Life & Work of Chad Wilson from Springfield

Today we’d like to introduce you to Chad Wilson.

Hi Chad, we’d love for you to start by introducing yourself.
I graduated from Kenton Ridge High School in Springfield Ohio in 1997. Growing up in Northridge a small bedroom community that was built in the 60s was kind of like growing up in The Wonder Years series just 20 years later. We were surrounded by working class families. My mom was a nurse at Community Hospital and my dad worked as a Wildlife Officer for the ODNR. We didn’t lock our doors back then and our days were spent playing backyard football and baseball games with aluminum bats and tennis balls so as not to break too many windows. Most of us didn’t have video game consoles and cable was a luxury, so we spent most of our time outside, playing, fighting, and then playing some more.

Baseball was king in Northridge and our high school was known for major leaguers like David Burba, Rick White, Dustin Hermanson, and Adam Eaton. My older brother Travis was an All-State pitcher as a senior and threw multiple no-hitters during his tenure there. My oldest brother was the Alex P. Keaton of the family, reading the Springfield News & Sun front to back every morning before school from a young age. I wasn’t the best student living with undiagnosed ADHD which was kind of taboo issue back then. I also wasn’t the best athlete although I tried to hang with my classmates. In 8th grade my parents bought an acoustic guitar for me from a pawn shop downtown where our new parking garage now resides. I took to it like a fish in water and quickly picked up several other instruments like the drums, piano, and the harmonica to name a few. I began writing songs and performing for anyone who would listen. My grandmother was my biggest fan.

As a teen I wanted to be the next Garth Brooks, I met some older guys at an open mic in downtown Springfield in the 90s and I joined their band. I was playing in regional bars as a co-frontman at the age of 15, and I thought I had hit the lottery. My parents always invested in us and told us we could do anything we put our minds to. As I approached graduation, my dad really encouraged me to make the move to Nashville to get started on a songwriting path. I was scared though. I didn’t trust myself. I was immature, and didn’t know how to go out on my own. I decided to try to replicate my brother’s paths instead.

My dad had spent 8 years in the active duty Army and my brothers and I were born on bases around the world. After high school we each joined the Ohio Army National Guard and even got to serve in the same unit- Troop B 2nd 107 Cav, in Lebanon Ohio. Andy my oldest brother, served as the company XO, Travis was Cadet with Wright State’s ROTC program, and I was an enlisted radio operator as an E4. While I was in Advanced Training at Fort Gordon GA, I ran into a Wildlife Officer at a career day. I talked to him for over an hour and decided right then and there I would follow my father’s path into the thin green line.

I got back from my training and enrolled in Hocking College’s Wildlife Management Program. Before school started I did an internship on South Bass Island at the Division of Wildlife’s Aquatic Visitor Center. It was a dream where my roommate and I got to spend our days talking to tourist about the history of fish stocking efforts on Lake Erie. Our evenings were filled with fishing in my small boat and hanging out with the students from OSU’s Stone Lab.

I graduated 2 years later, and became the youngest Wildlife Officer in the State. My class attended OPOTA and then went on to our Wildlife Officer Training Academy in Delaware Ohio. I was assigned as an at-large officer in District 1. For 6 months it was on the job training with officers from Champaign County all the way over to Knox County. It was really fun learning from these seasoned officers on how to handle everything from wildlife law enforcement to doing press releases and interviews. I worked every weekend and also served one weekend a month in my National Guard unit in Columbus Ohio- a unit that I had transferred to- to be closer to my civilian job.

On the morning of September 11th 2001, I was with the Knox County Wildlife Officer doing an interview Channel 10 on ginseng poachers. I will never forget when the camera man called us over to his satellite truck to what the terrible events unfold in real time. I ran emergency from Mt Vernon all the way to my apartment in Urbana to get my military gear together and wait by my phone. As the American response unfolded, I was told in January of 2022 that I would be getting activated for 12-18 months and to get our personal affairs together. I was engaged and my fiancé who was a student at Miami University and I moved our wedding up from after her graduation in June to February. It was a wild time for sure. As the military often does, our orders were changed several times and I was one of the few soldiers who wasn’t activated. My wife and I spent the first 4 months of our marriage living in different parts of the state while she finishing school, and I was finishing my field training.

