Terry Rich is having too much fun. He betrays it with a luminescent smile that never dims as he talks about what’s possible at the newly energized Blank Park Zoo, where he’s been its first-ever CEO – the “Zoo Dude,” he jokes – for a year and four months. By the time he’s finished his spiel – or, at least, stops for refueling breaths, because this is a guy who is so deliriously consumed by his passion that he never completely shuts it down – Rich has made a convincing case that he can pull it off.

“I don’t like to talk,” the affable, gracefully aging Rich, 52, said, mocking himself. It’s part of his shtick, as important a skill as business acumen in the 25 years he spent building entertainment and telecommunications companies. He’s a newbie in the non-profit world, but he’ll use his talents – the business sense, the jokes, the relationship-building, the high energy level and a genuine niceness – to shake the zoo from its lethargy.

Rich wants the zoo and other South Side attractions to own Sunday afternoons this summer, the way the farmers market, concerts on the riverbank and other crowd-drawing venues own Saturdays downtown. He thinks that cam be accomplished by staging special events for children on Sunday afternoons and concerts for young adults in the late afternoon and evening, and by building on the synergies of the adjacent 18-hole A.H. Blank Golf Course and the nearby Fort Des Moines Memorial Park and Education Center exhibits commemorating the site of the Army’s first African-American officer candidate class and the establishment of the first Women’s Army Auxiliary Corps.

Refueling, Rich pauses briefly.

He’s working on a deal to add a carousel and has a few solid leads. That’ll be a moneymaker, and will help the zoo staff add a small attraction each year. He wants Iowans to look at the zoo like it’s the Epcot Center from 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. and the Magic Kingdom at night. Though the zoo, Living History Farms and the new Science Center of Iowa due to open in April are distant in location, they’re close in synergies with their focus on families and emphasis on education. He wants Iowans, not just those living in Greater Des Moines, but from all corners of the state and in between, to regard the Blank Park Zoo as the state’s zoo. He’s been thinking about the large hoofed animals indigenous to the state, but now facing extinction, and how an exhibit featuring them might build on Iowa’s agricultural heritage.

And that’s just the short list. Rich said there’s no end to the potential in the Blank Park Zoo Foundation’s acquisition of adjacent Fort Des Moines barracks and other buildings to create a true zooplex with programming that touches populations that not only are untapped, but were never seen as likely partners for the zoo.

“What’s really incredible about this guy is that he never stops thinking about other possibilities,” said Tim Urban, a member of the foundation board that hired Rich as the CEO to help wean the zoo from significant city support. According to Urban, privatization freed the zoo from a “straitjacket of bureaucracy,” but was uncharted territory fraught with challenges.

“This is a major-attraction institution,” Urban said. “It has to grow through promotion. Terry was the perfect guy to take us to the next level.”

A veteran of the $2 billion Heritage Communications Inc., a locally grown, publicly traded cable television company, Rich parlayed the cash settlement he received in the 1987 sale of Heritage to Tele-Communications Inc. and the experience he gained as its vice president of marketing into his own company, Rich Heritage Inc., a national television programming and production company whose clients included Time Warner, HBO, Cox Communications, AT&T, Starz! and USA Networks. In addition to a handful of other start-ups he’s been directly involved in, he’s invested in several more Iowa ventures as one of the founding members and investors of Emerging Growth Group, a high-tech venture capital group and business incubator.

The turnaround begins

When Rich took over in October 2003, the Blank Park Zoo was an institution “with its back to the wall” financially, Urban said. Des Moines officials, struggling to cope with some of the city’s worst financial times ever, saved about $225,000 in the first year of the privatization agreement that transferred operation of the zoo to the non-profit foundation on July 1, 2003. For the foundation, it was an uneasy time, and closure of the only American Zoo and Aquarium Association-sanctioned facility in Iowa seemed a not-so-unlikely threat.

Taking on the expense of another executive – the longtime chief curator and de facto chief executive David Allen stayed on as zoo director after Rich was hired – at a time when deficits we nearing $500,000 was a risky strategy, Urban said.

“But we just had to get out of that straitjacket, and Terry was the path to get us out of there, the one who not only convinced us to cover the cost of hiring him and adding overhead expenses to run the zoo properly and deal with the deficit,” Urban said. “He said, ‘You can do it. Increase the numbers, charge a little more.’”

Rich delivered on his promise that he could turn around the zoo’s fortunes in a matter of a few months. “He met his objective in a very short amount of time,” Urban said. “He had to meet a substantial deficit, and he pulled it off.”

Rich also inherited a bit of a public relations problem. The boards governing other cultural attractions that also receive a share of the city’s hotel-motel tax receipts were suspicious of the zoo privatization deal. The city had promised zoo officials they could draw on a $125,000 cushion for each of two years if planned revenue enhancements failed to materialize, but the money would come at the expense of the other non-profits, which were facing their own financial difficulties.

