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Empty Building Tours with Deb Brown

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Brandon Burton (00:01.024)
Hello, Chamber Champions. Welcome to Chamber Chat podcast. I’m your host, Brandon Burton, and here on the podcast, I introduce you to people and ideas to better help you serve your Chamber members and your community. Today’s guest is a leading voice in rural revitalization and a fierce advocate for the potential of small towns. Deb Brown is the co-founder of SaveYour.Town.

where for the past decade, she’s partnered with Becky McCray to deliver practical, inspiring solutions that help rural communities take bold action and create lasting change. Deb’s expertise is grounded in real world experience, from her impactful work as a Chamber of Commerce Executive Director to her varied background in retail, insurance, and entrepreneurship. She brings an energetic, no-nonsense approach that resonates with community leaders and grassroots

doers alike. She’s also the author of From Possibilities to Reality, Savior Small Town, a hands-on guide that brings essential reading for those working to breathe new life into rural places. Whether she’s leading workshops, crafting strategies, or sparking conversations, Deb Brown brings insight, connection, and deep belief in what’s possible when a small town takes ownership of their future.

Deb, I’m excited to have you with us today here on Chamber Chat podcast. I’d love to give you an opportunity to say hello to all the Chamber Champions who are out there listening and to share something interesting about yourself so we can all get to know you a little better.

Deb Brown (01:40.504)
So first of all, thank you for the lovely introduction and for having me on your podcast. I am a fierce advocate for belonging to the chamber and being active in your chamber. So I’m glad to be here having conversations with you. Now, what do you want to know about me that might be different?

Hmm. I know how to set off fireworks. In fact, I’m a licensed pyrotechnician and I learned to do that while I was a chamber director in Webster City, Iowa. So it goes to show many things can happen when you work with a chamber.

Brandon Burton (02:08.277)
Wow.

Brandon Burton (02:19.104)
That’s right. It just shows how Chamber Executive wears many hats and carries credentials that you never dreamed you’d have to carry, right? That’s awesome. Well, tell us a little bit about your organization, Save Your Town, just kind of how it started, what the vision is, what you guys do, and kind of anything you want to share about

Deb Brown (02:23.15)
Indeed. Yes.

Deb Brown (02:43.478)
So we, Becky McCray is the rural small business advocate and she started a small biz survival back in 2006. And it is one of the first early blogs that talks about small businesses and rural communities and actions you can take. And I had been following her on Twitter of all places, right? When I first started on Twitter and I didn’t know any better. So I just reached out and started talking to her.

Brandon Burton (03:12.94)
There you go.

Deb Brown (03:13.452)
I guess I still do that, right? Anyway, we met in person at a bloggers tour in Hutchinson, Kansas and hit it off and started doing some things together. I was living in Iowa at the time and she lives in Oklahoma. We were involved in the 140 character conferences, which again is a Twitter-based conference.

Brandon Burton (03:34.05)
Twitter.

Deb Brown (03:37.059)
We just really got along and thought along the same lines. And she came to visit me one day and we’re sitting over dinner and she said, you know, I think we should do something together. I’m like, okay. So our first venture was a toolkit on how to do a pop-up in a small town. And my first question to her was, are people really gonna pay for this? And indeed, indeed they did because at that time not very many people were doing that.

Brandon Burton (04:01.12)
Yeah.

Deb Brown (04:06.83)
And we have grown over the years. I was still working at the chamber at that time and went out on my own with Becky in 2017. we’ve grown and spent many, many hours in rural communities across the United States and Canada. And it’s work that we love to do and we like being on the ground and hearing.

what people’s challenges are and working with them to figure out ways to overcome those challenges. That’s a short synopsis for you.

Brandon Burton (04:40.226)
Yeah, no, that’s great. It gives a good background. So I’d mentioned in your bio that you were a chamber executive. You mentioned it with the fireworks. Maybe just to continue helping to set the stage, tell us a little bit about your experience as a chamber executive.

Deb Brown (04:59.566)
Oh, sure. So my father had had a heart attack and we moved from North Carolina back to Iowa. And I was looking for something to do. So I volunteered at the local chamber in Hampton, Iowa. And lucky me, the director was phenomenal. And I ended up actually doing the communications, Main Street work and social media work. This was 2009, right? A while ago.

Brandon Burton (05:28.162)
Great.

Deb Brown (05:28.904)
and learned a lot in Iowa has phenomenal main street and chamber organization. So I really did learn a lot and the position for executive director came up in 2013 in Webster city. And I thought, sure, let’s apply for it. And danged if they didn’t hire me. So I was able to be a director there for a little over four years. it was for me.

Brandon Burton (05:47.03)
Yeah.

Deb Brown (05:55.511)
I had some background, of course, in chamber, but more in communications and tourism and talking to people and conversations. So I was given the opportunity at that chamber really to set the stage for the things that we could do in that community that would really make a difference. They had lost a major manufacturer two years before I got there.

employed 2,000 people in a town of 8,000 to kind of give you an idea. It was a company town and had been there for a long time. So you, many of your listeners will know exactly what that feels like. And there were some challenges, but as a community and as a chamber, we figured it out and really had a good time reinvigorating the community and getting more people involved and got past that.

Brandon Burton (06:29.858)
Wow.

Brandon Burton (06:36.32)
Yeah.

Deb Brown (06:51.416)
pour me stage into look at who we are. We’re phenomenal. What else can we do? So that’s my chamber experience. I just tried new ideas all the time.

Brandon Burton (06:57.43)
Yeah.

Brandon Burton (07:06.274)
Very good. Well, it definitely helps to give us some background so those listening know you understand chambers. You’ve been in it. You’ve been in the throws and some of those, you know, deepest, toughest struggles that we see.

Deb Brown (07:12.993)
yeah.

Deb Brown (07:18.54)
And I wanna throw in here too that I do have my IOM certification and that is probably one of the best educational trainings that I have received in my lifetime. I was fortunate to have a great class, but also the instructors, it’s unbelievable training. And if anybody has the opportunity to do an IOM, please do it. And no, I’m not being paid to say that.

It’s just been huge in my life going forward from that point.

Brandon Burton (07:45.654)
Yeah.

Yeah, very good. Well, for today’s topic, we’re going to spend most of our time talking about what I see as a very unique revitalization tool, we’ll call it, to help revitalize some parts of maybe your downtown or town square that maybe is looking a little empty, a little quiet, a little, you know,

It needs some help, say. We see this in small towns all across the country. And Deb’s got some great ideas on how to address that. And we’ll dive into that as soon as we get back from this quick break.

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All right, Deb, we’re back. So as I teased before our pause there, today we’re talking about this unique approach to revitalizing downtowns, town squares, some of these areas where we see

parts of towns that maybe get forgotten. Maybe they had a great historical impact in this community, in any community USA, right? We see it all across the country, but I’m gonna let you introduce what this approach is and how you go about doing it.

Deb Brown (09:08.47)
Absolutely. So we’re going to talk about the tour of empty buildings. And I want to tell you a story about how we came up with this entire idea and this concept. So I mentioned before working in Webster city, when I went over for the job interview, I counted 14 empty buildings downtown, 14 in a town of 8,000.

And I knew if I got the job, I was gonna be responsible or one of them to help fill those empty buildings. And I got the job. And yes, of course they said, so Deb, what are you gonna do to fill these empty buildings? And my first response is, well, what are we going to do? I have some ideas, right? And my thought was,

The beautiful, some were beautiful historical buildings. Most of them had a great story. I know that people are curious and they want to see what’s in places. Like if I can go upstairs and see where they stored their things in the old bank vault, I want to do that, right? So we came, I came up with the idea, let’s showcase these buildings because instead of hiding them or ignoring them,

Brandon Burton (10:08.033)
Yes.

Yeah

Deb Brown (10:24.844)
We want to fill them, so let’s showcase them. And it’s vacant or underutilized buildings. You can do that for. And actually, the tour’s design, it raises awareness about these building vacancies and inspires the reuse and revitalization ideas.

In a month’s time, we figured out, we scheduled a tour of empty buildings. Now, would I recommend doing that in a month’s time? I might tell you to take two months, just saying, but I didn’t know any better. And I had a group of people that were ready for change. They were tired of the story that we failed because it didn’t fail, things just changed and that’s life. Life happens.

Deb Brown (12:00.003)
So, you know, we had some really great members and people were ready to try something new. They were tired of that we failed story because that was just a story. In real life, things happen and change is the only constant, right? So a group of us,

Brandon Burton (12:02.082)
Okay, sounds good.

Deb Brown (12:24.906)
members got together and said what can we do? So we made a list of the empty buildings, got in touch with the realtors to ask them do you know the owners, which ones are for sale. We’re fortunate to have a local historian in the community and Nancy put together stories about each individual building which was great because it’s good to know the history right and our chamber champions those

Brandon Burton (12:48.588)
Yeah.

Deb Brown (12:51.5)
were the retired individuals that were still members. We called them chamber champions. And they stepped up to say, well, I’ll tell that story. I’ll go in this building and I’ll tell that story. So we put the tour together and it was, you could come and go as you please. It was over a time period of three hours. A local engineering company made the map for us.

Brandon Burton (12:56.802)
I love it.

Deb Brown (13:15.182)
And we made that available both online and at the chamber office. So you could come and pick it up or print it off. And the biggest secret I can share with you both before and after the tour is we talked to everybody. We had conversations with everybody. Have you heard about the tour of empty buildings? Are you coming? And people had not heard and it involved being out in the community and being in the places where people talk.

One of my favorite stories is I went to the morning coffee where the old guys go and all have coffee, right? You know this group, most small towns have them. And crotchety group of old guys. And one of the fellows said to me, Deb, what are you doing? It’s not gonna work. It just doesn’t make any sense to me. Why should I share about it? And I had to think for a minute and I said to him, you know, where’s your daughter live?

Brandon Burton (13:47.2)
you

Brandon Burton (13:52.266)
Yep, yep.

Brandon Burton (13:58.019)
is that we have a front-end center that we’re able to start moving. And just in some cases, why should I share a back-end? And then I think, well, it’s not too bad. It’s not too bad. It’s fine. But I think that we have to be very careful.

Deb Brown (14:11.182)
Because well, you know, she lives at the state capitol. I’m like, yeah, that’s right. You got grandkids, right? And he goes, yeah. I’m like, what would it be like if your daughter can move back home with her family and start her own business in one of these empty buildings? And it’s like the light bulb went off over his head. Everybody has a motivating factor and that was his.

And now he saw reasons where he could share that story. And he became one of our biggest advocates and in fact did share the story amongst his group of peers and organizations. It was just wonderful. And so a month later we had the tour, 44 people came and I declared that a success because that was 44 people that not only got to see the empty buildings, but also took their stories and shared them.

Brandon Burton (14:35.094)
Yeah, I it.

Deb Brown (15:03.018)
outside of the tour with their friends and families and associates. And we continue to share the local newspaper got on board every time somebody rented a building, they showed up and took pictures of the new renters and made a big deal about the ribbon cutting and shared about those people’s stories and the kind of products and services they were providing. The local radio station got involved.

It was, it became just so much fun to see what was happening in all these different buildings. And there were 12 buildings on the tour. In 18 months, 10 of those 12 buildings were filled.

Brandon Burton (15:42.53)
Wow

Deb Brown (15:45.571)
And they weren’t filled with another factory or some new big conglomerate from outside of our community. The majority were filled with entrepreneurs and local businesses that may have been expanding or ready to move from their garage to a brick and mortar building. Why did it work? Because we kept talking about it. And we shared every story possible and we use social media because

Brandon Burton (15:53.154)
you

Brandon Burton (16:09.034)
That’s awesome.

Deb Brown (16:13.742)
This was 2013, social media was important, much more important than before all the stuff that goes on with it now, right? Yeah, yeah, yeah. It was just people being in touch with their families and sharing stories. So I love talking about the Tour of Empty Buildings because I know it works. We heard from Natchez, Mississippi that does the Tour of Empty Buildings just about every year.

Brandon Burton (16:21.826)
all the algorithms now and how they manipulate it.

Brandon Burton (16:44.309)
Yeah.

Deb Brown (16:44.312)
Buildings come and go, business owners come and go. know, things don’t stay permanent. So for them, it made sense to do that little bigger community. We heard from a group in Australia, and I think it was in Sydney, who said, you know, we do tours for tourists to go see different things in our community. We have added one empty building into that tour because you never know when a tourist might want to start a job.

Brandon Burton (16:57.868)
Ha.

Brandon Burton (17:10.914)
That’s right.

Deb Brown (17:13.454)
We were just hearing all different kinds of people wanting to take advantage of this tour. And we got the phone calls from some of our neighbors. Hey, can we do one in our community? And of course, what am I going to say? Absolutely, you can do one in your community. And here you and I are 12 years later, still talking about the tour of empty buildings. I want to go a little bit further and share another story from that.

Brandon Burton (17:28.758)
Yeah.

Brandon Burton (17:35.33)
That’s right.

Deb Brown (17:41.773)
the local movie theater closed my first week on the job. You know, that’s just wrong. In a small town, the local movie theater is really important, right? And I think it was the straw that broke the camel’s back for a lot of people in town. And so I said, let’s bring a bunch of people together and talk about this. So I just said, hey, let’s meet in two weeks at the middle school and see what we can do.

Brandon Burton (17:46.114)
I don’t mean… Right?

Yeah.

Deb Brown (18:08.458)
huge group of people showed up that wanted to save the theater. So that told us right there was an unofficial informal gathering to just see who was interested. And there were a lot of people interested. This group ended up forming a 501C3. They raised money. Now it was going to cost $90,000 to upgrade from old film to digital.

and had to buy the building and the building was for sale for $30,000. That’s a lot of money, right? But we didn’t care because we knew we could raise the money. People wanted to save the theater. The alumni associations in town jumped on board. We decided to sell the seats at $300 a pop, not actually sell the seats, but you could have your plaque on the back of it.

And the alumni associations bought those like they were giving them away free, made a huge difference. The students at the high school created movie trailers about the project that could be shown on social media. mean, everybody jumped in and got involved. And it was, the majority of the funding came in five, 10 and $25 donations. There were a couple of $10,000 donations, but the majority of it was small. And that

Brandon Burton (19:13.186)
That’s really cool.

Deb Brown (19:30.164)
speaks to the power of a small town that knows what it wants and someone or some group of people is there to help guide them to achieve that. That’s just one story from those 12 buildings.

Brandon Burton (19:40.205)
Yeah. Great story. Yeah. So I do, I’ve got some questions about the empty building tours. So, with this initial tour that you did at the 12 buildings, you had 44 people come to do the tours. What was your initial goal going into it? Like what, if we can accomplish one thing out of this, doing these tours, what would that be? And then with that goal, you mentioned talking about it everywhere, but

Deb Brown (19:48.142)
Sure.

Brandon Burton (20:10.22)
Who was it that you were really targeting to be on those tours?

Deb Brown (20:14.114)
Very good question. So the initial goal was to change the conversation from, we suck, we have empty buildings, to look at the possibilities. Look at what we do have. There’s place for lots of new businesses here. And that’s important because if you’re thinking positively, these are the kind of things you can accomplish. But if you keep that negative attitude around you, it’s just hard to break through that.

So that was the initial goal, get the building shown and maintain that good conversation and get people excited again. Excuse me. Generally, we’ve seen chambers, economic development groups, even local community organizations do put these tours on.

And you want to fill them with people that want to start businesses actually. So maybe it’s entrepreneurs, maybe it’s another business that wants to expand its footprint. Perhaps it’s, we never looked for big businesses. We were looking for the smaller businesses and how we can make that happen. A good example is three of the empty buildings went into the incubator project.

Brandon Burton (21:20.648)
So, that’s the plan. And that is the plan. And this is what I’m going to do.

Deb Brown (21:35.885)
which was just something I made up. I approached the owner and said, what if we helped entrepreneurs start a business and they could do that in your building, free rent first three months, reduce rent the rest of the year, they pay the utilities, the chamber will help with marketing and the SBDC will come in and help with the tools that they can provide. And she said, fine, sounds like a great idea.

Brandon Burton (21:47.011)
Because the treatment is being done in a way is not going cause any harm by any of the other things. And it must be a similar kind of treatment that involves the type of treatment.

Deb Brown (22:04.73)
And that really worked. That was phenomenal. And not just that, there were several different people that tried that idea out and a couple of them ended up buying buildings in town and expanded their initial footprint. So you just have to think a little differently, a little outside the box, give people a chance, lower those barriers to entry because that’s what an incubator project does.

If you think about buying a building, you know, there’s $100,000, another hundred grand to rehab it and fix it, and you haven’t even tried your idea out, makes no sense, right? So an incubator project gives you that opportunity to do that. I hope I answered your question. It kind of went off.

Brandon Burton (22:38.242)
Right.

Econ Dev Ops is the virtual assistant service built specifically for small Chambers of Commerce and Economic Development Organizations (EDOs)

Brandon Burton (22:50.722)
Yeah, very cool. Yeah, yeah, you did. In fact, as you were giving your response, it reminded me I had heard I was trying to remember where I’d heard it from. And I’m pretty sure it came from the book 13 ways to kill your community. Yes. And he talks about one of the ways to kill your community, obviously, uses reverse psychology, right? You don’t want to kill your community. But if you did, one of the things would be don’t paint. Like don’t

Deb Brown (23:06.146)
Doug, yeah.

Brandon Burton (23:20.514)
don’t keep things fresh, don’t keep things looking good. And he talks about the downtown environment and where there’s vacant lots, some communities put a little park, you know, in this vacant lot and, you know, updated the facade on the buildings. And I think it was in here where he even talks about putting posters up in the windows of some of these vacant buildings to show, you know, either how that building was used in the past. when there’s

When you’re walking down Main Street and you see this empty building, maybe it used to be a barber shop and you’ve got posters of a barber in there doing this, you could put posters, these screen posters on the windows to help people imagine what the space could be. And it’s not necessarily getting them in the doors and doing the empty building tour like you’re talking about, but it’s drawing attention to what can this space become?

What has it been in the past? What can it become? And keeping it beautiful, keeping the area looking nice, making sure that there’s not broken windows in these buildings, because that just spirals into bigger things.

Deb Brown (24:31.234)
And you know, I want to piggyback on that because it doesn’t have to be the building owner that does all of that. You know, I follow this lawn mowing service on TikTok and they actually go to people’s houses and mow the yards for free. man, that stuff is addicted. But we call those ninjas where what if…

Brandon Burton (24:46.4)
Yes, yes, I’ve seen that.

Deb Brown (24:54.54)
Me and a couple of my friends went and washed windows on one of those empty buildings. Just wash the windows and swept the sidewalk. That makes a big difference because people notice, are they doing in there? Look, the windows are clean. Sometimes if it’s a local owner, they get a phone call that says, what’s going on? I see your windows are clean. It’s little ninja things that other people can do. What are they gonna do? Are they gonna tell you to dirty the windows again? Of course not, right?

Brandon Burton (25:23.04)
That’s right.

Deb Brown (25:23.342)
So how can we as community members become a ninja and help? What things can we do? You have an empty lot in town and you’d like a restaurant, you know what, go take a card table with a couple of your friends and eat lunch there every day. Because you know, people are going to drive by and go, what the hell is Deb doing over there? And they’re going to stop or call me and I’m going to say, we want a restaurant here. So we’re trying the idea out.

Don’t be afraid to take those tiny steps to get people thinking and talking about what you’re doing. It matters.

Brandon Burton (25:59.009)
Yeah, I love that. I love that. Those little things matter. So back with the focus on the empty building tour, I imagine there’s some level of coordination when trying to track down the owners of the buildings, if they’re a local owner, if they’re out of town owner, if they’ve got a realtor that they’re using. How do you gain access to these buildings and coordinate?

Deb Brown (26:07.522)
Yes.

Deb Brown (26:22.548)
So that’s easier than you think. The majority of small town realtors that I know anyway, know their community very well. And they know the history of the buildings that they’re responsible for. For us, that was the perfect outreach to get in touch with all. We asked all the realtors in town, let’s sit down and visit because we want to do something with these buildings you’d like to sell or rent or fill, right?

Brandon Burton (26:25.324)
Okay.

Brandon Burton (26:31.948)
Yeah.

Brandon Burton (26:48.065)
Right?

Deb Brown (26:50.048)
So those were willing partners in the progress of it. Like I said, I counted 14, 12 came on the tour. And one of those actually backed out at the very last minute because that kind of stuff happens, right? And ended up he had a building that probably shouldn’t have been toured. And that’s why he backed out. It happens, right? It happens. you know, one person, the chamber director does not do all this work by themselves.

Brandon Burton (27:05.75)
Sure.

Brandon Burton (27:11.456)
Yeah. Yeah.

Deb Brown (27:19.948)
You will lose your mind. This is an opportunity where you can, yeah, no, you need to gather as a crowd and people that want to participate in this project with you. It will be usually the realtors and the building owners. Some of the local ones just pick up the phone and call them. Or you know they go to lunch at this restaurant every Wednesday, go sit down and visit with them. You know these people. This is not difficult.

Brandon Burton (27:21.73)
I’m glad you said that.

Brandon Burton (27:44.406)
Yeah.

Deb Brown (27:48.399)
Often we make projects hard. You know, so maybe I don’t know Connie, but I know that my board president does, and I’m going to say, can you go talk to Connie, and here’s what we want to know. So use your connections, and don’t be afraid to ask other people, what are your ideas? What do you think we should be doing? The newspaper was thrilled to be involved, and they came up with their own idea about follow-up and how

Brandon Burton (27:48.512)
That’s right.

Deb Brown (28:16.3)
they can be most effective with these new businesses. So the more you work with lots of people, the more ideas, and you want to try them all because you don’t know which ideas are going to work and which aren’t. if the idea doesn’t work, so what? It just didn’t work. Go to the next one, right?

Brandon Burton (28:28.876)
Yeah.

Brandon Burton (28:32.714)
Yeah.

So would you have everybody meet up at the chamber office and then walk to these buildings or would you caravan or how would you gather to begin this tour? Right, yeah.

Deb Brown (28:38.9)
No.

So to do the actual tour, mean? So we didn’t do it that way because we wanted people to come and go, say, you may only want to look at three buildings. You don’t want to look at all 12 buildings. So you would pick up your map or download it. And you knew from four to seven, you could go look at the buildings. So counting was interesting because we had somebody in each location that counted the number of people that were serious. They came in to look at stuff.

Brandon Burton (28:55.678)
Okay, gotcha.

Deb Brown (29:12.43)
By serious, mean stayed, had a treat, and asked a few questions. That’s serious enough, right? So I wouldn’t recommend doing a ride around tour unless that’s something you want to do. Maybe you have a group of, Centerville, South Dakota had this idea. They had empty buildings that were not open.

Brandon Burton (29:19.009)
Yeah.

Brandon Burton (29:27.852)
Red.

Deb Brown (29:39.819)
So they decided to meet downtown and they did a walk around of their empty buildings. And I think there were six or seven. And the economic developer knew, again, somebody that knew most of the people in town. And they just walked around and talked about the history of the building and what could be possible, answered questions. And I think they had maybe 14 people on that tour. It’s a tiny town. It was perfect for them. Esteline, I think they’re South Dakota.

Brandon Burton (30:02.452)
Okay.

Deb Brown (30:09.58)
The weather was not the greatest when they did theirs. So they decided to do just a mini tour for their board and a few building owners. They wanted to try the idea out. Let’s work with our board and see how this is going to work. And that worked for them because it was a smaller group, a new director that didn’t quite know how to be a chamber director yet. He’s really learning and he’s great. But this was good for him to try it out and see what his board thought.

And of course it was positive because you bring a group of interested people together talking about the possible success of your community. How could it not work out?

Brandon Burton (30:49.322)
Right. Yeah, I love that.

Deb Brown (30:50.754)
Yeah, it doesn’t have to be huge. can be work what works in your community.

Brandon Burton (30:57.1)
Yeah, yep. And you’ve shared some great examples of how different communities have taken it and adapted it to fit and work for their communities. So I love that. Well, Deb, as we start to wrap things up, I wanted to ask you on behalf of the chamber leaders that are out there listening who are wanting to take their organization up to the next level, what kind of tip or action item might you share with them as they try to accomplish that goal?

Deb Brown (31:27.79)
So I have a couple of things. The first one that I suggested just about everybody is to host a coffee and calendars event. And how this works is perhaps you want to work with a select group of people.

it might be your nonprofit organizations, invite them to come over for coffee and bring their calendars. And what you’re gonna do is talk about the next three months on the calendars of what people are doing. You wanna share information and see if there’s any way that you can collaborate or work together. The way that we did it is, I think we, maybe 10 people there, and we met.

I don’t even remember where we met. Doesn’t matter. It doesn’t have to be at the chamber at City Hall. can be at the coffee shop for that matter. And I asked people to go around and tell us who they were, what organization they were with, and tell us one thing that we may not know about their organization. And we found out that Building Families, a nonprofit organization, had funding to give to daycare, possible daycare owners to help

Brandon Burton (32:17.27)
Good evening.

Brandon Burton (32:26.914)
and the other organization. And without them, there’s no chance of a government to get money to make the big bang without the contribution.

Deb Brown (32:41.358)
If you have a house and you wanna start your own daycare, but you need to get licensed, it would help with the licensing. Maybe buy new toys, maybe put a fence up, just those small things that are necessary, but an individual may not have. That’s huge. You know how hard it is to find childcare these days. So to have an organization have that kind of funding, was a big deal and we didn’t know it. And I’m the chamber director and might’ve thought I should know it, right?

Brandon Burton (32:45.214)
Okay.

Brandon Burton (33:06.73)
Yeah.

Deb Brown (33:08.64)
So you start with that so you learn about each other and then you start looking at calendars. So maybe you’re having an event February 14th and so am I at one o’clock, both of us. Can we partner? Can I do mine at 10 and you do yours at one so we can have people in town the whole day? Begin to have these coffee and calendars kind of conversations on ways to work together to collaborate for the benefit of the community.

Brandon Burton (33:35.648)
That’s a great idea. Great.

Deb Brown (33:36.36)
Anybody can do that. Chambers can do that, but so can the local church society. mean, think about who could do that. So that’s my first tip.

Take the small steps. Not everything has to be a big deal. Find out from your membership, what is it that they want? I used to have one of my staff, part-time staff, was a retired school first grade teacher. That should tell you. Nobody told Joanne, no. So she would make the phone calls to members and say, Deb wants to come over for half an hour and have a conversation with you. And book the appointments. And I’d go with my notebook and just simply ask, so.

Brandon Burton (34:08.396)
Yeah.

Deb Brown (34:19.244)
What can we do for you? What is it that you want? And they were frankly surprised because nobody had ever asked them that. Generally we go with our hand open, right? Find out what your members want and how you can help them and how each other can help each other. We’re in the business of making our communities the best they can possibly be by supporting our local businesses and our members.

Brandon Burton (34:29.751)
Yeah.

Deb Brown (34:48.332)
Remember that. Continue to support your local businesses and your members in the way that they ask for help.

Brandon Burton (34:54.498)
Great pieces of advice. I love it. I like asking everyone I have on the show as we look to the future of Chambers of Commerce, how do you see the future of Chambers and their purpose going forward?

Deb Brown (34:59.629)
Thank you.

Deb Brown (35:11.386)
We live in this space, particularly those of us over 50, where we have one foot in the old way and one foot in the new way. So the new way of doing things is generally taking the small steps, building connections, gathering our crowd, figuring out how to work together as a group or as an organization. And the old way is letting your board make all the decisions and, and

deciding without input from the community, figure out how to get from the old way to the new way. Those communities that can do that are going to do really, really well. Yeah. And I’m not young, just you’re saying, I understand the old way and I know why it worked when it did, but it’s time for a new way. Let’s support as many people as we can.

Brandon Burton (35:52.578)
Yeah, I think that’s a great point. Yeah.

Brandon Burton (36:04.395)
Yeah.

And change can be hard. And if we can be helpful in helping to bridge the old way to the new way, let’s help make that transition a little bit easier.

Deb Brown (36:16.204)
And know, change is the only constant. There’s always gonna be change, right? The other stuff comes and goes too, right? Yeah.

Brandon Burton (36:20.438)
That’s right. That’s right. Yeah. Well, Deb, I wanted to give you an opportunity to share any contact information for listeners or anywhere you’d want to point them if they wanted to reach out and connect and learn more about what it is you have to offer or how you can help their communities. Where would you point them?

