Welcome to Your Childhood
Chances are you've haven't paid much attention to zoos lately-or, say, since you were 12. It's not that you've been ignoring zoos, they just haven't been doing much to grab your attention.
You visited them when you were a kid. You liked the monkeys, were scared of the bats, could never really see the zebras and always left the monorail, tram or whatever the tracked or treaded transport to the outer limits was, disappointed that it went less than 5 miles per hour.
Some ride that was.
You went to the zoo for the animal kingdom and a day of thrills, but came back exhausted, smelling like a farm, carrying a balloon on a stick and, inevitably, feeling slightly guilty about the monkeys cowering in the corner, seemingly ashamed that you were watching them.
That bad feeling? The one that probably crept into your mind then and is most likely creeping back now? That, "Are we just exploiting these little fellas?" feeling? Remember that feeling as we tell you the story of the man who's saving the Minnesota Zoo. It's the story of Lee Ehmke, the man who's out to save the animals.
Thinking Outside the Cage
The Minnesota Zoo, at least when you first arrive, isn't all that different from the zoo of your childhood. It still looks like more of a concrete bunker than the world-class landscape immersion and conservation hotbed it's becoming. Snow monkeys still cower timidly below visitors' sight lines, and in some of the bigger exhibits animals are still hard to spot, though the cages keeping them in are not. Oppressive is a word that comes to mind--especially on a dreary late fall afternoon--but don't take our word for it. During our conversations, Lee Ehmke himself referred to the plaza as "something out of North Korea" and the zoo's general '70s concrete aesthetic as "Brutalist."
Let's rewind 31 years. Born of a local conservationist movement and dubbed the "new zoo" when it debuted in 1978, the Minnesota Zoo was notable because of its 485 acre swath of Apple Valley and its focus on putting wildlife in "nature-imitating" settings. The initial concept was to afford visitors a birds-eye view of massive outdoor exhibits [think Monorail] as well as to offer glass partitions and other open elements in an effort to do away with the antiquated notion of steel bars and cages. And, by 1981, the plan seemed to be working, as evidenced by a Smithsonian Magazine cover story praising the zoo's innovative, natural settings. In fact, by the end of the '80s it was regarded as one of the nation's top zoos, even being recognized as such by Family Circle magazine.
Eventually, inevitably maybe, attendance and general community and legislative interest began to wane, however, and by the late 1990s the Minnesota Zoo was focusing all of its energy simply on surviving. Accordingly, the board began to search for an answer.
"The zoo was basically just trying to manage things," says former Minnesota Zoo board member and chairman of the search committee that took a chance on Ehmke, Peter Myers. "There wasn't a lot of big dreaming and visioning going on. And we knew that if the zoo was really going to rank among the top zoos in the country [again] and among the top cultural attractions in the Twin Cities [again] we would have to take it to another level."
Finding a transformative visionary is one thing. But finding a transformative visionary willing to make less than industry standard and move to a zoo that was developing a reputation of stagnation is quite another. In fact, if the search committee were to succeed, they were going to need to find a raw candidate with more potential than actual CEO experience: someone willing to take as much of a chance on the zoo as the zoo was taking on them. After 18 months the zoo found just such a person, a rising star in the exhibit design and conservation field with no discernable C-level experience, the Bronx Zoo's Lee Ehmke.
Continental Shifts
"It was clear when I was 8 or 10 that I was going to be a zoologist," says Ehmke of his early passion for animals and the direction it was destined to take him. "But at some point I kind of hit the reality of, 'I'm not going to be a very good scientist because my math grades stink and my skill set is really more in writing and other areas.'"
Accordingly, Ehmke, who grew-up in Northern California, did his best to align his talents with his passion, eventually going the route of conservation and environmental policy.
"I went to school for political science at Berkeley with the intention of doing environmental law. It wasn't to be a lawyer so much as to impact environmental policy and do good things for the world," says Ehmke. "And that happened. I was working for the Sierra Club Legal Defense Fund, and I did some work for the California Costal Commission. I enjoyed the results of what we accomplished, but it was mostly about stopping bad things from happening as opposed to creating things or creating new positives."
