NC Chamber CEO Gary Salamido joined High Point University President Nido Qubein in the Power List interview, a partnership for discussions with influential leaders. The interview was edited for brevity and clarity.
Gary Salamido is entering his 14th year at the NC Chamber, including serving as CEO since 2019. He has advanced policies credited with helping the state achieve various best-in-business rankings and raising the group’s profile. The advocacy nonprofit has a $5 million annual budget and employs 28. Before moving to the NC Chamber, he worked for 19 years at GlaxoSmithKline, including a decade as director of state government affairs. He has a bachelor’s degree in pharmacy from the Albany College of Pharmacy in Albany, New York, and a master’s degree from the University of Texas. He and his wife, Lisa, have three children.
Tell me how a pharmacist becomes a CEO of the chamber of commerce.
I learned very early on from my upbringing that people are the priority, and taking care of people and being of service to your community and your family is a top priority. That’s what my family was all about when they came here. So I went to pharmacy school because I wanted to take care of people. The pharmacist in the community was that person who had access to a lot of different people. So I learned how to listen, and I learned how to understand people and take care of them. As long as you’re open and you meet people and you build relationships, opportunity comes. That’s what it’s all about, right?
Right. The state of North Carolina is thriving businesswise. Great climate, mountains and beaches. Wonderful place to raise a family. Corporations are attracted here because of our workforce, because of our values. What does the chamber do that supports economic development?
As you know, North Carolina wasn’t always the number one place around the country, around the globe where people wanted to come. We had some work to do. So we sat down and we put in an intentional plan in place through business leaders like yourself. We developed the 2030 plan. It was intentional that we’re here where we are now. That was back when Stan Kelly was our chairman and decided we needed a long-range plan for North Carolina’s economic security, so people can have a good job. We just finished our last five-year installment. Over the next five years, we’ll finish that up. We’ve almost achieved everything that’s there.
Summarize the plan for us.
It’s divided into three pillars: education, talent supply and a competitive business climate. Because you can get everything else right, but if you don’t have the people, and you don’t have the skill sets necessary for the jobs of today and tomorrow, nothing else matters.
Then you need a competitive business climate, everything that goes into the cost of a job, the tax climate, the legal climate, the regulation. And then you have infrastructure, roads, water, sewer, ports, goods and services and people back and forth. So we aggregate the voices of the private sector business community and ask what are the things that transcend across industries that make the state the best place for private sector job growth, so that people can have a good job?
Do we have enough people? Do we have enough graduates? Not just talent that can do manufacturing, but talent that can also be equipped to deal with the world. Where would you rank us?
We have all the ingredients. We have the schools. We have the public and private universities. We have a world-class community college system. So we have all the ingredients, but nobody has the people. And, you know, it’s just a math problem right now.
The birth rates are less than they were 25 years ago. Things have changed dramatically in our cultures. So we have less people than we have the availability of the jobs at this rapid rate of change and innovation has created for us. And yet we have migration to the states, but not enough. We have to be the best state in the country and the best place in the world for migration of talent.
We have to do it all together. We’re at the top right now. The magic sauce is out now. Everybody knows why North Carolina is winning. Do we have the initiative? Are we agile enough as the business community to act and to make those critical investments so that people want to continue to come here?
What is the toughest part of your job?
The toughest part is addressing all the needs that the people have. And each community is different. So we have to be really good at listening to understand what’s going on in each community and then aggregating that into the policies that will benefit businesses across all industry segments. So the toughest part is the needs in the west are different than the needs in the east and in the Piedmont.
We are figuring out what the common threads are and advancing the common thread so that North Carolina wins wouldn’t matter where you live, you have the opportunity to succeed.
How much of your time is invested in the legacy of communication? I call it lobbying.
Oh, at least 90% of what we do is legacy. At the North Carolina General Assembly and the agencies. The other 10% is making sure our members’ educational needs are met among those key policy issues. But we’re an advocacy organization whose goal is to advocate for policies and initiatives that advance the economic climate for it. So it’s 90%.
Give me two or three of those policies. What are you working on now, for example?
Right now, one of the biggest challenges is workforce. The pandemic revealed a couple of things that we knew were challenges anyway, including the affordability and availability of childcare.We know the demographics are changing. We have two parents, two spouses, two partners that are working either because they have to or they want to.
The other is housing. We need affordability of housing. We need to modernize our permitting processes so builders can build safe and good homes for everybody across the economic spectrum. It takes longer to permit something than it does to build it. With the technology we have and the awareness out there, we can be better than that.
And the other one we’re working on is water and wastewater. Water is life, in so many ways and so how do we have a plan for water and wastewater treatment across the state that reimagines how we look at that, looking at public and private partnerships, looking at how we regionalize the delivery of those services in ways we haven’t done here historically.
The last one is energy. We have good, affordable, reliable energy here now in North Carolina. But what’s the future look like? We should lead the nation in advanced nuclear technology. We should make sure that it’s a safe place, but a place where diversified energy sources are here for our people and for our businesses. So those are the top three.
And what is the role of government in that? You say 90% of your time is advocacy mainly in the legislature. I assume you’re talking about funding and you’re talking about laws that that expedite the processes.
The role of government is to do the things that the private sector can’t do through the markets and through innovation. There’s a role there for government to help build infrastructure, public education, highways, rail, water, sewer. All those things that have to exist across county and municipal boundaries.
I want to talk about housing. We have to make it amenable for developers to invest money and build affordable houses, right?
There’s a lot of innovation going on there right now. We can’t put it into one bucket and say, this is the one solution that will work, because Charlotte is very different than Raleigh and very different than rural North Carolina.
We have a lot of farmland here now. So we have to be really thoughtful. But if we’re taking away farmland, farming and agriculture is our number one industry in the state, we feed the world in North Carolina. So let’s be thoughtful about how we do that.
It can coexist. It can thrive together. But it’s not going to be the same in every community. All of those things are going to be needed for North Carolina. We just have to be thoughtful and communicate with each other about what works where.
What about healthcare? Where do you see some of the pluses and minuses in North Carolina?
We have some of the best healthcare in the world. People come to North Carolina for healthcare. So its quality is unmatched. The challenge we have and something we’re working on to know is, the bigger businesses that can pay for it, that can fund themselves, they have options. They can influence their people. They can influence the providers, they can influence the systems. They can incentivize things in a certain way.
The biggest challenge in North Carolina is that our small business don’t have that option. Our small businesses don’t have the option to aggregate the lives of small business employees and then go to a system or go to an insurer and say, ok, I have 100,000 lives here, and I know what I need and here’s what I’m willing to pay for it.
What about childcare? How do we resolve that issue?
The issue is multifaceted. The system that was developed 30, 40 years ago has not modernized with the changing times. We have a different population of people now that need it and access it. We have different needs for the economically challenged versus in Cary, where I live.
But we’re making one size fits all. The regulatory scheme needs to be modernized so that private healthcare providers can come in and have it be affordable.
We did a nationwide study, and no one’s doing it well. The private sector and the government come together and innovate and do public private partnerships that keep our children safe and help get them the education that they need.
What worries you at night? I worry if my grandchildren and children are going to have the same opportunity I had because the world has changed so much.
I worry about how the value of relationships has gone down and how we’re so polarized and how our society is so transactional. There is the hard work of solving difficult problems between two people who look and see or feel differently about the world, and put each other in a box and don’t talk.
If you’re not learning from people that think, look, feel, come from different backgrounds, then you’re not going to make the difference you want to make. ■