SEQUIM – As this place evolves from a small town into a city – due to throngs of retiring baby boomers – business people will do well to stay in learning mode.
That’s the attitude of Lee Lawrence, the former financial adviser and new executive director of the Sequim-Dungeness Valley Chamber of Commerce.
On Tuesday, the Sequim Elks Club was packed with chamber members eager to hear Lawrence’s goals as the new chief.
He didn’t list them.
“The canvas is kind of blank at this point. We’re starting fresh,” said Lawrence, who on Aug. 1 replaced Marny Hannan, who retired after seven years at the chamber’s helm.
He added that he’s absorbing as much as he can from everybody he encounters – at Sequim City Council meetings, at the Visitor Information Center on East Washington Street and on downtown sidewalks.
Then he quoted his father, Wade Lawrence, who said: “You’ll meet a lot of people in your life that you don’t care for. But you will never meet anyone you can’t learn from.”
Lately Lawrence has been learning from the dozens of volunteers at the visitor center.
Many are “retired,” yes, but in Sequim the word doesn’t mean what it might in other places.
Sequim seniors don’t sit inside gated communities, Lawrence said.
They are highly animated, pouring their energy into community projects from Master Gardeners to the Boys & Girls Club.
And although Sequim is turning into the North Olympic Peninsula’s commercial, recreational and medical center – in keeping with the comprehensive plan vision statement adopted by the City Council in 2006 – it still has a small-town feeling, said Scott Nagel, director of the Sequim Lavender Festival.
Nagel stood up during the chamber lunch to read from two letters, one from Pennsylvania and one from Britain, in which festival-goers raved about their Sequim experience.