Ehmke realized that, although he knew the work he was doing was important, simply "stopping bad things from happening" wasn't enough. He had been paying attention to zoos all along and was noticing progressive, exciting change therein.
"I was seeing this mini-revolution in how zoos were being built and thought about, and this whole turning-it-inside-out notion. And I started realizing that there was this little profession of people who think about and design and build zoos, and they're mostly out of a landscape architecture background," says Ehmke, describing the niche that had caught his interest. "Someone designed zoos all throughout history and it typically would be architects [looking for a change of pace], but the results were the kind of things you've seen in traditional zoos: buildings-people-oriented things-designed to house animals. It was never quite the right fit. Whereas when landscape architects started approaching zoos, it was like, 'Well, what's a landscape with animals?' That's a very different way of thinking about it."
The problem for Ehmke, however, was how to begin doing the type of work he wanted so badly to do. So, law degree in hand, Ehmke went back to school for a masters degree in landscape architecture-from U.C. Berkeley-with the notion of inventing a zoo career.
In 1988, he landed what he thought was an informational interview related to his thesis at the esteemed Bronx Zoo. It didn't take long, however, for the Bronx Zoo to realize that the former lawyer with a passion for next generation zoo design was unique. Quickly, the meeting went from informational interview to job interview, and by the time Ehmke-the only one in his program with zoo aspirations-was completing his masters he already had a position in one of the world's premier zoos.
From 1988 to 1999, the Bronx Zoo's willingness to take a chance on a zoo outsider paid off, as did Ehmke's move to New York. He went from exhibit designer to project manager to deputy director of design and, ultimately, director of design. And he was instrumental in creating the Bronx Zoo's crown jewel, and what many consider one of the greatest examples of landscape immersion in the world, the $50 million Congo Gorilla Forest.
However, once work on the Congo Gorilla Forest concluded, Ehmke began wondering what else the zoo world might have in store for him. An urban zoo with finite space like the Bronx can get satiated after a major project and, since building is where part of Ehmke's passion lay, it only made sense when a waning zoo with massive acreage, tremendous potential and a board of directors unafraid to take a chance on someone new to the C-suite came calling.
Grand Design
"What we saw in Lee was a unique combination of skills," says Myers. "He clearly had the ability to create big visions as evidenced by his wonderful work at the Bronx Zoo. We had every indication that he had the potential."
The first step in Ehmke's vision was to make the zoo relevant again. In doing so, he knew it was important to think of the zoo as both a product and a resource.
"One of the most interesting things is that the zoo's attendance had leveled off," says Myers. "Lee made a very strong case that the zoo needs to constantly reinvent itself. He was thinking like a marketer, and he knew the zoo needed new product."
However, new products--in the zoo's case, exhibits--require money, and funds weren't easy to come by. And, since new products drive revenue growth and only proper revenue growth can beget a zoo's educational and conservational mission, lack of funding is a major issue when you're one of only two state zoos in the country and said state is no longer paying much attention to you.
"Getting a family to go to the zoo is different than what it takes to save trumpeter swans, but the way to save the trumpeter swans is to get families to come to the zoo," says Ehmke. "So the way I've looked at it is we have to be attractive to our audience, we have to expand our audience, and we have to sustain our audience. That allows us to do more mission-driven things like providing more education opportunities for more kids, or being involved in more conservation programs, or helping figure out why moose are disappearing in northern Minnesota, or protecting black rhinos in Namibia. All that will come only if we are successfully operating the zoo and bringing in the revenues to support those pieces."
Knowing that the Minnesota Zoo needed substantially more than a simple spit-shine, Ehmke initially focused on investing in outside firms--thanks to money the zoo's board raised--to help develop plans for a long term zoo overhaul, while also utilizing his design acumen and the inherent talents of zoo staff to bootstrap some early projects.
"Instead of spending $100,000 to bring in consultants to figure out how to build a meerkat exhibit, I sat down with the staff and said, 'We can do this.' I found out quickly that we have some talented people who can build little environments in a much more cost effective way than a traditional design-build process," says Ehmke. "So, without much money at all, we were able to make some incremental improvements. We did a number of projects during the first few years, before we got the big capital infusion from the state, which were build-it-yourself. It really improved the zoo and created new things for us to talk about and for people to want to come and see; and that really set the stage for what might be possible here."