Deb Brown (36:42.898)
So to find out about us, if you go to saveyour.town and it’s S-A-V-E-Y-O-U-R dot T-O-W-N.

Wealth of information, sign up for a free newsletter, read the stories and the articles about what different small towns are doing and enjoy yourself at the site. Both Becky and I have written books and we’re pretty excited about it. Mine is, you mentioned it, From Possibilities to Reality. And you can find that one at saveyour.town. You’ll find the article that talks about the books. If you go to saveyour.town/books.

You’ll see both of our books there. Just sign up for the newsletter. It’s free and we share stories from people that we meet on the road, emails that we receive, from people like you that have stories to tell us. We are committed and invested in our rural and small towns and we want everyone else to be as well.

Brandon Burton (37:47.01)
Yeah, very good. I will make sure that’s in our show notes for this episode to make it easy for listeners to find the website and find you and find the book and reach out and connect. But Dev, this has been a great conversation. I’m glad we’re able to get you on the show and to really explore this empty building tours idea and some of the success stories that have come out of this, not just in your community, but in other communities that have adopted this strategy. I think it’s a really great idea.

Deb Brown (37:51.544)
Thank you.

Brandon Burton (38:16.384)
So thank you for sharing it with us.

Deb Brown (38:16.707)
Thank you. And thank you so much, Brandon, for having me on the show. feel for anybody has a chamber question that I might be able to answer, just shoot me an email, deb@saveyour.town. Be happy to answer.

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Importance of Vibrant Communities with Christopher Germain

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Brandon Burton (00:01.171)
Hello, Chamber Champions. Welcome to Chamber Chat Podcast. I’m your host, Brandon Burton, and it’s my goal here on the podcast to introduce you to people and ideas to better help you serve your Chamber members and your community. Today’s guest is Christopher Germain, CEO of the Lake Superior Community Partnership, where he’s been making waves since stepping into the role in 2022. With a background that includes everything from environmental regulation to urban planning and political communications, Christopher brings a diverse and dynamic perspective to regional economic development. Before LSCP, he spent six years with the Michigan Economic Development Corporation, helping communities across the state through redevelopment ready community programs.

A proud Michigan native and Northern Michigan University alum, Christopher fell in love with Marquette and the Upper Peninsula and has become one of the strongest advocates. His leadership at LSCP has introduced an ambitious, comprehensive economic development model that is tackling major regional issues like housing, childcare, air service, and small business support.

When he’s not working, you’ll probably find him out exploring the natural beauty of the Upper Peninsula, cooking up something delicious in the kitchen, or even logging some time, or even logging some hours in flight training. He shares his adventures with his husband Aaron and their energetic cattle dog, Woody.

Christopher, I’m excited to have you with us today here on Chamber Chat podcast. I’d love to give you an opportunity to say hello to all the Chamber Champions who are out there listening and to share something interesting about yourself so we can all get to know you a little better.

Christopher Germain (01:51.448)
Sure, yeah, thanks, Brandon, for having me this morning. It’s really great to be here. We’re excited about this. know, additionally, beyond the flight training, which is usually the part people find the most interesting about me, you know, I’ve been teaching myself to code video games as well, because I don’t have enough to do, apparently. So that has been a really cool kind of feature as well. But honestly, my dog doesn’t let me do anything that sits down. know, if anyone else owns a cattle dog or a blue healer, they would understand.

Brandon Burton (02:17.321)
right? That’s awesome.

Christopher Germain (02:19.209)
Yeah.

Brandon Burton (02:20.585)
Yeah, the flight training, is super interesting. A friend of mine is a flight trainer. has his own company doing flight training. And last Christmas, I had the idea, I reached out to him, like, hey, would you take my wife and I up to look at Christmas lights? And it was pretty cool to look at the Christmas lights from the sky. But there’s a lot of cool things you can do from the air. The video game coding too, that is interesting.

Christopher Germain (02:26.509)
you

Brandon Burton (02:50.539)
That’s a first that I’ve heard. So is that a, what drew the interest to coding video games?

Christopher Germain (02:58.317)
So I learned it a number of years ago and I kind of lost it. But honestly, what’s re-driven my renewal of it is an old video game from like the early 2000s that they don’t make anymore. And I’ve been trying to recreate it. So I’ve been using Claude and Chat GPT and all those AI coding assistants, you know, in addition to those years of actual school now.

games as best I can. So it’s pretty cool.

Brandon Burton (03:22.259)
That’s awesome. That is really cool. Well, tell us a little bit more about the Lake Superior Community Partnership to give us an idea of the size of the organization, staff, scope of work, budget, just to kind of set the stage for our discussion today.

Christopher Germain (03:38.383)
Yeah, absolutely. So the Lake Superior Community Partnership has been around for 28 years. We’re always say we were an organization that was born out of crisis. So in the mid 90s up here, we had an Air Force base called K.I. Sawyer Air Force Base. They used to launch B-52 bombers from it during the Cold War. And that Air Force base closed in the mid 90s, like a lot of other bases. And so there were three chambers at the time. They all formed into a single chamber called the Lake Superior Community Partnership and started down this path.

towards greater economic development in addition to chamber services. So today we’re an organization that really focuses heavily on economic development but retains those chamber pieces as well. We have 400 members currently, which is about a 30 % growth over the last three years as we’ve really changed our model. A 12-person team, about a $900,000 operating budget, but a multimillion dollar budget when you factor in the grants that we’re entrusted with from our state and federal partners as well. So…

We tackle honestly everything from traditional chamber services like business after hours and ribbon cuttings and breakfast events to a full-scale business retention expansion program, tackle issues like housing and childcare. We do advocacy in Lansing and DC. My friends joke that I’m never home, you know, because we’re always so active doing something, so.

Brandon Burton (04:54.121)
That’s right. Man, yeah, that’s enough to keep you busy there. Luckily, the 12 staff helped to get that done, I’m sure. that’s a…

Christopher Germain (05:05.806)
They sure do, and that’s about a 50 % growth over the last few years. So it’s nice as we’ve grown, our team has been able to grow.

Brandon Burton (05:12.598)
Yeah, absolutely. Well, for our discussion today, we’ll focus the majority of our time around the idea of the importance of vibrant communities and the different aspects that revolve around that topic. So we will dive in deep on that as soon as we get back from this quick break.

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All right, Christopher, we’re back. As I mentioned before the break, we’re talking about the importance of vibrant communities. So what does that mean for you there in the Lake Superior area as far as building a vibrant community? know communities look different everywhere, right? So for you guys, what does that look like to have a vibrant community and what does a chamber do to help facilitate that?

Christopher Germain (05:58.157)
Absolutely. So honestly, I think the test for vibrant community is pretty simple and it’s are you proud of your community, right? Every single community looks different but the first step to asking anyone to invest in your community is whether they see everyone around them believing in the future of that community. And so for some places that’s super vibrant, downtowns with tall buildings and lots of restaurants.

For other places, it’s vibrant neighborhoods, right? Homes that are well taken care of, community organizations that band together, small businesses, right? That really define the community. So up here in Marquette County, which is geographically the largest county in the state of Michigan and one of the largest east of the Mississippi, we have a bunch of different communities. So honestly, what it looks like in the city of Marquette is different than what it looks like on the west side of the county in Ishpemine and Ragani or in Big Bay or in Gwynne, or they’re the places that we cover as a countywide organization.

So, but to give you maybe a sense, you know, of some really great examples of what we think is driving community vibrancy is obviously downtown, right? Areas that people can walk, they’re walkable, the businesses are filled, there’s events. And we’ve seen some really incredible strides on that front that we still talk about here, including the Community of the Year here in Michigan, which is right here in Marquette County, thanks to all of their downtown vibrancy.

Brandon Burton (07:15.067)
Yeah, well, tell us more about that Community of the Year. That’s awesome. you’re right, for building that vibrant community, you do kind of have to have that hub, right? That central gathering place, that downtown, like you mentioned. And there’s going to be a different feel in different communities or different parts of the communities. being able to have that focus and that hub, I think, is important. But yeah, tell us about the award. That’s awesome.

Christopher Germain (07:18.798)
Yeah. Sure.

Christopher Germain (07:41.389)
Yeah, so, you know, the city of the Gani, which is about 10 miles outside the city of Marquette, has this incredible city manager. to give a shout out to Nate Heffron and all the work that he’s done around the community to drive that pride. This idea, again, that the Gani is a community that historically has a mining heritage to it. And a lot of mining communities have struggled in recent years. But when Nate came on board, he was able to harness that community pride that did exist and really leverage it into something else. And so.

using about a million dollars in state grants, they totally overhauled their downtown a few years ago, which has then resulted in this incredible resurgence of commercial and housing developments all throughout downtown. So there’s fire pits now, there’s events, they’re constantly still doing new events on top of everything else they already have. They’ve seen the biggest turnover in commercial investment they’ve ever had in their history as far as they can tell. And there’s just this sense of pride now.

And so the Michigan Municipal League every single year identifies what they call a community of excellence. It’s actually a really competitive award. They name finalists and you actually basically have to lobby for the votes to be named that. And so to get that from a town of a few thousand people here in Northern Michigan, which only has 3 % of the state’s population in our entire Upper Peninsula, is a huge win for us up here. And so we’re really proud of the work that they’ve done, but it’s translated to additional businesses.

additional economic activity that’s still spilling over today.

Brandon Burton (09:07.079)
Yeah, that’s great. So I very much think that in order to have a vibrant community, there has to be good things going on in the community, right? There needs to be jobs. There needs to be a good economy. There needs to be those opportunities to get out and connect with others and to be able to enjoy what the community has to offer.

From the chamber perspective, what are some of the approaches and you guys are heavily involved with economic developments? So what are some of those things you guys are doing to drive the stronger economy there to be able to help, you know, in the end have that vibrant community in a place where people want to be?

Christopher Germain (09:49.187)
Yeah, so ultimately we’re taking a really multi-pronged strategy here. So the core of our work for a long time has always been a business retention and expansion program, of course, which I think it’s important to have your pulse on the business community to understand what those barriers are, not only locally, but at the state and federal level. But in recent years, we’ve really expanded that to really focus on our overall health of our communities. What does that quality of life look like? And so for us, that means tackling issues like housing.

It means helping with the availability of childcare. In a rural area like ours, it means ensuring that we have convenient and accessible flight service. A lot of rural areas might have one or two flights a day. And so that’s not exactly conducive to business. If you need to get out and that flight schedule doesn’t work. And then even for us, we dive even deeper and then we talk about rural healthcare. We talk about energy costs, which are very high in the Upper Peninsula compared to most of the country and how all of that ultimately impacts

how people feel about their community, right? And again, that sense of pride. It’s so easy, frankly, to derail community efforts, right, with the negativity that you can see on social media or that people show up to public meetings. And so working as a chamber to go meet with those businesses, to hold public events, to bring as much from outside, like from underneath, I should say, the paywall, right, a membership of the LFCP and just do good community work.

is really vital to us. And it’s possible because of our public sector partners really coming to the table. I think it’s primarily probably due to our economic development side of the house versus the chamber side of the house. But by combining the two, we’re able to leverage the benefits of both, right, and help our small businesses connect with the public sector and connect with their neighbors and connect with each other. And so they can actually offer their services, you know, in a coffee shop from the art shop down the street.

We see those kind of connections happen too and that drives that community pride too.

Brandon Burton (11:45.384)
Yeah. So what really stood out to me was the flight service and being able to have a focus on that and help bring more flights and more people in. How do you approach something like that? I mean, I think, you know, a flight will come and go as there’s a demand for it is what I would assume, but maybe I’m assuming wrong. So how do you approach that to try to get more flights coming in and out of town?

Christopher Germain (12:04.856)
sure.

Christopher Germain (12:11.116)
Yeah, you know, so it’s interesting for us up here in the Upper Peninsula, we have six commercial airports for an area of about 300,000 people. Now we’re really geographically dispersed, right? So it makes sense that you can’t just have one. But five of those six airports, federal subsidies through a program called Essential Air Service. So program that was set up in the 80s when the airlines deregulated and basically it was meant to help transition rural areas as consolidation happened. They would maintain

Brandon Burton (12:24.691)
Yeah.

Christopher Germain (12:40.142)
critical air service if you were too far away from a hub. It’s become one those programs that has existed kind of into perpetuity, right, whether or not, and our airport actually doesn’t get essential air service because at the time of deregulation, we had two airlines and one of the requirements was you can only have one. And so for us, what air service looks like is actually going to meeting with airlines and doing what we call demand and leakage studies where we actually see what demand is generating in our travel shed and where it’s going.

In our case, we’re actually losing 52 % of the demand that generates in our travel shed to places that are either subsidized by the federal government or folks are driving the six hours to Chicago to take an international flight, which sometimes that makes sense. So we literally go meet with airlines. We do the data studies. We do marketing. And we work directly with our airport to make sure that they’re enhancing the overall experience. in the last state budget,

The LSCP was really the one who put in the request for three million dollar state investment in our airport primarily because we don’t get federal subsidies and we’re now working through how to spend those dollars in a way that’ll drive long-term fiscal sustainability for the airport which will make it more appealing to airlines and I think part of you all of that work we’ve done for years just last week maybe two weeks ago now actually the

United Airlines announced that they’re coming to Marquette-Sawyer Regional Airport, it will be the only airport in the region that has three, all three major airlines coming out of our airport going to Chicago, Minneapolis, and Detroit. So it’s been a collective effort. It really takes a whole village to make that happen, but you just have to stay proactive, sort of the answer.

Brandon Burton (14:21.181)
Yeah, that’s awesome. That’s a great win to be able to see American come in and to be able to open those doors. Yeah, yeah, that’s amazing.

Christopher Germain (14:26.766)
Yeah, we were very surprised but happy. Two years ago, I was out in Utah, sky west, which is one of the biggest regional carriers in the country. We had lost service in Minneapolis in 2022 during the pilot shortage and the plane shortage prompted by COVID. We were able to get it back starting this year and it’s been a game changer for our businesses, especially who have business out west.

They can now hop on a plane in the morning via Minneapolis and make it out to the west coast by lunchtime.

Brandon Burton (14:58.119)
Yeah, that’s awesome. That is, that’s a game changer for sure. So I know you guys recently had a local economic exchange. You want to tell us what that was about and how that plays into this whole conversation of building vibrant communities?

Christopher Germain (15:16.686)
Yeah, absolutely. So we were really proud of this event. It’s been on my list since I started in this role in 2022 to just bring together the public sector, the private sector, our nonprofit partners and have a day focused on solutions, right? We sort of know what our challenges are. And so the whole idea was to bring folks together, talk about how we move the needle on issues like housing and energy and childcare, rural healthcare, all of those issues. And so the day had about 120 attendees, which I…

say for a first time event is a really big win. We’ve had nothing but positive feedback about it. But ironically, you know, people laughed at us a little bit when we started out the day with a data dump, right? Just tons of data. We had the Federal Reserve come and go through their data. We had our own data. And I think we saw some rolling eyes and some confusion, but it really set the foundation really well for folks for the rest of the day. And so between that, from there, we went to an inspirational story from the village of Casapolis, which is an incredible success story here in Michigan.

a small village that just decided enough was enough, right? And they were just going to go after every resource they could go after to make their community more vibrant. And that led to these great breakout sessions and a legislative panel. And so we were just so proud of the events. And in the month since we’ve had it, the momentum has been very real. We’ve had more people come to the table. We’ve had more ideas come out of the woodwork than we can even handle right now. And so that’s a good problem to have.

We’re really proud of it as we move into planning for 2026 and figuring out what are our focus areas. They’ll likely come out of that event.

Brandon Burton (16:47.175)
Right. Now that event sounds like it’s great and really just drawing attention to some of these good things that are happening throughout the region. But at the beginning, as we started talking about vibrant communities, I really liked what you had to say about really creating a place that you want to be. it may be tough to measure, you know, what is, are we a vibrant community? Have we increased our vibrancy? we decreasing? Where are we at? But what are some of those

marks you look at as far as is your community vibrant? it going in the right direction? Is it going the opposite way? What are we doing to help kind of regenerate that excitement and desire to be a part of the community? What are some of those things that you look at to measure that?

Christopher Germain (17:32.921)
Sure. So, you know, I think there’s, yeah, there’s qualitative and quantitative stuff, right, that you can look at. And so I think on the quantitative stuff, there’s some simple things like population growth, right? Are you seeing new housing being built? Are you seeing new students in your school districts? Are you seeing investment, right, in your downtowns your business community? And you can ask your businesses if they’re seeing growing sales because that likely indicates new events or more people coming to those businesses, choosing to spend their dollars locally.

We can look at city municipal tax revenue, right? As well as a really big key indicator of a vibrant community. But it really is that qualitative stuff. I always get those two mixed up. The qualitative stuff that you walk downtown and you see folks, you know, are they pointing to the shops, right? Are they deciding to move events that maybe left the community back into the community? Are people taking ideas that they have and actually finding the other people in the community who also share those and can…

create those ideas. And like one really great example is there’s a group of folks in the western side of the county that are looking to create a Christmas market for the first time ever. And I honestly think maybe five years ago, you would have found a lot of naysayers, right? Who would have said there was just no way this is going to happen. And today that momentum feels so real. And so they had no problem finding people to form a committee and finding partners and finding people to build stalls. And so

it’s that kind of qualitative stuff that is really hard to measure. Economic development, think in general, you we’ve really always measured ourselves based on investment and job creation. And those are really core metrics that we need to have, but there’s a lot more to economic development than just that piece of it. And so I think that’s where community really comes in.

Brandon Burton (19:16.795)
Yeah, I think, you know, we’ve all seen and talking for the people listening as well. We’ve all seen the communities for the downtown is just basically a ghost town, right? Where it’s just depressing. It’s sad. It’s, you know, it hasn’t had any life going on there in 20 or 30 years, maybe. versus the communities where there’s stuff happening, you know, there’s events going on. There’s holiday things. There’s, you know, all these different things that happen and drive people out there.

Christopher Germain (19:30.84)
Mm-hmm.

Brandon Burton (19:47.012)
and really build that sense of community. One of those things you had mentioned as far as measuring the growth was the population growth and the housing. I know housing is one of those things that you guys are trying to tackle as an organization. What are some of the approaches? I mean, obviously, you guys are creating a vibrant community because it becomes enough of an issue that the chamber needs to say, hey, what are we going to do about housing? So what are some of those solutions?

Christopher Germain (20:01.88)
Yep. That’s right.

Christopher Germain (20:12.846)
Sure.

Brandon Burton (20:16.655)
the approaches you guys are taking to housing.

Christopher Germain (20:20.014)
Sure, so we could do a whole podcast on this brand and just in alone. And as a trained planner, of course, we have a plan, right? And so we have an eight point plan right now that’s really focused heavily on things like collecting data and educating the public, right? Arming folks who want to say yes in my backyard and showing up and giving public officials cover to approve housing projects. But really there’s some really cool, tangible things that are happening too.

Brandon Burton (20:22.055)
Right?

Christopher Germain (20:45.218)
Marquette County is the first county that we’re aware of, at least similar to ours, that has a dedicated housing specialist. So somebody whose full job is basically to work with developers and work with local government officials to move the needle on projects. And he also happens to be the executive director of our land bank. So we have a kind of a one-two punch there in terms of having two great tools. The LSTP and a number of other partners helped fund that job and our position, I should say initially, and we really…

move forward with that. But we’re also working on things like pre-reviewed housing blueprints. We are collecting data through a target market analysis that shows our market could hold up to 10,000 new and rehabilitated housing units over the next five years. We don’t think we’ll hit those numbers. We think that’s where the market breaks, but there’s clearly a demand for those. And the story I always tell people honestly is

I went to Northern, you in the late 2000s, as you mentioned, the introduction and like a lot of folks, I left after that, not because I wanted to, because I just couldn’t find an opportunity in the field I was in. Ended up in Ohio and spent the next 14 years trying to get back. And in 2022, I was recruited back to this position. And the night before I had to give the board an answer, my answer was no. And it wasn’t because I didn’t want to be here. It was because I literally couldn’t find anywhere to live.

And so it was too hard to move from Grand Rapids. And I had to find something that my husband would also be happy with. And so something, know, a view of the lake and all that kind of stuff. But it is still was, you know, I don’t ever want anyone to have to go through that situation. And we lose far too many northern students who want to stay here or people just in general who want to stay here. And they start to get priced out as second homes get built and as Mark Hat, you know, particularly does get more expensive.

to live in. So that’s really why housing is a critical issue because if the folks who work in our restaurants and run our schools and operate our libraries, right, and public safety and all these folks can’t find places to live, you lose the vibrancy of the community. And so that’s really why we take an issue. And so we have a website, it’s called housingnow906.org that I always tell everyone to go to. Everything we do around housing is there. We’re happy to share it.

Christopher Germain (22:56.418)
We’re really proud of our leadership position on housing because I think a lot of economic developers in general would tell you housing wasn’t on our radar even five years ago. It was somebody else’s problem. And now I think we’ve really figured out that we’re losing projects. We are losing deals and losing expansions because our businesses can’t find the workers that they need to expand. So they’re opting to just not expand. so housing is the real deal there.

Brandon Burton (23:24.883)
Wow. I almost feel like you needed to have that experience of not being able to find housing to really be able to share your personal story about why this is so important. know, the community loses out on talent. Like you said, the vibrancy when we don’t have places for these people to live and be a part of the community. So that’s a, I love that you guys are approaching that and making that a priority there at the organization.

Christopher Germain (23:51.543)
Absolutely. Yeah, it’s necessity. Every meeting I have, Brandon, housing, housing, housing, it doesn’t matter what it is. Housing comes up.

Brandon Burton (23:58.634)
Yeah, and there’s a lot of creative opportunities out there that I’ve heard from different chambers. And each one is unique to their own community. it’s fun to see those answers, those solutions come to pass. Well, Christopher, I wanted to ask for those listening who are interested in taking their chamber up to the next level, what kind of tip or action item might you share with them in trying to accomplish that goal?

Christopher Germain (24:31.118)
So, you know, the thing I always tell folks is chambers should be talking to their local planners, like their local community planners. And you know what? It feels like an odd one to throw out there, but the decisions that your planning commissions and your planners make around zoning and regulatory reform and the future of the community impact the business community. Right. And so having a really deep understanding of those and not having a confrontational relationship with them, I think is really critical to any chamber really being successful.

And again, I say as a trained planner and as a board member of the Michigan Association of Planning. So like I see both of those worlds and I see how planners also don’t necessarily understand chambers very well or economic development in general. so having that dialogue, I think is important. So breakout, right, of the traditional chamber training modules, which are again, very helpful. And I do a lot of those as well, but go to a planning conference, take a zoning course, take something that can really help you understand.

with that other side of the regulatory environment and seeing, and it’ll make you a much more effective advocate for your businesses when you understand.

Brandon Burton (25:36.754)
Yeah, I have not heard that as a tip yet and that is so wise as I think of a chamber executive just being able to understand what’s possible from the community planning standpoint, being able to understand what obstacles they’re dealing with as well, what their constraints are, what their blind spots are, and being able to come to the table and say, here from the business community, these are the things that are important to have a vibrant community. So how can we make these things match up?

and find solutions together, but without having those conversations ahead of time and kind of knowing what those community planners are thinking and what they’re working with makes it really hard to walk into those conversations without having it be a little bit confrontational because you’re coming from perspectives that neither of you understand. So I think that’s such a wise tip. Yeah, I love that.

Christopher Germain (26:29.658)
Exactly. You know, and the example I always get folks brand into is I sat on the master plan steering committee for the city of Marquette and early on we had the set principles, right, guiding principles for the plan. And one of them was to protect neighborhoods. And, my response was like, yes, like I love the area where they live in and I don’t want it to massively change. But if we’re setting out to not change anything, we’re not creating new business opportunities and we’re not creating opportunities for the neighborhood to really evolve in a way we want it to.

And I think it took the business community pushing to change that a little bit. And so it’s a balance, right? But really, our local government partners and planners, not our enemies. They really can be our allies when we understand each other.

Brandon Burton (27:10.589)
Right. Yep, absolutely. Very well said. Well, I like asking everyone I have on the show, as we look to the future of Chambers of Commerce, how do you see the future of Chambers and their purpose going forward?

Christopher Germain (27:27.864)
So I think there’s always going to be this human need for connection, right? And this idea of learning from each other and partnering together. And so I see chambers that are embracing technology like AI to amplify their value for their members. And whether it’s a smarter business listing or taking your networking events that maybe are heavily on networking right now and incorporating an educational component to them, that’s what we did with our breakfast and business series. So it’s not just about having coffee with your friends, but…

you always leave having learned something or met somebody new. That’s where I really feel the future is continuing to evolve in that way, but also integrating economic development. I’ll admit like our structure is very complex and sometimes it is hard to balance the economic development and the chamber side of things. And sometimes quite frankly, they’re in conflict. And so trying to figure out how to balance those two can be really difficult. But I also think if chambers in their local communities have an opportunity to

partner with their economic development organizations to consider some sort of structural marriage, I would really encourage them to do that because I also think that really is the future if you can plan it correctly. There’s a lot of models that don’t work too, but if you can find the one that fits, you’re going to be better off as a chamber working directly with your economic development organization than you are as separate entities.

Brandon Burton (28:45.789)
Yeah, yeah. And there’s no harm in looking to other communities and seeing how they do it and what’s working for them and seeing what those structures look like that are working. All of us have those other communities we look to and maybe want to be a little bit more like and look and see what those structures look like in those communities. So I think that’s a great.

Christopher Germain (28:54.721)
yeah.

Christopher Germain (29:06.956)
Absolutely our model today, I borrowed from someone downstate, you know, and I’m not shy about it. And so it works.

Brandon Burton (29:11.389)
There you go.

There you go. Well, Christopher, I wanted to ask for those listening who might want to reach out and connect with you and learn more about how you guys are doing there, how you guys are doing things there at the LSCP. Where would you point them? What would be the best way for them to reach out and connect with you?

Christopher Germain (29:33.106)
So honestly the easiest way is to find me on LinkedIn. My team jokes a lot that I’m on there more than I am on Facebook and so people can see that. But also you know our website marquette.org so marquette.org has all of our contact information so they can reach out to us directly that way for sure. Yeah I love to chat about this stuff you know I sort of stumbled into this world and like so many of us but I find it fascinating.

Brandon Burton (30:00.551)
That’s perfect. We’ll make sure we get both your LinkedIn account and your website on our show notes for this episode. So we’ll make it easy for listeners to be able to connect with you. But thank you for spending time with us today, sharing your insights, your experience with the listeners here at Chamber Chat podcast. Really appreciate you spending time with us today. I think it was a fun and insightful conversation as well. So thank you.

Christopher Germain (30:14.475)
you

Christopher Germain (30:26.456)
Awesome, thanks for having me Brandon, I appreciate it.

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Fostering Strong Engagement with Jessica Walden

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Brandon Burton (00:00.737)
Hello, Chamber Champions. Welcome to Chamber Chat podcast. I’m your host, Brandon Burton, and it’s my goal here on the podcast to introduce you to people and ideas to better help you serve your Chamber members and your community. Today’s guest is a dynamic leader and proud Macon native whose career has been defined by a passion for community vitality and economic growth.

In 2022, Jessica Walden was named president and CEO of the Greater Macon Chamber of Commerce, where she leads the organization to strengthen businesses, attract new industries, and enhance the quality of life for citizens across the region. Jessica brings more than two decades of experience in community and economic development, leadership training, and small business support.

Before taking the helm of the chamber, she served as a business and leadership advisor for the University of Georgia Small Business Development Center and the J.W. Fanning Institute for Leadership Development, connecting entrepreneurs and organizations with programs that foster growth and innovation. She has also helped launch leadership programs statewide addressing workforce development, entrepreneurship, DEI, and sustainable community transformation.

Her professional expertise is matched by her academic accomplishments. is the first person in Georgia to earn the entrepreneur led economic development certification from the International Economic Development Council.

She is a graduate of Leadership Georgia, Leadership Macon, and Georgia’s Academy for Economic Development. And she’s been an active contributor to numerous community boards, including Montessori & Macon, and the Bragg Jam Festival, and the Otis Reading Foundation. A graduate of Georgia State University with a degree in journalism and a minor in English, Jessica is known for her infectious enthusiasm, her deep commitment to Macon, and her vision for inclusive, sustainable growth.

Brandon Burton (02:00.359)
Jessica, I’m excited to have you with us today here on Chamber Chat podcast. I’d love to give you an opportunity to say hello to all the Chamber Champions who are out there listening. And if you would share something interesting about yourself so we can all get to know you a little better.

