Launchpad USA
By Anthony P. Bartlett
A friend recently told me a story, and I can't stop turning it over—no pun intended, you'll see. (Neither could he. You can read his take here in "Gateway to Greatness.")
He'd been to a breakfast where the speaker owned 110 cell phone stores across the Midwest. Retail. High turnover by nature. In that world, nobody takes the job planning to retire there, and the owner knew it. Yet his locations kept staff far longer than the industry standard.
How? On day one, the table got set: You're going to be here about three years. Six months ramping up, two solid years, then a six-month tail. This is a stepping stone, and we'll help you throughout. Mentorship and investment from the first week, and in those last months, while everyone was still on the payroll, professional resume writers, career coaches, and outplacement came as a benefit promised, not a response. And if, two and a half years in, someone wanted to stay and build a future with the company, great. They could work that out together, too.
What the owner didn't do was pretend a job behind a cell phone counter was something it wasn't. He took the weakness and made it the strength. And because nobody was expected to stay, and in fact everyone was lovingly shown the door, some wouldn't leave.
It left me wondering: What if that could be St. Louis?
Fittingly enough, Missouri has always been a crossroads, and our region one of the great pass-through towns. For two centuries, literal and figurative wagon trains rolled in, bound for somewhere else, while many who stayed behind built fortunes outfitting them along the way. For those of us who grew up with the Arch, it's a magnet. For newcomers, it's often a doorway.
For years, one of my lines to local audiences has been that we're the world's greatest lily pad. Our largest export? Our kids. I pound the table about how we've been living like a hermit crab, hunkered in a shell that no longer fits, hoping, praying, pleading that everyone stays. How we can't wish away impending demographic winter and population decline.¹ But lately I've been thinking: What if I've had it backward? What if accepting departure could be part of the talent engine?
The Launchpad
Indeed, we are a lily pad. A stepping stone. I get it. But what if we made this the best jumping-off point there is? What if everyone who landed here got a welcome and a send-off for the ages, and found a community waiting to back them full throttle whether they were coming, going, or anything in between? Introductions, mentorship, investment, and open doors, offered up front rather than when someone gives the proverbial notice.
And what if those St. Louis years imprinted like no other? Akin to boot camp meets summer camp. Maybe not the years when someone makes their name, but the ones that lay the foundation for denting the universe.
We could drop the pick-me energy. Thank early professionals and graduates for the honor and privilege of having them for this time in their lives. Tell them it's okay to fly. Encourage it, even. Let them know we'll be here when they get back. And the funniest thing might happen once we let go of the rope, as it so often does when someone has permission to leave: more might stay. Even more might return. Anyone who's dated knows the feeling.² People want to buy, not be sold. And while I'm not sure of much, I'm fairly certain it's a better pitch than "Move back for a cheaper house and a free-er zoo."
The emphasis lands on the wrong syllable, too, when we lead recruits with the 1904 World's Fair. Facing, acknowledging, showcasing, and sharing our past is a process I hold sacred, in my bones. But history isn't what draws the talent we hope to attract. They come because they can picture a future here, and themselves in it. You can't rest on laurels alone. You have to earn them. Again, and again, and again after that. (Unless, of course, you're David Freese.)
We're not always first, but my God, do we dominate second. Researchers once studied the faces on the Olympic podium in Barcelona and found the unhappiest person up there was rarely in third.³ Bronze was glad to be on the stand at all. Silver wore the thousand-yard stare of what it had missed. That's the face this region has worn for a long time.
But what if we looked at the podium again? The nation's number two medical school.⁴ The second-oldest symphony in America. The second-winningest franchise in baseball. Second in geospatial anywhere on earth.⁵ More Fortune 500 headquarters than Nashville, Indianapolis, and Kansas City combined. Not one silver medal. A whole city of them.
And the gold? Plenty of those medalists are ours too. They just won it somewhere else. Silver has its own convenience lining, by the way. In a city of firsts, you spend the night getting there. Here, there's no traffic gauntlet between you and the second-best museum, the Fox, or the ballgame. Second place is the one within reach.
The Chapter
Some institutions already compound their power by treating leaving as part of the plan. Big Three consulting and Big Four accounting watch their people do a lap, take off, and land in CFO, CEO, and coveted board seats across the globe. Teach For America asks for two years and ends up with alumni leading schools nationwide. Universities turn the goodbye into an endowment. Teaching hospitals train residents knowing most will practice elsewhere, and their reputation travels with every one of them. The ones who leave are tacitly understood as the signal and the asset, not the loss.
We're not a training ground. We're the training ground. The champion's champion and the big-league farm team — and not the lesser kind.
On the field, the ice, or the court, one need only look at the walls at Chaminade, SLUH, CBC, Nerinx Hall, Incarnate Word, or St. Joseph's Academy. Five of the eleven Americans who beat England at the 1950 World Cup were St. Louisans, and four of those grew up on the Hill.⁶ Two on the roster four years ago played at the same high school in O'Fallon, MO. And that's just the parochial schools. Becky Sauerbrunn, two World Cups and the captain's armband, went to Ladue. Pick a game, any game, and chances are one of our sons or daughters is in the lineup.
Onstage, on screen, and on the catwalk,⁷ one need only look at the walls at COCA - Center of Creative Arts and Opera Theatre of Saint Louis, or turn on a late show. Ask how it started: "Made my debut at The Muny." "Found my voice at the Black Rep." "Got my first five minutes at the Funny Bone." "Tried out for the Burroughs spring musical."
