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Category: Innovation

How Forward-Thinking Initiatives are Reshaping Communities with Linda Parsons

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Brandon Burton (00:00.972)
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 seasoned leader in the Chamber and Association Management with more than 25 years of experience, advancing economic development and community collaboration. Linda Parsons has served as President and CEO of the Moore County Chamber of Commerce. since 2014. Under her leadership, the chamber has been nationally recognized as a four-star accreditation from the US Chamber of Commerce and twice named as a runner-up for the National Chamber of the Year. In 2025, Linda was honored by her peers as the North Carolina Chamber Executive of the Year, a testament to her impact across workforce development, business advocacy, and strategic planning.

Her leadership extends far beyond her role as she actively serves on a wide range of local and state boards focused on education, healthcare, childcare, and economic growth. Before relocating to North Carolina, Linda gained valuable public policy experience with the Ohio Chamber of Commerce and served under two Ohio governors as a state and local government commission. She holds a degree in politics and government from Ohio Wesleyan University and is a CCE and a graduate from the US Chambers Institute for Organization Management. Please welcome to the show Linda Parsons. Linda, 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 you can all get to know you a little better.

Linda M. Parsons (01:50.836)
Well, Brandon, I really appreciate the opportunity to be here today. It’s always great to connect with our chamber colleagues across the country. So a little bit about myself. I think you asked for an interesting fact. And a lot of people do not recognize that I am artistically inclined. I was a ballerina until I was 18. And I am fluid in piano, violin, and a vocalist.

Brandon Burton (02:04.59)
That’s right.

Linda M. Parsons (02:19.341)
I am a painter and I have thrown pottery throughout the years. Currently not doing that, but so artistically, that’s always what’s motivated me and it’s what brings me joy when I have the time to do it.

Brandon Burton (02:34.7)
Yeah, I love that. And I wish we would talk more about that just as a society, just the joy that comes from creating things, know, just being expressing your creativity. There’s so much goodness that comes from that. So I’m glad you’re leaning into it. It is. It is. Yeah. Very good. I love getting those those little interesting facts about people.

Linda M. Parsons (02:49.299)
It’s also relaxing.

Brandon Burton (03:00.494)
If you would tell us about the Moore County Chamber just to give us an idea before we dive into our discussion today. Help us understand the size, staff, scope of work that you guys are involved with, budget, just to set the stage for our discussion.

Linda M. Parsons (03:14.291)
where I’d be happy to do that. So the Moore County Chamber of Commerce is located about an hour south of Raleigh in two hours from Charlotte, North Carolina. We are a population of about 110,000 people, one of the fastest growing counties in the state of North Carolina outside of an urban area with a projection to grow 50,000 people by 2050.

So it’s a lot of growth that is expected. I’ve also seen figures of another 70,000 residents. So we shall see. We are a tourism-based economy, and we also have a strong healthcare economy. We have currently 620 members with a staff of three, with just shy of a little over a half million dollar budget. And we are a mighty three.

Between the three of us, we have almost 40 years of experience in the chamber industry. All of us have a chamber background, which is extremely rare in the chamber industry. I’ve gotten both of them from seasoned chamber organizations, one in our state, one in the state of Texas. And we work very hard on a variety of issues ranging from workforce development, childcare is a very strong advocacy area, housing.

Brandon Burton (04:19.607)
Yes.

Linda M. Parsons (04:39.315)
transportation, leadership training. We have one of the oldest leadership training models in the state. And then of course, you know, just supporting that general member, whether it’s a solopreneur or a large corporation in our area. Golf is heavy. are home of the second home to the USGA. They built their second headquarters here in Moore County. And we also are home to the World Golf Hall of Fame.

And so if someone is a seasoned golfer, they’re probably very familiar with Pinehurst Resort, who is in the process of building another course in our community. So we have about 43 courses within 15 minutes of our community.

Brandon Burton (05:23.402)
Wow, well that is a great snapshot, but also painting a picture as you do, right, with your creativity, but painting a picture in the mind of what the community looks like. And I’m picturing with these beautiful golf courses and whatnot, just the beauty of the area as well. That definitely does help to set the stage for our discussion today. And as we kind of went back and forth a little bit on trying to figure out exactly what we wanted to cover,

Linda M. Parsons (05:24.263)
I’m out.

Linda M. Parsons (05:34.298)
Okay.

Brandon Burton (05:52.943)
I see a lot of the things that you guys are doing there in the Moore County Chamber as being very future forward, leaning and thinking. So we’ll dive into some of that future thinking, as well as some of the more actionable things that you guys have been doing to really take action on those thoughts and vision of what the future looks like. And we’ll dive into that as soon as we get back from this quick break.

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All right, Linda, we’re back.

As I mentioned before the break, today we’re talking about some of these future looking things that you guys are doing there at the Moore County Chamber of Commerce. One of the first things that I wanted to learn more about is I know you guys recently have gone about this, a new co-working space in your community and really targeting those people that work from home or those entrepreneurs and.

individuals like that, businesses like that. So please tell us a little bit more about the co-working space, how that came to be, how it works. know different chambers have co-working spaces, they’ve stood up, they all have their own nuances. So I’d love to hear the approach that you guys have taken and hopefully others listening will learn some things and be able to take some notes as to what they might do in their community as well.

