PDG Profile: Eric Schmautz

Eric Schmautz’s Rotary career almost reads like an adventure story. He got an early start, joining Interact as a high school freshman in Florida, becoming president the second semester and continuing through his sophomore and junior years. His senior year, after working for the Boy Scouts during the summer, he took an interim position with the organization when the district executive became ill. Skipping Rotaract entirely, he became a member of the Rotary Club of Lake Seminole, FL, as a high school senior.

Eric transferred to the Rotary Club of Denver at the recommendation of his freshman adviser at the University of Denver, then to the Rotary Club of University Hills, because it was near the campus and he could attend meetings more regularly. After graduating with a major in applied mathematics and statistics, he continued working for Dominoes, where he had worked full-time all through college, while teaching courses at the University of Chicago in management in the service industry and taking graduate courses in statistics and operations research. While teaching at a conference in Chicago, Eric met people from several big national accounting firms and ended up taking a job with Deloitte and Touche in 1997; his second week on the job, he was transferred to San Francisco.

His first big client was in Japan, so Eric alternated weeks between San Francisco and Japan for a year and a half. He worked on the merger between Norwest Bank in Minneapolis and one of his other clients, Wells Fargo, which recruited him in 1999. He started with the bank in corporate finance and product management, became manager of Central Marin community banking operations, then worked in marketing strategy and now works in corporate communications.

Travel to Japan had precluded attending Rotary, but once Eric was at Wells Fargo, his boss, who was being recruited to join the Rotary Club of San Francisco by Past President Bill Ecker, asked Eric to join the Club. His sponsor was Dick Volberg, a Deloitte retiree. Eric’s first big project was working as a counselor at Camp Enterprise (now RYLA), where he became “more and more involved,” serving as chair or co-chair for six years. From 2007-09, he was a member of the Future Vision Advisory Committee for The Rotary Foundation, helping to plan for future funding.

Eric was President of the Rotary Club of San Francisco during its centennial year (2008-09), a time of great change, including closing the office, reorganizing the Board, moving the lunch meetings to the Olympic Club, and organizing the committees around the RI areas of service. During the centennial year, the Club raised $600,000 to rebuild and renovate the Boys and Girls Clubs’ Mission Clubhouse, the first freestanding clubhouse west of the Mississippi, which the Club had built in the 1920s. At the same time, the Club raised $70,000 for The Rotary Foundation.

Eric served as Lieutenant Governor (now Chief of Staff) for District 5150 during 2009-10. When one of the San Francisco Assistant Governors dropped out, he took on that job as well, which he held for a second year. He started the District Visioning Team in 2009 and was District Conference Chair for three years.

In 2013-14, Eric served as District Governor of District 5150, the first year of implementation of TRF’s vision plan, now known as the TRF Grant Model. Also during that year, the district leadership team was reformulated and three new provisional Rotary clubs were formed. Eric has been District 5150’s RI Convention promotion chair for four years and finance chair for three years. On the Zone level (British Columbia, Washington, Oregon, Northern California, Nevada), he has been on the Zone Institute committee for three years and RI convention promotion chair for one year.

Eric served two years on Rotary Interntional’s Vocational Services Committee and currently chairs the RI President’s Young Rotary Leaders Advisory Committee. He has also been a trainer for three years at the RI Convention in membership development, visioning, and vocational service.

Eric played hockey in college, but an ankle injury ended his sports career. Now, he says, his biggest hobby is cooking, which he puts to good use each year preparing the Thanksgiving meal for the clients of The Arc of San Francisco and the Salvation Army. He also loves to travel. He and his wife, Past President Stephanie Schmautz, and their two daughters, Molly, two-and-a-half, and Katie, who was born June 7, recently returned from a month in Portugal.

“The biggest thing about Rotary for me,” he says, “is that it gives you an opportunity to do so much more than as an individual,” citing polio eradication as a prime example of the “power of like-minded people.”