The zoo's sweat equity didn't go unnoticed. Medtronic gave $1 million to sponsor the zoo's revamped Minnesota Trail exhibit-now known as the Medtronic Minnesota Trail. And, seeing the systematic shift towards a results-driven, conservation-oriented zoo, the state also began to take on more financial responsibility, eventually ponying up the majority of the $24 million price tag of the zoo's largest exhibit initiative since it opened in 1978, Russia's Grizzly Coast.
New Frontiers
Russia's Grizzly Coast, which received top honors in the exhibit design and marketing excellence categories from the Association of Zoos and Aquariums (AZA), is the embodiment of the landscape immersion Ehmke champions as well as his "if you build it-and make sure people know about it-they will come" philosophy. Featuring grizzly bears, Amur leopards, sea otters and wild boars, the exhibit offers visitors an intimate, visceral journey into the world of the East Asian wilderness by employing innovative design in a way that allows for maximum authenticity coupled with optimal visibility.
The exhibit helped draw an all time high 1,355,260 guests to the zoo in fiscal 2009, exceeding an optimistic outlook of 1.2 million. Additionally the zoo saw a 21 percent jump in memberships from 36,538 in 2008 to 44,233 in 2009, and record revenues of $21.7 million compared to $19.5 million in 2008. Then there is the staggering fact that the zoo's attendance has increased by 40 percent and member households have increased by 49 percent since 2005.
And, as Ehmke alluded to, with spiking numbers the zoo is able to play its proper role in conservation. The zoo partnered with the Nature Conservancy to work on Save the Rhino Trust, provided grants of nearly $40,000 spread across 18 projects in 13 countries through their Ulysses S. Seal Conservation Grants Program, reached a milestone in their work to save the South China tiger, raised more than $20,000 to fund Amur leopard conservation efforts in Russia and used a choose-your-cause donation kiosk in Russia's Grizzly Coast, to record nearly $15,000 for conservation activities related to Amur leopards, sea otters and brown bears.
One might call it the "new 'new zoo'" and it's producing tremendous results that are being noticed globally.
"There are zoos with bigger budgets, larger staffs and larger collections, but pound-for-pound there isn't any zoo in the country that's more engaged and committed to conservation and species survival plans than the Minnesota Zoo," says Jim Maddy, president and CEO of the Washington D.C.-based AZA. "Without this type of work, there is no future for a lot of these animals. Our children and grandchildren are not going to be able to have the experience of seeing some of these living creatures, and the Minnesota Zoo is right at the front of that."
Despite the game-changing recent success, Ehmke's Minnesota Zoo is far from complete. In fact, some would say that the real work has yet to begin. There's still that nagging matter of what Ehmke calls the zoo's "gauntlet of concrete bunkers," for instance. Or the exhibits that still place animals in a hole-think of the cowering snow monkeys-and not their requisite pedestal-think Grizzly Coast. Or the animals such as the tigers, which one may or may not see as they roam the far reaches of their enormous, albeit natural, cage.
It's all accounted for in Ehmke's three-phase, six-year master plan that will rely upon bonding, donation and, most importantly, your attendance. It's a plan that will keep the zoo interesting, keep the zoo relevant and keep the zoo evolving.
And when it's done? Well, let's just say that, although you might still leave the zoo smelling like a barn and carrying a balloon on a stick--hey, some things never change--that feeling, that nagging guilty feeling that we mentioned earlier? That will be replaced with pride. Pride in the Minnesota Zoo, pride in contributing, and pride in Lee Ehmke, the man who's out to save the animals.
BizBriefing
Minnesota Zoo
Headquarters: Apple Valley
Inception: 1978
Revenue: $22.7M
Description: The Minnesota Zoo exists to connect people, animals and the natural world.
Website: mnzoo.com
Leader Profile
Lee Ehmke
Title: Director, CEO of the Minnesota Zoo; President, the Minnesota Zoo Foundation
Education: J.D., Hastings College of the Law; Masters in Landscape Architecture, University of
California-Berkeley