Linda M. Parsons (07:12.209)
I’d be happy to do that. And I think one of the things that’s been very fortunate about our chambers, we have a board that has had progressive thinking throughout the years. They understood that if we remained the same, we would no longer be relevant in our community and for our region. We do serve a six county region, meaning we have a lot of traffic that comes into work and a lot of traffic that comes out. And we are also 45 minutes away from the largest military installation outside of the Pentagon.

So back in 2014, literally 30 days after I was hired, our building sold. It had been on the market for quite some time and I was working at the chamber at the time, but it wasn’t CEO. And so we sold our building and went to a temporary home and really tried to develop what our vision was. And we had heard about a particular business in downtown Southern Pines that was going to be building a building, three story building in the historic district.

So I approached him and asked if we could go into the building with him together and take the top floor. Fast forward to 2020, we built a building during the pandemic. We started that building in 2019 and finished it in 2020. There was some delays with supplies, but he was very forward thinking as the owner of the building, majority owner of the building where he had a lot of supplies dropped in before the final roof was put on. So a lot of the people that were having delays,

We didn’t necessarily have some of those delays. We did with appliances. But we went from a 10,000 square foot building that was built in the late 80s and was able to take that investment and turn it around into a 3,500 square foot penthouse suite in the downtown historic district of Southern Pines.

Brandon Burton (08:41.741)
Yeah.

Linda M. Parsons (09:05.18)
It was probably one of the best decisions we’ve ever made. I literally threw the spaghetti on the wall and said, I think this is what we need to do. And when we do it, we need to open a collaborative workspace. Obviously not realizing that the entire world was going to shut down in March of 2020. So at that time, this construction had already started and I didn’t have the ability to shift the layout, but we moved forward and kept got creative. So we have a platform where people can drop in and work on a daily basis.

with a drop in rate. have subscriptions very similar to some of the corporations you see across the country, such as WeWorks, where they can pay to play a couple of days a week and a month. And then we have a conference room space that serves as overflow for individuals working quietly, not on Zoom calls or other things like that nature. And we have that ability to rent out that space.

One of the most popular things for us has been that remote worker who works for Fortune 500 companies across our country and they regularly use our space, they consider it their home. It does help where above a bar, but we also serve in adult environment if they so choose, as well as other snacks and coffee. I never thought an espresso machine would be so popular as it is. But one of our biggest leaders really has become the military

Brandon Burton (10:19.234)
Yeah.

Brandon Burton (10:29.806)
Bye!

Linda M. Parsons (10:33.78)
component. So we have a lot of groups from the military that use that space sometimes for transitioning veterans to learn what they need to be doing to acclimate into the civilian world, as well as other training opportunities that they do in our space. And so I would say that is the majority of our user with the second being our members. And based on their membership, they have that option to use the space. So we have a lot of people that do team meetings, interviews.

Um, if someone is opening a new place in town, they have that opportunity to do other interviews if their growth is still under construction. It has been a revenue generator. So we were able to eliminate the God, the events that were a burden. Shall we say a time sucker for the stack. And now we just have to manage a calendar, which is fairly simple because we kind of have a regular users.

Brandon Burton (11:19.202)
Yeah.

Linda M. Parsons (11:29.628)
And from there, it’s got a website, it’s got a following, and we are regularly booked. And it’s been a great investment for the organization and for our community.

Brandon Burton (11:43.437)
Yeah, I love that. love the, again, the forward thinking of being able to have that kind of space and before, you know, COVID even hit and to be able to see where needs are going and to be able to address that before they even really showed up in mass numbers like they did after the pandemic. I think there’s a uniqueness too of being able to serve

So you mentioned the remote workers, also entrepreneurs and startups and kind of that vibe that comes into it because they’re getting associated with the chamber early on in their journey. But I’ve also, I’ve seen and heard of some coworking spaces that are not connected with the chamber as being almost a chamber in themselves as far as the networking aspects go.

and who you meet within that networking space. Do you have any additional thoughts or insights on those points with the entrepreneurs and startups and the networking effect that happens in the coworking space?

Linda M. Parsons (12:52.752)
It absolutely is true. It is an opportunity for people that are working there to connect with others that may not have in otherwise while sitting in their living room navigating their children or their barking dog. And so I’ve actually seen some relationships form where they have now gotten into business together. Meaning we have a couple of consultants who have been able to do some work with some of our other workers.

During the holidays when everybody kind of took a break, it was fun to see everybody come back in January. How was your holiday? What are you working on? And we actually have one gentleman who used our space transitioning in his career, not military, but just a career transition. He got his MBA while in the space, was able to connect with one of those military groups and has now opened a consultant business.

So it’s fun to see those success stories, as well as the members who use the space as they grow and upsize their business and utilize it for team meetings and see that growth of those businesses or nonprofits that are using this space.