“They made it out as if the zoo was the fall guy,” Urban said. “If the zoo didn’t meet certain requirements, the city would provide support for the zoo by taking it away from the others.”

However, after the first fiscal year of operation under the agreement, the foundation returned $59,000 of the emergency cushion. In the current fiscal year, which ends June 30, “we anticipate not being able to access any of it,” Rich said.

His next challenge is to build the zoo’s endowment fund so more attractions can be added. An intense capital campaign is still in the future, after the zoo is more financially secure. He doesn’t want to be one of those desperate fund rasiders going to the public trough to stave off a disaster.

“We can continue to increase attendance, memberships and sponsorships,” Rich said. “We can grow this thing without saying we’re about to close.”

‘Push the envelope’

Terry Rich lives his life professionally by a simple motto: “It’s better to have tried and failed than to have done nothing and succeeded.” In the nearly three decades of involvement in entrepreneurial businesses, whether as an employee, founder or investor, he’s learned to trust his instincts. When he was interviewing for the job, he asked if it was OK to “push the envelope.”

“If you don’t push the envelope,” Rich recalled Urban saying at the time, “we don’t want you for this job.”

Rich has done that, for sure, testing boundaries with quirky events like last summer’s “Zoo Brews.” He didn’t spend all those years in the entertainment industry without learning that sex, booze and music sell. Promotions for the event teased young adults with words like “hip” and “sexy” and promised an evening of beer and wine, hors d’oeuvres, Caribbean music, and – get ready for an attitudinal shift, because this wouldn’t have happened at the city-operated zoo that catered exclusively to children – the main event, bongo breeding.

Despite the hype, the programming matched perfectly the zoo’s educational mission. Zookeeper Jeff Dier explained to the guests, many of them first-time visitors to the zoo, that the African antelope species is nearly extinct, about the importance of conservation, and the zoo’s recent acquisition of a bull in hopes he will mate with the zoo’s three female bongos and the plan to release any resulting offspring into the wild.

Rich’s strategy to advance zoo programming closer to the edge worked. Now, similar special events will be offered during what Rich calls a “super-sized summer” that will further extend the zoo’s reach into previously underserved populations.

“The City Council would not have looked favorably at beer at the zoo,” Urban said. “But once we were able to get out from under those artificial constrictions, it gave us more freedom to be entrepreneurial.”

‘Our only baby’

Rich said the asset, the zoo itself, was in better shape than he had anticipated. It was well-maintained, had a nice parklike appearance and offered programming appropriate to a youth audience, but as one of several facilities managed by the Des Moines Parks and Recreation Department, “it was like having 10 kids,” he said. “Parks and Recreation does a great job with all of them, but the zoo is our only baby. It allows us to make it shine and put it in the spotlight.”

The events that have ushered in the new era at the zoo weren’t all his ideas, Rich emphasized. He merely created a fun culture that encourages entrepreneurial and off-the-wall ideas, something he learned during his nearly 20 years at Heritage Communications, his first job in 1974 after graduating from Iowa State University with a major in speech and minor in journalism.

“I had the time of my life,” Rich said. “There was maybe only one day of the entire 20 years that I didn’t want to go back.”

His experience at the zoo is much the same. Yet the fun he’s having belies the seriousness of his task. He’s had to make tough decisions about personnel and finances. Were they right? Were they wrong? In retrospect, Rich said, what will matter is this: “Were they fair?”

Currently, the zoo staff must keep up an exhausting pace, especially during the summer months, when they work seven days without a break. It’s a condition he hopes to ease with more employees when the zoo’s cash-flow position improves.

“I have never worked harder or for more hours,” he said. “This is much more tedious because you don’t have the staff you typically have in business.

“When you step back and look at it properly, it’s pretty scary. If the zoo has to depend on me, it will not make it. I have to help the zoo build a staff and financial basis.”

Ultimately, that’s how Rich will gauge his success. Did he empower the staff, open the spigot that allowed their creative juices to flow? Time will tell, but he thinks so.

For example, zookeeper John Krogmeier suggested “Dream Night,” an event he’d heard about in Europe, but which hadn’t been accomplished yet at a U.S. zoo. Iowa Health-Des Moines, Mercy Medical Center and Wellmark Blue Cross and Blue Shield sponsored the private night at the zoo for terminally ill and severely disabled children. “It had us all bawling like babies” and will be repeated, Rich said.

Another idea, elevating the menu at the zoo’s grill to bistro fare and renaming it “Beastro” came from Susan Denotter, who works in the city’s accounting department. There are others, ideas that had been “suggested or nixed or seemed a little crazy” that have found their way into zoo programming under Rich’s leadership.

“Everything in management is setting up the culture,” he said. “The most rewarding part of being an executive is seeing how employees react.”

It’s what keeps the job high on Rich’s personal “fun scale.”

“This is completely different than anything I’ve done,” he said. “This is one of the more personally satisfying jobs I’ve had. This is a give-back.”