By Anelia K. Dimitrova
Giving back to Cedar Falls is a mission for Adam Bolander.
At 33, he’s crushing it as an advocate for the city he and his family now call home.
As the sales manager at Cedar Falls Tourism, the city’s leisure and events planning arm, he’s doing just that–bragging up the town’s offerings for special sporting and cultural events, conferences and association meetings, and bringing them to town with lasting impact.
His pitch has yielded palpable results so far. In less than five years, Adam has brought 100 events to Cedar Falls, an impressive number that is estimated to have added a significant financial gain and prosperity to the area.
Cedar Falls Tourism, which hosts about 50 events annually, is estimated to have $25 million in economic impact.
And while the special events range in scope, they all fill hotel rooms, restaurant reservations, venues like the UNI Dome and the McLeod Center, and continue to attract guests from around the country.
Adam’s career journey, finding home in Cedar Falls
Cedar Falls is built for business – that’s the motto the city uses in its marketing materials.
But it is also built by and with dedicated professionals like Adam, who work with passion, deliver with joy and continue to aspire upward and forward once they reach a milestone.
A 2014 business and marketing UNI grad, Adam landed his current job during the pandemic, when travel and gatherings, which make tourism tick, were severely hamstrung.
But Adam, who at the time had just wrapped up an eight-year stint at the Waterloo Cedar Falls Courier in sales and circulation, looked beyond the restrictions for travel and socialization. He saw an opportunity to create a network of contacts, so he focused his energies on virtual explorations, reaching out to groups and associations of various sizes.
The cold calls he made and the online meetings he initiated paid off. In the first post-pandemic year, Adam brought 30 events to town.
“It really just kind of took off,” he tells me. “And a lot of that was just from the relationships I built over the first year of not being able to actually host anything.”
What motivates Adam in his present job is the opportunity to give back to the city that has afforded him “so many opportunities right out of school.”
Indeed, Cedar Falls had given generously to Adam, a Fort Madison native.
When he came to UNI in 2010, he didn’t know a soul.
Today, he has a rich network of colleagues, friends and neighbors he can count on to keep going.
The college degree he earned at UNI equipped him with the skills he needed to succeed, but so did the consistent message he heard from his professors about self-reliance, discipline and drive, which reinforced his personal work values.
It is at UNI that Adam met his wife, Kate, an Eldridge native, and when they married in September of 2015, they decided to plant their roots in town.
Now their two kids, Grayson, 5, and Taytum, 2, as well as their adorable mini labradoodle, Max, love their life here.
Planning events for a living
It is fair to say that in his college years, outside of throwing together a few informal parties, Adam had no experience in event planning.
In fact, the life-changing event in his personal life at the time–the wedding, at St. Stephens, which drew about 200 guests to town–was fully planned by his mom, his future wife and mother-in-law.
Now that he has developed into a professional event planner, Adam fully appreciates all the work the women in his life did to make the wedding day special.
“They took care of everything,” he laughs.
At the time, he could not have imagined that life would take him down this path of planning events for a living.
His first event planning
On his office desktop screen, Adam has an inspirational quote.
“People who want to see you win will help you win,” it says.
Adam does not recall where it came from, but it stuck as a motto for him.
Among those he knows want to see him win are all the people he connected with in his first year on the job.
During the pandemic, he cold called former NFL Jacksonville Jaguars fullback and Hawkeye football player Trevor Bollers, and offered to help with his dream of launching a youth league from scratch.
That’s how Iowa 7 on 7 Back 2back Ballin’, now in its fifth year at the UNI Dome, came about, enabled also by a $10,000 grant from Cedar Falls Tourism to offset the costs of the venue.
Since then, it has grown into two annual tournaments for student athletes who love football. In April, the event is for high schoolers and in May, for youths.
In the inaugural year, the event kicked off with 30 teams for each category and now that number has doubled, with participants from “all over the country.”