Jessica Walden (02:15.704)
Thank you so much, Brandon, and thank you for hosting a podcast like this. We were just speaking before the show began about how all of us chamber executives are big fans of R &D, a chance to really learn from each other. And I’m just, I’m thrilled to be here today and talk about what I love so much, which is my community of Macon, Georgia, and how it really brought me into the chamber world. What my bio didn’t mention, a lot of this came from a business that I owned

for over a decade, my husband and I operated a music history tour company called Rock Candy Tours. And we actually sold our tour company just two years ago to Visit Macon where it continues operating today under that very same name. But what I discovered with my tour company was just how much storytelling can benefit our community, how much storytelling gets us attention and relevancy and a chance to share so much more.

And for me, was just, was a natural opportunity. Even though I come from this community development, economic development background, my family history in Macon runs really deep. And it starts with the music business where my uncle and my father were the original managers of Otis Redding, the late great soul singer. And then later my uncle would go on to discover the Allman Brothers and my father would discover Lynyrd Skynyrd. And they operated right here in Macon where we became

became a capital of Southern rock and put making on the map through music. And so ironically enough, my chamber headquarters is located on that very same block where my uncle once had Capricorn Studios and where my dad did all of his work with his bands, including Lynyrd Skynyrd. And so it’s just so full circle to be here today and still sharing, making story using music as a continued platform. But I often get the

question, how does a kid who grew up in the rock and roll business end up a chamber president? Because that does seem like a big leap. But I tell everybody it’s a natural fit because at the end of the day, this is all talent, recruitment and retention. And it’s about being able to export our greatest good, which is often the story that we can share about our communities. so I find it to be natural, even though I don’t think my long hair

Brandon Burton (04:23.413)
Right?

Jessica Walden (04:45.484)
hippie parents and all that were at too many chamber meetings growing up.

Brandon Burton (04:50.167)
That is really cool though. So as far as interesting facts go that that’s high up on the rankings for me. You know over 350 episodes. That’s a pretty cool fact. yeah, awesome. Well, if you would tell us a little bit about the making chamber, just give us an idea of the size staff, the type of work you guys are involved with budget just to kind of set the stage for our conversation today.

Jessica Walden (04:57.002)
you

Jessica Walden (05:01.837)
Okay.

Jessica Walden (05:10.988)
Yeah.

Jessica Walden (05:16.929)
Yeah, absolutely. The Greater Macon Chamber of Commerce is one of the oldest chambers in the state of Georgia. So we are over 150 years old and we’re located Macon for anyone who doesn’t know we’re right in the heart of Georgia. So in order to get to the world’s largest airport or seaport, which is Atlanta and Savannah, you often have to come right through Macon. Our chamber has, today our chamber’s operating on roughly a $2 million budget.

The majority of that budget is in our special initiatives such as workforce development and that talent recruitment and retention. We have nearly 800 investors and we have a staff of an incredible staff of 10 here at our chamber. We just added on a new staff member just a couple weeks ago. We’re located in the heart of downtown Macon so we’re in our commercial business district. If anybody has any prior history of our chamber then they

remember our old building that was just off the interstate and that was still standing when I came on board almost three years ago but it is no longer there. We’ve actually bulldozed that building in anticipation of great community progress and we’ve moved our chamber headquarters across the river to the vibrant area of an incredible downtown renaissance that we’re experiencing here in Macon and this is where we operate.

much the traditional chamber initiatives and programming in the sense of we had a very packed house our last business after hours of the year last night but we also are into innovative community driven programming and in a big focus of ours now we really turned towards the the lighthouse of that talent retention piece so in addition to our greater together message for the business community is making bibs most significant organized business community

We also have launched and really along the drumbeat of Choose Makin, which is both a website and an initiative and a call to action. So we have a lot of that going on all at one time as many of us Chambers do. But it is, it’s a really…

Jessica Walden (07:36.974)
I like to say our chamber has really continued to progress with the times and right now the times in Macon are amazing. It’s excellent here. We have installed a new 12,000 seat amphitheater. We’ve got now home of the world’s largest pickleball arena of all things. Our downtown has been recognized by Main Street America as the great American Main Street. And we’re all working really hard together and collaboratively on

trying to make Macon’s Old Mulgee Mounds America’s next national park, which means big things for us. So while we’ve got this urban vibrancy piece, like we’re in the middle of a renaissance here, we’re also looking towards conservation and nature and creating this giant green space that will be a huge tourism boom for this region and this state.

Brandon Burton (08:31.947)
You know, 10 years ago, I don’t think any chambers were talking about pickleball. And now it’s such a part of our society, know, social outings, right?

Jessica Walden (08:36.768)
I know.

Jessica Walden (08:41.623)
vernacular now. Well, fun fact, fun fact about our pickleball, not only is it the world’s largest indoor pickleball arena,

But the whole story behind it is so incredible because it was, it was the, so I’m born and raised here in Macon and shopped at the Macon Mall, sat in Santa’s lap at the Macon Mall, was a total child of the late nineties, or I’m sorry, late eighties, early nineties mall scene. But like many malls in our nation, it went through an economic downturn and it just sat pretty much, you know, abandoned for all, except for a few anchors and

completely underutilized and we have some really visionary leadership here including our own mayor who saw more than it could be and so the world’s largest indoor pickleball arena is has been repurposed and is located in what was the make-a-mall or what is the make-a-mall I should still say and so now we affectionately call it the pickle mall.

Brandon Burton (09:42.86)
pickle mall. I love it. I also I really like when chambers are located in their downtown. I think it’s just it’s a good signaling of being right there in the heart of business and where things are happening. But it doesn’t have to be you know, for anyone listening who’s still on the interstate or you know, different type of location, but I do like it when the chambers in the downtown so

Jessica Walden (09:57.87)
Absolutely.

Jessica Walden (10:08.301)
Yeah, you know, it’s important to meet businesses where they are. And right now, such density of business is in our downtown. And the other piece of that is like right across the street from me is the Tubman African-American Museum. Our visit-making, our CBBR Tourism Bureau is right here. Our terminal stations, I like to think we’re very neatly positioned along the welcome corridor into our community, which I also think is so important for a chamber to be.

Brandon Burton (10:35.187)
It is. That’s great. Great alignment. So today we’re going to focus most of our conversation around fostering strong engagement. And that can be such a topic that chambers across the country are always thinking about. How can we better engage our members? How can we create a stronger community feeling? So we’ll dive into some of the approaches you guys have taken and really what strong engagement looks like, especially there in Macon. We’ll dive into that as soon as we get back from this quick break.

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Jessica, we’re back. As I mentioned before the break, we’re talking about what it looks like to foster strong engagement at your chamber. So maybe start by telling us what does strong engagement look like in Macon? What have you guys done to foster that and create that?

Jessica Walden (11:24.683)
Well, you there’s there’s always the numbers to back it up. And one thing we noticed was a trend. Now, again, I came on board three years ago, very new to the chamber world, but I wasn’t new to make in. And for me, it was signaling a whole new chapter for us. Like I said, we we moved buildings. We we completely we’d switched to a tier system. All these things happened at once within this three year change. But one of the things we noticed

at the end of that year as we began to see an increase in engagement in our post 2020 world. And it really did ask, you know, make us really ask like, what is this uptick from? And I think what a lot of that what strong engagement really looks like, it is good attendance. I mean, none of us want to do this to an empty room. So it is strong attendance. But it’s also creating a welcoming environment, setting the stage

for that natural connection to take place. And in order to have great connection, great engagement with one another, you definitely have to have a variety of people in the room. So, you know, just like many of our chambers, we’ve got the mom and pops to the largest industries in our chamber.

And what I am seeing, and it’s really exciting to see this, when I look around the room now, I’m seeing a lot of people I don’t know. And again, have you been born and raised here? And you think you know everybody, especially when you’re in the chamber world. But I’m starting to see a lot more younger faces. I’m starting to see a lot of these boomerangs, the people who return to their hometown, and they may be returning for a variety of reasons. Part of that reason may be that they’re taking over the family business, businesses are

transitioning, they realize that you can come home again, all those things, but I’m seeing this, this burgeoning new crew, like this burgeoning new leadership. And I’m like, that’s what you want. Like, that’s what we want to see is we don’t want to continue to, to grow, you know, stale and just talk to ourselves, we want to see new people entering. And so what positions our chamber is that that point of entry, and a lot of that is the relevancy, making sure that your chamber

Jessica Walden (13:46.272)
is relevant, but a lot of it is being really focused on what is the best use of people’s time. So, I mean, our chamber, again do staff of 10, team of 10, we do nearly 100 programs a year. So, I mean, and again, in the chamber industry, that’s no big deal. But when you actually do communicate that to your investors, they’re like, wow.

No wonder it looks like you do a lot. You do. I that’s almost something every single that that usually is something every week, if not five things every week. But.

Brandon Burton (14:15.319)
You

Brandon Burton (14:21.643)
Right.

Jessica Walden (14:23.197)
Our job isn’t to do more. mean, we look at our calendar every year and think, what can we cut, combine, and do better in order to keep that attendance at an all time high, in order to keep people talking and connecting with one another. And so I really think good engagement looks like a good use of people’s time. And the communication and again, tour guide on the side here, the storytelling piece of it is making sure

that our programming aligns with the community in the sense that you’re coming here and connecting for a purpose even greater than you. It’s for the greater good. It’s for our greater community. It’s because Macon’s on the move. It’s because Macon is experiencing a resurgence, a renaissance. It’s an exciting time to be here. You want to be in the room where it happens. so, you know, I think to me that’s what good engagement looks like. And it is. It is a variety of demographics. It is your small business owner.

being able to connect with your larger industries. It is diversity in all kinds of demographics and it very much is the new audience that we don’t know yet who it’s our job to nurture, help them create leadership opportunities and hopefully keep them here at the end of the day.

Brandon Burton (15:41.942)
Yeah, I love what you said about with all the events and everything you do to be able to cut, combine and do things together. as a as different, you know, chamber members look at engaging and business owners look at trying to get involved as their local chamber. There can be some overwhelm when there’s so much that is going on. And we talked about a little bit before we started recording, but my background is in chamber publishing. And over the years, I meet with

members about advertising and different publications. And I often hear from them almost a sense of guilt. Like, I, you know, we joined the chamber three years ago and I haven’t been to an event yet. You know, I just, I’m too busy. I can’t make it to the luncheons or the mixers, the after hours, the ribbon cut, whatever it is. And so being able to cut, combine, do things together, show where there’s value in these different events that you’re doing. So they want to be

there, so they make it a priority. Do you have some examples where you’ve been able to do that, look at some different programs, cut, combine, do them together and how that resulted in more engagement?

Jessica Walden (16:55.189)
Right, yeah.

Well, and you know, I’ll say where that comes from is, and I joke all the time that I’m a recovering entrepreneur having owned a small, I’ve owned several small businesses, but in particular, the tour company being one of them. And I understand what it’s like. I worked independently, every commitment that I made was taking away billable hours. Like, you you don’t want to have people stack away from the register necessarily. At the same time, community engagement is everything for your business.

Brandon Burton (17:18.646)
Right.

Jessica Walden (17:26.177)
and being visible and I mean to me it’s cause related awareness, it’s cause related marketing. One of the best ways that you can market your business is to be seen and be visible and be out there and connecting. So coming from that place of understanding like really being able to meet businesses where they are.

and realize that they just, one, they can’t do everything. So can you offer like just really intentional programming that again is worth their time to step away from or fits more along there, knowing your audience and knowing who your target audience is and what their schedule may be. So for example, I mean, I would just say restaurants, that’s one of the hardest things chambers have, they come and go in our membership, right?

they join for the ribbon cutting, it’s hard to always retain them. And then of course during 2020 our chamber saw drastic drop in the restaurant hospitality industry. Now we’ve started seeing them all come back in. Well they’re not going to be able to go to some of the traditional, they can’t come to a lunch and learn for example, I mean that’s a peak time for them. So can we create relevant opportunities specifically for our restaurants? They give them a reason to

invest in the chamber. And so what that can look like is our breakfast programming if they are not a lunch spot. Or what that could look like is our taste of making committee, which is an online virtual session that’s offered once a month that is during like an afternoon. Like I think it’s around like a post lunch rush time where we offer all the opportunity for industry specific businesses in

restaurant industry to gather to share best practices to have some type of featured speaker from the community side of things so they can be aware of things going on and then also inform them on the calendar and what’s coming up and where are opportunities to plug in that they may want to consider and so for them many of these it’s just that pause that they can they can do such a thing. you know this is this is I don’t know if is I don’t know if cut was quite the right word in this

Jessica Walden (19:48.448)
this one example, but we all do golf tournaments, right? Like every chamber does one. We have a successful one once a year called the Legacy Golf Classic. I inherited it as I came on board. In fact, my first day on the job was our golf tournament. And immediately I began thinking about this program, knowing that it’s a great revenue source, knowing that we’ve always done it this way, you know, that sort of thing.

also noticing that it really doesn’t include everyone and there’s not an opportunity to participate in it. And unfortunately, I’m not a golfer. I can drive a mean golf cart, but I’m not a golfer. And one of the things I started talking about on day one, and it did take us two years to implement, but we introduced the bingo component during the lunch. And this provided an opportunity for our sponsors, our general membership,

our ambassadors. If you didn’t play golf, you wanted to be there during lunch because you could play bingo. when I say bingo, we’re not talking about, you know, like nursing home level bingo. We’re talking about legal gambling with beverages, you know, and the chance to really have fun together. And bingo is making quite the comeback. In one of our favorite bars up the street does it. And that’s where our team went to go learn how to

to run a masterful bingo game. But we introduced that component. And what that does is it has created a whole other sponsorship avenue for us in many ways, because from the card to the hose to the collar, mean, there’s all that. But it also engaged the non-golfers. And so now we don’t have a legacy golf classic. We have a legacy classic. And so it’s this classic part of our chamber on the golf course. And now with this fun inter…

way to have lunch together and play bingo. And some of the golfers even last year were like handing me money and being like, can you proxy for me? Because I wish I was in there too.

Jessica Walden (22:00.949)
You know, and I took it and I did it, but, you know, that’s enough. That’s one way of it. business after hours, this is, all, so many of us do business after hours and I have heard pros and cons. I’ve heard that some do, you know, for us, it is a very easy lift. We offer it as a sponsor. The host sponsor pays their sponsorship. They provide the food and beverage. We, we handle registration. That’s our primary goal with it. But,

And you know, it is it’s a significant revenue generator for us in addition to that. But it’d be easy to do 12 business after hours a year. But would that be easy on our team? Does that get in the way of being able to market some of our other programming? So do we end up with like a marketing backlog where every all of our programs are competing for the same calendar and the same messaging time? And do we have can we

do less business after hours, but get more people there. And that’s what we decided to do. So now going from 12 to last night was our last one of the season, our ninth business after hours. We’ve had consistent high attendance to each of these. We’ve had consistent sponsorship ease for each of these. We’ve easily crested 150 people at these after our programs.

And now we’re done for the year. Now we can focus on the legacy classic coming up in October, our annual awards coming up, our making in eggs, which by the way, we have making in eggs instead of eggs and issues. That’s a great part about living and making Georgia. know, and so we’re able to focus on our signatures towards the end of the year, make sure that our marketing can hit those marks. And at the same time, we created strong series of business after hours.

Brandon Burton (23:42.639)
That’s great, yeah.

Jessica Walden (23:59.612)
We did have to take that revenue cut at the end on the sponsorship side, but what we increased was the attendance, Adam, by doing that. So it works. It worked for us on that. And then just one more example of something that we learned to do better. Annual awards. Again, so many of us have these programs. Ours was evening. It was long.

and it was tired. It was one those that you know, you know that it’s right. And you know, I’m like many of us if once I go home, I’m not going to necessarily get back out there. So it was one of those where I was like, you know, is this the right time?

Brandon Burton (24:29.655)
That sounds familiar. I feel like I’ve heard that before from other teamers. Yeah.

Jessica Walden (24:48.359)
Is this the right format? And so we switched that up recently. And so in the last two years, this will be our third year this year, we’ve switched our annual awards to a three o’clock start time. And we’re doing it at a brewery, but it has a very large event space at the brewery. And so now it is our annual awards and it has the tradition and the sense of giving out awards. But the happy hour component indeed helps. It has created

incredible where the doors open, people gather, we have a happy hour period, then we move to the awards portion, and then we open it back up to happy hour. And we laugh, like we do it earlier and now people don’t want to leave. Like they’re not leaving the program when it’s over because they’re still gathering and celebrating and that sort of thing. And, you know, again, I think we met people where they are with that by doing that, changing that

time, altering that format, being willing to do it differently, just create. And now our annual awards is uniquely ours. It complements well with our neighbor chambers. One has an incredible morning annual awards, one has an evening one. Those all work for their communities really well. And for investors who are in multiple regional chambers, ours works again really well because they could fit ours in during that happy hour time period in the late afternoon.

Brandon Burton (26:17.823)
Yeah, that’s great. So I love the examples you shared as well. And while you were talking, you saw me turn around and grab a book off my bookshelf. I’ve plugged this before on the podcast, but it’s a book called You’re Invited, the Art and Science of Cultivating Influence.

Jessica Walden (26:34.765)
just gotta write that down.

Brandon Burton (26:34.955)
And as you’re talking about knowing your audience, it’s so important to be able to understand who it is that you’re trying to gather together and being able to extend those invitations so they know that there’s purpose in you reaching out to them to be at that event because there’s something there for them.

Jessica Walden (26:45.069)
Yes.

Brandon Burton (26:55.439)
and whether that’s having more industry specific type of events or even looking at if every event the chamber does has to do with, has a happy hour component to it. I mean, it works very well, but I can bet there’s probably a segment of the membership that doesn’t come because family responsibilities or, and maybe if there was something that was family friendly.

that there was something for that. it’s just, goes back to knowing your audience and extending those invitations.

Jessica Walden (27:27.137)
is. You know, and that even is a happy argument by moving it up to that three, that also freed up that family time too. I mean, you know, and I’m a mom.

Brandon Burton (27:35.697)
Absolutely, absolutely.

Jessica Walden (27:39.884)
I just, know the value of all that, especially as a chamber president, as many of us can relate. Like, you know, our time is just everything that we get outside of all of this for that. having that level of consciousness of like, if we’re going to create, you use the word purpose and that’s what it is. Just having that, we’re going to do it, it has to be worth people’s time. Otherwise we shouldn’t be doing it. And I know when I started this job, I was given that sticker that said,

it.

This is how we’ve always done it. And then I had a big X over it, you know, and being able to have that. I’m okay with us being able to do our traditional things, but how do we evolve it just enough for our newer audience and the audience we want to be and an audience that is truly invested and engaged in what we’re doing and time. mean, money is one thing, but we know time is what is attached to that. And we just have to be conscious of every ounce of people’s time that we’re using.

Brandon Burton (28:14.069)
Yeah.

Jessica Walden (28:41.483)
and knowing that what we do, they leave saying that was worth my time to be there.

Brandon Burton (28:47.537)
Absolutely. I think that sticker, if I remember right, is a YGM sticker. So there you go. All right. So I feel like I have to ask you about this before we move on, but you had shared with me ahead of time that you do an event with singles, trying to mix singles. Yeah. Can you tell us just what that is about? yeah, just tell us what that event is.

Jessica Walden (28:52.149)
Yes it is, yep.

Jessica Walden (29:04.915)
So glad you asked.

Jessica Walden (29:11.469)
Yeah, I was wondering how we’re gonna get to that, you know, it is definitely, um, all right, so another example of, you know, of cut combined or

and do it differently. And our young professionals network was at one time strong and going well. And then of course, 2020 happened and it really had a hard time getting traction again. then around this time is when I’m coming back on board and again, looking at everything closer.

It started out more as a joke because I was mildly offended that I was no longer considered a young professional and I didn’t like the age cutoff and I’m like if we’re gonna be an inclusive chamber that includes age too. that was one piece of it. But what we heard by listening to our investors, listening to our community and listening along the needs of workforce and again,

Brandon Burton (29:54.33)
Ha

Brandon Burton (29:58.168)
you

Jessica Walden (30:12.025)
attraction and retention. It was the fact that

that love’s not easy, connection’s not always easy, but when you have a really good employee and let’s say they are doing so great at their job that they don’t have the greatest love life or they’re single and they don’t have anything, well then they may look online and start swiping left and right and next thing you know, they’ve met somebody and maybe that somebody’s out of town and now they’re moving out of town.

for companionship and you’ve lost an incredible employee and No matter you know in different ages, especially This gets harder and harder. So we heard what people were saying and I said well You know, let’s think about this. What if we took this idea of like young professionals, but made it more aimed towards singles and Really the intention on this being for those who are looking to make connections

connection, relationships, love, whatever you want to call it, that we create an in real life opportunity that’s not necessarily speed dating and is, I keep saying, not creepy. Like we wanted to make sure that it maintained some integrity here to bring people together, to convene people. And we had our

Brandon Burton (31:33.52)
Yeah

Jessica Walden (31:43.522)
young team who are who a lot of them chose Macon who graduated college chose to stay here they came forward with an incredible plan for these these mixers so we call them the Mac mingles with singles and Mac stands for Macon area connections and it is a low entry low cost program to attend where you come in you register you self-select while you’re there so you can pick up a cup

And that cup may mean that you are seeking women, seeking men, or maybe you’re a wingman and you’re just there to support someone who is doing all of that. And you’re able to mix and mingle. We have some actual icebreaker programming put into it. Of course, it is a very business after hour style event, but it is a young audience. It is a unique location and it is heavily programmed. you are, um,

you know, it’s curated enough where you actually intentionally meet people. And it was one that like, I have to say it’s not scary, but you are worried like how is this gonna come off? It has been so well received. I have many of my industry say, I am putting that flyer in our break room. I’ve had industry say like, I have.

Brandon Burton (32:51.435)
Yeah.

Jessica Walden (33:01.151)
of really strong, like all male staff. I need these guys to meet some people like they are in a lot of them, you know, if they’re working all the time. And so the industries have been supportive in that sense. The attendance has been, we’re really pleased with it. It has been a growing attendance, but like the first one, we were worried if any guys were gonna register. had quite a few women register, but we’re like, is there gonna be anyone else?

Well, they showed up. They just didn’t pre-register. There was a lot of people who were just trying to ease on in there, see what it’s about. Now it has really picked up steam in that sense. And they just had one a couple of weeks ago and we made it a game night theme. So they actually had a chance to go from table to table and they were doing card games and fun stuff. we had about, it was like, we were almost 70 people show up to that one. And so we’re starting to hear about some matches being made.

Brandon Burton (33:34.391)
Yeah.

Jessica Walden (34:00.992)
hopefully can share those stories soon too. But it’s a fun way. mean to me this is now our YPN group. This is our way to look at it. We just look at it through different lens.

Brandon Burton (34:10.613)
Yeah, it’s a great retention strategy as you alluded to. And I love how it engages other staff of the different chamber members. But you may need to be thinking of a 2.0 for this as they matriculate, and they’re no longer singles because this is so effective. So yeah.

Jessica Walden (34:14.07)
Yes.

Jessica Walden (34:21.537)
Yeah.

Jessica Walden (34:28.525)
I I don’t know. They’re starting to come to, you know, lot of these folks had never been to a chamber event or they don’t even know it was a chamber program when they signed up.

And now we’re starting to see like second dates at business after hours. So that works too. They graduate, they graduate to full. But this also feeds into our membership, I mean our leadership program. You know, we operate leadership, leadership make in and if you think about how we create this programming that really does create a pipeline, that’s what it’s about.

Brandon Burton (34:42.039)
That’s great.

Brandon Burton (35:00.873)
Yeah, I love that. Well, Jessica, as we start to wrap things up, I wanted to ask for the listeners who want to take their chamber up to the next level, what kind of tip or strategy might you be able to share with them to help in encouraging them with that goal?

Jessica Walden (35:19.021)
I don’t know if it’s a strategy, but I’m gonna quote Dolly Parton here. Find out who you are and do it on purpose, which is sort of my favorite thing she says. And of course we can apply that personally, but how do you apply that to your chamber? And I think it is, find out who you are as a chamber and not just about doing it on purpose, is about doing it with purpose. And again, everything that we’ve talked about on that, who is your audience? What is it you’re trying?

to provide your audience and does this fit and does this fit into your community right now and where it really doesn’t meet your business is where you are but what your community needs and

and create that community out of it. So I would just say that, you know, really being able to evaluate, like, evaluate that strategy, but is there a purpose? Is it purpose driven in what you’re trying to achieve? And I think when you have that, that is as a strategy, that it ends up working out in a way to really be able to curate those programs for your year that make it worth everybody’s time.

Brandon Burton (36:34.795)
think that’s great advice. I’d like to ask everyone that I have on the show as we look to the future of Chambers of Commerce, how do you see the future of Chambers and their purpose going forward?

Jessica Walden (36:46.303)
Yeah, well, and you know, I’m like, I’m new to this world, but what I really realized very quickly.

is the past was about recruiting industry. And it’s not to say we all don’t do that as community or work with our with our economic development team to do that. And we’re very blessed here. We’re a collaborative community right now. And so I work with our development authority every day. In fact, he’s texting me right now about something else that I but I appreciate that relationship. But I very much understand that in that he may be recruiting industry. But my job as a chamber president is to recruit people.

So we are now in the business of recruiting people. And I think that’s where we’re going for us. Our choose making strategy is really our North Star. Like that is our chance to continue to bring people into our community, to keep them here and to be really bold and innovative of what that looks like and how we do it. so, you everybody talks about location, location, location, and I can talk about making all day is an awesome location.

But I would say it’s about people, people, people, and that’s where our chambers are heading.

Brandon Burton (37:57.922)
Yeah, and if you’re single, they’ve got a place for you to meet somebody. I love it. Well, Jessica, for those listening who may want to reach out and connect and learn more about how you’re doing things there in Macon, where would you point them? What would be the best way for them to reach out and connect?

Jessica Walden (38:01.809)
I mean, we are, it is wraparound services around here, that’s for sure.

Jessica Walden (38:16.087)
Yeah!

Obviously you can find me on social media. You can find me on LinkedIn Jessica Walden, but I would say go through MaconChamber.com our new websites rolling out next week So I’m really proud to show that off and easily way to connect with us You know our communication is something that we’re all really proud of as a team. So One of the things I love sharing is our newsletter format that we put out weekly I actually do a weekly video component to it and so if you want to see that that, just shoot me an email, we’ll get you signed up for that and we’ll stay in touch that way. Thank you, Brandon.

Brandon Burton (38:51.627)
Very good. And of course, we’ll have that all linked in our show notes to make it nice and easy. But Jessica, this has been a fun conversation. I appreciate you setting aside some time to join us here on Chamber Chat podcast and to share your experiences and the things that are working for you guys there in Macon. It’s always great to talk about engagement and what’s working for chambers in that realm. So thank you.

Jessica Walden (38:56.894)
Awesome.

Jessica Walden (39:16.077)
Thank you Brandon for providing the platform to do so and thanks to my counterpart in Cobb County, Sharon Mason for recommending this opportunity.

Brandon Burton (39:27.032)
Absolutely.

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Community Strategy with Jason Mock

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Brandon Burton 0:00
This is the Chamber Chat Podcast, the show dedicated to chamber professionals to spark ideas and to get actionable tips and strategies to better serve your members and community.

Hello, Chamber Champions. Welcome to Chamber Chat Podcast. I’m your hosts Brandon Burton. And it’s my goal here on the podcast to introduce you to people and ideas to better help you serve your Chamber members and your community.

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Our guest for this episode is Jason Mock. Jason is a dynamic and visionary leader committed to fostering strong connections between businesses and communities. As President and CEO of The Greater Dalton Chamber, he works to drive economic growth, advocate for businesses and create a thriving future for the region. His leadership extends beyond Georgia. With a proven track record in chamber and community development before leading the greater Dalton chamber, Jason served as president and CEO of the San Marcos Area Chamber of Commerce in Texas, and as the director of Small Business Services for the foresight Chamber of Commerce in Georgia. Jason is deeply engaged in regional and state leadership. He serves on the board of Thrive regional partnership and the Georgia Chamber of Commerce. He is a member of the hub chamber Council, a key policy group of Metropolitan Chamber leaders across Georgia, and serves on the ALI Alumni Advisory Committee for the Appalachian Regional chain, Regional Commission. His career began in politics, studying political science at the University of West Georgia and working with former congressman Lynn Westmoreland, and later served as political director at former Georgia Secretary of State, Karen Handel, and played a role in the 2008 Republican National Convention and John McCain’s presidential campaign. Committed to professional excellence. Jason earned his IOM certificate in non profit management from the US Chamber of Commerce Institute in 2016 Jason, I’m excited to have you with us today here on Chamber Chat Podcast. I’d love to give you an opportunity to say hello to all the Chamber Champions who are out there listening, and to share something interesting about yourself so we can all get to know you a little better.