Brandon Burton (14:04.6)
Yeah, I love those success stories. What’s the relationship like with the work, with the chamber itself, kind of the space that you guys have within this top floor versus a co-working space? it kind of blend into each other? Is there distinct areas for chamber and co-working space or what does that lay out?

Linda M. Parsons (14:25.202)
It’s a complete blend. So we went with an urban design, meaning open ceilings, lots of metal. We did not shy away from comfortable furniture. We have standing desks. I’ll be honest, my board gave us complete discretion. They said, here’s your budget. You make it work.

And so we have an office in the front that is a collab space with a desk, a desk and a standing desk and a round table so people can have meetings. Then our offices are with incorporated within the middle. And then there’s another office in the back that gives a little more privacy. Again, conceivable, fix people. And then the conference room space is off of a massive kitchen and what we call the gathering space. So.

Great example on Friday mornings from seven in the morning until nine a.m. We have a group of military veterans that move our space for coffee. And when we come in at nine, they’re wrapping up, they clean up our kitchen, they go about their day. They’ve had their time to have a private coffee and we’re able to jump in through our workspace and do what we need. I do have a standing nine a.m. meeting every Friday. They know that. And even if they stay behind, they respect the fact that we are in our space.

working and doing our thing, but it gives a good blend. So our collab users have key fobs. can come and go as they please. And if we’re not there, they have access to the space, they have access to the kitchen and it works really well. So it’s a good blend. and it, it makes it feel like home. I don’t know how it’s. In fact, one of our coworkers users use that term this week.

Brandon Burton (15:48.93)
Yeah.

Brandon Burton (16:08.77)
Yeah.

Linda M. Parsons (16:13.875)
It’s a place that I call home.

Brandon Burton (16:17.132)
Yeah, that’s nice. That’s very nice. So I’m curious with the design and building it out, just from the little things from the scheduling to the key fobs to having the kitchen stocked. And did you guys consult with somebody else who’s done this before or was dreamed up on your own amongst the staff and the board and you guys like, let’s go do this. How did things come together?

Linda M. Parsons (16:44.479)
So when we initially came up with the concept and got the board approval, A, to move forward with the building and B, to do the collaborative workspace, we did visit several co-working spaces in our state. Most of them were corporate or other forms of, they weren’t connected to a chamber. And so we took some of those ideas, particularly knowing we were gonna be above a bar.

You know, we even discussed putting taps all the way from the first floor to the third, but we felt that we wouldn’t be able to go through a keg fast enough. So then we created relationships with local breweries. And so those breweries were able to put in the beer, can beer, so that the shelf life was a little bit better. We looked at those spaces from, you know, aesthetics, furniture, comfort.

Brandon Burton (17:17.219)
Right.

Linda M. Parsons (17:32.47)
And those things were very important to us. Standing desks are extremely important, but not everybody likes the standing desk. Some people like the sit. Some people like high tops, so we have high top tables. And then we very thoughtfully configured our conference room. If anybody remembers their science days from high school, you had a black top science lab table with wood legs. We reversed it. have

Brandon Burton (17:52.877)
Yeah.

Linda M. Parsons (17:58.368)
custom-made tables made in the state of North Carolina out of ash wood with black metal legs all on casters. So the room can be configured in whatever format somebody wants. Whether it’s a large conference table, they want to do classroom seating for a training session, which obviously works really well for the chamber when we hold a session. I’ve seen it done in pods where people are working with individual teams.

Brandon Burton (18:09.368)
Very cool.

Brandon Burton (18:17.944)
Yeah.

Linda M. Parsons (18:25.225)
And that has been very good. And then the other thing is we went with very top of the line technology. We did not shy away from technology. I talked to our IT guy and I said, I want you to bring in the best IT that you can possibly bring in. If the chamber is encouraging businesses to be on the top of their game as it relates to marketing, IT and other things, we can’t not do the same. So we have a seven-point television.

that does direct streaming. have access so that they can do Zoom meetings or other video type teleconferencing. We have mics around the room. We have a second TV in the room, because it’s kind of an L shape. So you can have a private session in the other part of the app. We have the same technology in the other offices. And we’re not shying away from updating it. With some of our military folks, we have some more restrictions.

Brandon Burton (19:12.622)
Okay.

Linda M. Parsons (19:25.211)
in reference to how they access technology. We’ve been working with them as well so that they can still access due to their firewalls and be able to utilize the space. So we didn’t shy away from the technology. And when we had our full budget, that was something that we thought, Philippe, thought about. Plus we have TVs in the lobby. So if they need to stream something while they’re in the kitchen using space or highlight a sponsor.

whatever their program is, they can do this thing. As it relates to the key fobs, it’s part of our security system. Probably the biggest challenge is if we lose internet and power. That’s a problem. But we can work around it and we have, but technology’s great, but you can’t control mother nature. And a couple of years ago, unfortunately, Moore County was

Brandon Burton (20:07.342)
Ugh.

Linda M. Parsons (20:24.277)
had a massive power outage that was done by a human, not by Mother Nature. And so we could not access our space because the town with the county was out of power for seven days. I was the only one with a computer, but all of our collab users completely understood because they couldn’t work either.

