BusinessReport.com

During his almost four years with the Baton Rouge Area Chamber, Chad Cornett has racked up a lot of time away from home. “My first year on the job, I spent 67 days in hotels,” he says. “It breaks down to about a week away per month.” But Cornett’s travels are paying off, as he markets the Capital Region to businesses and industries interested in relocating and the site-selection firms that are working with them.

In his time with BRAC, Cornett has helped lure several businesses to expand their Baton Rouge operations, including getting Albemarle to move its corporate headquarters from Richmond, Va., and EA Sports to set up a video-game testing lab near the LSU campus. “The biggest target right now is digital media,” Cornett says. A recent Orlando [Fla.] Sentinel article discussed how Florida officials were worried about losing digital-media jobs to Louisiana; Cornett says he was pleased to see those concerns. “Baton Rouge has an opportunity in that market, which is unique because it doesn’t have a home outside of the Bay Area,” he says. “We have the incentives and the talent pipeline.”

Cornett says he’s seen national perceptions of Baton Rouge change as a result of his time away from home. Before 2006, the Capital Region never was marketed nationally. When he started the campaign, Cornett says the view of Louisiana was centered on New Orleans and the destruction caused by Hurricane Katrina. “The greatest challenge was market awareness,” he says. Since then, more than 37 expansion and relocation projects have gone into the nine-parish Capital Region, accounting for more than 4,000 jobs. “We’ve worked to change that dynamic from people not knowing anything at all about Baton Rouge to being seen as the creative capital of the South,” he says. “It’s all about maximizing our strengths such as Pennington [Biomedical Research Center] and the petrochemical industry.”

Cornett is continuing a line of Forty Under 40 winners who work for BRAC. “This organization requires excellence every day,” he says. “It’s good if you’re young, passionate and want to make a difference.”

Age: 27

How do you make yourself heard in the discussion 
on how to move Baton Rouge forward? “I live and breathe it every day, by visiting and bringing a 
bit of Baton Rouge culture to business prospects.”

Click here for the complete list of 2009's Forty Under 40 winners.