Jason Mock 2:53
Brandon, thank you so much for having me today. You know, I don’t know what’s most interesting about me, but I will say that at one time, I got to drive around Lee Greenwood at an event. And for those that may not recognize Lee Greenwood, you know, God bless America, very powerful guy that loves to sing about our country, but got to drive him and his son around back in the day for some political events when I was working for on the presidential campaign for McCain. So, so,

Brandon Burton 3:26
which is pretty cool. Yeah, he’s still on the circuit too. It seems like I just saw him, you know, a few months ago on stage. So that’s that’s great, very interesting. I like asking that question because we learn these, these fun tidbits about people, but tell us a little bit about the Greater Dalton Chamber. Give us an idea of size, staff, scope of work you guys are involved with and budget just kind of set that perspective.

Jason Mock 3:52
Greater Dalton Chamber. For those that may not be familiar, we’re up in northwest Georgia. We’re home to a lot of people know us as the carpet capital of the world. Now we like to say we’re the flooring capital of the world, just because we’re carpet and hard services, as well as astro turf. In fact, if you watch the national championship football game that was hosted in Atlanta, Georgia this year, that turf was made right here in Dalton, Georgia. So kind of unique and special about that. But our community is a, you know, manufacturing community, but it is one of entrepreneurs. Our chamber is about 800 members. Our staff is about we have 10 folks on staff, and we always are looking to grow and and find different ways. But you know, we’re engaged in a lot of different things, mainly in the connecting side of things that networking most chambers are, but developing talent, workforce development is key for us, as well as the advocacy standpoint. So those three. Standpoint, or our focus as an organization. And I know today we’ll talk a little bit about more about the community side of things that we’re working on. We really dive into making sure that, you know, not only with the voice of our business community, but we’re also looking at how we’re growing greater Dalton community as a whole, for for families, residents, and anybody that’s coming to visit our community as a throughout the time,

Brandon Burton 5:27
That’s great. That gives a great snapshot and and a great you know item to pinpoint, you know, the manufacturing to the national championship. So yeah, that turf, and that turf is becoming more and more popular everywhere.

Jason Mock 5:42
It seems like you see it, not just at the National you know, in sports from a major league to the NFL, but you’re seeing it down to the Parks and Rec and in fact, Shaw sports turf, that’s the one that made the national championship. They’re making it where they’re putting these coconut shells in them, and it’s supposed to keep the temperature really cool on the ground and during the turf. So for those that are in the the South, in the summer times that you know that that turf can get a little hot, and they’re finding ways to keep it safe from a temperature standpoint, as well as a safety on the knees and the ankle. So it was kind of cool.

Brandon Burton 6:22
Yeah, one of our neighbors just put it in their backyard turf, and got me envious. And I’m like, shoot, how much does that cost? Gotta figure this out. He told that lawn mower very quickly. That’s right, that’s right. Well, you had mentioned it a minute ago that our focus for our conversation today will be around the strategy you guys have for building community there in the Dalton area. And look forward to diving in deeper on this as soon as we get back from this quick break.

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All right, Jason, we’re back. As I mentioned before the break, we’re talking your community strategy today. Chambers across the country, throughout the world, need to have some kind of strategy right to build their community and and I always like getting the perspective from different chambers to see what is it that’s working for you guys, what? Where’s your areas of focus? And maybe it lights a spark for somebody listening to see ideas that they can maybe implement in their community. But tell us what I believe. It’s called, Believe Greater Dalton.

Jason Mock 10:40
Believe Greater Dalton is our community strategy led by the Chamber of Commerce. It was something my predecessor and board chair at the time had many conversations about, because we were constantly doing a strategy, year in and year out, and some were working and some were were not. Some of our community leaders were feeling like that. Those strategies were being in silos, and the only people that can make a decision with those that were at the table versus being a community strategy for for the greater good. And so over time, believe greater Dalton came to life in 2018 and it is a it became a five year strategy to look at our community, and we really dove deep into what our community needs, what our community is needs to focus on for the for the future. We brought in a consultant to help us with this process. We interviewed community leaders, chamber businesses, elected officials, we held focus groups, we did surveys, we did it all to kind of figure out what are the top issues that are facing our community. And we came up with six areas of focus that we wanted to focus on in those first five years. And then we went out and raised those dollars once we knew those focus points. First year, we raised a little over a million dollars in that process to focus on six areas like I talked about. And those areas were education, housing, downtown, entrepreneurship, community, pride and economic development. And each of those had we broke them down into more of like objectives inside the education model. A lot of folks right now across the country are talking about third grade reading, and from a business community standpoint, it is very important that we look at third grade reading. And so from a chamber, I know a lot of folks, colleagues around will be like and listening to this going well, is the chamber out there in the school system teaching third grade reading? No, we’re not. We’re but we are working with our our educators. We’re working with our school districts to figure out ways that we can improve third grade reading so that that our third graders are reading at, you know, at grade level throughout the year, and so really, the focus of that is, how do we solve some of these problems? You know, when it comes to housing, you know, we’re not out there building housing, but we knew and know that housing is an issue for our community in I’ll back us up a little bit. No eight, no nine. When the housing crisis took place, it really hit greater Dalton because of our industry, we were pretty much a one horse town at the time, and so developers backed away. And so we really knew that we needed to have a focus to look at housing, at all aspects, from the workforce housing all the way up to the executive housing. And so when we launched this in 2018 we we did a housing study, which we produced with with a group. But that housing study allowed for developers in our community to have almost a road map that they could go to business or go to the banks, they could go to developers and go to investors and find a pathway to build housing. And we’ve started to see our housing stock to change in the sense of, we started to see additional workforce housing. We started to see more mid level executive housing. We’re we haven’t solved the problem, but we are working to fill those gaps, and we’ll continue to do that. So really, the true focus was how first six years, we’re flying the plane and building the plane at the same time. And so a lot of studies were done, a lot of looks at how we can improve our community. And so we were putting dollars into those areas that we felt would move the needle. And then fast forward, we said, You know what? This is something that we really, truly need for generations to come. We don’t need this to be a one year plan. And so believe greater Dalton 2.0 came about. And so we have additional five years where we went out and did the same process again. And but came up with some new strategies to look at.

Brandon Burton 15:03
So after that, the five years, what, what kind of strategies did you see in the second evolution of it?

Jason Mock 15:11
Yeah, some were the same. Housing still stayed at the top. I mean, when we talked to our investors, when we talked to community leaders, they still talked about, hey, we’re making progress, but we still haven’t. You know, we still are not at the finish line from a housing standpoint, so housing and education stayed at the top of the of those two lists. But what changed a little bit was we weren’t focusing on just on downtown. We said we gotta focus on our community as a whole. We got to focus on revitalization as a as a whole, greater Dalton ecosystem. And so we started to tackle different projects and different things, and a lot of this is public, private partnerships. I’ll give you example of one where the city came to us and they wanted to do, and this was in the first year, but they wanted to do some downtown improvements, of some streetscapes. They were able to get a grant to help with this, but they needed some additional dollars to cover the streetscapes, and so they came to us, and they asked for some for some funding. And so between the city, the grant, believe, greater Dalton, as well as our downtown development authority, we all chipped in some money into this to allow for this project to happen. It’s being constructed right now. It’s a little bit of a mess, but we know it by by the end of this year, that streetscape is going to be tied in to allow those businesses along that that corridor to be more successful, to have better parking for their interest, to have better walkability for their customers. At the end of the day, it’s going to be a game changer for that area, but it’s going to be a game changer for our community, because hopefully it’s attracting more businesses to that corridor so that more can grow and more can be successful, right?

Brandon Burton 17:01
So as you talked about education, housing, still stayed on that list, or still, you guys are moving the needle, but the problem’s not solved yet. And makes me picture, you know, a world where all the community problems are solved, and then what purpose does the chamber have, right? That’s right. You gotta have some job security there, right?

Jason Mock 17:19
Hopefully. So I’ll say we, we got a lot of work. I mean, we’re blessed to live in a great community. We got a great industries that call greater Dalton home. But, you know, there’s, there’s a lot of things that we want to improve on. We’re always trying to cross that finish line. I always say that the in our world, the finish line is always moving. That goal post is always is always moving. When we think we’ve accomplished and got a good product, we go, ooh, we need to tweak it here, or something else comes about. So there’s always job security and making sure that our communities are successful Absolutely.

Brandon Burton 17:59
And that was my point, that goal line keeps moving, and there’s always going to be, you know, things to focus on, and some of the things will stay on that list for some time, until you can really find a positive solution. But seeing that these are issues in almost every community, it seems like I don’t think anybody’s found that silver bullet just yet, but they’re all working towards good things and innovative ideas that’ll come out of it too. Yeah,

Jason Mock 18:26
and one thing I’ll say that has made this successful for us, and it may not make it successful for another community, but what’s made it successful for us is the folks that we’re engaging with. We have a big tent kind of philosophy, everybody’s invited to the room, everybody’s opinion is listened to and allowed to give comment about what’s going on. So we meet regularly with community leaders that are not businesses. They may not even be a chamber member. We’re meeting with folks to make sure that they understand the value of believe greater Dalton and what’s going on, but we’re also there to listen to what they they their input. Because we know this is a community strategy. It’s led by the chamber, but it’s a community strategy that we want our community to buy into. And so if it’s, you know, somebody that is retired and but lives in our community, is invested in our community. We want to hear from them. It’s a single mom trying to raise two kids. We want to hear from them. If it’s that business owner that has two employees, or that business owner that may have, you know, 1000s of employees, we want to hear from them, because this is their community just as much as it’s our community.

Brandon Burton 19:38
Yeah. So that leads right into the next question I had for you. So you had mentioned, with the in 2018 when the strategy was first being built out, there was a lot of surveys and things going on. How has that evolved? You mentioned you wanted to hear from all these people. I imagine surveys are going out to members the community at large. How is that being communicated? How are you gathered? Bring that information. We

Jason Mock 20:01
actually do a survey every year to our community. It goes out we we blast it out as best we can. We get it on social media. We make videos about it. You know, I’ll say this, our community, our city limits, is about inside city limits of Dalton, 52 53% are Hispanic. So we we put the survey in English and in Spanish. We have our marketing materials in both English and Spanish. We have folks that are speaking about it at different events and Rotary Clubs and civic groups. So we’re out there, you know, pounding the pavement for about three to four weeks the surveys out there, and the main thing we’re looking at is a net promoter score. Many chambers are starting to look at net promoter scores for their their their membership, from their events. We look at it from our community as well. And so we’re trying to improve our net promoter score throughout the years we’ve we’ve climbed a little bit on some things. We’ve dropped a little bit on some things, so we’re constantly working on that. The other thing we do with our survey is we poll and survey our high school students, our juniors and seniors. Get this survey. We want to hear from them. So we work very closely with our school districts, our superintendents, our principals, to make sure that this survey is getting in the hands of our students so that they can give us feedback. One thing we want to do is, you know, talking about the brain drain, we don’t want that those folks to leave our community. We’re blessed that we have Dalton College, Dalton State College, here in in our community. We have a technical college here in our community. But we also want folks to know, students, to know that there are great jobs in our community. So we want to hear from our students what they think about greater Dalton, because we know that they’re the future of our community.

Brandon Burton 21:56
That idea just alone in asking those high school juniors and seniors for their feedback shows that, hey, the community cares about me, right? There’s a place for me if I want to build a career here, if I want to, you know, grow my family here, there’s a place for me, and I don’t need to look somewhere else necessarily. And

Jason Mock 22:14
what’s amazing about this is going back to that net promoter score, usually, the net promoter scores of our students is higher than our net promoters of our adults, of the community. So that’s a great thing. I mean, I mean, when you look at it, the future is bright for us, but the that they really believe in the place they live, they love the place they live. And that’s, that’s cool.

Brandon Burton 22:33
Yeah, that is cool. I’ve got a a son that graduated last year, and a daughter, it’s a junior this year, and I’m thinking, would she, would she specifically fill out a survey? And I hope she would, yeah, I hope that would give that, that boost of confidence of, you know, the community cares about me, and they want me to they want my feedback. You know what? My opinion matters, especially as they get into that voting age, and they get more involved civically, like we want them, knowing that their voice matters and

Jason Mock 23:01
going still with that same survey, we also we carve it out a little bit. We ask you if you are a mother or father or parent or guardian with a student in our school system that has been in their school system currently or in the last five years. They then fill out a different or same survey, but they’re filling out some additional questions about how they rank our schools. What is it that they like about our schools? What is it they may not like about our schools? We take that data, we meet with our superintendents, we meet with our school board representatives, and we talk to them about the information that they have. Some of the data at the last year, survey came back that are we have two school system. We have a city and a county district that our County school system, their career and technical education was being called something in house. Parents were calling it something else, or didn’t recognize that. So that the that change right there had a negative on what they were offering. But what the school says is, we’re calling it a, they’re thinking it’s B. So we gotta work on our language. We gotta look at work on our communications. Fast forward to this year. Those numbers were drastically improved because of the way that they changed how they communicated that with their with their parents, so just little things like that making a bigger difference for how, you know, we can solve problems around here. Yeah,

Brandon Burton 24:29
some minor adjustments that are easy to make and it, you know, it’s night and day difference. Yeah, that’s great. Have there been other examples like that? If the feedback that you get from the surveys, just, I like those, those minor adjustments. Because sometimes you see the feedback, you’re like, Oh, this is gonna be big undertaking. This is another five to 10 years to move this ship, you know. And others are like, we can do that next month, you know? Yeah,

Jason Mock 24:54
most of them, those little ones, are great, like you talked about. A lot of the stuff we get are. Those bigger picture you know, ooh, this part of our community needs to be improved. I would love to see us have this type of retail store or this or that, but that right there just gives us feedback, and really and truly, it gives us our elected officials political cover. A lot of times, elected officials across the country are hesitant to make a decision, hesitant to make a move when it comes to growth or spending some dollars, but when you can come to them and say, the community as a whole has voted, has given their opinion that they want to see this improve, that’s political cover that they can go back at a county commission meeting and a city council meeting and say we’ve heard through our chamber, through this survey that’s given out to the community, that this is an important issue to us, and therefore we’re going to step into that arena and help solve that, because now they have that political cover to do that.

Brandon Burton 26:03
Yeah, having data means everything, right? That’s right. Having that information, I love it. Well. Jason for chamber listening, who’s wanting to take their organization, even argue their community up to the next level? What kind of tips or action plans, maybe you offer them to try to accomplish that goal.

Jason Mock 26:24
First of all, I would say, get a group of leaders together to have that conversation. And this is where you’re going to think big picture. What are the issues we’re facing today, what are the issues we may be facing tomorrow, and then, what are those issues that we may be we’re not sure of that are 20 years, 30 years down the road, if you can get that, if you can get that group together and have that kind of conversation as first but two, you gotta be willing to talk about, I hate to say it this way, the ugly in the room or the ugly in the community, what needs to be improved On. You can’t be as scared to lay it out on the table to say, you know, we are not successful in this area. We need to improve our school systems in this way. We need to improve our streetscapes in this way, or our look in this way. But it’s going to take a lot of push. I’ll say the first time that believe greater Dalton got introduced to the Board of Directors for the chamber. It was not well received. The board did not want to get into this arena. It took some more conversation. It took some more time with business leaders to convince the chamber board, at the time to invest in this project, once we had that investment from the board, we then had to go out and get the investment from our elected officials. We knew we needed both parties. We knew we needed the business leaders and we needed the the elected official side of things invested in it. So we had those two sides. And then we went and found key leaders. And I would suggest you go find key leaders that may not be at the table, may not be at your may not be a board member, may not even be a chamber member, and this is a good way to get them to become a chamber member, but you may have to have those conversations with with key leaders in the community that you may not talk to on a regular basis, and if they can get their buy in, and then I’ll say, dream big, but Start slow. You want to have that big picture of one day our community can look like this. Our community is going to have XYZ, but know that that doesn’t take place overnight, that it takes time. We the first year. You know, lot of people go what you did the first year. We did a lot of studies. We paid for a lot of information, but that data helped us to be ready for year two, or for the believe 2.0 the next five years, where we’ve put some more data. I’ve had invested more data, but at the end of the day, we’re working on more projects than we’re working on on studies this year, and so that will just grow. So just know it takes time. It takes leadership, it takes vision. And you know, Rome wouldn’t see, you know what built in in a day,

Brandon Burton 29:06
right? Yeah. And as you’re giving that explanation, I’m reminded the book 13 ways to kill your community. And you talk about, you know, pointing out the ugly. And you know, people don’t want to live in a community that, whether it’s visibly ugly or just, you know, things are not welcoming, or whatever those those stinky parts are, you know, your community got to recognize it and fix it, that’s right,

Jason Mock 29:29
and just have those open conversations. I think chambers that chamber CEOs and leadership that don’t have those tough conversations with their boards or with their community, or doing a disservice to their Chamber members, because our members are talking about it. Our business community is talking about it at the water cooler, or at the ball games with their with their kids, or, you know, at church, you know, they’re talking about, Oh, would you see the potholes that we came in on throughout, you know, the. This afternoon, or whatever it may be. So we have to be open minded to know that if they’re talking about it, then we should be talking about it. Yeah,

Brandon Burton 30:06
absolutely. Well, Jason, I’d like to ask everybody I have on the show, as we look to the future of chambers of commerce, how do you see the future of chambers and their purpose going forward?

Jason Mock 30:18
They’re changing every day. You know, I think the chamber of the past and the past is last, is yesterday. Chambers are always evolving and always having to think of things. I think if this kind of project, believe greater Dalton community strategy for a greater community would not have been something that would have looked at 2030 years ago, I think chambers would have just said, That’s not our lane. We don’t need to get in it. I think more and more we’re seeing chambers having to get in lanes that we may not have been in last year or 20 years ago. We have to be thinking about how we’re truly growing a community as a whole. We’re helping our members, but we’re helping the bigger ecosystem of our community. And at the end of the day, we may not be serving and helping some members through this process. They may be elevating themselves because we have a better community. That’s okay. That’s okay because we want businesses to succeed, and at the same time, we want to show value what we’re doing. And hopefully they see that value, and we can show that, hey, look, we’re we’re working on your behalf, even though you may not know of us, you may not see us, but there’s a role that we love for you to play within our community, within our chamber. So I think chambers have to think big picture, be very broad in the way that they operate, and not pigeonhole themselves and just those events and networking side, but really look at the whole ecosystem of the community that they they represent.

Brandon Burton 31:47
Yeah, great explanation. Absolutely need to to get outside of just the the networking and so forth. That’s a means to an end. It’s not that. It’s not the main focus. So, right? But I

Jason Mock 31:59
think in the end, you know, we’re going to have to look at, you know, I don’t know this answer, and I know you’ve, you’ve tackled it a little bit on your calls, and love to learn more about it. But the membership side, I mean, that is always changing, and it’s a dynamic stuff. And, you know, I was telling somebody, and you’ve heard this, and our audience has heard this, you know, people were joining the chamber because my grandfather was a chamber member. My daddy was a chamber member, you know? And now it’s getting to a point where the new business owners are going, I don’t, I don’t know that, and there’s really showing value of what that value is and and everybody’s value is different. Everybody’s Chamber’s value is different. Everybody’s community value is different. So you have to find that value that fits for your community and your organization. Yeah, absolutely.

Brandon Burton 32:41
Well, Jason, this has been fun to have you on the podcast. I appreciate you taking time to be with us today and sharing some of your experiences examples you know, going through the your community strategy there in Dalton, wanted to give you a chance to share any contact information for listeners who may want to reach out and connect with you? Yeah,

Jason Mock 33:00
I’m happy to my email address is mock@daltonchamber.org, and I’ll be brave enough, I’ll throw my cell phone out there. If anybody wants to call me, please do 770-241-3629, I’m happy to meet with you, talk to you, and help any way I can. I think we’re all in this industry together, all in the boat together, and whatever we can do, I can be learning from you, and hopefully you can learn a little bit from us. That’s perfect,

Brandon Burton 33:27
and we’ll get that in our show notes for this episode to make it easy to find. But again, Jason, it’s been great having you on the show and and appreciate you sharing these examples and and really, you know, shining a spotlight on what what a community can do to really have a strategy and move the needle going forward.

Appreciate it.

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Long-Term Vision with Johnna Reeder Kleymeyer

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Brandon Burton 0:00
This is the Chamber Chat Podcast, the show dedicated to chamber professionals to spark ideas and to get actionable tips and strategies to better serve your members and community.

Hello, Chamber Champions. Welcome to Chamber Chat Podcast. I’m your hosts Brandon Burton. And it’s my goal here on the podcast to introduce you to people and ideas to better help you serve your Chamber members and your community.

Our title sponsor for this episode is Bringing Local Back. Remember when your community could turn to a local TV station or newspaper for the latest updates and affordable ads? Those days may be fading, but the need for local connection remains. That’s why we created Bringing Local Back, a game changing platform that restores the local visibility and advertising power to your community. It’s more than just tech. It’s about driving engagement and creating new revenue for your chamber. Ready to see the future visit bringinglocalback.com to schedule your demo today. This is the future of local commerce.

Our guest for this episode is Johnna Reeder Kleymeyer. Johnna is the President and CEO of the Colorado Springs Chamber and EDC. She has a distinguished background in leadership roles, including serving as president and CEO of the Regional Economic Development Institute Cincinnati, and holding leadership positions at Duke Energy Citigroup, United Way of Greater Cincinnati in Ohio and Kentucky, the O’Bannon County Chamber of Commerce and the Jackson Downtown Development Corporation in Tennessee. John is a proud graduate of the University of Memphis for her Bachelor’s in communications. Thomas Moore University for MBA, and she attended the University of Oklahoma Economic Development Institute where she earned a certificate in economic development from the International Economic Development Council as the inaugural President and CEO of the Regional Economic Development Institute in Cincinnati. Johnna led a 15 County, three state regional economic development organization. Under her leadership, the R, E, D I, Cincinnati achieved 175 project wins, created 25,000 jobs and secured $1.4 billion in capital investment within four years in 2022 she became the president and CEO of the Colorado Springs chamber and EDC, Southern Colorado’s largest Chamber of Commerce and Economic Development Organization. Since then, she’s led major initiatives in aerospace and defense, develop, Defense Development, legislative advocacy, and has successfully overseen the securing of 29 economic development projects, creating over 5000 jobs and attracting over 1.1 point $8 billion in capital investment. Johnna, I’m excited to have you with us today, here on Chamber Chat Podcast. I’d love to give you an opportunity to say hello to all the Chamber Champions who are out there listening, and to share something interesting about yourself, so we can all get to know you a little better.

Johnna Reeder Kleymeyer 3:02
Oh, well, thank you so much. I’m honored to be with you. And want to say hello to all my colleagues out there. And really want to say, just, just keep doing what you’re doing. Some days I feel like these are thankless jobs, and we’re carrying the weight of our communities and trying to make big things happen. But just know you’re never alone. I’ve been doing this a long time, and you are making a difference

Brandon Burton 3:26
Absolutely.

Johnna Reeder Kleymeyer 3:29
So if I, if I think about something interesting, let’s see I’m I was born and raised in Tennessee and lived in Ohio for over 20 years, and after the the pandemic, I said, I’m going to do like a millennial and and I’m not a millennial, if you’re, if you’re looking at me right now, and said, you know, where do I want to live versus where do I have to live? Our children were grown, and I had had a lot of success at ready Cincinnati, and said, Do I Do I really need or have to stay in the Midwest? And my husband and I said, Let’s go to a beautiful place that’s fast growing, and let’s see if we can make a difference there. And so I came to Colorado Springs, and have not looked back. It’s been fantastic, but very unusual for someone that’s almost in their 50s to do that, versus someone that maybe were in their 20s. So very unique path that that I’ve taken,

Brandon Burton 4:27
yeah, you could have fooled me. I thought you were a millennial. So flat

Johnna Reeder Kleymeyer 4:31
flattery works on me. You think

Brandon Burton 4:34
my friend? So you guys did what a lot of people did and took off to Colorado. It’s beautiful country there and and lots of good reasons to be there, but tell us a little bit more about the Colorado Springs chamber and EDC to kind of set the stage for our discussion. Help us get an idea of the size staff, scope of work. You guys are involved with budget to kind of set the stage,

Johnna Reeder Kleymeyer 4:56
sure. So we’re the second largest chamber. The state of Colorado, behind the Metro Denver chamber, we’re the second largest city in the state of Colorado. It’s about three quarters of a million people in our metropolitan statistical area. It’s a community that’s made up of five military installations, which is really unusual. It’s a huge part of our economy, which has really led to that large aerospace and defense sector here, our chamber and EDC has over 1000 members. I have a six and a half million dollar budget. We host not only typical chamber functions such as government affairs and Small Business Services and membership services, but we also have the economic development arm of our organization. Our community is the size that it works well for it to be joined together as one organization. We also host a group called the Pikes Peak Housing Network, where you’re in a faster growing state like we’re in in a fast growing region, affordable and attainable housing are a real issue, and so this organization works constantly to try to try to help solve, how do we have more housing in our in our region? And then we also host the Small Business Development Center in our region to a very important piece to to work for small business and entrepreneurs, just as we work for primary employers, primary sector, and trying to recruit and retain them. So some traditional goals and some non traditional roles, that’s

Brandon Burton 6:28
great. It’s enough to keep you busy, for sure, and it’s a neat dynamic, having the military, you know, involved there as well, and having that focus. Yeah, it

Johnna Reeder Kleymeyer 6:37
is. This is my first community to have such a military presence. But when you have, when you have one army installation and four aerospace I’m sorry, when you have four bases that are around the space and the Air Force, it’s, it’s a huge part of your economy, and it really adds to the fabric of our community,

Brandon Burton 7:01
absolutely so for our discussion today, we’re going to, we’ve titled this episode long term vision. I like being able to talk vision with chambers so other chambers can hear and maybe get some ideas and maybe broaden their minds as to, you know, what’s happening in Colorado Springs. Maybe it can be scaled to, you know, wherever they’re at in the country, so we’ll dive into that as soon as we get back from this quick break.

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All right, Johnna, we’re back. As I mentioned before the break, we’re going to focus our discussion around long term vision for Colorado Springs. But first, we’ve alluded to it a couple times already. The tremendous growth there in Colorado Springs, what’s drawing so many businesses to want to choose to invest into to grow in Colorado Springs in that region.

Johnna Reeder Kleymeyer 11:04
Well, I think it’s a variety of things. I think number one, Colorado has so much natural beauty and such an outdoor lifestyle, I can literally walk out my office door Brandon and be on three trails. So we have about 600 hiking biking trails in our region. You can be in the mountains and minutes. It’s a really, it’s a lifestyle state. And what I mean is we all talk about that we want balance in our life and harmony in our life. Well, people have moved to this state because they’re living it. So where talent comes then follows business. We know the importance of, after you have a good site for an economic development prospect, you have to show can you get the talent. So Colorado has was a was a net benefactor during during COVID, and continues to grow as a state. Colorado Springs has really taking off because you have big city amenities, but you have a small town atmosphere. We are not a ski town, but you can be to in, you can be skiing in an hour and a half away from us. But then you had, we’re not a mountain town. So we, we have lots of we have lots of amenities because of the aerospace and defense culture here, even in in in down times, in an economy, quite often for national security reasons, our economy bounces back quickly and and and goes down less severe than what some other communities might face that are so dependent on other sectors. I think it’s it’s also that during the pandemic, a lot of young people realized that they didn’t have to live in the super high priced cities, and could move to more mid tier cities, mid size, and have a lot of the same amenities. We have the arts, we have sports here, we have universities, and so they could have all those amenities, but maybe not the big city prices or, unfortunately, some of the the other things that that go along with, with, with the large cities, the the taxes and homelessness and crime and and things such as that. So this city’s really done well because of that. And then I will give my team some credit. I think it’s important when you’re the chamber and the EDC that you’re on the forefront of selling your community, telling your story, or it’s told for you, and you may not, but what is told, if you’re not getting in front of that, and this is a community that, I would say is the best kept secret in Colorado, in a lot of respects, it’s fast changing, and so we’re out there working on those national news stories, I would think Any Chamber of Commerce would want to be going out and telling their story. We work very closely with our Convention and Visitors Bureau to try to recruit tourism to this area, so that while we have tourist is one part of our economy, we also have primary sector employers, and we’re doing that in aerospace and defense, cybersecurity and advanced manufacturing are our three areas of focus, and the chamber in EDC where we lead that charge, I like to say we’re the quarterback of the team, and then we have a whole lot of great folks on our offensive line, our city, our county, our utilities, our state organization and such. So I think that’s contributed to our success.