Brandon Burton (20:38.328)
Move.

Brandon Burton (20:45.39)
Brave.

Linda M. Parsons (20:46.005)
We didn’t make the national news and it’s unfortunate that someone chose to do that to our entire power grid. But those were good lessons to learn. How do we overcome that? We put in some other parameters so that we can get into our space, but sometimes you just can’t control technology. So it’s great, but Mother Nature or unfortunately some people have other plans and you just have to work around them. And we’ve got great people. They’re like, understand it.

Brandon Burton (20:56.27)
Thank

Brandon Burton (21:05.059)
Yeah.

Brandon Burton (21:15.778)
Yeah. So there’s been a few different times and ways you’ve mentioned the forward thinking of the board and of your staff. It sounds like historically, at least in recent years, there’s been a very forward thinking board for your chamber. What are some, a few other examples maybe of looking to the future and planning ahead and not getting caught, you know, with the

unexpected with what the future presents.

Linda M. Parsons (21:47.328)
think I’ve been very fortunate in my tenure as president to have a board that understands that the three of us do have chamber experience and we look thoughtfully at studies, whether it’s ACCE studies, whether it’s our own studies that we’re doing and monitoring our membership trends, things of that nature. And so we bring things to the board and we make our recommendations on not what’s happening today. You’re always gonna have your

these events are happening or this program is occurring, we are always moving five years ahead. So a great example back in 2014, I actually made my board read the book, The End of Membership as you know it. And I’ve used a lot of those books and guides to help them understand that if we continue to, I used to use the term be our grandfather’s chamber, maybe to some it’s a

great grandfather. Not that they didn’t do wonderful things, but we wouldn’t remain relevant in our community. There’s a lot more competition. There’s a lot more ability to do things digitally. There’s just a lot of competition. And so by being able to stand out as a organization who’s been around for 59 years, I think always looking ahead, how can we do something differently? So we eliminated a majority of our events and we really focused on some key

leadership, HR training that’s connected to workforce development, childcare, housing study. So we’re investing in a different wave, the long-term of our community and our employers in our area, whether they’re a nonprofit, a small business, a large business. And it’s been really good. I think that members, we still do networking. You’re always gonna have a little bit of networking.

It’s a critical piece, but sometimes you can remind them you can network differently. You can network digitally, even through our own organization. You can connect with a military person and help them as they develop their resume and transition into the civilian life. And so it’s really been, we’ve been really fortunate to have that board who really hasn’t stopped us from trying something. Have we had failures?

Linda M. Parsons (24:13.233)
Absolutely. And I think those failures too.

Brandon Burton (24:15.726)
I’d hope so. Otherwise, that means you’re not taking any risk, right?

Linda M. Parsons (24:18.641)
Exactly. And I love to take risk, calculated risk. The building was probably one of my biggest calculated risks. That’s a pretty big risk. But I know that if it is a beautiful building, it is set in a beautiful place. And a lot of people think it’s an historic building. To me, that is a win.

Brandon Burton (24:24.195)
Yeah.

Brandon Burton (24:30.318)
Yeah.

Brandon Burton (24:44.514)
Yeah, that is really cool.

Linda M. Parsons (24:46.037)
I had someone recently come in, they’re like, so how old is this building? And I’m like, five years?

Brandon Burton (24:51.47)
But with the spirit of 100, right?

Linda M. Parsons (24:56.731)
Exactly. I think, you know, analyzing what programs are successful in a chamber. What does the chamber industry look like in five, 10 years? What are trends that we’re seeing? For example, AI, know AI is an important trend. So we’re in process of developing a curriculum in partnership with our local community college to help our business community navigate AI to their benefit and learn it so that

they’re doing things safely and that they’re doing things that are going to be helpful to their business as they continue to right size their business. we’ve held a session last fall. We sold out in seven days and we did it in our our own respective conference room and we’ve had a request to have it again. And so it’s it’s been great to see that excitement and the people that were in that room for that program are

were not traditionally attending events. And so I think you have to, you can’t just do one size fits all. Our chamber is not a one size fits all. We like to…

Brandon Burton (25:57.708)
Yeah.

Linda M. Parsons (26:08.437)
cater things to the members’ needs, whether they’re small, medium, or large.

Brandon Burton (26:15.918)
I love that. So as you’re giving that response, my mind’s racing with all these different things, but like you’d mentioned, networking is always going to be some aspect of the chamber and paying attention to tools that are coming. I recently did an episode with the founder of an app called Chamber, but with a Y, so the C-H-A-Y-M-B-E-R. And it’s all about being able to network digitally or you meet somebody in person, but then you connect digitally and

continue to build that relationship and that networking. And there’s great tools and resources available that we just need to be aware. And like you mentioned, AI and being able to stay on the forefront of some of these things and introduce them to your membership and help them gain the confidence to use some of these new tools because change can be scary, right? I mean,

just human nature, like if you wanted to survive, you don’t change, right? So being able to help hold their hand through some of this change is so important. But being from Ohio, you may be familiar with Matt Appenzeller, Southern Ohio Chamber Alliance, but he’s made the distinction between with chambers being either a lamppost, where you’re shining a little bit of light on a

portion of town square or being a lighthouse where you’re really showing, you’re shining the light of where the direction needs to go. Really, you know, bringing people along to where you see things are going and guiding them that way. And that’s, that’s what I see you guys doing there at the Moore County Chambers, being more of a lighthouse and really shining that light, saying this is where things are going, come along with us because this is where the future is bright.