I was eventually assigned to Delaware County Ohio as the State Wildlife Officer, and my new bride and I got our first apartment and boxer puppy. Looking back on that season brings back such a flood of memories and emotions. I worked my tail off in Delaware County, and she worked as a mortgage broker before the economic bubble broke. I spent my weekends often a mile or more from my vehicle, quietly walking through the woods observing resource users fish and hunt. I enforced wildlife regulations, litter enforcement, and drug interdiction on the 4 reservoirs, 2 rivers, 2 state parks and wildlife area of Delaware County. I was 23 years old, and the state gave me boat, 4-wheeler, gear, and a brand new Ford 150. I was the only officer in my unit with a CD player. This one feature of that vehicle would prove to be a huge part of my journey.

As a Wildlife Officer I usually got a day or two off in the middle of the week. Since none of my friends could do anything on those days, I built a small home studio in my basement to record my songs. I would burn my own CDs and listen to my mixes in my state truck while patrolling Delaware county. My recording and songwriting skills were basic and I would return to my basement to try to make them sound better. This went on for months and no matter what I tried I was never quite happy with the sound. In the early 2000’s we didn’t have YouTube and there just wasn’t anywhere to learn how to record and mix better. I didn’t understand EQ and Compression and always used too much Reverb. As an extravert and creative, I began to get quite lonely on long days of patrolling the county by myself, and my songs weren’t hitting me like I knew they could. My wife and I decided to take a short vacation to Nashville to get away together. While there I got to attend a recording session for hunter I had met who was an aspiring songwriter. I was fascinated with the studio, the musicians, engineers, and the process. Before heading back to Ohio we shot over to MTSU in Murfreesboro. I knew they had the largest recording department in the country and I wanted to see what their studios were like. It was summer session and in a stroke of fate, the student worker at the front desk just happened to be bored out of his mind. I asked him if he would give me a tour and he gladly jumped and said yes. We spent the next 2.5 hours going through all the studios from the 4-track, MIDI, digital, and large format studios. I asked him hundreds of questions and he fielded them all. My wife thought we were speaking in a different language. At the end I thanked him for his time and we headed out to the car. Before we jumped in, my wife walked over to my door and asked me to hold both her hands and to look her in the eye. I was confused but played along. She looked into my soul and said, “I have never seen what I just saw in you over the last couple of hours. Here is what we are going to do… You are going to resign from the state, job, we are going to sell our town house, and we are going to move here for you to return to school.” I was dumbfounded. She saw something in me that I had tried to suppress in the interest of being a good provider. We dreamed, laughed, and planned all the way back to Ohio. A few weeks later I laid my badge on the Chief’s desk in Columbus Ohio, and we sold our house and moved on to a new adventure. Youth wasn’t waisted on the young for once, and a new chapter began.

As a 25 year old student at MTSU, I enjoyed and absorbed every second of teaching and mentoring I could. My wife also received a paid full-ride to their Economics PhD. program and we were study buddies for the next few years. I joined the student chapter of the Nashville Song Writer’s Association, and spent time fishing in my canoe with our student chapter president Eric Paslay. I quickly found out what a real song writer was, watching him perform at the Blue Bird Cafe in Nashville. His songs were memorizing and somehow even though he was younger than me he seemed 20 years ahead of me in the craft. Eric went on to write over a dozen #1 hits such as Barefoot Blue Jean Night for Jake Owen and many others. I found a love for the video and audio production side of the business and was able to work on a couple projects with the assistant chair of our department Nathan Adam. He took me under his wing and by the time I graduated 2 years later I had credits on award winning internationally distributed products such as Gibson Guitar’s Learn and Master Guitar series, and Multi-Platinum ProTools which was carried by Sweetwater Sound.

