We recently connected with Steven Doniger and have shared our conversation below.

Steven, appreciate you joining us today. Looking back on your career, have you ever worked with a great leader or boss? We’d love to hear about the experience and what you think made them such a great leader.

The best boss, mentor I ever had is John Seibert the executive director of parks & recreation in Valparaiso Indiana. As a young professional it was difficult to see the “next step”, or the cause and effect of different decisions and John helped to broaden my perspective to be mindful and to make sure we are always looking for the win/win.

As I developed my career, I carried a vast amount of his teachings and guidance with me. I look for the best solution with the end in mind and welcome thoughtful and vigorous debate to work through problems and create solid outcomes. The teams that work with me all embrace the philosophy of “I am because we are” and understand that we all achieve success if everyone takes part.

I value people like John and hundreds of others that taught me along the way and understand that I am here standing on their shoulders and it is my responsibility to continue to make the foundation strong for the next generation.

Awesome – so before we get into the rest of our questions, can you briefly introduce yourself to our readers.

As the executive director of Summerville DREAM, I work to enhance and develop small business opportunities. Our organization provides outreach events, invest in marketing and is an advocate for businesses and organizations that independently do not have the resources to provide themselves. DREAM works to help consumers “reinvest” in small businesses and showcase the value compared to major box stores or online shopping.

My career path is best described as a Beatles song “The long and winding road.” I did not start out to work in events management or business development, my goal was to be a career performer, but since I only learned five cords on the guitar and cannot sing that did not work. In all seriousness I fell in love with the profession at a young age working as summer camp. I embraced the chaos of everyday being different and always looking for creative solutions to difficult problems.

I started with events management in parks & recreation and I was blessed to have a vast array of experiences and the opportunity to manage everything from youth sports to golf courses to botanical gardens and ice rinks. After working in the industry for twenty-five years I ventured into my own company and built and managed aerial adventure parks. This provided me the opportunity to meet and be mentored by some extraordinary individuals and learn how to fail with grace and realize from those failures how to forge success.

Now after thirty years I have the education (Business Management) and life experiences that brought me to Summerville, SC and Summerville DREAM. The work we do here is critical to the health and wellbeing of small businesses. I am proud of the success as we helped to keep small businesses opened during the pandemic, brought investment to the area, and reestablished the small business corridor as an essential economic structure for the success of the entire community and not a “nice to have” aspect of the town.

How do you keep your team’s morale high?

One of the lessons I learned very early in my professional life is always surround yourself with difficult people. Difficult is a relative and yet endearing term. Difficult people are not those that want to destroy everything and look for failures, difficult people are the ones that look to question everything, that enjoy vigorous debate and won’t accept the status quo. They are creative thinkers and comfortable in different situations, but from time to time are “difficult.”

I find it best to be with people (staff, board members, committee people) that are different and allow them to work in their strengths. I share the attitude that we all here to “do” something not “be” something and we all share in the success, and we all work on disappointments. The team fully understands the task, and everyone embraces the common goal and standard of “I am because we are” and we all succeed together, and we all hurt when one hurts. I assign our best people on our biggest opportunities and not our biggest problems.

Open communication, shared vision, vigorous debate and everyone working in their strength keep morale high.

Of course, there is always taco Tuesdays

What do you think helped you build your reputation within your market?

Do what we say we are going to do.

DREAM always under sells and over delivers. We are transparent in our approach which provides our customers with a great deal of trust and if things don’t go as well as they should we built up that trust to recover quickly.

I have positioned our company to be the “go to” organization. We removed red tape and streamlined our process to provide quick and honest solutions. When asked to do something outside our standard operations we always try to find the yes or bring in other partners to get the job completed.

Additionally, we listen to our customers and pivot quickly to meet market trends and adjust to fads

Contact Info:

• Website: https://summervilledream.org/
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/SummervilleDream

Image Credits
Summerville DREAM, Inc