Linda M. Parsons (28:03.125)
We talked a little bit about in the beginning about my artistic background. I’ve always said that sometimes a chamber is kind of like a conductor, a conductor of a symphony. We may not always have the answer, but we can connect and collaborate with different organizations or people to help make our businesses and our local economies be successful. I may not always have that answer, but I can connect a business to our local school system. I can connect them to the college.

Brandon Burton (28:11.011)
Yeah.

Linda M. Parsons (28:30.447)
When everybody was saying, what are we going to do? Everybody’s leaving the workplace. I need employees. I need more students to go into this career path. OK, well, let’s start a workforce development collaborative task force so that we can work in partnership instead of all working in silos. A lot of times, that’s what happens in communities. Everybody’s working on something, but they’re not talking to each other. OK, well, it’s not going to be successful if you’re not talking to each other, being direct and open. And events will always have their place.

Training will always have its place, but our world is changing and we’ve got to change with it to continue to remain relevant to our members, otherwise known as investors, who are investing in us and our community.

Brandon Burton (29:17.08)
That’s right. I love that. Well, Linda, as we begin to wrap things up, I wanted to ask on behalf of the listener who is striving to take their organization up to the next level, what kind of tip or action item might you share with them as they strive to accomplish that goal?

Linda M. Parsons (29:34.804)
I do think reading the book, End of Membership as you know it, is a really good idea. And I really think taking a pause and stepping back and doing an analysis of everything that you’re doing, what is successful, how much time are you putting into it. The people time does cost you money. And if you’re doing an event to turn around to do in another event to pay for that event, is that really the most cost effective thing?

Brandon Burton (29:54.99)
We are finished.

Linda M. Parsons (30:02.101)
for your organization and the members that you serve. Sometimes taking that pause is scary, but by doing an analysis of everything that you’re doing, helps you move forward. While we did that back in 2017, we actually had a discussion yesterday that we’re gonna be doing it as a team discussion again, so that we’re prepared for this next 10 years. And…

and are able to continue to serve that investor of our community. So I do think that’s important. I also think if you’re really new in the career, find a mentor, find somebody that you, an organization and a person that you can regularly check in with. Being at the top is lonely. It’s a lonely place to be and one of the most exciting places to be, but it can be scary. Taking those risks are scary at times. And so being able to talk

Brandon Burton (30:53.539)
Yeah.

Linda M. Parsons (30:57.599)
through those things with somebody I think is important.

Brandon Burton (31:01.324)
Yeah, absolutely. And really the idea of looking 10 years in the future and trying to plan and work towards that before too long, you have a 10 year plan, but you probably have to readdress it on an annual basis and see, we still on track? And I had heard a recent interview of Elon Musk and somebody was asking him about how he sees the future. And this is the man who’s literally building the future, right? With self-driving cars and robots and

Linda M. Parsons (31:28.341)
Correct.

Brandon Burton (31:31.286)
putting people on Mars. And he gave a great forecast of in the next one to three years, but himself, he said, 10 years? I have no idea. I have no idea what the future looks like in 10 years. And I think it’s good to have a plan, but we need to constantly make sure we’re still on course with that plan, that we’re going in the right direction.

Linda M. Parsons (31:51.638)
Absolutely, because you never know what curve ball such as COVID, which a lot of people got thrown at, know, nobody knew that was coming and you had to pivot and you have to be able to pivot quickly.

Brandon Burton (32:00.751)
Yeah, exactly. Well, Linda, I feel like this whole episode we’ve been talking about the future of chambers, but I’m going to ask the formal question that I always ask towards the end of an episode, which is how do you see the future of chambers and their purpose going forward?

Linda M. Parsons (32:21.449)
think we are at a great place to really excel our communities forward. Kind of looking at that road where you have two choices to go, Chambers had the opportunity to really pull their communities and help them in the areas of workforce development and bring employees to their employers, whether it is cultivating that relationship as young as kindergarten.

to others who are maybe second chance individuals looking for employment, veterans, the opportunity is there. And I think the chambers that embrace that and start working as collaborative units in their communities are gonna excel and be extremely successful.

Brandon Burton (33:09.526)
Yeah, I love that. And that visual again, that road, I think Alice in Wonderland, right? She comes to the fork in the road and she asks, which way do I go? Right? And the Cheshire Cat says, it depends on where you want to go. You know, and you got to know where you’re headed. Yeah.

Linda M. Parsons (33:15.658)
Mm-hmm.

Linda M. Parsons (33:20.277)
She does.

And every community is unique. Every community has its place. Every community isn’t the same. And yes, we borrow things from communities, but you have to look at your own community and what does that future hold?

