Joyce Waugh, president and CEO of the Roanoke Regional Chamber of Commerce since 2008, announced her upcoming retirement this December.
Joyce Waugh, president and CEO of the Roanoke Regional Chamber of Commerce since 2008, will retire December 31 of this year. She will be succeeded by Eric Sichau, vice president of membership services for the chamber.
Waugh, who is 70, has “been planning this for a while,” says Waugh, who joined the chamber in 2000. When former president/CEO Beth Doughty left to head the Roanoke Regional Partnership, she became the head of the chamber. Doughty retired earlier this year. Prior to her chamber gig, Waugh was with the Roanoke County Department of Economic Development for 10 years, finishing as its assistant director.
Sichau, she says, will be a strong replacement: “He is “a quick study. I don’t know I could have pulled off our virtual [performance during the pandemic] without him. He is not just somebody in [my] place.”
Waugh says her love of travel (“my favorite way to learn”) will have a strong place in her retirement and that she will have an “encore career” that will see her working with executive searches. “I’ve been involved in a lot of things I would like to do [in retirement]. There are some other things tentatively in the works. I’ve been volunteering over the years and will do more of that.”
Her management philosophy over the years, she says, has involved “getting people here who are smarter than me, better than me.”
The chamber, she says, has accomplished a “lot really good things—and it didn’t start with my leadership.” She pointed to the Virginia West Coalition advocacy program as especially effective. The Total Resource Campaign Program of work laid out a schedule for the next year. “If you want to sponsor something, you can select from a menu,” she says. “It takes a small army of volunteers [to run the program].
Additionally, she points to “work we’ve done on the advocacy front that has so defined the Roanoke Regional Chamber. … It doesn’t matter what structure is, so long as players work well together. Things get done and things have gotten done.”
During the pandemic chambers in the region regularly stayed in touch, says Waugh, and worked together at historic levels. “We kept in touch, decided not to lay off people because knew would need them. Camaraderie has been very important. We’ve seen changes in the last few years in chambers, but there is common ground for all of us. We help where we can. One thing that has changed in my 44 years here is that even local governments that didn’t cooperate now do.”
In recent years, Waugh’s chamber has pushed for small airport grants and additional flights, improvements to I-81, as well as improved and new passenger train service to Roanoke, Lynchburg and the New River Valley
She says the “defining point of my 44 years were the years I spent with the River Foundation (Explore Project). Bern Ewert hired me to be public information officer, and while I was there, if we had a problem child, it came to me. I wound up doing the property management for 50 owners. I got more gray hair during those years than since, but I learned so much. It stood me in good stead afterwards.”
About the Writer:
Dan Smith is an award-winning Roanoke-based writer/author/photographer and a member of the Virginia Communications Hall of Fame (Class of 2010). He has authored eight books, including the upcoming novel out in Summer 2022, NEWS! He is founding editor of a Roanoke-based business magazine and a former Virginia Small Business Journalist of the Year (2005). His new novel is NEWS! from Propertius Press.