After graduation I took a job as an assistant producer at a mega-church and that is when I really was able to hone my skillset. The church had over 100 employees and I was in daily production with some of the best producers, engineers, lighting designers, and editors in the business. I was invited to sessions at Dark Horse in Nashville with one of our award winning producers. I learned what it meant to be a great producer and I honed my skills day in and day out. It was like drinking from a fire hose, yet I am still thankful for that experience today.

My wife and I had our first son a year before she finished her PhD, and to say the least it was a tough year with me working nearly 7 long days a week, and her defending her thesis. That year showed me that I needed to find work that would be more family friendly, so when she was offered a teaching job in our home town of Springfield Ohio, we decided it was time for the next chapter of our story.

I was honestly not overwhelmingly excited about my work prospects in Springfield. I had been trained for Tier 1 production and I didn’t know where I could find that back in the Miami Valley. I spent the first year home, consulting with churches who needed technical help. One of those churches ended up hiring me full time to take over all of their production and music. For the next 10 years I led 85 volunteers, planning and executing weekend services, and designing, building, and maintaining new AVL systems in the multi-site church. My wife taught finance and economics at Wittenberg University and we expanded our family with our second son. Around 8 years into that career I began to get a little discontent with the under belly of modern American Evangelicalism, and started considering the next chapter. Almost 10 years to the day after serving that church, I tenured my resignation for a new life in entrepreneurship.

For the next 5 years I ran a couple of production companies with a fully stocked video and audio studio. I served clients with installations, story telling and fundraising campaigns and full length album production. In January of 2025 I joined Big Fish Local- a full service marketing firm in Springfield Ohio that I had interfaced with over the years. My wife also made a major jump from being a tenured professor and department chair at Wittenberg University to join the College Board where her team writes the AP Macro Economics test that 140k students take around the world. Our boys now 17 and 14 are students at Catholic Central in Springfield, and my wife just took the elder on his first college visit to the University of Cincinnati last week. Our beloved boxer passed away 8 years ago and our new boxer is now 6 years old.

I co-manage my downtown recording studio which is currently being sub-rented by several area music and video producers. I spend any free time I can with my family who loves to patron all the new music venues and restaurants part of our Springfield Downtown revitalization. We also can be found kayaking, fishing, hunting, and hiking the beautiful water ways and parks in Clark County Ohio.

Alright, so let’s dig a little deeper into the story – has it been an easy path overall and if not, what were the challenges you’ve had to overcome?
One of the things that has been hard being raised in a town like Springfield Ohio is that the resistance to change of any kind was kind of embedded in us. My friends and I had parents who often worked one job, had one home, one faith community, and vacationed to one spot once a year. It was hard to make the career jumps I did at first due to this dynamic. Each step was met with skepticism and fear from those around me and I learned that charting my own course would not come without pain.

Another challenge came in returning to Springfield from Nashville. Springfield is a town that is a classic picture of historical struggles, from the decline of manufacturing in the 70s and 80s to being the ground zero for the terrible idea of redlining- a practice that systematically disenfranchised people of color from being able to get ahead after WWII. The generational effects of poverty caused by that and many other systems are felt to this day. On one hand we have one of the coolest and most affordable places to live in the country with an abundance of natural resources and opportunities to thrive in investments, business, and entertainment, while on the other hand almost half our community deals with the effects of poverty such as food insecurity, violence, and economic and educational deficits.

As you know, we’re big fans of you and your work. For our readers who might not be as familiar what can you tell them about what you do?
Big Fish Local is a full-service marketing firm specializing in Websites, SEO, Advertising, and Social Media Management. With over 10 years of award winning service we help all kinds of businesses from start ups to companies with hundreds of employees. Our team works in a restored historical house on North Limestone Street just 1 mile north of our city center. We are known for our quick response times, strategic solutions, and exceeding our customers goals with our measurable digital marketing tools.

Is there a quality that you most attribute to your success?
The success of any business is found in finding the right team with diversified skills both soft and technical. We also want to see our entire community thrive through its challenges.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://www.bigfishlocal.org
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/bigfishlocaloh
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/bigfishlocal
• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/bigfishlocal/posts/?feedView=all
• Other: https://www.facebook.com/springfieldusatv/