“Last year, we actually had teams from Canada,” Adam says. “It has grown and got international attention, which is super cool. That’s the fun.”
Adam says that each tournament brings approximately 2,500 to 3,500 visitors to the area, including athletes and spectators, with an estimated economic impact of close to half a million dollars on the city.
“You notice that our restaurants are a little bit fuller or that Scheels has more people shopping there,” he says. “That’s ideally what we try to do at Cedar Falls Tourism, we want to fill our hotels, but we also want people to be spending money in our restaurants and shops and everything in between.”
That was just the beginning of Adam’s successful 100-event streak.
On a regular day, he researches various state associations and professional groups to network with executives, presidents and conference planners and convince them to bring their meetings and conferences to Cedar Falls.
In the process, he has developed a supportive network of local stakeholders, like working with the university on education-related or sporting events as well as trade shows.
In addition to pursuing new leads, Adam is tasked with preserving the tradition and enriching long-established events started by others, like the Iowa High School Athletic Association (IHSAA) State Football Championships, which will be marking its 50th anniversary in November.
Drawing about 50,000 visitors a year, it is the biggest event the city hosts annually and has an estimated economic impact of $4 million to $5 million.
Other events, like association conferences, for instance, are about $50,000 to $60,000, in terms of impact, but like the tributaries to a river, smaller events in great numbers–the city hosts about 30 of them annually–they all add to an impressive record. Last year, for example, Cedar Falls hosted the Iowa Chapter of the National Association of Insurance and Financial Advisors for the first time.
“Anything that draws groups of tourism, I am usually behind the scenes working with those planners to get those types of groups to Cedar Falls,” he says.
But Adam’s commitment to his mission does not stop with bringing an event to town. He sometimes thrusts himself into the thick of it, going above and beyond the call of duty.
For the Big Soil Health Event, which drew 500 farmers and experts from near and far to Bien VenU Event Center in town in December of 2024, Adam dressed up as a giant corn stalk mascot to welcome guests.
“I do it to give somebody that memorable experience so they wanna keep coming back,” he says. “I’m most proud of it [bringing this event to town] because the event planner for that actually lives in Texas.”
He is also the brains behind a new mascot that will be introduced at the Gateway River Park ribbon-cutting ceremony this spring.
On a personal note, Adam has also started a family tradition of taking his son to some of the events, so they can share some special moments together.
Making Cedar Falls a destination
Ask Adam how he does his job and he will tell you Cedar Falls sells itself.
To those who know nothing about the town, he tells the story of a cozy, quaint, safe, medium-sized Iowa town that has everything a big city boasts minus the problems.
He points to the vibrant Main Street and its shops and restaurants, the premier athletic facilities like the Dome and the McLeod Center, the big retail stores and the hotels, like the Holiday Inn and the Hilton Garden Inn that have venues attached to them.
“But the number one thing that I tend to hit on the most is because we’re a smaller community, it’s super easy to find support when you bring an event here whether it’s the university, stepping up and sponsoring an event or it’s Cedar Falls Tourism sponsoring an event on behalf of the city,” he says. “The feedback is always spectacular, every once in a while, of course, we run into system challenges that we have to overcome but at the end of the day, people are very impressed with our venues and our town.”
The rewards that come with the job
In 2017, Adam received The Cedar Valley’s 20 Under 40 Award for leadership work in the community while working at the Waterloo-Cedar Falls Courier.
Recently, on the occasion of his 100th event milestone, he created, with the help of AI, a tongue-in-cheek digital “limited edition action figure” with his likeness, name, and the words 100 Events Club.
The people who want him to win and help him win, “liked” on social media the light-hearted digital Adam.
But the real Adam is not counting on likes, he is onto his next event, and in fact, to the next 100.
“Being able to give back to the community and the city makes this job very rewarding,” he says. “Knowing that what I do makes a difference for the city and the community gives you a positive attitude every day to keep going. It’s the opportunity, not the obstacles that you remember.”