The new Gateway Studios campus made the launchpad concept an actual business plan. Thirty-two acres and rehearsal facilities the size of a football field. Film and television productions and the biggest tours on the planet come here to build the show, then take it on the road. From Chesterfield.⁸ You heard that right. Chesterfield.
In the corner office or the lab, countless stories begin the same way. "I did my residency at WashU." "Raised my seed round after Monsanto." (Ba-dum-tss.) "Put my first office in Cortex Innovation District." "Cut my teeth at FleishmanHillard and came up at A-B."
Jack Dorsey once told 60 Minutes the idea for Twitter came from listening to police scanners as a kid in South City. Years later, between "jobs," he got a call from Jim McKelvey, the glassblower and engineer who had given a teenage Dorsey a coding internship and had just lost a sale because he couldn't take a credit card. Together, those two St. Louis natives made Square, now Block. Add Sam Altman, who grew up in Clayton, and OpenAI makes three with roots here. When St. Louis Bread Company becomes Panera, we grieve it. But what if that's the theory working?
Danny Meyer stopped by recently for his 50th high school reunion and released his new book at his childhood library three days before anywhere else.⁹ The very same branch he used to tell his parents he was headed to on summer nights, before sneaking off to the parking lots at Fitz's, Ted Drewes, and Carl's instead. Those nights became Shake Shack, a gathering place in Madison Square Park.
So yes, many of our kids and graduates leave. Too many, and I've made a career of trying to stem the tide. But I'd be remiss not to acknowledge that plenty go on to carry the thing the rest of the country lines up for and swallows wholesale.
People already say "St. Louis made me" from all corners of the map. What if even more who came for a chapter got to say it too?
The Ambassadors
When people on rotations, fellowships, visas, and transfers utterly adore their time here, they're less of a flight risk and more like walking advertisements that happen to fly — no longer spoken for, but speaking for us. The same goes for the package deal that comes with them: the spouses, parents, partners, and loved ones who follow, and who go on to become community pillars, artisans, restaurateurs, and proprietors.¹⁰ Embrace them, and they keep embracing St. Louis.¹¹ And when they go, they'll miss more than the attractions.
At the end of a grant this summer, Rachel Sinha posted a heart-wrenching goodbye that read more like a love letter: to neighbors who actually knew each other, a front porch where somebody played music, a kid who learned to swim messing around in a friend's pool, custard eaten in the back of the car, fireflies in June, Art Hill in the snow. And at the very end, unprompted, a promise: to always defend this place when people dismiss it as dangerous or dull.
These are ambassadors, made, not paid for.
The Boomerang
I'm not saying it's easy. Run a small business, lead a team, mentor, coach, or raise a kiddo, and you quickly learn the leaving can be the hardest part. Believe me, I know that ache too. Tough as it is, I try to remember there's also bounty and beauty in the setting free. In sending what we love, and helped shape, out into the world. And if we did our job well, they might come home.¹²
And for those who have grown and might replant? At some point in life, many want to give back to the people, places, and institutions that made them. In Detroit, Pittsburgh, Cleveland, and the rest of our Rust Belt kin, replanting reads as a triumph, not a surrender. And the triumph belongs to the one who returns, not just the city that asked. There's no endorsement like someone who could live anywhere, at the peak of all their powers, choosing St. Louis again, in Nikki Glaser fashion. We could be the boomerang capital of the Western Hemisphere.
The hermit crab is how we've been living. How I have, too. But now I'm thinking we could be more like an octopus: a body at home, arms out in every city where someone's repping St. Louis hard. Same region, entirely different posture.
I'm not sure who's coming back. But I am sure the road home starts at the same door. The one where we left the porch light on. Where we told them to get out there. To go get 'em, and to give 'em hell. Where, with trepidation and faith, hope and humility, we said we'd miss them more than anyone, and love them more than anything, in this one precious life. Where we hugged and held them with all our might. And then, we let go.
Anthony P. Bartlett is president of Acclimate St. Louis, providing independent ambassador services to St. Louis employers on behalf of their candidates, new hires, hybrid leaders, and families. He writes and speaks on why recruits come to the region, why some leave, and why others stay. The firm is based in the Delmar Loop.
Notes:
Ness Sándoval, Saint Louis University, "The Coming Population Squeeze," May 2026.
"We have to leave right now. Got a stage five clinger." Wedding Crashers (2005).
Medvec, Madey, and Gilovich, 1995 study of medalists at the 1992 Barcelona Games.
U.S. News & World Report, which now ranks medical schools by tier.
Ron Kitchens, Greater St. Louis Inc., on the region’s geospatial standing.
U.S. Soccer, on the 1950 team; Stacker, 2026, on Missouri's World Cup players.
Karlie Kloss, supermodel, raised in Webster Groves.
KMOV, March 2023, on the opening of Gateway Studios & Production Services in Chesterfield.
What Could Possibly Go Right? (2026), launched at the St. Louis County Library's Clark Family Branch, September 26, 2026.
St. Louis Mosaic Project, on immigrant business formation in the region.
"The child who is not embraced by the village will burn it down to feel its warmth." African proverb.
"You can never go home again, but the truth is you can never leave home, so it's all right." Maya Angelou, Conversations with Maya Angelou.
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