Brandon Burton 14:21
That’s great. I’m glad you got to the point of bragging on your team and telling the story of the work you guys are doing and what Colorado Springs has to offer to create that narrative so it’s not being created for you. I’m a big believer in being an agent of action like that. So how do you guys there at the Chamber in EDC? How do you go about advocating for for sound and a sound environment for business to be conducted?

Johnna Reeder Kleymeyer 14:47
Well, I’m a I’m a big proponent of the Entrepreneurial Operating System that Gina Wickman has has coined, and it’s in the book traction. I’ve used this in several organizations that I’ve. And we adopted that when I first moved here, little over three years ago now. And so just what you said, we do not measure activity here at the Chamber in EDC. We measure outcomes. And that could be really hard for chambers of commerce, because you have a lot of competing priorities. You have a lot of legacy programs that people have done for years and years and and it can be chambers are famous for adding things on. We’re not very good for taking things away. So this chamber, we really have evaluated all of our programming, all of our events, all of all of our initiatives that we’re focusing on, from government affairs to economic development and in between, and if we don’t have measurable outcomes, it’s hard for us to sell to our constituents, to our membership, why we’re doing it. So we do this crazy thing, we stop, we stop doing it if it is not working. And so I would just encourage your listeners that as they’re leading their chamber organizations and trying to decide and help shape the future of their community. Measurable outcomes can make all the difference, and I believe in the smart principle of specific, measurable, actionable, realistic and time based. So put those together so you agree with your board on what success actually is, and then you can all celebrate together. But if, if you as staff, have a different mindset of what that is than your board, you’re not going to see success for your community, and frankly, you might be out of a job. Yeah,

Brandon Burton 16:35
I love how you said that you there at the chamber. You guys don’t measure activity. You measure you measure outcomes, and that’s really where the rubber meets the road, and you can really see the needle move in your community. Is by by measuring those outcomes. And that is, I think, the definition of success that you’re talking about is seeing those outcomes that are measurable. So it

Johnna Reeder Kleymeyer 16:55
is, and that doesn’t mean, you know, did we? Did we have 250 events this year. Oh, my goodness gracious. That exhausts me to even hear that, right? And you know, real outcomes. This is hard work. We’re working on things like housing affordability and attainability, child care in our community, retaining our military installations, ensuring that we’re having good policy at our state and local level, for for business and low regulation. We’re working on Union bills right now. We’re we’re working on a K through 12 program to ensure that we can have homegrown talent, not just imported talent to the state of Colorado. These are not easy topics, and they don’t happen overnight. But if it’s not the chamber doing it, who is

Brandon Burton 17:42
That’s right? So that’s a good transition. I wanted to ask you about workforce, and if workforce is a struggle throughout the country, but what initiatives you kind of touched on them a little bit there. But what initiatives are you guys doing there in Colorado Springs to address it the workforce challenges that so many communities are seeing? Yeah,

Johnna Reeder Kleymeyer 18:00
you know, we’re fortunate because we’re the second most educated state in the Union, but when you peel back that onion, it’s because of so many people that move into the pop move into the state of Colorado. It is not necessarily that it’s our homegrown talent. So when you really look at our test scores and graduation rates and such. And this is, this is the same all over the country, but we’re actually going deep and looking at this on how do we solve it? Because I don’t believe in the long term the United States, you know, we’re short on population for jobs of the future, so not all communities are going to succeed. And we want to be sure that we’re seen as a mega region, with both our partners, all the way to Denver to all the way down to Pueblo Colorado, as a mega region of Front Range talent, the Front Range, or the front range of mountains here in Colorado. So we’re going deep with our 17 school districts in our metropolitan area to evaluate those test scores, to evaluate the why. And we’ve created an initiative called innovate Pikes Peak, and we’re partnering with education experts, a group called Peak education, because I’m not an education expert, we’re business people and but we’re trying to solve an issue that will produce talent for us in the future. Again, homegrown talent. Because I’ll remind everyone Brandon that while business and chambers sometimes shy away from getting involved in education, we should remember that while maybe your children have choices in life, not all children do, and if they’re not graduating with a great start and maybe certification, certificates, some some college, two plus two programs, they’re going to live in your community. They’re not going anywhere. So they can either live in your community or they can live on your community. So we believe that the chamber and. See has a role to play in ensuring that those young people graduate with a great start. So this innovate pipes peak is all about evaluating career pathing and whether that be a college track or that be a technical track. We think that the two blend together. So we’re working with our higher education and our K through 12 right now in the business community is really leading on defining those paths and where we need to be involved for the future, because the duplication of resources and the teacher pay and all of this does not add to success for our children long term. So we’re stepping in, we’re leaning in on that. We’ve got those measurable outcomes, and this is a big, hairy, audacious goal that we’re working on, but by the end of the year, we’ll have a pathway, a roadmap for our business community to follow

Brandon Burton 20:51
Absolutely and you know, I haven’t seen any formal surveys on this, or anything. Maybe you have, but it seems like youth, as they graduate high school, they feel like their future, either they stay in their community and don’t go anywhere, or they have to leave the community to go to school and get a job and and in very select communities, you see the sense of pride where a student graduates. And like I live in Colorado Springs, I want to raise my family here. I want to have build a career here. So there’s something to that, building that sense of pride within the community, where they don’t have to feel like the grass is greener, you know, five states away, to go to school and get a start their career somewhere else. But have that be the desire even. And maybe they do go somewhere for school, but they come back because they see the opportunities and that pride within the community.

Johnna Reeder Kleymeyer 21:43
I think I’ve heard the quote before that the grass is not always greener on the other side, it’s greener where you water it. So I think it’s the chamber and EDCs role to water that grass. How are we ensuring that there are opportunities for young people? How are we ensuring that they can afford to live in our community, to buy a home. You know, the most likely to move are an 18 to 34 year old. And so if we can make sure that the Colorado Springs metropolitan area is on their radar, even if they go away to school, we want them to think, wow, it was pretty cool where I lived, and I want to go back. So we like that boomerang effect too, because then they’re bringing back fresh ideas and perspectives too when they have lived somewhere else. But we’re working hard to build on that population, and I think any chamber needs to be focused on that. If you’re lucky enough that people just show up in your community, good for you, but I don’t think that’s the case for most communities anymore.

Brandon Burton 22:44
Yeah, I think it helps for like you’re saying that boomerang effect, to be able to see a contrast of another community and say, You know what the grass is really green back where I grew up. So let me go back there. Yeah,

Johnna Reeder Kleymeyer 22:54
that’s things like nightlife and outdoor activities and things that young people want and desire are are different than where I am in at this point in my life and career, but I think that’s why we have to ask the right questions and young professional organizations being active in your area. We started a we started a program called Find your calls, and we use cos and everything, because it’s Colorado Springs, but find your calls the play on words. And it’s a, it’s a suite of talent initiatives to recruit, engage and connect young professionals, young people. One of those programs is called Hello cos so, and it’s about, it’s a, it’s a summer intern program. So when interns come to our region to to work in the summer, housing was a big issue for three months to find somewhere to live. I mean, are you going to find it on Craigslist in somebody’s basement? That’s just scary. So, you know, we we worked with Colorado College, and we have a safe environment for those young people to live in the summer, and then the chamber and EDC does all the fun wrap around programming. So while they’re out of work, we we hike up Pikes Peak with them. We go to a switchback soccer game. We introduce them to speed dating with military generals in the region, where they can have interaction with people that are in charge of our national security, in our in our country, we think that chambers in EDC should be doing things to help our business community recruit that talent and then help that, help that young person fall in love with the region. Maybe they fall in love with the job too, but if they have a great experience in your community, they’re going to want to come back.

Brandon Burton 24:43
Yeah, well, and inevitably, other jobs will come, and people that are already employed are going to go to the new job, and so you got to backfill all the time. And you know, what I’m hearing is it’s not so much intent, you know, just to focus on the K through 12 and helping create, create a career. Path, but it’s really place making within the community. So they have a desire to be there. They want to be there. They love being there. So I think that’s just as important. Yeah, so I think you’ve touched on it in different aspects. But the next question I wanted to ask is, how do you see what is, what is your long term vision for Colorado, for the Colorado Springs Chamber and EDC.

Johnna Reeder Kleymeyer 25:24
Well, for us, I would say that for you know, so goes the community. So goes the Chamber in EDC. And we are, we are a community that has growing pains. And I’ll and I’ll say this so things that, the things that we’re having to work on are a how do you maintain a low tax, low tax environment, but at the same time you have big needs, such as road improvements and high quality schools, maintaining our military bases. We talked about housing, we talked about child care for young families. This is a really big deal, and something that the pandemic just exacerbated the problem, particularly for women and people of color needing to get back to work full time, working on all these issues. I call them growing pains, because we’re fortunate that we have these growing pains. If we weren’t a fast growing community, this wouldn’t be the issue. But with that the Chamber and EDC, we’ve tried to set those goals, set those measurements, and then where we focus, where we measure, is where we will succeed. And that’s what we’ve tried to do. You announced, you talked about some of our economic development announcements when, when you in the introduction, we weren’t, we weren’t seeing that until three years ago, and now we’re one of the top locations in the state for new announcements. It’s where we focused. We said we’ve got to get more of a diversity of primary employers in our region, and that’s where we focused. We’re now trying to solve those big issues Brandon that will make it where it’s the right environment for business to be able to thrive in place, expand or locate to our region. So I’ve given you several of those examples, and that’s where we’re spending our day. And I would just tell my colleagues out there that it’s not about party planning, it’s not about business after hours, it’s it’s, it’s not about having the best gala in the community. Those things are a means to the ends. Those are a networking opportunity. I think the future of chambers and economic development Corps are solving big issues for the community, coming alongside government where government cannot, cannot solve the issue because, either because they’re a public entity, or they just don’t have the dollars. And how are we being the conduit between business and private, the private sector of business, community officials and government officials? I think that’s the role for a chamber to play,

Brandon Burton 27:58
Absolutely and I love that, that vision that you have, where you focus is what’s going to grow, right? You got to keep watering those areas, make that grass green? Yes. So I like asking, as I have guests on the show, as for chambers that are out there listening, what kind of tip or action item might you share with the Chamber who’s trying to take their organization up to the next level. I feel like you’ve shared some good tips. But is there anything else that you want to expose and share with those listening?

Johnna Reeder Kleymeyer 28:29
Well, I think that I would just say, I know that many of our chambers, you know, I have 2528 people on on our team. So we’re, we’re a large organization for a nonprofit, especially for our size, but we’re doing a lot of things. I think number one, what I’ve learned through my career, and it sounds a little cliche, but it’s so true, is you can get a lot more done when you surround yourself with the right people, and when you don’t care who gets the credit. So we work really hard on our internal culture. We have a we have a culture of excellence and accountability. It is. These are lifestyle jobs. We don’t work. We don’t work eight to five here. We work when the clients need us. We do a lot of evening events and weekend things going on. But, but I would say that putting the right people around you as a leader in the chamber world or the economic development world will allow you to do more, and it will free you up as a leader to be more visionary and forward thinking and making sure that you’re helping drive results for the future, but you need people on your team that are also integrators of the mission, that are going deep and working hard to to close projects and to find wins in the community and work on big, big goals. So surround yourself with the right people, and then our philosophy here is, as long as we get the win, we don’t care who gets the credit. So quite. Often we may be carrying a heavy load on a project or an initiative, but we make sure that all of our partners are equally thanked and appreciated. Then there are other times, our partners are taking the lead and and we’re serving as a resource to them, and I just think you can get a lot more done when that’s your philosophy and that’s the way that you’re pushing forward? Yeah,

Brandon Burton 30:21
working as a team, right? So we’ve talked about the long term vision for Colorado Springs. The next question I have for you is, as we look to the future of the chamber industry, Chambers of Commerce in general, how do you see the future of chambers and their purpose going forward?

Johnna Reeder Kleymeyer 30:40
Well, I think it’s an interesting time for our industry and profession. I’ve been in and around this work for almost 30 years now, and seen it in four different states. I would say that all chambers, if you’re not constantly thinking about how you’re reinventing yourself and how you’re adding value for your membership, you’re going to lose membership. You’re going to be left behind. Now, what do I mean by that? Well, because our economy is changing so fast, and because the access to resources and artificial intelligence now and being able to reach people across the web, I don’t think businesses feel the need to be a member of a chamber of commerce, as they did maybe 50 years ago, 30 years ago, even longer. I liken it to years ago, our parents, our fathers. Usually it was typical, were members of the Rotary Club, and Rotary Club was the place to go so you could meet other businessmen or and at that time, it was man, but business people now and and do business and find ways to network. People have so many choices now as as businesses on how they connect with their customers and how they connect with other business people, that unless you’re constantly thinking about your value add as a chamber I think it’s going to be hard to make the case of Why be a member of the Chamber of Commerce when businesses are having to make choices about payroll and and health insurance and other things, or do they pay their chamber membership? We may get put at the bottom of the barrel. So I would recommend finding non dues, revenue sources. What are programs you can offer that are at a fee that add value, not add what are data sources you have that not everyone in your community has? Are there? Are there? Is there information or programming or something that you can do that’s a value add that I constantly say we need non dues revenue. Non dues revenue because just depending on a membership model for the future, I’m not so sold on that’s going to work long term, maybe, maybe in my career length. But those of you that are starting in chamber world in your 20s and 30s, now, I think we’re going to live in a very different society in 10 to 20 years, and you if, if you’re not at the table, you might find yourself on the menu. So get to that table and make sure you’re adding value that others others don’t have, and you’re differentiating yourself as an association. Yeah, and

Brandon Burton 33:17
I think it’s important to not just look at your chamber as a membership association, but as a business, operate it as a business and find those income generating. You know, you’re calling them non dues revenue, but in the end, it’s income generating, and that’s the only way to thrive and stay healthy as a business. So yeah, constantly

Johnna Reeder Kleymeyer 33:36
people will will say to me, Well, Well, John, you know, the chamber is here to just do good community work. And I said, and that’s a business unto itself. If I can’t make payroll, I can’t have our organization doing this work you’re asking us to do. I’m a business too. I have a profit and loss statement like every other business, and I think you hit that on the head. It’s important for us to be seen and think of our business in that way as chamber leaders.

Brandon Burton 34:05
Yeah, well, Johnna, this has been great having you on the show and sharing your insights and some of the exciting things that are happening in Colorado Springs, the impact your organization is having in the community. I’d love to give you an opportunity to share any contact information for listeners who may want to reach out and connect and maybe learn some of the strategies you guys are are working on, maybe without giving away all the secrets. But how would you have them reach out and connect with you?

Johnna Reeder Kleymeyer 34:30
Well, number one, I do believe that there are no new ideas. You just need to borrow ideas from our partners. So go out there and meet with other chambers and find those find those leads. You know, we have a national organization association that we can all tap into, but if they’d like to speak with me, I’d be flattered and more than happy to help in any way. You can find me on LinkedIn under Johnna Reeder Kleymeyer, you can find me on our website is ColoradoSpringsChamberEDC.com, and my phone number 719-500-9485, or my email is jreederkleymeyer@cscedc.com. I’d be happy to speak with anyone and be be flattered to get a call perfect.

Brandon Burton 35:26
We’ll make sure all that is in our show notes for this episode make it easy to find and connect with you. And I just want to thank you again for setting aside some time to be with us today here on Chamber Chat Podcast, sharing some of your experiences and tips that you’ve learned from and being willing to share them with the Chamber community, we appreciate it.

Johnna Reeder Kleymeyer 35:44
It’s my pleasure. Good luck to everyone out there. Keep making big things happen in your community.

Brandon Burton 35:49
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Capital Campaigns with Ann Hutchison

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Brandon Burton 0:00
This is the Chamber Chat Podcast, the show dedicated to chamber professionals to spark ideas and to get actionable tips and strategies to better serve your members and community.

Hello, Chamber Champions. Welcome to Chamber Chat Podcast. I’m your hosts Brandon Burton. And it’s my goal here on the podcast to introduce you to people and ideas to better help you serve your Chamber members and your community.

Our title sponsor for this episode is Bringing Local Back. Remember when your community could turn to a local TV station or newspaper for the latest updates and affordable ads? Those days may be fading, but the need for local connection remains. That’s why we created Bringing Local Back, a game changing platform that restores the local visibility and advertising power to your community. It’s more than just tech. It’s about driving engagement and creating new revenue for your chamber. Ready to see the future visit bringinglocalback.com to schedule your demo today. This is the future of local commerce.

Our guest for this episode is Anne Hutchison, and became President and CEO of the Fort Collins Area Chamber of Commerce on January 1. 2021 she started with the Chamber in 2003 is a policy committee coordinator and was promoted to Executive Vice President in 2005 before moving into the CEO role and directly manage the communications and events departments, assisted in the day to day operations of the chamber and managed issues and political advocacy, as Well as as well as the chambers and leadership Fort Collins and leadership northern Colorado programs, and is responsible for the future vision and strategic direction of the organization, while maintaining the staff team and the day to day operations of the Fort Collins Area Chamber, she’s been a key community leader in advancing the business friendly policy agenda while building community through business. And I’m excited to have you with us today here on Chamber Chat Podcast. I’d love to give you an opportunity to say hello to all the Chamber Champions who are out there listening, and to share something interesting about yourself so we can all get to know you a little better. Yeah.

Ann Hutchison 2:15
Well, thanks, Brandon. I’m thrilled to be a part of the podcast today and really looking forward to hopefully sharing some insights that are of value to my colleagues across the country. As far as something interesting about myself, I don’t know that this is interesting, but I am a true blue or true green CSU RAM fan. So I graduated from University of Northern Colorado in Greeley, which is about an hour away from Fort Collins. But my father and my sister have multiple degrees from Colorado State, and they, they gave me the opportunity to be a fan of Colorado State, and so, so I am. I’m fully invested football, basketball, volleyball, you name the sport that has a clock and a and score, and you’ll most likely see myself and my sister there cheering the Rams on. I’m wearing green today because we do Fan Friday here in Fort Collins, where we get our green on on Friday. So you will, you will regularly see me sporting the green and the gold in support of that important community partner. But also it’s just a lot of

Brandon Burton 3:29
fun. Yeah, that’s awesome. It’s always nice to get those proxy invitations to be a fan, right? Exactly, exactly. That’s awesome, but you wear it well. So this is that that’s fun. Well, tell us a little bit more about the Fort Collins area Chamber, just to kind of set the stage for our discussion today, so we know where you’re coming from in this conversation, to tell us about the size staff, budget, scope of work, the things that you guys are involved with, to kind of preface for this conversation, yeah.

Ann Hutchison 3:57
So Fort Collins is located in Colorado, we’re about an hour north of Denver, and as already noted, Colorado State is our single largest employer in Fort Collins, they’re a key primary employer in that we bring in about 10,000 new students every year onto Campus. So we have a campus of about 40,000 students, and we learn them up, we take that raw material, we learn them up, and then we send them back out into the world to do really great things, and as a sizable employer, but also that primary employer, bringing those new dollars into the community, incredibly important to Fort Collins, but we’re not a single industry town. We also then have a strong technology presence here in our economy. Um, we’re well known for our retail sector. Um, at one point we had the justification that we had more restaurants per capita than anywhere else in the United States. So a beautiful cross section community that the economy is driven by a lot of really interesting and great companies and organizations. As far as the chamber goes, we are the Fort Collins area Chamber, and that’s very intentional, that we not only support concepts and visions and ideas for Fort Collins, but we really do address issues on a regional basis. So it’s a connection between Larimer County, which is where Fort Collins is, and Weld County, which has Greeley as it’s a county seat. That two county area represents almost 700,000 people, and we really are a regional economy, with people living, working and playing throughout that two county area. As a result, we then end up being one of the largest chambers in the two county area. We have about 1200 members. We then staff the work that those 1200 members request with about 14 people that represent 11 and a half FTE. We’ve We’ve tested out a lot of concepts that we funded through grant funding that then we move those folks off of contract basis onto our staff, so you’ll see us continue to grow a little bit, although the last several years, we’ve really leaned into that concept of not FTE, but contracts in order to get the work done. Last little note would be, we function under a five year strategic plan that we call northern Colorado prospers. And you and I’ll talk a little bit more about how we created northern Colorado prospers and what it does for us, but it sets the stage for the work of the chamber to be largely around four key goals we’re we’re staying highly focused on the economy and how the economy works and how we can influence the economy here in the two county area, we spend a lot of time working on our talent ecosystem and making sure that the ecosystem is easy for people to get into, but also then creating the talent and the workforce that our employers need moving forward, we spend a lot of time talking about transportation in a two county area, and really making sure that there’s a system that allows people to get throughout the two county area. And then our fourth goal is around a business for the environment, really making changes locally, at the county level and at the state level, to make sure that business has an opportunity to thrive throughout Northern Colorado.

Brandon Burton 7:40
That’s great. Yeah, that gives us a really good snapshot of what you guys are involved with. So do you have any of the tourism or economic development, or you solely chamber? Or what’s the what’s that scope look like?

Ann Hutchison 7:52
We are solely chamber. So here in Fort Collins, we have a separate organization that manages our visit profile. We have a separate organization that manages our downtown Fort Collins promotions. We have a separate organization that does any of the pageants and parties. So yes, our full time job is membership, connections and

Brandon Burton 8:17
advocacy. Awesome now that that helps set the stage, for sure. And I’m, I’m curious more about the the contract workers, and exploring that through grants and and I think there’s a lot of opportunity there for other chambers to be able to to really assess the needs. See, do we need a full time person for this? Is it a short term commitment that could be a contract thing or, or if it may be a long trip. I’ve heard of accounting, you know, being contracted out and not necessarily having a staff person for that. So, yes, they’re doing some innovative things. It sounds like, Oh,

Ann Hutchison 8:48
thank you. Yeah. It really the contract design has really allowed us to test out concepts and test out concepts using other people’s money, which is kind of fantastic, but it also then gives us as an organization that opportunity to buy only the services that we need for that moment in time without then having that long time commitment, especially if a concept doesn’t work, but that long time commitment of staff time benefits, office space, technology, I mean, you name all of the parts and pieces. And so using that contract model really has given us the opportunity to test ideas, make sure that they work, and then we can, we can adopt those into our organization, if they make sense. Yeah,

Brandon Burton 9:33
so I don’t think you mentioned what the your budget is, operating budget there at the Chamber, because I think that’ll be a key thing as we get into our topic for today. Yes,

Ann Hutchison 9:43
so we function with a with approximately $2 million a year. Half of that budget comes directly from membership dues and community events or membership events that we run. The other half of that. Budget, then, is a funding stream that very specifically drives our major priority work for the organization. So and again, we’ll we’ll talk deeper about this, but we ran a five campaign that asked business to make a five year investment with us, and that generated about $4 million for use over five years. So that’s where that other million dollars comes from. Is that very specific campaign that then drives and funds this very specific strategic work? Yeah,

Brandon Burton 10:35
now that that’s perfect. Yes. And as you alluded to, we’re going to be focusing our conversation today around capital campaigns and being able to use those to raise the funds for these important you know, key work for the chambers are involved with so I’m excited to dive in deeper on that topic, learn more about how you guys are doing things there at the Fort Collins area Chamber. Soon as we get back from this quick break,

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All right, Ann, we are back, as we mentioned before the break today, we’re going to be talking about capital campaigns, and you mentioned how that makes up about half of your your operating budget there at the Fort Collins area Chamber. And you had mentioned that you go about asking people to commit to to support this strategic strategy for a five year plan. Tell us more about the structure, how this is done. Just unpack it for us, you bet.

Ann Hutchison 14:41
So it it’s important to note that I inherited an amazing legacy here at the Fort Collins area Chamber. So our our former CEO, David May, who led this organization for 20 years, really did a fantastic job and helping. Our business community and especially our leadership. Think about the role of the chamber and and placing the chamber into a space where we were taking on the biggest of regional issues we were we were proving out that we could be a trusted resource, that we could actually move the dial on policy and create the future that we really want here in Northern Colorado. At the same time, he identified that we were doing that in one year chunks, and it was really challenging to start to move that flywheel relative to these really massive system changing issues. If you if you spend half of your foot your fundraising, and then you only end up with six months in order to work on the issue itself, and then you go right back into fundraising again. So David led our board through an analysis to really identify that this capital campaign concept could work for things other than buildings. And so we launched in 2016 a fundraising effort where, number one, we worked with the business community to identify the biggest issues that the business community wanted to see the chamber work on. We then packaged those with four major goals and took it out into the market and said, business community, are you willing to make a five year commitment in order for us to do this work? And that first campaign, we were able to raise $3.8 million for use over a five year window and and it was transformational for our organization. It really got this out of that one year cycle, but also laid down a marker to say our organization Well, yes, we are about people connections is really about taking on the biggest issues of our region and delivering on the promise of making change with those issues. So under David’s leadership, we ran with Northern Colorado prospers 1.0 had some great success as David then prepared to retire in 2020. We were coming up onto the last year of that five year campaign. We we went back out into the market and said, Hey, community, we’ve been doing this work. Here’s what we’ve been able to do. We think we’re still the right organization to continue this work. Would you be willing to fund us again? That feasibility study came back and said, Absolutely, we could show very specific improvements that we had made to our business environment. And business was very willing to say, yes, let’s let’s give it another round. So my first year in seat in 2021 was to take that new product out into the market and spend 2021 fundraising while wrapping up the first campaign, as far as moving the dial and again, very successful, about $4 million that was committed to us for then the next five years of programming. So we’ve been under northern Colorado prospers 2.0 for for three years, four years, with 2223 and 24 being the first three years of that campaign we’re will be taking on in next year, 2025 an analysis of, is this the right tool moving forward? Do we run another campaign or not, and what that might look like for for fundraising in 2026 so it’s, it’s, it’s been transformational for us? Yeah,

Brandon Burton 18:35
I really like the idea of of not needing to spend half the year on fundraising, and only have six months to do the actual work, right? So be able to do it once, and kind of have it set for a five year time frame and and be able to really roll your sleeves up and get some things done. So you’ve been there at the Chamber for you know well before this, this is put into place. How have you seen the change? I know you said you guys will be doing an analysis to see if it’s worth going forward, but how have you seen the before versus after? With with using this kind of strategy? Yeah,

Ann Hutchison 19:13
I’d love to use the example that really showcases this idea of the flywheel turning and the impact having lasting, lasting change in your community. So here in Northern Colorado, Fort Collins is connected to Denver, our city center, by an interstate. It’s called I 25 and it’s an interstate that was put down on the ground in 1969 and had really very little improvement to it since we were starting to experience as a community that our commute to Denver, whether it was to head to an international airport or or to interact with state government or or just to do business. Was going from a 45 minute commute up to closer to an hour and a half, with projections that that commute could expand to three hours in a very short amount of time. So So capacity on that roadway was was a growing, growing concern. Our transportation division said, don’t you worry about that. Northern Colorado, we have you slated to to do some pretty major improvements to that roadway, adding an extra lane, and we’ll be, we’ll be getting that done in 2075

Brandon Burton 20:35
awesome, can’t wait, right?

Ann Hutchison 20:37
This is 2015 when we’re having this conversation. Business leaders around the room had some very choice words to say and said, You know what? We appreciate that, but we’re going to knock about half a century off of that number, and we are committed as a business community and as a government community to find the funding in order to improve that roadway and have all of those dollars secured, if not the construction completed by 2025 so we’re in 2015 2020 make the big declaration we are going to fix north I 25 by 2025 because of Northern Colorado prospers and that fundraising, that campaign style fundraising, we knew we had money for the next five years to be able to very specifically create a lobbying plan to build relationships, to to to dive in full time to this conversation, To make a change. And I’m happy to report that we’re we’re coming up on January one of 2025, and we have been able to secure $1.2 billion for the improvement of that roadway. We actually have, of the five segments that we were working to improve, four of them have been completed. And actually we have concrete on the ground with an additional lane that is offering free flowing traffic we have then the final segment is now fully funded and is under construction now. So because of the funding that we had in place, we were able to go on a absolutely proactive pathway in order to make change and then turn around and deliver to our business community exactly what we promised. So very real example, and made all the difference.

