Consultant's Plan To 'Formalize' October Festival Season Gains One Supporter: Himself

WAUKESHA — A 1,100-word opinion piece arrived at this newspaper's inbox Friday afternoon under the subject line "Re: Our Untapped Fall Tourism Advantage," written by Robert Sheffield, a 47-year-old business consultant who runs Sheffield Strategy Group out of a converted garage on Hillcrest Drive. Its argument, stripped of three paragraphs about "destination branding synergy," is this: Waukesha has accidentally become a regional fall festival hub, and somebody should get credit for it before Oconomowoc does.

Sheffield's evidence is a calendar he says he built himself in a spreadsheet with color-coded tabs. Waukesha Unlocked, the industrial-tourism weekend that walks visitors through working factory floors, ran its tours the first weekend of October. Scarecrow Lane at Retzer Nature Center, now in its fourth week of a planned five-week run, has 63 scarecrows entered this year, two more than last year's count, which Sheffield notes in a footnote. Old World Wisconsin's lantern-lit evening programs and Prairie Home Cemetery's Halloween-season tours round out what he calls, in boldface, "an unmarketed four-week tourism asset."

The Spreadsheet

Sheffield's recommendation is specific down to signage placement. He wants reflective parking-direction signs at six downtown intersections, a single combined events website, and what he terms a "fall ambassador" position at City Hall, unpaid, to be filled, he suggests without naming names, by someone "with consulting experience in destination strategy."

"We're doing a better job of fall tourism than towns that market it intentionally. The only thing standing between us and a real tourism line item is somebody willing to put it on a one-page memo."

— Robert Sheffield, business consultant

The memo, which Sheffield attached to his submission as a PDF, is two pages.

City Hall's Response

Councilman Gary Puchalski, reached by phone, said he had read the op-ed "in full, start to finish," and found the parking signage idea "not insane," which he clarified was a compliment relative to most unsolicited memos he receives. He said the city has no current budget line for a fall ambassador position, paid or otherwise, and that the last time the council voted on new downtown signage, in March, the discussion ran 41 minutes over its allotted time and concerned a single stop sign near Prospect Avenue.

"I'm not against coordination," Puchalski said. "I'm against a consultant telling me coordination is a job title."

What Happens Next

Sheffield said he plans to resubmit the memo to the Common Council's economic development committee, this time as a three-page version with an appendix. He has also, according to the footer of his original email, cc'd the Waukesha Chamber of Commerce, the Retzer Nature Center's events coordinator, and, for reasons he did not explain in the text, his own father.

Scarecrow Lane runs through the end of October regardless of whether anyone formalizes anything. Sheffield said he will be submitting a scarecrow of his own this year, entry number 64, modeled, per his email, "loosely" on a city planner he declined to name.