive Mazda Toyota Manufacturing plant, tower additions to Huntsville Hospital and a Facebook data center.

The Rocket City also lived up to its name securing investments on Redstone Arsenal and Cummings Research Park and establishing a prominent role in America’s return to the moon.

All of this culminated when U.S. News and World Report released its Best Places to Live 2021-2022 rankings in July and Huntsville was No. 3.

Cherry is quick to point out that the success of the Huntsville-Madison County area is largely due to the mindset of unity shared by the leadership throughout the community.

“The way the community and region grew up, there was a foundation laid a long time ago for regional cooperation,” Cherry explained. “A lot of other places that I’ve worked, you have a hard time convincing people in various different jurisdictions that it’s in their best interest to work together. Here, that premise was already established.”

Cherry has been instrumental in his tenure with the Chamber in developing and implementing ideas for economic development over the last decade. As president/CEO, Cherry is the liaison among businesses, organizations and the community at large. His work has certainly not gone unnoticed.

In July 2017, the Huntsville/Madison County Chamber of Commerce was named Chamber of the Year by the Association of Chamber of Commerce Executives, which is made up of more than 7,500 chambers around the world. Site Selection magazine also awarded the chamber with the Mac Conway Award for Excellence in Economic Development in May of 2019.

Cherry, who had nearly 30 years of experience chambers in North Carolina, Virginia and Georgia before coming here, cited Huntsville’s ability to highlight possibilities where others might see barriers as the key to its success.

“We have the largest concentration of engineers in the country and it shows,” Cherry said. “Other communities, when faced with a challenge, the conversation starts with ‘we can’t do this because…’ and there’s a whole litany of reasons why you can’t do it.

“Here, the conversation identifies how to solve the challenge with option A or option B or a combination of different options. It’s subtle difference than is lost on some people but it is a huge differentiator. Instead of bleeding out energy dealing with why we can’t do it, you are basically creating energy based around opportunities and options.”

This process has resulted in a livelier and more diverse Huntsville. Skilled, young workers are flocking to the area and have created a housing boom that is feeding a new demand for the entertainment and hospitality industry. Construction cranes are as much a part of the skyline of downtown Huntsville as are office buildings and hotels.

Even though he is approaching 40 years of working with various chambers around the country, Cherry said he is still rewarded in his work by the same thing that drew him in as a 22-year-old intern: the opportunities for creative problem solving.

He said his role with the chamber allows him to see how pieces of the puzzle are scattered throughout the community and identify how to put the pieces together to tackle a problem or take advantage of an opportunity.

“Taking a very complex, challenging problem, breaking it down and finding the right partners to advance through the problem is very rewarding to me,” he said. “And I love being able to do that with the brightest minds in both Huntsville and Madison.”

Three Questions with Chip Cherry

Will the loss of Sen. Richard Shelby’s influence in Washington adversely impact Huntsville attracting federal jobs and money?

Senator Shelby has been a huge blessing to us with his ability to see opportunities in the area and convince his colleagues that it was wise to make the investments here. What has been created at (Redstone) Arsenal for over 60 years now is amazing with how diverse and complementary of one another they are with the Army (commands), the FBI, NASA; they all reinforce one another. Will people take shots at Redstone? Certainly. It just works that way when you have a shift like that. But Senator Shelby and his team would agree that his efforts have built a stronger national asset and not just a state asset. This will help it long term to not be blown around by political winds.

How do you project the next 5-10 years to be different from the past 10 years?

We’re already starting to see the benefits of the investments that have been made. Nearly 10 years ago when I first arrived, I attended a presentation that highlighted a gap in the ability to recruit talented people out of college and grad school, ages 22-28, to Huntsville. The recent investments in things like Downtown Huntsville, the Trash Pandas and the upcoming amphitheater have created a stronger sense of place. Now it’s a much easier sell and they see that some of their traditional perceptions of the south aren’t true because of the nature of what we do here. The most recent numbers I saw show that 47% of people that live in Huntsville are not from the state of Alabama which helps makes us a more dynamic community. It’s very exciting for me that we are looking over that horizon and seeing some change in that regard.

What has been your strategy for job growth in Huntsville?

We wanted to make the market healthier. And one problem we had that doesn’t jump out at you, when you only look at things like unemployment rate, median income and etc., was a lack of attainable jobs to propel residents from entry level to the middle level of the job market. When Mazda Toyota would announce a 200- to 400-person expansion, 10,000 people would apply for those jobs even though we don’t have 10,000 people that are looking for work. The reason is because we have a significant amount of people who are underemployed but not unemployed. We were looking at that issue wondering how we could modify our approach and solve that problem and decided that advanced manufacturing would be one of the core pieces in the solution. Before, we had been focused on aerospace, defense, life sciences and other higher end industries but we didn’t have many jobs that make up the middle part of the market between entry-level and high-end jobs.  We’ve now added 28,000 jobs in that market with predictions of at least 7,000 more over the next few years.