Brandon Burton 22:32
That is awesome. That’s quite the quite the example,

Ann Hutchison 22:40
if only every issue was that easy, right? I mean, at the end of the day, you have a problem, you know exactly what the answer is, right? Problem is road doesn’t work. I need $1.2 billion we find $1.2 billion and we fix it. Some of these other challenges are, sadly not as easily, easily addressed it and and you can’t check the box quite as quite as quickly, but it is a very real example for us.

Brandon Burton 23:08
You had mentioned earlier that there’s there’s pillars to this work, to this plan that you guys have going forward the northern Colorado prospers. Can you talk to us about what those pillars are and and the thinking that went behind creating those pillars Absolutely.

Ann Hutchison 23:26
So our four pillars are number one, reigniting the economy. That pillar was created as we were coming out of COVID. And so reignite was a concept that we were using relative to, how do we bounce back from COVID? I would say with that goal, we’ve actually evolved it into not only recovery, which we we have been able to do since COVID, but also now, how do we accelerate our economy? How do we grow our economy in northern Colorado? So that’s our first our first goal, or our first pillar is around the economy. Our second goal is around our talent ecosystem. And how do we continue to attract, grow and retain the right talent for Northern Colorado, and what are the systems that we need to affect in order to make it again easy for people to come into our workforce, stay in our workforce, and grow in our workforce. Our third pillar is around transportation. That’s where that I 25 example comes from. We were really keenly focused at the beginning of this campaign spend window on I 25 now that we’ve been able to check those boxes, we’re now altering our vision to really be about regional roadways. How do we connect to that spine of I 25 to go east and west across the two county area, and then the fourth pillar, or fourth goal, is around a business friendly environment? What are the barriers? What are the regulations? What are the artists? Official limiters that we’ve created here in Northern Colorado that make us less business friendly. How do we eliminate those in order to inspire and encourage the opportunity for business to have success here so for for very broad areas, gives us a lot of space to be impactful, but also fully driven by our business community, saying these are our biggest pain points that we believe the chamber can be impactful around. Yeah,

Brandon Burton 25:30
I knew you guys would get the feedback right. You wouldn’t just, you know, pull topics out of a hat and say, this is where we’re going to put our attention and and not have any data to support that. So that’s fantastic. So when it comes to the capital campaign, do you guys? Do you put it on yourself? Do you make all the contacts? Do you bring in a consultant? How do you guys approach it?

Ann Hutchison 25:51
Yeah, so for Northern Colorado prospers 1.0 we did a full RFP with the with the fundraising community and interviewed consultants from across the country. We created a fantastic relationship with Sean McCullough with power 10. They’re in Atlanta, Georgia, and Sean is just this really dynamic leader that absolutely takes off his hat of I live in Atlanta, and becomes immersed in our community to help us really understand what’s happening at boots on the ground. He ran a feasibility study for us where we took out the basic concepts, and he then was that third party to give our business community a really confidential but easy path to share their feedback. Once we completed the feasibility study with Sean, we then did enter into a contract where he, working with our staff, managed that actual fundraising campaign for the first northern Colorado prospers. We then went back with Sean a second time to do another feasibility study, and then they were a key partner with me as I was doing the fundraising in 2021 and that outside consultant was incredibly powerful. I think, as chamber folks, we have a tendency of thinking we can bootstrap everything. But I will say that investment with power 10 and with Sean paid for itself in so many ways. They pushed us hard to be able to articulate what we were offering to the community. They also pushed us hard to be able to tell the story once we did start the work, and then again, that that anonymous, almost anonymous, third party pathway for our investors to really provide strong, raw insider feedback that again, we may or may not get as as a chamber with our community so big proponent of sometimes you have to spend money in order to make money in order to get the work done. Yeah.

Brandon Burton 28:09
So when it comes to making the asks for people to commit to funding, this is that you that’s actually making the ask. You’re sitting down and making those calls and make setting those meetings exactly

Ann Hutchison 28:23
right. Power 10 came in, and they were, in some ways, our back office. So they were coached, yeah, and they would coach us up. They helped us with the messaging and the narrative. They would set up the meetings so that so they were they were going through the brain damage of getting on two different schedules. And how does it work? And is it in person? Is it online? But then it was myself as CEO, doing the pitch as well as the ask. And then the great news was then power 10 was, in some ways, that that follow up closer, so I would make the ask in some cases, you know it was, it was an ask of $50,000 a year from a company for five years, and then power 10 would do the follow up to make sure if we got a warm or a hot Yes. They then did all the follow up to to finalize, have the paperwork done, and then we process the rest of that internally.

Brandon Burton 29:20
Yeah. So how long would you say the the capital campaign lasts like the actual work of, you know, from start to finish, from doing the research and, you know, surveys and everything to you’re done, and you’ve know, you know what the dollar amount has been committed for the next five years. So

Ann Hutchison 29:38
it’s, it’s probably an 18 month process. And as I noted, we’re highly focused in next year, year four of the current campaign. We’re in in doing analysis from start to finish, and then fundraising in 25 and we’re planning 18 months for that process. So. Um, we’ll be starting as soon as January, talking with our board about other ways that we could create the same kind of funding streams. Um, deciding if any other pathways make sense, or if we need to stay on this campaign path, then going out into the field with a feasibility study in q2 of next year, then making a decision in q3 on where we head. Um, q4 then is, is the narrative and the finalizing of goals. And then January one of of 26 crazy to say out loud, January 26 then I would be heading into the field to start, start those one on one conversations with a goal of being able to wrap up the campaign within about six months.

Brandon Burton 30:45
Okay, very good that that definitely helps. So you’ve done it. You’ve been in it through point 1.0 and 2.0 now, and it looks like the the amount that was committed was it increased some. So hopefully that speaks well to it being received well by those who have committed to fund this. Yes, and hopefully that’ll continue. I know you need to be sensitive, and that’s why you’re going to do the you know, this assessment, to make sure you’re not wearing people out. But it seems to, seems to work well. If they can see the results of the work you’re doing, they’ll, they’ll continue to fund it.

Ann Hutchison 31:21
Absolutely, I will say, I think one of the opportunities that’s in front of us, one is with the campaign we were talking to regional business leaders and having people that probably wouldn’t necessarily write a check for a membership, write a check four times the size of membership because they were investing directly in specific work. So so that was a tremendous change of opportunity for us as a chamber. We weren’t going to the same well all the time now, certainly key investors in our organization that have been long time. Sizable membership. Investors also invested in NCP, but the new audience, the new employer that we had the opportunity to talk to was was just tremendous. I do think as we start to look at NCP 3.0 we not only want to continue to expand that UN unusual investor in the chamber, I’m also curious about, how do we broaden this opportunity for investment to our our basic membership participants? What are those pathways for even our smallest of investors on the chamber side of the house to also then invest in northern Colorado prospers. So for us, it’s looking at both ends of that spectrum, top and the bottom.

Brandon Burton 32:51
Yeah, that’s fantastic. And I can feel the excitement of it too. I mean, it definitely it funds important work, and the money needs to come from somewhere, and you guys are lucky enough to have some strong partners there in your chamber to help fund this. As we start to wrap things up, I’d like to ask for the chamber listening who’s trying to take their organization up to the next level. What kind of tips or action item might you share with them to try to accomplish that goal? Yeah,

Ann Hutchison 33:21
and I know a lot of us have been using this line ever since COVID, but I think it’s very true in that chambers need and should be at the forefront of the biggest issues that are impacting a community. We have the skill set, we have the relationships we we have the foundational presence in a community to be able to take on the very biggest challenges for us in each of our communities. I would suggest that pre COVID, we were maybe hesitant as an industry and as chamber leaders to really dive in full on being that resource. COVID forced many of our organizations to be in a space that was new and unexpected, but proved out that we can be not just a voice for business, but we can be a change agent, and I really encourage my colleagues across the country to embrace that. Yes, membership connections are important. Yes, community parades and community celebrations are important. But if you really want to be a change agent, there is an opportunity and you can do it, and you’d be surprised how much the business community is willing to fund that work.

Brandon Burton 34:43
Yeah. Proofing point right there. But as we look to the future of chambers of commerce, how do you see the future of chambers and their purpose going forward?

Ann Hutchison 34:53
Yeah, again, I think in this time and space where we have a lot of. Of conflict in communities. We’ve just come off an election season that was probably as divided as we’ve ever seen since we became a country of people having very, very different views of the world. The chamber can be this fascinating, exciting, vibrant home base for multitudes of perspectives to come together, to then identify what is very best for the future of your community, and realizing that we’ve built these connections that we’re interacting with business and that can remain this incredible home base for so many community decisions. That gets me excited and showcases, I think, the role that chambers can absolutely play across the country in in creating our next future.

Brandon Burton 36:00
Yeah, I love that. I love that response well, and I wanted to give you an opportunity to share any contact information, if there’s anyone out there who wants to reach out and connect and learn more about how you guys have gone about your capital campaign results, things that maybe we didn’t touch on, what would be the best way for them to reach out and connect with you?

Ann Hutchison 36:19
Yeah, certainly. My email is probably the very best pathway. Um, I’ll promote that. Our website has tons of information, just as as every chamber across the country does. So our website is FortCollinsChamber.com and Fort is spelled out. So F, O, R, T, C, O, L, L, I, N, S, C, H, A, M, B, r.com, is our website, and then my email, I’m please, please take full advantage of that, and my email is ahutchison@fcchamber.org.

Brandon Burton 37:01
That’s perfect. And we’ll get it in our show notes too, so people don’t have to try to catch all the spelling. We’ll we’ll get it in there and clickable and everything so But Anne, this has been great having you on chamber chat podcast. Appreciate you sharing your experiences and impact from your capital campaigns and really driving the work forward there in the in the Fort Collins area. Thank you for for being with us and sharing these insights with us today.

Ann Hutchison 37:25
Absolutely. Thank you Brandon for the invite, and again, I hope it’s of value to my colleagues across the country. If

Brandon Burton 37:32
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Income Generating Community Masterplan with Rudy Flores

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Brandon Burton 0:00
This is the Chamber Chat Podcast, the show dedicated to chamber professionals to spark ideas and to get actionable tips and strategies to better serve your members and community.

Hello, Chamber Champions. Welcome to Chamber Chat Podcast. I’m your hosts Brandon Burton. And it’s my goal here on the podcast to introduce you to people and ideas to better help you serve your Chamber members and your community.

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Our guest for this episode is Rudy Flores. Rudy is the President and CEO of the Lincoln Square Ravenswood Chamber of Commerce in Chicago, also known as the LSRCC. He is a passionate advocate for small business and community development. Over Rudy’s 13 year tenure, he’s grown the LSRCC budget by 354% and led the creation of a community wide master plan that has driven significant public investments. He also manages the Lincoln Square Neighborhood Improvement Program and has secured grants to enhance organizational resilience and foster peer to peer training. Rudy serves as a chair on the US Chamber in on the US chambers, Institute for organizational management, Board of Regents and the Illinois Association of Chamber of Commerce Executives, demonstrating his commitment to advancing the chamber industry. Rudy, I’m excited to have you with us today here on Chamber Chat Podcast. I’d love to give you a moment to say hello to all the Chamber Champions who are out there listening, and to share something interesting about yourself so we can all get to know you a little better. Yeah,

Rudy Flores 2:16
thanks for having me today. You know, I am in a different type of chamber, I think, than most of our industry, where it’s in the inner city Chicago is a little different than most, where every neighborhood within the city proper has a Chamber of Commerce. So I’m in a square mile area that has 45,000 residents. So that’s usually shocking to people. And the business mix. We have about 800 business licenses within that square mile. So that’s something I think that’s unique. And then about myself, that’s something I that people usually find really interesting, is I just bought a car in March of 2023 so two years ago, I went 22 years without having a vehicle. I’ve always lived in more dense urban settings, Baltimore, DC, Philadelphia and Chicago, so never really needed a car, and decided to finally get one and do some more exploring and being on the two boards that you mentioned, I’ve been traveling a lot more to different chambers through my role, and it’s been really interesting and unique to go and visit, you know, rural chambers, suburban chambers. And the one thing I like to tell people is, like, you know what? We’re all the same. We all have the same struggles, the successes. It’s just our geographies are different. So it’s been really fun for me having a car and getting to drive around and, they, know, experience the chamber industry.

Brandon Burton 3:42
Yeah, that is, it is interesting. So was it an adjustment to drive again? Like to skip behind the wheel?

Rudy Flores 3:50
Yeah, I still rent cars here and there, you know. I mean, you still have to have a car originally, but, you know, it’s, I’m don’t have the downtime of, like, reading a book while on transit and stuff like that. So that’s a little different or, you know, but now I’m switching to podcasts.

Brandon Burton 4:07
Good deal. I’m glad, glad we could support that for you. Well, tell us a little bit more about the Lincoln Square Ravenswood chamber. Just give us an idea. I mean, you, you’d mentioned the 45,000 population, that square mile. It definitely is unique. But give us an idea, size, staff, budget, scope of work. I mean, it is a unique type of chamber. So just to dive into that a little bit and help help us get our minds wrapped around that, I guess.

Rudy Flores 4:39
Yeah, so when I started in was that 2011 it was just at two and a half of us, you know, two full time, one part time. Now we’re at five full time, one part time. We have a little over 300 members. Why? What else our budget is? When I started was right around three. 100,000 the last two years we’ve been over a million. So, you know, growth has been a really important thing, like trying to diversify our income, it’s been a big focus. And that’s that you mentioned in my bio, a peer to peer grant where we train other chamber professionals. It’s been about, how do you grow your budget without, you know, overworking your employees, or, you know, only having limited employees and stuff like that. So that’s been a big focus on mine, just because I love the industry that we’re in. But you know, in my community, in Lincoln, COVID area of Chicago, we’re on the north side. We’re about a mile and a half from Wrigley Field, where the Cubs play. So the members that we have, a lot of them are brick and mortar retail restaurants. So I know a lot of chambers have, like the CVBS or the main street organizations, so we kind of more aligned with that, but doesn’t mean we don’t have the professional services and stuff like that. So for us, it’s always having to find a balance of like, our bread and butter is that brick and mortar retail restaurant. So we’re doing a lot of events where it’s consumer facing, but still having to figure out the right mix of things we’re doing to create benefits for those lawyers, accountants, you know, insurance agents, things like that.

Brandon Burton 6:14
Yeah. So with one square mile that you’re working with when it comes to events and different things like that, do you have a venue that you go to, like your go to venue that you use? Or how do you when you don’t have the entire city necessarily to to pull from, or maybe you do, I don’t know. I mean, how do you, how do you approach that when you have different events and where you need to utilize a venue of sorts, yeah.

Rudy Flores 6:41
So, I mean, the public street, it’s like, our biggest venue. So we, Chicago is really well known for street festivals. You know, if you’ve been to Chicago, hopefully you’ve been in the summer, when our weather is amazing. If you’ve been in the winter, it’s a different amazing. It’s cold and windy. You know, earlier this week, it was a negative three windshell, you know, at eight o’clock in the morning. So, so we really, we had two street festivals that we do in one’s in the second week of July, and then the other one is the first weekend of October. The one in the summer has about 40,000 attendees. It’s music, craft beer, local businesses and food. And where the one in October is called Apple fest. It’s a Fall Harvest Festival where we bring farms in from around the Midwest and kind of celebrate the return of fall. We hit 70,000 people this year. The we closed down almost a half a mile of our main business corridor. And it’s all about promoting local businesses. And so that’s where, like a big, big money generator for us, is that those are fundraising efforts for the for the organization, but also our members are selling product and stuff and making money. But then we do our smaller things, like in the winter we have, we’re lucky, an industrial corridor that, over the years, has turned into more like event spaces and more artists and startups and galleries and stuff like that. So we do rent some of those venues and do things indoors. We used to do galas. We don’t really do that anymore, because our membership isn’t really looking for that kind of stuff. So we do a lot more business to consumer facing events. We do things like wine strolls and beer crawls and stuff like that, where you basically go and taste like for our wine store, we go, we get wine distributors to be within each of our businesses. They can be from dental offices to a retail store, and you buy a ticket as a consumer and go and taste wine. But it’s marketing the business, because you’re not walking into something. So we do a whole bunch of different things. We also run 22 weeks of farmers markets twice a week. So we have 78 days of programmed community events that we put on throughout the year. Wow, that’ll

Brandon Burton 8:54
keep you busy. It does well. That definitely helps give some more context around, you know, setting the stage for our discussion today, and we’re going to focus most of our conversation around that community master plan, and specifically with the income generation that comes from this community master plan. And we’ll dive in deep on this as soon as we get back from this quick break.

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All right, Rudy, we are back, so let’s, let’s dive into this community master plan. Tell us what it’s about, kind of how the vision came to be implementation, and, of course, get to the money part of it. That’s what everybody wants to know.

Rudy Flores 12:47
Yeah. So we started in, let’s say, like around 2013 or 14, seeing a lot of interest in developers coming into the community, and we had one specific street the city came into and did a streetscape, meaning they came in and redid, all the sidewalks did decorative plantings, like the brick crosswalks and stuff like that. And the in that street that they redid had a lot of just parking lots or, like, old industrial buildings that weren’t really being utilized anymore and stuff like that. And all of a sudden, developers started coming in, buying these properties, started building and multi unit homes were ground floor, some commercial and upper floors being either condos or apartments. And I noticed, like the residents of the area, like complaining. You go to these public meetings and everybody’s super angry and and everyone seen, I’d go to these as the as the chamber director, and and listen. And one thing I noticed was that people kept feeling like they weren’t being heard, they weren’t part of the process, and saying there’s no plan. And I, coming from an urban planning background, I spent my bachelor’s and my master’s programs in community planning. I was like, we need to look at not just individual properties, the way they’re developing and having public meetings talking about it, but let’s look at our entire community holistically. Bring people together to weigh in on what’s the direction they want to see growth happen, or maybe not see growth, and also letting everybody have a say, because I feel like most people that go to the in person public meetings are typically the angry ones, exactly the NIMBYs. And there are NIMBYs. And if you don’t know what NIMBY is, it’s not in my backyard and NIMBYs, yes, in my backyard, yes. And so, and there needs to be a balance, right? You can’t make everybody happy. So there needs to be a give and take. And so we were like, what can the chamber do? Because. Is backing up a little bit. Our community, starting in 2000 started to see a decline in population, and it’s a fairly affluent community now. It was originally the German area of Chicago, and over time, it’s just it’s changed into just being a mix of different people. But what was happening was our public schools, our district was getting better, so we had families moving in, and they were taking, we call them flats. They’re homes that are like each level is a different apartment, basically, so two flat or three flat, and converting them to single family. So it wasn’t changing the look and feel of the community, but what was happening is we were losing the density. And what happens then is then the businesses have less customers, and so we’re like, we need denser housing. The Chamber doesn’t want to get involved in like, the residential area drama, that’s what I call it, but the arterials, which are our commercial corridors, that’s the chamber like, that’s like, you know, our our territory, doing air quotes here. And so we were like, how do we advocate for growth along those commercial corridors to have denser housing so younger people can move in, or maybe, you know, individuals or couples that don’t have children, that are probably going to go out more and spend more money and still keep the fabric of those residential areas the way they are. So we have, basically, in the chambers, the umbrella organization of a we have a business improvement district, a taxing district that focuses on like public way, esthetics, cleaning and greening, holiday decorations. Can do some marketing programming. We do street pull banners and things like that, things like Main Street organizations do, and I know some communities have business improvement districts, so we call them special service areas here in Chicago, so that has its own board called a commission. So both the board of the chamber and that board of that taxing district both agreed to kind of partner together to put some funds together to do this community plan. And one of our goals was like, we really want it to not just be about pretty pictures of like, this is what we want things to look like. Because I tend to think that when people create these, like, elaborate plans, that just they look beautiful and they sit on a bookshelf and don’t go anywhere. We wanted data. That was the biggest piece. We still had pretty pictures, but we really wanted to have the data of what the community wanted, and so what we did was a lot of surveys and public meetings and and built this interactive website because we wanted to meet the residents and and employee employees who come into the community and people just visit. We wanted everybody to have a say and be able to give their thoughts and opinions on the way that they felt most comfortable doing. And so with the website, the way we developed, it was almost like a Pinterest, if you’ve been on Pinterest before, where you could post ideas, pictures, comments, whatever, about what you would like to see, and then people could add to it, or they could actually rank it, and if you got more likes and stuff that posted to go higher up on that that page. So that’s one way of getting people’s thoughts and opinions. We also had a map where you could place things on a map, if you, if your brain works that way, where you like to see a map, you’re like, oh, this intersection is difficult to cross that or, Oh, this would be a great place for a park or whatnot. You could post things on a map, and then we would have digital surveys. People would fill those out, and then we would make sure that all these ways that we’re trying and then go, sorry, and then go back to, like, the public meetings. We also hosted public meetings so you could weigh in on that as well. What we did was, though, ensured that we were marketing this, not just through a newsletter, but also through different social media channels. We’ve, as an organization, currently have over 40,000 followers between Facebook and Instagram. We’ve always had a really strong marketing presence, and so we really utilized those tools, so newsletters and social media and some media as well. We we have a PR firm, so we do some to our like our local online paper, we do some TV, media and stuff like that to publicize what we’re doing. So trying to make sure that we were being thoughtful and looking and creating a plan on how to get the buy in. And so through the whole process, the three or four surveys we did, we’d have like, 2000 entries for each one, wow, and, and we always make sure we do it where it’s multiple choice, right? Because most people don’t want to write, you know, anything. But we’d also always put like the other or a comment box, and we would get. 1000s of comments. It was, it was incredible to see, because I’ve done surveys so many times, but people were so invested in the project that we just got all this really great data. And so it really, it was. It really created a really great plan. And then the reason it really took off after that was because our elected officials saw the engagement that we were getting, and they were like, Oh, wow, this is my constituents. Like, right? That are weighing in. And they’re like, All right, well, this is what we’re we’re seeing and hearing because of the chamber. What can we do to actually start implementing these pieces?

Brandon Burton 20:43
Yeah. And I can see that being replicated in chamber of any size, really. If you start developing a vision, start, you know, doing the surveys, getting the feedback. I like the idea of the Pinterest type website, the maps, the surveys, compiling all the data, but, but that’s a key factor right there, is having the the elected officials seeing, hey, something’s going on here, and I need to be involved. And let’s see if we can make some of this stuff happen. It’s a

Rudy Flores 21:13
it also, it also, though the community too was really exciting because, again, there’s those original meetings with those developers coming in and developing projects without really

Brandon Burton 21:22
having the feedback coming in. Like, do we want this or not? Right, exactly. So people

Rudy Flores 21:27
were like, Oh my gosh, I have an outlet that I can finally have a voice. And it started to make people understand the chamber more, start to sign up for our information, and we now became, like, a bigger leader in our community. And then our politicians were like, oh, I need to start working with the chamber board. That’s

Brandon Burton 21:50
right, that’s awesome. So how did this start gaining traction? Once the elected officials say, hey, we need to be involved more. Let’s see how we can make some of this stuff happen. How did, how did things actually develop in, you know, seeing the ball move forward. Yeah. So,

Rudy Flores 22:07
you know, our area is split with different council members and our state rep and our state senator and stuff like that. And so everybody obviously wants a piece of the pie, and they want their piece to be first, and so that was the tricky part. So what we did? So we adopted the plan in 2019 it took a little over a year to do the plan, and we decided to do the plans, a big, overarching plan, right? It’s not something that’s super detailed about any one thing. It comes, you know, just talking about all different pieces with some recommendations on what are the things you probably should start first? So what we did was those recommendations started to do like these bite sized studies each year afterwards, and balanced it between our two council members, because that’s who we work with the closest so we’re two we’re calling wards here in Chicago. So we have the 47th Ward and the 40th ward. And we did two different studies, one in 2020 in our 40th Ward and one in 2021 in our 47th ward. And that was a way for us to work with both offices so they both know they’re getting a piece of the pie and seeing how we can do a deeper study in these in two different projects. The first project was an underutilized block of a street that, over time, had been rerouted so it was just like an empty street of nothing. And we did this a temporary Plaza during the COVID years to see, would this space eventually be able to be turned into a park, like a city park, and it worked pretty well, and that, working with the council member, was able to secure, I think, like, $12 million not just for the plaza itself, but to redo the entire commercial corridor in the section of this area which was kind of a blighted part of our of our community. And then the following year, we did a deeper dive study around our transit station, which was is in the center of our central business district for our community, to re look at an under utilized Plaza and a parking lot that we use for our farmers market and some festivals occur there about how can we make the parking lot that look like a parking lot? So be for parking when it’s not being used for some activation, but then if it’s being used for the farmers market or festival, it doesn’t feel like you’re standing in a parking lot. So what’s going to happen is it’s going to be pavement converted into like brick pavers and stuff like that, and then the plaza that’s next to it that’s very under utilized is going to be incorporated into it. So it all feels like this, like nice little landscaped area. And so both of those studies happen year after year, much cheaper than the big project that we were doing originally, but came from that, um. And then that those two little projects, both of our council members took that information and then started to look for funding sources, through public dollars that could help implement them, so we would not have been able to fund the actual construction and the construction for the first projects occurring right now. Hopefully we’re wrapping up this spring, and the other one is starting this spring and will hopefully be finished within a year.

Brandon Burton 25:25
Okay, that’s awesome, but I like seeing that, the vision that gets caught, and then, you know, seeing that the ideas spread. So the idea of this being a so you get these, these big improvement projects right as part of the master plan, and there’s big expense that comes along with that. Like you said, you know, elected officials are going after the funding, looking for that, but we’ve also talked about this being income generating for the chamber. So how does that play into the overall master plan? Well,

Rudy Flores 26:02
there’s a couple, a couple of things. So the Some people ask, what does this have to do with a business organization? Right where in enhancing the public way? Well, the public way, you know, the prettier it is, the more likely consumers are going to come and support the businesses along that. And so the current businesses started. The ones that were part of members already knew what we’re trying to do. The ones that weren’t, oh, seeing that the chamber is really trying to invest in their area to ensure that they’re going to see growth of, you know, foot traffic and stuff like that. And then we also started to see, like, developers looking at now properties we have, I think, like 400 plus units now being built within this, this confined area because of the plan, because they know that all of this investment, public investments, coming. But we started having people like, message us, like businesses message us, and we’re like, Hey, I saw the work you’re doing. How do I get involved in this. Like, it just started to build a conversation, because we just became more noticeable. Like, it wasn’t just about the events that we do. If you’re not brick and mortar retail restaurant, you might not want to do some of our public facing events. It wasn’t about the networking. It was just this, this change that’s happening, I think, in the chamber world in the last couple of decades, where it’s not just about networking, because you can network in so many ways. It’s just another component to showing what a business organization is doing to try to create more business for businesses,

Brandon Burton 27:36
right? So it’s very organic. The revenue generating is organic, and these businesses seeing the value, wanting to be a part of the chamber, wanting to support, wanting to just be engaged more fully. So have you, I know construction, you’ve got two sides of the coin, right? It’s very positive. It’s exciting to see new growth, new development, and then you’ve got the headache of dealing with the reality of this road’s closed for some time, or I can’t go the way I normally would go, or access to my business might be altered a little bit. Yep. So are you hearing any of that feedback yet? Is, how do you how do you deal with that through I, I’m I’m in Texas, and we get we’ve got a lot of growth here and and we see that with construction, where, especially, you know, access to businesses, and it’s an opportunity where a chamber can step up and help provide some solutions, right? But what obstacles are you seeing coming up, and how do you go about helping to resolve those obstacles.