Brandon Burton (33:38.004)
Exactly. Well, this has been a fun discussion. I’m grateful to have had you on the show. I wanted to give you an opportunity to share any contact information for listeners who may want to reach out and connect with you and learn more maybe about the co-working space or how you guys are navigating the future. What would be the best way for someone to reach out and connect?

Linda M. Parsons (33:58.176)
So they can contact me directly at the chamber, 910-692-3926. If they want to see a little bit about our space, they can visit thirdfloorcollabspace.com. And if they want to visit a little and learn a little more about the chamber, it’s moorecountychamber.com. We do get confused with Moore, Oklahoma. In fact, today we have an application for a membership in Moore, Oklahoma.

Brandon Burton (34:15.371)
you

Linda M. Parsons (34:24.937)
We are not in Moore, Oklahoma. We are in North Carolina. So please be mindful of that. You can find me on LinkedIn as well, as well as LinkedIn.

Brandon Burton (34:32.334)
Very good. I’ll make sure to get those in the show notes and make it easy for people to find and connect with you. But Linda, thank you so much for spending time with us today here on Chamber Chat Podcast sharing your experience and some of these things that you guys are doing to really position your community well for the future and look after those investors that are within your stewardship. I really appreciate you sharing those things with us.

Linda M. Parsons (35:00.106)
Thank you, Brandon, for the opportunity and I wish the Chamber community all the best.

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Chamber Bitcoin Foundations with Brandon Burton

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Brandon Burton (00:00.824)
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. Our topic for this episode is going to be a little bit unique. It’s something that I haven’t really dove into on Chamber Chat yet. Typically, I have guests and

Given this time of year, we’re coming into the holiday season. I wanted to be able to give a little reprieve to the guests that I would normally have on and allow them to enjoy the holidays, but also to dive into what I see as an important topic for Chambers to be paying attention to right now so you can be better prepared for the future. So before I dive in,

In this episode, I am going to be sharing some ideas around Bitcoin and how Bitcoin can help strengthen the finance, the outlook, financial outlook for your chamber. But I do want to put out the disclaimer that I am not a financial advisor, that this is not financial advice. You know, all the disclaimers go along with that. What I want to do with this episode

is really just give you some exposure to Bitcoin, what it is, kind of a vision that I’ve had of seeing how Chambers can utilize Bitcoin in the long term and give you something to be able to talk over with your board, with your executive committee, with your accountant, see what makes sense for your organization and to look to some other models and

how they’re utilizing Bitcoin as well. without further ado, this episode, the thought came to me, chambers are always looking for long-term sustainable revenue streams and ways to strengthen their role as community stewards. that’s a long way of saying chambers are always looking to remain relevant, right? But as Matt Appenzeller,

Brandon Burton (02:22.881)
talked about as he was a guest on the podcast a few weeks ago, it’s not enough to be relevant anymore. You need to be forward thinking. You need to be looking at what’s coming next. And it’s part of my thesis, you can say, that Bitcoin can very much be part of that long-term sustainable revenue stream and way to strengthen your role as community leader. We’re seeing

around the country, around the world, major institutions, Fortune 500 companies, and even universities are adopting Bitcoin as a long-term strategic asset. And I’ll get a little bit more into that as we go along. But to kind of frame the thought process as we get into this, what would it mean for a chamber foundation to build a strategic reserve

designed for growth for decades, designed to grow for decades. Think about that, ponder on that. What would it mean for your chamber foundation to build a strategic reserve designed to grow for decades? This is big thinking, long-term thinking, and we’re gonna dive into it as soon as we get back from this quick break.

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All right, so before the break, I kind of set the table for you. Explaining what this episode’s all about with introducing you to Bitcoin and more importantly with how Bitcoin can be a great asset for long-term growth for your chamber, specifically for Foundation. So I’ll get into the details of it. I do kind have an outline that I’m going to follow. So as I go through the outline, it may seem like I’m reading some things, but I wanted to make sure that I had…

as much of the detail and reference points available as possible so I’m not missing anything. Bitcoin can be a complex topic. So I’ve been in it and involved with Bitcoin for nearly a decade now. So as I’ve gotten into it, there’s some things that I take for granted that I realize other people don’t have that framework or that foundation for understanding Bitcoin.

Brandon Burton (04:44.844)
I’m hoping to be able to give some of that background about what Bitcoin is generally before I build on the bigger ideas. So what is Bitcoin? Bitcoin is a decentralized digital monetary network. So some people call it like a digital gold. So it’s a store of value. It’s an investment tool, but it’s a way to be able to send money digitally.

anywhere in the world for very low fees. In the past, as I use the term digital gold, in the past, people would look to gold as a store of value. But if you needed to send gold across the world, there’s a lot of effort required with that, including insuring it and transporting it and the whole nine yards. So Bitcoin is a way for you to digitally transfer large amounts of money without

or large amounts of value without all the extra friction. Bitcoin is not a company. There is no CEO of Bitcoin. There is no website for Bitcoin. It was created anonymously about 17 years ago at this point. So as I record this, we’re in December of 2025, which is important because I will reference some different

things that will be important for us to pin back to this date in mid-December 2025. So Bitcoin was created anonymously and the way that it works is it’s mined a lot like gold is. Where gold, you have to get the tools, you gotta go into the mountains, you gotta dig through the granite and put forth a lot of effort to reveal the gold. So with Bitcoin,

