Michael Hensley of Go Great Lakes Bay

“The Convention and Visitors Bureau's job is to get folks that don’t normally come to this area to come and visit. We're really a destination marketing organization, but we also have employees who reach out to meeting planners, sport tournament organizers, group tour organizers, and reunion organizers saying, ‘You've had your event in Indianapolis for the last five years, have you thought about having it in the Great Lakes Bay region? Here's all the reasons why you should…’

Each visitor brings, on average, $160 per night into the area on things like lodging, gas, food, entertainment, and shopping. So if we brought in a youth soccer tournament and there were 400 participants, that’s $460,000 brought directly to this area! That helps everybody, including residents. When you can take dollars that weren’t generated here and bring them home, we all benefit.

"When folks who travel all over the United States land in places like Bay City, or some of our other regional communities with these really robust downtown areas, they say, ‘This place is awesome! You can eat outside, there are shops everywhere, and how many restaurants are here?’ So at the Convention and Visitors Bureau, all we have to do is say to everybody who doesn’t live there, ‘Why don’t you give this place a try?’

We have shops, museums, events, concerts, bars and restaurants and the activities. Recently, it’s been exciting to look at Bay County and how the Saginaw Bay has grown over the last ten years into a world class fishery. We attract back-to-back $100,000 bass tournaments with guys like Kevin VanDam, who is considered to be the greatest angler of all time.

In the region, we have over 100 miles of paved trails so you can hike and bike and rollerblade. If you have a mobility restriction, in a place like the Shiawassee National Wildlife Refuge, you can do the wildlife drive, and see all the crazy wildlife in that reservation. Along with it being a birding photographer's dream.

It brings a lot of pride hearing a visitor say, ‘We love your city, we love your fishery, we love coming up here.' It's a wonderful region. It's a great place to live, work, learn, and worship.

And it's a great place to have a little fun!

We have a saying that if you build a place where people want to live, you'll build a place where people want to work.

If you build a place where people want to work, you'll build a place where businesses must be.

If you build a place where businesses must be, you'll build a place where people want to visit.

And if you build a place where people want to visit, you'll build a place where people want to live.

An area doesn’t have to start with ‘building a place where people want to work’, you can start wherever you are on that line, because it comes back around and keeps going forever. Start where you are and it all trickles down.”

–Michael Hensley, Director of Marketing for Go Great Lakes Bay