Rudy Flores 28:41
Yeah, so the research we had done before the construction started, we knew that usually, when there’s the construction happening on the street that you’re located on your your sales might dip by 25% you know, at minimum, sometimes. And yeah, because just getting to the business or finding parking or just being able to walk down the sidewalk becomes difficult. You know, we learned that the hard way, like having to communicate better, like more often trying to meet people where they need to find their the communication, like the one of the first projects I we could have done better, getting the word out about what’s what to anticipate, and so learning from the mistakes of like, maybe not. We didn’t walk door to door handing out flyers. Right now, we have the contractors on the construction team, like working with our local government, having them go and ensure that they’re handing out individual flyers. We’re already emailing and stuff like that, but we all know we get a bazillion emails, and if you’re a small business, you’re wearing so many hats, you’re going to miss a lot. So that was one thing. We also started to do weekly contract meetings. So the chamber attends it with the contractors, our government official offices, somebody also attends it, but it’s open to the public. So. So if a business has a concern about maybe, you know, they’re getting deliveries or stuff like that, they can join that call. Or if they have any grapes, you know, they can just make sure that the team that’s doing the construction and can hear it. The construction started to become phased instead of just doing a whole street at one time, like three blocks at a time, only on one side of the street, so you’re not just disrupting everybody and everything. Started to look at the way that logistics of each project were being done. So you know, we had to learn the hard way. But at the main takeaway is, there’s never too much communication, and I think it’s our role to ensure that we communicate the way that people want to receive the information. It’s not always about what’s easiest for us. It’s about how to get that message out there and then being able to show like I did a printed delivery, I did a email, I did a phone call, or whatever you can do, because then it really shows you care. And those little things, I think that’s what makes chambers really unique and special, and I think that’s what makes the businesses happier. And then they want to be a part of you and continue being a part of

Brandon Burton 31:15
you. Yeah, I think sometimes we’re afraid to try to reach out one more time or one other way, because we don’t want to over Burton, the recipient, right? The Chamber members, yes, and when it’s going to directly affect their business. I think if you feel that prompting, if you feel like maybe I need to call too, or I need to, you know, do a personal flyer, whatever it is, I’d say follow that gut instinct, yeah,

Rudy Flores 31:40
because it’s not us asking for money. Like, they probably, that’s what they’re not looking at your sales like, Hey, can you sponsor this or whatnot? This is like, hey, I want to ensure that you’re ready to anticipate any, you know, things that might put a pause and in your business, or, you know, in consumer spending,

Brandon Burton 31:56
yeah, well, it definitely seems like an exciting time you guys got a lot going on, great vision and and lots of opportunity. I like to ask for, for those listening, who are, you know, wanting to take their chamber up to the next level? What kind of tip or action item might you suggest to them and trying to accomplish that goal? So

Rudy Flores 32:19
the big thing for us is, was the the money that needed to be utilized right to do this project. And so, you know, having a reserve is extremely important. If you know you’re around around 2008 in the recession, hopefully your chamber started to make sure they were having a reserve after that issue, especially through 2020 Yeah, right, right. If you didn’t have a reserve, I know some chambers that you know, closed because of it. So we’re lucky that we, you know, have learned over the course of decades and had a large reserve, and so we had started to budget, to put money aside for this project. The way that we’re doing that is through our festivals, so communicating to the public that when you’re coming to our festival and donating money, because we asked for donations at our entrances, that money we’re saying is going towards these kind of projects. So being very transparent about where the money is going, I think the community then really, like, starts to notice and understand and they want to support you. So that’s been that was our biggest thing. So I just budgeting is extremely important, and really ensuring that you’re trying to raise money. I think that, from my perspective, a lot of chambers tend to be afraid to charge for what they’re doing. But we do great work, and we don’t work for free, and so we are a business at the end of the day, and so really looking at, how do you generate money, not only to grow but also to do bigger projects. And then if you can tell the story of why you’re increasing your fees or asking for donations because of what you the projects you want to do, I think that goes a long way.

Brandon Burton 33:58
So with those business and community improvements going on, and you incorporate that into these events, and saying that these the money, the funds that are donated here, help to support that. Are you seeing an increase of people participating with those donations? Has the needle moved with that, or as far as how that’s being communicated and then and reciprocated on the back end?

Rudy Flores 34:19
Great question from our local community, yes, but as we were becoming more well known, so like the event I mentioned that happens in the fall Apple fest, we went from 50,000 people in 2023 to 70,000 in 2024 we did not see an increase in our gate donations for that event, it stayed the same. So our thoughts are our community that’s been coming take care is hanging, yeah, but now we’re pulling from a much wider audience that’s not going to have the connection to our community. They’re coming for the event and not not for like I want to make sure that this community is strong. Yeah, and so we now need to relook at our messaging and stuff. And how do you communicate that when everyone’s trying just to walk into the event, how do you market like, why this event is more than just getting a slice of apple buyer or buying a bushel of apples?

Brandon Burton 35:14
That is really good feedback, though. It’s good information to know that it’s being supported locally. You know, the community locally understands and that messaging is getting to them. And I can see somebody coming from out of town like, Hey, I don’t live here. What do I care? Right? I just exactly so, yeah, now that is interesting. Well, I like asking everyone that I have on the show, as we look to the future of chambers, how do you see the future of chambers and their purpose going forward.

Rudy Flores 35:43
You know, I think that you it has to be very mission focused. The younger generation, we know is not joining our organizations like the older generation. And I think part of that is because, not because they don’t want to be a part of something, is that they want to do something that’s like ensuring It’s more meaningful to what their beliefs are. And so I really believe it’s us having to really stand behind what our organization stands for, communicating that and showing that value. So it isn’t about the events like it was. I just the events of getting together and meeting somebody. There’s so many ways of meeting other people. It has you have to have a purpose that people feel emotional about. And so I think that that is one of the things. And I think economic development, I think that, you know, government is pulled so thin, and we seem to expect government to do everything, and in this example we’re talking about today, we took the initiative to do the plan ourselves, because we knew that our local government didn’t have the capacity to do it like they’re doing projects in our downtown and not in our neighborhoods, which is fine, like our downtown needs it, but we wanted to ensure that we were in control of our own destiny and our own community. And I think that that’s a direction that a lot of chambers can go, and I don’t think they need to do it alone. You can partner with somebody, because these can get costly. So finding another nonprofit organization that has shared values that you can bring, you know, resources together to do these kind of things, or do little, you know, small little studies that grow into a bigger one. There’s, there’s so many different ways you can do

Brandon Burton 37:27
it. Yeah, I like that. Being mission focused and communicating with that mission is clearly so people understand that the cause, the purpose, like, what is it you’re getting behind? And it’s still, it drives me crazy to this day when somebody will ask me, What does the Chamber of Commerce do?

Rudy Flores 37:44
Same here? Well, where do

Brandon Burton 37:47
we start, and which chamber are you talking about, right? Well, Rudy, this is great. And I think there’s you know, things that can be scaled too for other communities to be able to look at what you guys are doing here, and creating that vision and that sense of community, and driving that forward as to what the community wants things to look like and to be able to take some initiative on that. I wanted to give you an opportunity to share any contact information for listeners who may want to reach out and learn more about your approach or how you guys are doing things there. What would be the best way for someone to reach out and connect with you? Yeah,

Rudy Flores 38:22
well, first you can go to our website. It’s LincolnSquare.org on the far right drop down menu as our SSA. That’s our taxing district that shows the master plan and everything we’ve spoken about today is broken down into pieces and actually the entire process of how we did it. So that’s there publicly available. My name is Rudy, r, u, d, y, you can email me at rudy@lincolnsquare.org. Happy to chat. This is I nerd out into this kind of stuff. So happy to talk about it, or just contact us at the contact box on our on our website, and that’ll get to me.

Brandon Burton 38:58
That’s perfect. Well, we’ll get that in our show notes for this episode too, and make it easy to find you. But Rudy, I appreciate you taking time to be with us today on Chamber Chat Podcast and sharing some of these successes and vision that you guys have, and the really how you guys are moving the needle and seeing the the improvement of your community. It’s it’s fantastic.

So thank you so much. Yeah, thanks for having me.


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Non-Profit Collaborations with Crystal Narr

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Brandon Burton 0:00
This is the Chamber Chat Podcast, the show dedicated to chamber professionals to spark ideas and to get actionable tips and strategies to better serve your members and community.

Hello, Chamber Champions. Welcome to Chamber Chat Podcast. I’m your hosts Brandon Burton. And it’s my goal here on the podcast to introduce you to people and ideas to better help you serve your Chamber members and your community.

Our title sponsor for this episode is Bringing Local Back. Remember when your community could turn to a local TV station or newspaper for the latest updates and affordable ads? Those days may be fading, but the need for local connection remains. That’s why we created Bringing Local Back, a game changing platform that restores the local visibility and advertising power to your community. It’s more than just tech. It’s about driving engagement and creating new revenue for your chamber. Ready to see the future visit bringinglocalback.com to schedule your demo today. This is the future of local commerce.

Our guest for this episode is Crystal Narr. Crystal is the Executive Director of the Chillicothe Area Chamber of Commerce in Missouri, not to be confused the other Chillicothe chambers. We recently had Mike Throne in Chillicothe, Ohio, so but Chillicothe, Missouri, and she had attained her bachelor’s degree in Communication Studies from Missouri Western State University through her many community minded interests, Crystal found her niche in the nonprofit sector, leading downtown revitalization efforts with Main Street Chillicothe for six years before accepting her current role in 2014 she serves in volunteer leadership roles in numerous community and state organizations, including Chillicothe Rotary Club, Livingston County Library Board, Bright Futures Chillicothe, a plus Advisory Committee and the Grand River Technical School institutional advisory board. She currently is serving on the Missouri, Arkansas, Kansas, Oklahoma Chamber of Commerce board, also known as MAKO. She is the current vice president of Leadership Missouri, and will be the 2025, chair of the 19 County Regional legislative event, great Northwest Day at the Capitol. She also served as the 2021 President of the Chamber of Commerce executives of Missouri, and held a seat on the Missouri Chamber of Commerce and Industry board of directors. Crystal enjoys raising her three sons alongside her husband, Travis, on their farm outside of wheeling Montana. Crystal. I’m excited to have you with us today here on Chamber Chat Podcast. I’d love to give you an opportunity to say hello to all the Chamber Champions who are out there listening, and to share something interesting about yourself so we can all get to know you a little better.

Crystal Narr 2:56
Well, I’m honored to be asked to be on this podcast. Super exciting. I know that you meet with many individuals all the time that share their knowledge and experience in the chamber realm, and so I’m glad to be added to that list. You know, most of my bio covered, kind of moving forward all the different things that I’ve been involved in. And it’s something that I’m truly passionate about, is that once you become a more I will say tenured chamber executive is being able to give back and help the people that are new and coming into the industry. Because I think we can all agree that it can be overwhelming at times and feeling like you’re drinking through a fire hose. So anytime that I can help ease some of their worries and show how I’ve been able to, you know, make the best of it over my 10 years in my current role. I consider that a win both ways. So something fun about myself is that in my previous lifetime, I like to say I actually was a dancer and had the opportunity to perform at many different locations that have some, you know, familiar name recognition, like Disney World, Disneyland, Bush gardens, Navy Pier in Chicago. So that’s one of my claims to fame, although it’s been several years back, but still fun to reminisce. Yeah,

Brandon Burton 4:17
so tell Can you tell us a little bit more, what kind of dance were you brought in for performances? Or were you putting on costume? What were you doing? So I

Crystal Narr 4:26
was raised here in Chillicothe, so this, it just goes to show you know that if you have great leadership in any sort of role you know within your community, big things can happen for youth, and that’s something I still try to engage now in my role as a chamber professional, because I just had some great I love dance. I was also in show choir, and because of the leadership within those groups, they sought out opportunities to get youth, you know, into those arenas. And so it provided us some great opportunities and experiences. It long before I even turned, you know, 18, that I got to experience. So

Brandon Burton 5:04
that’s awesome, and it just gives you experience. It kind of opens your eyes to possibilities, and being able to travel a little bit and see some different parts of the country. That’s awesome.

Crystal Narr 5:16
Absolutely, has served me well, because we actually, we won’t necessarily talk a lot about that today, but our chamber actually has a trial a very successful travel program, and I’m the person that gets to assist with those from the start to finish booking, picking the locations, all the way to traveling on the trips with our travelers. So developing that love of travel and experience culture has served me

Brandon Burton 5:40
well. Yeah, that’s awesome. Well, tell us a little bit more about the Chillicothe area Chamber. Give us an idea of the size, staff, budget, scope of work to kind of set the stage for our discussion today.

Crystal Narr 5:51
So the Chillicothe area Chamber is located in northwest Missouri. We are about an hour drive to the Kansas border and about an hour drive to the Iowa border, we are currently sitting just shy of 300 members, which is the highest number of members that we have had in my 10 years. So we’ve seen a lot of growth through 2024 that we’re very proud of. Our budget fluctuates each year, as most do, but we have seen it grow, which I’m grateful for. So annual operating budget sits this year right around $220,000 and then our staff is actually fairly small. We are full time two people, and we do have one membership coordinator who only works one day a week, but makes the most of those eight hours each week. So yeah, and our town population is right around 9500 with our county population being about 15,000 so our Chillicothe holds the bulk of our county population and is the county seat,

Brandon Burton 7:01
yeah? All right, that definitely helps. So are you guys just chamber? Do you have any economic development or tourism, or what? What’s that scope look like? Yeah?

Crystal Narr 7:10
So that’s, I think, what led to the discussion that we’re going to have today about synergy among non profits. You know, within a community, especially what I would consider a smaller community like Chillicothe, and how that can work to everyone’s benefit, because we actually are a standalone organization. We are only the chamber, and there are separate organizations, separate you know what I mean? Boards, budgets, 501, c status for our tourism, our main street organization, economic development, community development corporation, arts organizations, everyone is completely separate, all

Brandon Burton 7:52
right. Well, that definitely helps set the stage for our discussion today, as we’ll focus the majority of our conversation around non profit collaboration. So how you as, as you said, just a chamber, I argue you’re more than just exactly, but how you as as a chamber focused organization, right? How you are able to collaborate with other nonprofits throughout the community? So it’s going to be a worthwhile conversation for for everyone listening, and I’m excited to dive into that as soon as we get back from this quick

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All right, Crystal, we’re back. So before the break, you’d mentioned that you guys are very chamber focused, but you have to rely on these collaborations with the other nonprofits in the community, whether it be economic development or tourism or downtown or arts. Talk to us about how that’s structured, how you go about building those relationships and collaborating, and especially when everybody’s reporting to different their own respective boards, operating within their own budgets. How do you try to lead with that synergy, to try to bring everybody together with the same goals and focus and in those areas that align for everybody to be on the same page?

Crystal Narr 12:21
I will preface this entire conversation that we’re about to embark on with a couple things. One is, I’m not going to pretend that we have it completely together, but I do know that we have figured out what works and what doesn’t work. You know, through trial and error over a long period of time within our community, but then also always coming back to the cliche, you know, quote of a rising tide floats all boats. A rising tide lifts all boats, however you want to say it, because truly, when you get right down to the heart of what everyone’s trying to do it is for the betterment of our community, no matter where you’re located. So that is really the heart of it all, and what we try to focus on. But that being said, it’s not always easy to get all the players around the table. That takes it takes work. It’s not something that happens overnight. So I already use the word synergy, and I probably will use it several times, but really that is what I try to focus on when thinking of these collaborative relationships within Chillicothe. You know the importance of nonprofits working together is basically to create a larger impact than what any of us individually could create, right? Yeah, so, and there are within each of our organizations a lot of shared goals, shared missions, even, you know, within each of our own independent silos. So there are just many facets that work because we are already closely aligned. So it just naturally makes sense for us to work together. We just have to cultivate that relationship to really be able to dive into it.

Brandon Burton 14:16
That makes a lot of sense. How do you do it, though? And I’ve seen it. I’ve seen in a lot of communities where there may even be a sense of competition, you know, between the chamber and another organization within the community and other it may even be another business association. Yeah, you’d mentioned the Downtown Association. That might be a point of competition, in some sense. But how do you get past the competition part and see the synergy part?

Crystal Narr 14:49
Okay, so you know kind of talking about how, like, you’re overcoming the obstacles to get to that point. So here are the things that are probably, dare I say, slightly taboo. Do, and so I’m going to choose my words wisely, and hopefully everybody understands. You know what I’m getting at here, but first of all, it requires a very open line of communication. Now, we all know within our organization there’s some confidential conversations that can’t be had with people outside of our executive board or our board of directors staff, that sort of thing. But outside of that, I truly do feel it’s important to have a very open line of communication with those other entities. Because I can tell you from experience, there have been a few things that have happened where we didn’t have that open line of communication and we were another organization ourselves. Were simultaneously working on a project, both of us, but there was this barrier between us. So, you know, we had opened up, and it wasn’t because we were trying to be secretive. We were just had our blinders on, and we’re, you know, working on it, and they were doing the same thing, and we actually both launched this project the same week, wow, on our social media streams, and then it just was, it was bad PR internally, because it really showed that we were not, we weren’t not communicating whatsoever. So things like that that, you know, just show the importance of having an open line of communication. One of the ways that has been done for us over the years is establishing we have done them monthly. We have done them quarterly. So you could just have to find what works for you and your schedule. But meetings among those entities, a lot of times, it’s over coffee and someone’s boardroom, everybody kind of comes with their calendar of events, their work plans for you know what their to do list looks like for that month, that quarter, whatever it is that you’re planning out. So then, number one, we can all be aware of what’s going on. Number two, we can provide assistance. Number three, we can help promote and number four, we don’t step on toes. You know that everybody is doing their own thing and aware of what everybody else is doing. So that’s kind of my first thing number. I

Brandon Burton 17:05
will say even, even when you were working in your silo with the blinders on, at least it’s a proof of concept, right, like you both saw the importance of working on the same goal, yes, and so just trying to find the positive in this, to be able

Crystal Narr 17:17
to Yes, absolutely. And I will say that because of having a positive relationship between our organizations, that when that happened, it wasn’t like there was some big blow up, disgruntled, you know, situation that ensued following it. Luckily, it was, it was our main street program that we that that occurred with, and it was just this past July, and they ended up being very willing and kind of did this version, you know, and changed it to where then it all worked. We were doing, like a member showcase series of our Chamber members. They were doing the same thing with like downtown spotlights, and they quickly changed it and focused it, instead of the business, on individuals who worked within downtown businesses. So we both still completed the mission of what we were wanting to do, but they kindly altered theirs to just focus on the individuals instead of the businesses. So it still all worked out, if that makes sense, yeah,

Brandon Burton 18:18
which brings a whole a neat perspective within its own So, exactly so.

Crystal Narr 18:25
So here’s my thing, that I’m like, I think everyone will understand it when I say this. But one of the key factors to making it work, especially in a smaller community, but it’s it works on any scale, is that every organization has to, has to stay in their lane. You have a mission. You have to abide by that mission. You cannot deviate from that mission, because if you do, it’s inherently going to step on another organization’s toes, you know, so that that depends like using our kind of our three main nonprofits that we work with. You know, locally the chamber, I always say our main two pillars are business and community downtown. Their focus is going to be confined to the defined district of the downtown and the members and events and everything that takes place within that area. Then we had tourism as our third, you know, leg of the stool of kind of our different entities that partner together, and they’re really focusing on everybody outside of our community and getting them here, right. But really, if you think back to what would that be middle school math, whenever you’re learning about Venn diagrams, right? We are all interconnected in that center piece of the pie, basically so. But we have to make sure that that center piece of the pie doesn’t keep growing to the point that the parts that exist solely to us that that part is bigger because. Then we’re losing sight of what our original mission is. So again, I think that staying in your lane ties back into having that open line of communication and really strong connections with the partnering organizations. So

Brandon Burton 20:18
about staying in the lane, and I can see the wisdom, the value in that. And I think in your structure, where you have all the nonprofit organizations to gather together on a regular basis and go over calendars and what you guys are working on, that definitely helps to see where those lines are drawn. But like you said, that Venn diagram is going to have overlap Absolutely. You all have buy in on certain things, but I can see that being where you’re supporting tourism in this, you’re supporting downtown in this, you have your buy in in that part of the Venn diagram, while helping them in their lane. Is that kind of the approach that you take with that, or is there more to that?

Crystal Narr 21:03
Yeah, no, you really kind of hit it, and it works just in different ways, depending upon each individual scenario. But for instance, our tourism organization, they offer tourism grants that support some of chamber led initiatives or events. Same thing for our main street program. So we are helping them by tourism is not having to put on the events, which we all know is nice when you’re not the one running to organize. But yet, they are a big supporting partner by offering up funds, because we all know we need money to make these things happen. So that’s a win win. It’s a great example of how we can utilize that. But at the same token, when tourism needs support for input, for things that they’re trying to do new initiatives, they’re trying to pursue stock photography that we might have you know on hand, that are, you know, essential to our events, we’re also paying them back by doing those sorts of things to provide support for them as well. Yeah,

Brandon Burton 22:02
I’ve seen in communities where stock photography becomes an issue where, you know, tourism has the rights to picture and, you know, chamber might want to use and say, oh, you can’t use that. That’s our pictures really like, aren’t we all building the same community. That’s it. So, yeah,

Crystal Narr 22:18
that is actually a good segue into kind of the next component of, you know, overcoming those obstacles, which is building trust. Yeah, um, it is key to this whole thing. If you don’t have trust, you’re not going to have synergy at any point, unfortunately, um, and one of the things that makes a big difference with that is personalities and making sure that the players who are coming to the table can come to the table and can be trustworthy. Our supporting partners for each other have everybody’s best interest at heart, not just their own. I think we probably all can relate to scenarios where somebody had an ulterior motive, you know, whenever they’re getting involved with something, and you kind of have to clear all those, you have to check those at the door and make sure that people are truly coming into these conversations with everyone’s best interest at heart, and not just to steal ideas and the manipulator that sort of thing. Something I’m not going to say, this is a little bit of one of those like, do as I say, not as I do, but we, we’ve had it in the past, and do a little bit still, but something we could continue to work on is having either the opportunity for even if it’s not the executive director or CEO of the organization themselves, but having someone in that capacity, maybe it’s a board member that can serve as an ex officio on each other’s boards, so that they are a part of those conversations early on. I think that is a great idea to keep that open line of communication, is something we had the opportunity for locally, and I I loved it. I thought it was brilliant. Was one of our organizations actually was in a period of transition and was hiring for their next Executive Director, and their board had the foresight to reach out to myself and the other entity and say, Would you please come be a part of this interview process and gave us that opportunity, and I will tell you that was it worked incredibly well because that board saw the importance of keeping a Very positive relationship, knowing that our roles are very comparable. And so we could say, oh, this person has the traits, you know, the things that you can’t train a person on that just need to come in and be able to, you know, pick up the reins and take off. And it worked really well. So I think that’s another takeaway, that if. People are willing to initiate that. It, it can work really positively. It’s

Brandon Burton 25:04
a great idea. It’s, it’s a little harder to to outs the person who’s there with the alter your motives and who’s there to, you know, steal ideas and whatnot, but to try to have those open conversations, to build the trust. But then when that typically, those people are not the people that last, right, right? Right, absolutely, there is a vacancy to be able to try to get these boards to come together and say, you know, it would behoove all of us to be able to have each other sit in on these interview processes to create a stronger community. I love that idea, yeah, for sure. So, any other ideas, though, for when there is that disruptor, you know, in the groups where not that you’ve experienced it at all. I mean, I don’t want to put anybody under the bus, but if there is, you know, you get a distractor. You know that that’s within the group, how do you go about trying to build the trust? How do you how do you move the ball forward with that person in that in the mix?

Crystal Narr 26:03
Yeah, we have had a couple different scenarios over my timeline, because you, you know, mentioned in my bio that I actually worked for the chamber as the assistant, and then went to the main street program and was the executive director there for six years before returning to the chamber, and now I’ve been in my role here as executive director for 10 years. So I was fortunate that I came to the table. I’ve worked in both realms, and so I inherently have some institutional knowledge of both, which has, in my opinion, served us well. But at the same point, whenever we do have those conversations with entities that or leadership, you know, in those entities that might not come in with that synergistic attitude and personality, it can be trying at times. And so there are times that you do just have to step away a little bit and figure out ways to cultivate those partnerships. We actually do a few events within our community that are all of us together, and initiatives that are all of us together. So Chillicothe, Missouri is the home of slice bread, right? We were the first place to commercially pre slice and sell loaves of bread. If you can believe that

Brandon Burton 27:24
you guys have made life so much easier, let me tell you, I mean, greatest

Crystal Narr 27:27
city since I you know, we’re trying to live up to our claim to fame, but we actually host annually a sliced bread day, and that is a unified effort that all of us carry some portion of to see that come to fruition each year. And so we have meetings all throughout but again, it is the prime example of everybody staying in their lane, making sure that what we are doing aligns with our mission. It could be even so far, is where the events are located. Downtown. Handles anything that’s located there. Tourism is really focused on the outreach component, getting people to Chillicothe on that day, and then we really handle promoting it locally, an additional component of a concert that brings everybody together to a local business that evening, bringing back local musicians that maybe have since moved away or are still here. And we call it our slice of home concert so and there are other partners that you know, our local museum, our art Guild and gallery, our library, like everybody, kind of has a piece of the pie, but it it’s just one of those things, like it couldn’t work if it was just one of us, but everybody coming together makes that work.

Brandon Burton 28:50
Samples, yeah, yeah, yeah. We

Crystal Narr 28:52
also, this has been several years back, but all came together to host the tour of Missouri, which was basically one step down from the Tour de France bicycle race that everyone’s familiar with, but it was here in Chillicothe as a part of their race across the state of Missouri. And it was huge, I mean, a huge staging event here, and that was really the first of something we have seen of that scope. And so once again, it took a lot of players all coming around the same table to make sure that that happened, and that when people left Chillicothe, they felt like, wow, that community knew what they were doing and were welcoming and gracious, and we would love to go back there again. So it’s just one of those things that, again, everybody stayed in their lane, knew their role, but was also willing to contribute and support others.

Brandon Burton 29:44
Yeah, great examples. I love it. Are there any other aspects that we need to consider when working with non towards collaborations with other nonprofits?

Crystal Narr 29:54
I one of my things that has come up more recently, that. Hopefully other communities are already doing this, but if not, maybe it’s something that would be a new idea for community our size and many other probably even big cities. I think that there’s a saying that you know, if you want to find something done, find the busiest person in town, or that 20% of the people do 80% of the work. Sometimes I feel like it’s probably more 10% do 90% of the work. So in a town our size, we are constantly tapping the same people over and over and over again, whether it’s financially or for volunteer time. So we have collectively started talking about creating a list of community volunteers, and that might even have a component of people who sign up but maybe don’t have the best track record of actually following through. That’s kind of what prompted this conversation between our entities, because there was a volunteer for a main street event, and they said, we said, Oh, do you have enough volunteers for this, you know? And she was like, Yeah, I think so. She was like, we have this, this and this, you know, person that are coming. And we said, oh, she list off a name. And we said, Well, we hope that they show up, because they didn’t for our event, and we were kind of left in the lurch. And she was like, oh, man, I wish I would have known that before I let them, you know, sign up for it, and I didn’t book somebody else with them, so I’d have a plan B. So that’s what started this conversation of possibly creating a cohesive, a collaborative volunteer list, and then also the same thing for maybe financial and that one would be a little bit different in that trying not, you know, to always have all of us hitting up the same five businesses over and over to try to get more creative and see who else is pulling money from them. So then we can try other avenues, so really being collaborative on those sorts of avenues as

Brandon Burton 31:52
well. Yeah, and at the same time, yeah, you want to be careful, because some of those people that do sponsor and donate to these different things, they look forward to that and want to do that, and if they don’t have the opportunity, then you’re going to hear that end of it. So yeah, yeah. Well, Crystal, as we start to wrap things up, I wanted to ask for chambers listening who are trying to take their organization up to the next level. What kind of tip or action item might you offer them to try to accomplish that goal? My

Crystal Narr 32:20
favorite quote is that change is debilitating when done to you, but exhilarating when done by you. So really trying to make sure that people can be a part of the process and to not be afraid of change. You know, I’m nearly 20 years in in some role of nonprofit leadership, and Change is the only thing that I can continue to count on every single year. We really try not to be stagnant. We really try not to fall into that bane of, well, we do it because it’s always been done that way. We are really always trying to reinvent, keep the things that work, but then change the things that need to be changed, to consider us progressive minded. And so that’s my one takeaway for any don’t be scared of it, and make sure that you’re taking people along with you for that change, so that they also want to embrace it, and that includes your board, your membership and your community.

Brandon Burton 33:28
Yeah, there’s so many dynamics to change, and that quote wraps it up very, very concisely. I love that. So I like asking everyone I have on the show, as we look to the future of chambers of commerce. How do you see the future of chambers and their purpose going forward?