Bitcoin is mined in the digital landscape. And the easiest way to explain this is there’s very complex equations that are put out there that computers work on essentially nonstop. And as a computer solves this equation, they are rewarded with a block. So a block

Brandon Burton (07:07.598)
for the blockchain technology maybe. So a block is mined roughly every 10 minutes. So every 10 minutes a block reward is issued. And what that is is that block of transactions gets approved and there’s a consensus across the different nodes that are being run on the network to validate that the ledger is correct. And then that block of transactions can get cleared and

and move on into the history of the blockchain. So as Bitcoin is mined, so there’s miners who they have expensive mining rigs that are used to mine the Bitcoin and it uses an intense amount of power to be able to do the mining. So a lot like mining gold, there’s a lot of effort that goes into it, a lot of energy. Same thing with mining Bitcoin.

So there is a difficulty in achieving it. And if there’s a whole bunch of miners that come on at one time, there’s a difficulty adjustment that gets made within the software. So it makes it harder to solve those problems, to earn that block reward. And if there’s less miners on the network, then that difficulty adjustment comes down to where it becomes a little bit easier to solve the problem. So it can stay on track for every 10 minutes for a…

a block to be mined. And that’s important too because miners, they are not online unless they can be profitable. So if they’re in an area where you can’t get cheap energy, then they’re not going to mine. So they tend to go to places where energy can be as close to free as possible. So maybe by a waterfall or some kind of water source where they can get electricity or solar or nuclear plant or

Even in oil fields where they’ll use some of the flare at the oil rigs to be able to convert into energy. Even methane from junkyard, from landfills, they’ll use the methane and convert that into electricity to be able to run their mining rigs. So there’s very creative ways that miners are able to access power to be able to do the mining. And it’s kind of transforming the world with giving a

Brandon Burton (09:33.311)
Access to energy in places the world that haven’t had it before so back to the minor so minor Is online they they go through the process to Earn a block reward and I keep saying block reward because if they win the block saying they solve the problem and and get that block there is a reward to it so that reward is a certain number of Bitcoin, so

Let’s say at one point it was 10 Bitcoin and then every four years there’s a halving cycle. So every roughly every four years, what was 10 Bitcoin be cut down to five Bitcoin as a block reward. And then four years later, that five gets cut down to two and a half. And then four years later it gets cut down. So you understand what I’m saying. Every four years that block reward gets cut down, cut in half.

However, the price of Bitcoin continues to rise very dramatically. So with that having, it tends to help boost the price of Bitcoin as well. Some of this may seem technical and really I just want to give a basis so you can kind of have a concept, a better concept maybe of what Bitcoin is. But Bitcoin is built to be long-term inflation resistant store about

So in the end, that’s what it is. institutions are starting to pay attention to Bitcoin. And you might ask why, why are institutions paying attention? Well, there’s the number go up technology. So the price of Bitcoin is dramatically increasing. But over the last 15 years of operation, there’s been zero downtime with the Bitcoin network. So because there’s no company, it’s not centralized into one.

building or one locale, these nodes and miners are spread throughout the world. So if one node or miner, if there’s a power outage in a certain area, there’s redundancy throughout the world. So there’s been zero downtime with the Bitcoin network. Historically, there’s been a 200 % average annual compounded return over the past decade.

Brandon Burton (12:00.258)
That number is a little bit deceiving because on the front end of the decade, this is averages. So the front end of that decade, that return was much higher. And as time has gone on, it’s not quite as high, but it is still very attractive. Usually around 40 to 50 % return annually at this point in time. Bitcoin has outperformed stocks, real estate, bonds, gold, and nearly every major asset class.

which is mind boggling. A lot of people say Bitcoin is too volatile and it is, it’s volatile. has its ups, it has its downs, but once you zoom out and look at it long-term, it’s just up and to the right ever since its creation. it is an amazing asset. Bitcoin is increasingly recognized as digital property. rather than risk on speculative assets.

This is where I want to make the distinction. People talk about crypto, cryptocurrency, and then there’s Bitcoin. So technically Bitcoin is a cryptocurrency, but cryptocurrency is not Bitcoin. So I hope we can be clear on that. In fact, I don’t ever talk about crypto. I have zero interest in any crypto asset. I don’t even want to name them, but there’s a lot of speculative assets in the crypto world.

to me, Bitcoin is the only thing that matters. Because even with all those speculative cryptos, people will buy and sell them, but they’ll accumulate value just to buy more Bitcoin, because that’s Bitcoin’s key. So let’s talk about what Bitcoin is not. So Bitcoin is not a get rich quick scheme. It’s not as, in fact, when you buy it, I would say you need to buy it and hold it. Otherwise you’re going to get burned. It’s not something to trade.

