A great deal of my boyhood was spent with my father, Doug Reichardt, in the boardrooms of United Way of Central Iowa, the Greater Des Moines Partnership and Holmes Murphy & Associates. 

A subject of great passion for my father and his community-minded peers was doing everything they could to improve the quality of life in Greater Des Moines in order to attract and retain talented people at their companies.

So many afternoons did I spend in these boardrooms, I learned that asking for “Dad” would turn the heads of half the men in the room. Out of necessity and no disrespect, I took to calling my father by his first name. 

Doug had a joke in his family: For all the work he did to make Greater Des Moines a better place for future generations, two out of three of his children still left Iowa. But the reason I am sharing my story is not because I left Iowa. It’s because I came back. 

Des Moines wasn’t what I was looking for when I left in 2004. I went to Colorado for the cycling and the mountains, and then I went to Dallas, Texas, for a career opportunity. And I won’t ever regret going to Dallas, because that’s where I met my wife, Sarah. I surprised her with an engagement ring in December 2012, and then she surprised me. 

She said, “So … when are we moving to Des Moines?”

Now that I’ve returned home, I hear all the time how easy it is to have a cup of coffee with just about anybody in Greater Des Moines. I can tell you this is not the case in other cities. But more than talk about it, the leaders of this community put words into action by creating real opportunities for the people they mentor.

Perhaps the most notable example in recent years is the Des Moines Water Works Park Foundation, created to implement a master plan for the 1,500-acre park. The foundation was also set up as a proving ground where emerging leaders could put themselves to the test, with thanks to my father and several other established community leaders such as Janis Ruan and Johnny Danos, to name just two of a much longer list.

Today, the Water Works Park Foundation’s board of directors is made up of 17 very talented people of whom the majority are younger than 50. To date, the foundation has raised more than half of the $9 million fundraising goal for the first phase of implementation of the Water Works Park Master Plan.

This progress is a point of pride for the board of directors. More significantly, it is a testament to the wisdom of the community’s established leaders, who deserve great credit for investing their time, energy and resources in setting up the next generation of leaders to succeed.

Newcomer’s Guide
Many of the topics Randy alludes to have been captured in our Newcomer’s Guide, which aims to help executives new to the area and emerging leaders understand how the Greater Des Moines business community operates. The publication will be a guide to the values, history, people and organizations that make the region unique. The Newcomer’s Guide will be inserted in the Sept. 30 issue of the Business Record.