Crystal Narr 33:44
So we actually have really started having conversations about what it looks like moving forward, and just like I said, embracing change, my board of directors in our retreat, preparing for 25 really took a lot of what we were the feedback that staff was providing them about lack of engagement, lack of attendance, and really took that to heart. And so we have initiated a lot of change for this year. We have always been a chamber that has had monthly chamber luncheons every single month, third Wednesday, and we have seen a really drop off in that. We think part of that is just strain on our members financially. We think part of that is strain on time commitment. And, you know, the financial part kind of plays into, you know, we’re seeing wages going up, and that that means that now our members are having to pay employees to attend a chamber luncheon, while also paying to attend a chamber luncheon. So we are just trying to be very mindful and meet our members where they’re at. So we’re cutting back on how many we’re having a year. So. Same thing with our networking events. We’re also trying to restructure them so that they are held at the times that work the best for our members. So again, embracing change, initiating some new things, like industry roundtables that don’t cost anything for people, but still give them a voice. Stepping up our game and our advocacy efforts to help our businesses in ways that they might not feel prepared to actually, you know, lead the charge themselves. So really, just changing the way that our chamber has functioned, and taking some baby steps to get us to where we need to be, to be progressive.

Brandon Burton 35:40
Yeah, I like that. I like the idea of looking forward like that, leaning forward into that and and really kind of punch, punching above your weight class, we’ll say absolutely like it. Well, Crystal, this has been fun having you on the podcast, and I appreciate the the insights and perspective you’ve shared. Wanted to give you a chance to share any contact information for listeners who may want to reach out and connect with you and maybe learn a little bit more about the approach you’ve taken with working with other nonprofits. Where would you point them? What’s the best way to connect with you?

Crystal Narr 36:13
Anybody can reach out to me at any point in time. My email is chamber@chillicothemo.com and our website is just www.chillicothemo.com as well. So I’m happy to chat with anybody, and hopefully I can even glean some information from them along the way.

Brandon Burton 36:35
That’s what it’s all about. So I’ll, I’ll get your information in our show notes for this episode to make a nice nice and easy to find you and connect with you. But again, thank you for being a little vulnerable and sharing some of these experiences you’ve had and working with other nonprofits. I know it can be sticky at times, but you guys have seemed to find a way that works, and I know it continues to be an evolution, but I appreciate you sharing some of these tips and strategies that are working for you.

Crystal Narr 37:03
I appreciate you asking me to be a part of the chamber chat podcast and look forward to listening to the many other ones so that I can continue my lifelong learning that I hope to always initiate in my chamber profession.

Brandon Burton 37:19
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Chamber Turnaround with Warren Call

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Brandon Burton 0:00
This is the Chamber Chat Podcast, the show dedicated to chamber professionals to spark ideas and to get actionable tips and strategies to better serve your members and community.

Hello, Chamber Champions. Welcome to Chamber Chat Podcast. I’m your hosts Brandon Burton. And it’s my goal here on the podcast to introduce you to people and ideas to better help you serve your Chamber members and your community.

Our title sponsor for this episode is Bringing Local Back. Remember when your community could turn to a local TV station or newspaper for the latest updates and affordable ads? Those days may be fading, but the need for local connection remains. That’s why we created Bringing Local Back, a game changing platform that restores the local visibility and advertising power to your community. It’s more than just tech. It’s about driving engagement and creating new revenue for your chamber. Ready to see the future visit bringinglocalback.com to schedule your demo today. This is the future of local commerce.

Our guest for this episode is Warren. Call Warren is the President and CEO of Traverse Connect, the economic development organization focused on advancing the economic vitality of the Grand Traverse region in Michigan. Traverse connect hosts the northern Michigan chamber Alliance, a coalition of 18 chambers of commerce and economic development organizations representing over 7500 businesses across northern Michigan that advocates for economic competitiveness and pro growth rural business policies. Warren’s role is to lead strategy for the organization, advocate for area businesses, represent the region globally and collaborate with local, state and national organizations on critical issues related to economic development and regional competitiveness. He holds leadership roles in several public policy initiatives dedicated to economic expansion, and was appointed by Governor Gretchen Whitmer to the Board of Directors for the Michigan State Housing Development Authority. Prior to joining traverse connect, Warren served as vice president and regional manager for Huntington National Bank with oversight board investments in private banking across northern Michigan. He holds an MBA in international finance from St John’s University, and a BA in history from Michigan State University, where he was the captain of the Michigan State University Alpine Ski Team. Warren, I’m excited to have you with us today here on Chamber Chat Podcast. I’d love to give you an opportunity to say hello to all the Chamber Champions who are out there listening and to share something interesting about yourself so we can all get to know you a little better. Yeah.

Warren Call 2:45
Hello, Brandon, thanks for the opportunity, and welcome all the chamber champions that are out there listening. It’s, it’s a pleasure to be with you. Yeah, Warren, call from, from Traverse, connect in Traverse City, Michigan, kind of maybe a little bit of background for me. The as you mentioned there in the in the bio ski racer, skiing is kind of my thing. I grew up in in a ski family. My parents both worked in the resort business, so we, we kind of lived there. And so I grew up skiing all the time. I was a high school and college racer. Worked in the ski business for a while in Utah, as well as in in Michigan. My brother was it was also chief of course for World Cup races in Colorado. And so we do a lot of traveling for skiing. We ski a lot here, and then been in a number of avalanches due to, due to my skiing experiences. Wow,

Brandon Burton 3:49
see, I’ve never been much of a skier. I’ve been snowboarding a couple times, but nothing. I can’t do it. It’s just not me. And I see videos of these people to get caught up in avalanches and like, that’s why I don’t do so that is interesting, though, and definitely an address adrenaline rush, I’m sure, absolutely. Well, tell us a little bit more about traverse, connect, give us an idea of size, scope of work, staff, budget, that sort of thing to kind of set the stage for our conversation today.

Warren Call 4:22
Yeah. So for anyone that’s not familiar with with Traverse City, traverse City’s Northern Michigan, the northern lower Michigan. So there’s the university the Upper Peninsula, the up, as we call it. We’re in the northern part of the Lower Peninsula of Michigan. The pinky of the mitt is, is basically where we are from a map standpoint, right on Lake Michigan. We’re about four hours north of Detroit, six hours north of Chicago, one of our claims to fame, Good Morning America, named us the most beautiful place in America due to Lake Michigan and the dunes and all that kind of stuff. Um. We’re Travers Connect is a hybrid entity. We’re both a Regional Chamber of Commerce and a regional economic development organization covering the five counties around Traverse City are, we’re we’re a small town, we’re a small region. We’re a Micropolitan Statistical Area. So think about 150,000 people in kind of the the micropolitan area our our chamber organization has 1000 member companies here in our in our five county footprint, we have about a $3 million budget and a staff of 11 here in Traverse City, we have a brand portfolio, as we call it, because again, we’re, we’ve, we’ve expanded beyond being just a traditional chamber. So we have under the traverse connect brand. We’re, we both have the five County Chamber of Commerce services as well as direct economic development for for this region. So business attraction, business retention strategies, you know, incentives for for business relocation, things like that. We also have what’s called the northern Michigan chamber Alliance, as you mentioned, and proud to report that it’s now 19 chambers of commerce and economic development organizations across the footprint. So that footprint is basically the northern half of the mid northern Lower Peninsula, and then all of the Upper Peninsula of Michigan. So the reason for that is from an advocacy and public policy standpoint. When our team is in Lansing, the capital of Michigan, or in Washington, DC, we’re not speaking on behalf of just Traverse City or just our micropolitan region. We’re speaking on behalf of all of Northern Michigan with a unified voice. We also kind of going through that band, brand portfolio further we’ve got, we house the Traverse City young professionals organization. We also have the Grand Traverse area manufacturing council. So that’s a subset entity that’s obviously focused on manufacturing. And then we run what’s called Michigan’s creative coast. That’s a talent attraction program for our region that is nationally, trying to attract talent to to Northern Michigan, so that that’s, that’s kind of us in a in a very brief nutshell.

Brandon Burton 7:36
And we could do, we could do about eight or nine podcast episodes and all these different branches that you guys are involved with within your your brand portfolio. It’s fascinating. I imagine, with the the 18th chamber now in the northern Michigan Alliance, that you’re probably close to 8000 businesses or so that are being represented on that, that advocacy front.

Warren Call 7:58
Yeah, our, our Director of Government Relations was actually just looking at that yesterday. She’s She’s put out a updated survey to all those those organizations, because we do want to make sure that I think we’re probably close to, or maybe over 8000 at this at this point. So you know, that’s, that’s a lot of businesses and a lot of organizations that we represent. And again, from an from an from an advocacy and public policy standpoint, you know, Northern Michigan, as with many rural areas and rural communities, you know, you can sometimes get lost in the mix. From a standpoint of, you know, in Michigan, Detroit speaks pretty loudly. Grand Rapids speaks pretty loudly. We want to make sure that policy makers know that the rural areas of northern Michigan are important too, and so we have that unified voice to speak on behalf of the rural areas.

Brandon Burton 8:50
I love it. It’s a great idea and a great strategy. So our focus for our conversation today is we’ve titled The episode is chamber turnaround. So we’re going to dive in deep onto to how traverse, connect became what it is today, and kind of the background story to that and and I’m sure a lot of the story can resonate with other chamber leaders across the country as they hear it, but we’ll dive in deep into that story and experience as soon as they get back from this quick break.

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All right, Warren, we’re back. So tell us, what is the background? What’s the story on on traverse connect, how did it come to be and and this whole idea of chamber turnaround, I think it’s safe to assume that things maybe weren’t as ideal, and then things had to happen to to get it on track to where it is today.

Warren Call 12:56
Yeah, it’s, it’s interesting Brandon, because what what we face here in the Grand Traverse region, the Traverse City area is unlike a lot of Michigan, or actually a lot of the kind of the industrial upper midwest Great Lakes region, we’re actually growing. We have really been on a pretty good trajectory from a growth standpoint, for a while, and what we needed was we had a lot of great institutions and a lot of great initiatives that were they were they were they were well intentioned, and they were well meaning, and what they weren’t is they weren’t modernized for our environment. So what we really needed to do is we needed to take kind of that big picture of Chamber of Commerce, services, economic development, and we needed to modernize our approach, or for the region. And what that really related to was we had a lot of organizations that were doing good things, but a lot of it was siloed. So there wasn’t a lot of coordination across some initiatives there wasn’t full coordination across the region. And so what we looked at was an opportunity to reimagine what business support services, in kind of its most general sense, looked like in our region. And it became, frankly, a wholesale reconstruction of of our organization and of of the approach to economic development and and Chamber of Commerce services for the entire region. So, from a from a background standpoint, it really, it really started back in in probably 2016 2017 there was, there was a number of initiatives that had kind of gone by the wayside. So a kind of an older, traditional public sector, county led Economic Development Corporation had gone dormant and didn’t have a lot of operations in it at the same time. Um, 100 plus year old Regional Chamber of Commerce, I wouldn’t say had, had certainly was still functioning and well functioning, but it was pretty traditional, and it was perhaps even a little bit stale in its approach.

Brandon Burton 15:15
I’ve heard that before from chambers have been around a long time. Yeah, right. And fantastic

Warren Call 15:21
legacy, very successful legacy, but needed, needed a refresh, basically, yeah, and then we had a number of initiatives that had newer initiatives that were important, so, especially in innovation and technology. So a new tech incubator had been stood up. A couple other good initiatives, but they were, they were in their own silos and not plugged into some of the other things that were going on. So a number of us, and I should, I should probably point out that I have no background in economic development or Chamber of Commerce services. So back at this point, I was actually working in the in the finance industry for a national bank with I was overseeing their northern Michigan operations. So I was involved in these things, but as a as a volunteer board member, yeah, so I was a volunteer board member on the Economic Development Corporation and on the technology incubator, and I was involved in one of the committees through the chamber, and there was things like that. But so we work, we were working as a community to re envision what economic development and Chamber of Commerce services should look like. And it there was a couple of retirements at some of these different organizations, and so we looked at that as an opportunity to kind of rethink what it what everything should look like. And at that point, I got asked by some of the people that you know, they said, well, great, but if we’re going to reconstitute everything, we want you to move from being a board member to being the guy in the chair. So I didn’t expect to be in that role. But that’s, that’s how it happened.

Brandon Burton 17:02
It sounds like maybe you spoke too much in these board meetings. I think so. I think, I

Warren Call 17:07
think I shared my opinion a few too many times, right? So what we ended up doing is the county’s Economic Development Corporation was reformatted with with new board members. I was, I was, again at that point, the volunteer chair of that organization, when we reconstituted it. And what we did is we, we built a strategic plan for rebuilding everything. And so that that process happened through 2017 2018 and then in 2019 I stepped into this role at traverse Connect, which at that point was a kind of a community development organization that hadn’t really found its footing. And so we, we, then my job was to work with a consultant that we had hired and build a strategic plan, not just for my organization, but for the entire region. So this really was a soup to nuts kind of approach. We had community wide forums, we had a listening tour. We had a steering committee made up of key leaders from business industry nonprofits from across the region, kind of, as I call it. That was our big shots group, right? We had prominent CEOs and other leaders who, you know, have influence. And what we ended up doing is through, through those public listening tours, those, those, those the kind of the road show as it was, the industry forums that we, you know, we brought together the manufacturers, and we brought together the healthcare providers, and we, you know, all these things. We ended up basically opening the hood, ripping everything out, and putting it all back together again in a new in a new structure. So we merged Travers connect and the Traverse City Area Chamber of Commerce together into one entity that’s now called Travers Connect. We spun off a couple of of subsidiaries that were no longer, you know, relevant, and we we then merged in over time, we merged in some of these other things. We expanded that chamber Alliance. It had gone when we went from 12, now up to 19 members. We also brought in and merged the Grand Traverse area manufacturing council as a now a subsidiary of our organization. And really what it was was we took all these outdated structures and we were trying to address the fact that we had growth in the region, which was positive, but we also had a lot of growth challenges. So we’re a very popular. Destination for tourism. We’re a popular destination for second homes, and those are very valuable aspects of our economy, but they’re not our only aspects of our economy. We have actually a lot of technology. We have a lot of advanced manufacturing. We actually have more employment in manufacturing than Michigan’s average. And for anyone that knows Michigan, there’s a lot that says a lot, right? So people think of us as a great place for vacations and beaches and cherry pie, but what they don’t realize that there’s also a lot of other things going on in manufacturing, in technology, in agriculture, so advanced value added agriculture, right? We, you know, if, if your kids ever eat, go, go squeeze, you know, applesauce in the packet that’s made right here in a very massive facility here, matern, the French company that has their their location here, we make a lot of wine that gets shipped all over the world, etc. So we’ve got a lot of things beyond tourism and and second home ownership, which are important to us. But one of the challenges there is we have a high cost of living because so many people want to either be here part of the time or be here, you know, for vacation, etc. So we have workforce challenges. So while we’re population was growing, our working age population was declining. Yeah, so 35 to 49 year olds, that core working age population, the people that run businesses, that you know, teach school, that have kids in the school system, that you know sit on nonprofit boards that kind of your core working age population that had declined by 7% between 2010 and 2019 Wow. So you can’t have a vibrant year round economy and community if you don’t have the people that are here year round working and, you know, getting their kids into snow pants and out to school the next day, right? It’s, you’ve got to, you’ve got to have that, that that year round population. So that was a wake up call to our region that we needed to do something. And so that was kind of all of the the work we did to institute a new structure and develop a new a new strategic plan was focused on the fact that we need to be a year round economy so and I can go into more more detail about, kind of, some of the key highlights of that, but I wanted to pause and see if,

Brandon Burton 22:33
yeah, I think that’s important to dive into some of those key highlights. I’m always curious as well, when there’s restructuring like this that goes on as to it. And you gave a great background about you being sitting on, on the two boards and ideas, you know, bubbling up. But you know, when you put the rubber to the roads to have the traction to actually implement these changes, it can be kind of sticky. You know, when you’re dealing with with leadership, with other organizations, multiple boards. So as as you talk to your next point, if you can try to work some of that into about the approach and and for a chamber listening, you know, not everybody’s has that perfect timing where everything aligns to just make it happen, but the vision is there of this is the direction our community needs to go. So if you can kind of speak to that a little bit too, as you in your response, yeah,

Warren Call 23:30
and there, there’s, there’s a lot there. But certainly, I think the key things here that we learned were that over communication. And I just mean complete, over communication and repeating. The reasons why we’re doing this were really key aspects of our approach, I think, because what we found was that, you know, people, people fear change. Yes, and organizations fear change. But really, when it comes down to it, there’s actually not a fear of change. They fear change because they fear loss. People equate change with loss. They think that the change you’re making is going to result in some kind of loss for them. And so we had to really do our homework to show that this change was not going to result in loss, it was going to result in gain for the community.

Brandon Burton 24:28
That’s a great framing. I like that. So

Warren Call 24:31
really thinking about, again, what you need when you’re going to implement big change like this, especially with 100 plus year organizations, and you know that legacy of the Chamber of Commerce and things like that, you’ve got to show that you’re respecting and building on that legacy and enhancing what it’s going to do going forward, not taking away from it. So part of that is, again, like I said, over communicating. So. Part of that is having a clear enemy. So again, from our perspective, that clear enemy was we lost 10% of the working age population between 2010 and 2019 right? I think I said 7% before, but it was actually 10% we lost 10% of that working age population in that that time period that got people’s attention, and that was the enemy, and we were able to focus our efforts around that enemy that allowed organizations to really work together. It allowed, you know, we had a business leader meeting with a county commissioner, meeting with a nonprofit, you know, hospital leader, all of them could agree that if you lose your working age population, you’re in trouble. So that that focused everyone’s mind, and it allowed us to do a couple of key things. Number one, I think it helped everybody kind of check their ego at the door, because it wasn’t about their organization or their project, it was about defeating that, that enemy, and then it also allowed us, I think, some latitude to what we ended up calling slaughtering some sacred cows. It’s

Brandon Burton 26:12
important, yeah, because everyone

Warren Call 26:15
realized that if we were going to address this issue of work, losing the working age population, we had to to come up with some new solutions. So that’s, that’s, that’s kind of the framing that helped us. I also think it was important that we did a lot of listening first. So we, we hired, sorry, we formed that kind of, what I called the Big Shots group, the key leaders across community as a steering committee, people that are trusted across business, industry, nonprofit, etc, that that helped. Then that steering committee was the one that gave me direction, and gave our consultants direction, and then we did these community wide forums, we did the listening tour, we did the workshops that were open to everyone. So we really we incorporated everyone’s feedback. And I think it’s important to do that regardless of what you’re doing. But here’s the thing you got to think about. And I think chamber professionals know this, you’re never going to make everybody happy, right? So that our new solution, our new structure, our new strategic plan, I think it’s well done. But of course, there, there’s going to people, be people that are going to not like some aspect of it, right? But being able to say we asked everyone for their opinion was really important, right? Even if we didn’t incorporate their opinion, maybe they didn’t like the final product, but we asked everybody. Nobody was nobody was on Ask. Everyone got tired of hearing my talking points because I repeated them so many times, and our steering committee repeated them so many times, but at least everyone felt like they were, they were heard.

Brandon Burton 28:03
It goes back to that over communication. And nobody can say, you know, I didn’t know this is happening, right? You’re talking about it, and you’re not catching them by surprise,

Warren Call 28:13
right? So that’s, that’s what resulted in, for example, the decision to have a hybrid structure, you know, our our leading private sector businesses were really tired of the chamber asking them for money and sponsorship and dues, and then the economic development corporation trying to get some funding, and then the tech incubator and blah, blah, blah, blah. So, you know, one entity that that has a really, you know, clear mandate. Now, you know, my private sector business leaders can say, I’m writing a check to traverse, connect, to do this, this and this right, so that, that we came really clear. And so it gave us, it gave us focus and clarity too. And we were, we were really intentional. And the end result of that, that hybrid structure and our strategic plan outlined exactly where we were going to lead, where we were going to support and where we weren’t going to get involved. So our focus became, you know, Travers Connect is going to our mission is to look at the economic vitality, strengthen the economic vitality of this region by growing family sustaining careers. So family sustaining careers year round. You can afford to live here. You can afford to put your kids in child care, etc. You can afford a house, a family, sustaining career is kind of the North Star. The way we do that in our three pillars of primary focus is the economic competitiveness of the region. Number one, strengthening that. Number two, direct support for business. Businesses, number three talent, making sure we’ve got talent attraction development and that continuum of of talent development, then we were really specific about where we’re going to support. We support the technology incubator in early stage company development. We’re not the leader in early stage. They’re the leader. We support them. We’re not the leader in housing development, but there’s an entity called housing north. They’re the leader in housing development. We support their efforts. So we’re really clear about, you know, some of those, there’s a community development. So some of the kind of more societal, environmental things. Yeah, we’re not the leader in that, but we support the community development coalition that is the leader in that. Okay,

Brandon Burton 30:51
this is all super fascinating, and I could see it’s a big undertaking as well, but being able to align the needs within the community to be able to say what’s important. How do we want to, you know, advance the future going forward, you said, create these family sustaining careers. Can you talk a little bit about some of the the outcomes that you’re seeing from these changes? How is the the temperature change? How has the mood changed in the community by implementing this. Well,

Warren Call 31:24
certainly, you know, again, as chamber professionals, know you’re never going to make everybody happy. So there’s still the same things that we always have, right? We still have challenges with with, you know, elected officials not agreeing with each other and different priorities. And always that tension between managing appropriate growth versus maintaining our character and our charm of our communities. Those are always things that continue to be items of debate. But I think where there’s where there’s really clear success in there’s probably three things I would touch on that have really been been clear success. First of those is under that, that banner of the Northern Michigan chamber Alliance, the opportunity to to leverage the connection between economic development and public policy, that that’s been really helpful for us across all of Northern Michigan, so that the Michigan Economic Development Corporation and other kind of policy leaders know what our priorities are, and they know that we’re we’re focused on it. They know that we need funding for our initiatives. They know that when we’re when we’re out there trying to recruit an advanced manufacturing company to come to Northern Michigan. They know that it’s part of a concerted strategy. So I think that that was one really, one really big win, especially since, you know, again, we’re a fantastic place to vacation. We’re a fantastic place for second homes and so a lot of policy leaders downstate, Michigan, that’s what they think of when they think of Traverse City. And that’s great. We want to, want them to continue to think about that, and that to be continued to be a strong part of our economy. But also we’re a great place for an advanced manufacturing entity to relocate. So that that’s one thing. The second thing is, it’s allowed us to leverage some unique attributes of our community to focus on cluster development, industry. Cluster development, we’re not going to be a place that Ford or GM are going to set up a huge production facility. That’s not the right fit for us. That’s the right fit for downstate Michigan, the right fit for us, from a cluster development, is freshwater research and innovation. We’re on Lake Michigan. We’re a great place for research and development as it relates to water technologies, marine technologies, things like that. We’re a great place for value added agriculture, as I mentioned, we’re a great place for testing and deployment of drone technologies. Our our local college is is a leader in the Midwest for drone technologies, and the way that drone technologies are need to be developed for rural communities. Think of agricultural uses. Think of rural healthcare delivery, both with drones and with telemedicine. Those are things that are unique to our region. So we’re leveraging our unique things to develop these industry clusters in rural health, in drone deployment, in marine technologies, to again, Grow family sustaining careers, right? We want, we want, you know, if, if some company is going to build the next, you know, advanced underwater drone research product, we want that to be, to be done here, right? Because we the. This is a good place to do it. And then the final thing I would talk touch on is Michigan’s creative coast, our our talent attraction initiative. We, I think we, we had a good plan and we built a good program. We also got really lucky Brandon, because we built this nationally focused talent attraction brand, and it went live about three weeks before the pandemic hit, wow, and one of our big initiatives as part of that was with remote work and technology. If you can work anywhere, why wouldn’t you want to work here? And our timing could not have been better, because all of a sudden the world realized they could do things from anywhere, and it’s been a huge growth for us. We’ve been able to attract entrepreneurs, remote workers, technology, biopharmaceutical entities. It’s just been phenomenal from a standpoint of attracting talent and attracting entrepreneurs,

Brandon Burton 36:03
that is huge. Yeah, I appreciate you touching on those three areas. And when you’re talking about economic development leveraging, you know, working with the public policy, the thought came to me, it used to be that the media kept government in check and made sure that, you know, trying to keep them honest, we’ll say, Right? But now I see that shift being more with with chambers and economic development on the advocacy front to keep governments in check. And if they know that you’re you’ve got your eye on these, you know, policies that affect business, then it’s hard to get something past a group, you know, of 18 chambers that are, you know, form this alliance to to make sure that business is being protected and it’s a fertile place for business to grow and thrive. So these, these are great areas, great successes that are, that are coming out of this and and I feel like in the format that we have for this podcast, we might have bitten off a little more than we could chew, because I could, I could listen to you for a couple hours, you know, going in depth with all of these, you know, different aspects and the the winds that are coming out of this. But I appreciate you being able to try to condense this to to work with this format, and kind of give a glimpse of what’s possible as you align resources and ideas and and getting you know the stakeholders involved, and really convening them all together to to create a good cause going forward in your community and region. As we start to wrap things up here, I wanted to see if there’s any any tip or action item that you would share with the Chamber who’s wanting to take their organization up to the next level. What would you suggest for them? You

Warren Call 37:51
know, what I learned in this process Brandon was, I think the key thing is leverage. Chamber leaders have way more leverage than a lot of them that real they realize or that they use. And I think, you know, chambers, chambers, and chamber leaders oftentimes are kind of the key servant of the community, and that’s that’s an important role, but I think it’s important to remember that it’s a servant leader role, and I think there’s an opportunity to have a bit more swagger in your community and and take the initiative. Be bold, you know, be authentic, but also be the authority, because, because the chamber knows more of what’s going on than most other people in the in the region, yes, build a vacuum, fill the vacuum of leadership, and really leverage that. And I think you can do that with your staff. I think you can do that with your board, your community, obviously, elected officials. So that’s what I would say. I think the best way to do that is, is to quantify things. And so metrics and quantifying helps you to leverage your authority.

Brandon Burton 38:58
I like that having the data to back up what you’re trying to accomplish and and I love that word leverage too. It brings power, quite literally, as you apply apply a force with leverage, you’re able to do a lot more than what you can do on your own. Absolutely, as we look to the future of chambers of commerce, how do you see the future of chambers and their purpose going forward, you know,

Warren Call 39:22
I think it’s gonna be really interesting. I think that, you know, as a as an industry, you know, as everyone knows, you know that that struggle for for member retention, I think, is always gonna is, is always gonna be there. And we don’t need to get into all the kind of the traditional things about, you know, retention and non dues, revenue and all that kind of stuff. But the key thing is, the chamber was always thought of as the authority, traditionally on business issues. Then the internet comes along and business leaders feel like they can kind of get information from other sources, so they don’t necessarily need to be involved. In the chamber, they don’t need to be members. I think that’s been a struggle over the last, you know, 20 years. I think maybe, and I don’t know for sure, but maybe as the internet becomes less of an information source and more of just a confusing mix of everyone’s opinion, maybe there’s a need again, for kind of that trusted authority, that authentic, trusted authority. And I would, I would love to see chambers and economic development organizations fill that role, because I think it could be kind of a full circle thing where, you know, there’s, there’s a million websites, and you really don’t know what’s going on, so you might need to just go talk to your local or regional chamber to figure out what’s really going on with business issues.

Brandon Burton 40:46
Yeah, I like that. I’ve never thought of it in that context before, but I like that. It gives you something to think about and see that that full circle come back around right? Well, warm for for those listening who may want to reach out and learn more about how things have developed, there at traverse connect, what would be the best way for them to reach out and connect with you? You

Warren Call 41:10
know, I’m, I’m 100% against email. I think it’s a waste. There’s, there’s actually a really good book called world without email. If you haven’t read it, you should my cell phone, 231-651-9174,

Brandon Burton 41:27
alright, we’ll get that in our show notes for this episode to make it easy for for people to reach out and connect with you. But Warren, this has been great having you on and thank you for you know, kind of pulling back the curtain and showing what took place to create travers, connect and aligning all those desires, interests, abilities, to be able to bring them in under one roof, and also shut off some of those sacred cows that may weigh you down a little bit. This is a great exercise that probably every chamber needs to go through on some regular basis, maybe not to the same extent, but to really see what the purpose is and what’s driving them. But thank you for sharing your experiences with us today. This has been fantastic, and I really appreciate it. My,

Warren Call 42:18
my, my appreciation to you, Brandon. I appreciate the opportunity. Thanks for having

Brandon Burton 42:24
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