So if you try to time the market, try to buy low, sell high, one, there’s going to be tax ramifications, two, you’re never going to beat the market. It’s always going to burn you in the end. So it’s not a get rich scheme and it’s not something you trade. It’s also not a traditional investment managed like equities. It’s best used as a long-term reserve asset. So just buy it and hold it and.

Brandon Burton (14:26.57)
As you buy and hold it, there’s other things you can do with it, which I’ll touch on in a little bit. So the background or the inspiration that I had into bringing Chambers into the Bitcoin world is there is a company, it was called MicroStrategy. Now it just goes by strategy and MicroStrategy was, I’m going to say more of a struggling

software company. They were doing, I believe, about a hundred million a year in software. But as a software company, that’s not a lot. As we hear in his chambers, that’s a lot of money. But software speaking, that’s not a whole lot. But MicroStrategy, it’s a publicly traded business, intelligence company, software company. Their CEO is Michael Saylor. And he pioneered what I’m going to call the Bitcoin Treasury Strategy.

So in 2020, Michael Saylor was looking for ways to save their company. And he learned about Bitcoin and he dove in about what all Bitcoin has to offer. And in 2020, Michael Saylor announced that they would be shifting excess cash into Bitcoin as a long-term reserve. As of early 2025,

Um, and this number is not even going to be accurate anymore because they keep buying and acquiring more and more Bitcoin. But as of the beginning of this year, um, they, they held about 1 % of the global Bitcoin supply. I believe they’re closer to 5 % at this point. Um, every few weeks they’re buying more, um, in massive loads. So they accumulated initially through.

excess cash reserves. So whatever cash was sitting on their balance sheet, they were buying Bitcoin because cash as we know is subject to inflation and over time devalues itself where Bitcoin, it inflates over time and it’s inflation proof as it continues to outpace every other asset out there. And once they exhausted their cash reserves,

Brandon Burton (16:52.472)
They started looking for other ways to accumulate more bitcoins. So they got into convertible notes. They got into issuing bonds. They got into regular, regular treasury allocations. So they are creating new treasury products that they’re putting out there in the market that you can purchase. And essentially by one of these different treasury notes that they

that they produce and it’ll return, depending on the price of Bitcoin, roughly a 10 % return. So when you look at people on fixed income, for example, looking at retirement and they want a steady return, you can purchase some of these shares, these fixed income equities, and they’ll return roughly a 10 % a year guaranteed return.

MicroStrategy has built out their balance sheet and issued these notes and bonds and so forth where they are over collateralized massively with Bitcoin. So the price of Bitcoin, when it was at its peak earlier this year, it could take a down ride. It could dip down to like 80 % of its top value.

and MicroStrategy would still have a strong balance sheet to be able to make all their debt payments. So super strong company, very creative with how they’re accumulating Bitcoin. But as a result, the market cap or the value of MicroStrategy went from about $1 billion to over $80 billion during peak cycles.

So within about a five year period, went from 1 billion to over 80 billion. Their operating business didn’t change, but their balance sheet strategy did, and that’s key. So as we think of Bitcoin for chambers, I don’t want you to think of changing your operating business. Your day to day, what you do shouldn’t change much, but the way you structure your balance sheet should to be able to adopt

Brandon Burton (19:15.454)
this kind of a strategy. So you don’t need to change your programs or events. You can strengthen your foundation by adopting a smarter treasury approach. So that was the initial inspiration that I had. And then as I’ve, I dove into Bitcoin education several years ago, just learning as much as I can about it. And there were ideas floated out there about

what’s called bit bonds. So what a bit bond is, if you think of a municipality issuing a bond, maybe they need to build a new fire station. They can allocate a percentage, even just a small percentage of the bond to purchase Bitcoin with, but then as the math plays out would vastly outperform the interest on the rest of the bond. So then in the end, the

the end of the term of this bond would be split between the bond purchaser and the issuer. So they both end up better off for it. So BitBonds are tokenized bonds issued on Bitcoin’s layer. They have been issued first in El Salvador.

to raise capital through what they called volcano bonds. So if you wanted to Google that and dive in more on what volcano bonds were with bit bonds. But they resent a government using Bitcoin, the Bitcoin rails to raise capital. It’s a hybrid model between traditional bonds and the Bitcoin upside. This matters kind of as a precedent because it shows that public institutions are now using Bitcoin.

as part of sovereign financial strategy. It demonstrates how Bitcoin-backed instruments can support infrastructure growth, tourism, national development projects. And as far as the relevance to chambers, if nation states, El Salvador, we’ve recently heard even the United States building a Bitcoin reserve, strategic Bitcoin reserve for the United States,

Brandon Burton (21:38.145)
I’m in Texas. Texas has started a strategic Bitcoin reserve. But if nation states are leveraging Bitcoin for a long-term capital formation, then why shouldn’t local business institutions consider smaller scale version of this? Why shouldn’t chambers consider having a long-term capital, strategic capital, strategic Bitcoin reserve rather? So as my thinking, it went from

MicroStrategy, the corporate Bitcoin reserve that they set up, it’s the idea of these BitBonds. And I’m thinking, man, how can Chambers take advantage of this? So as I started diving into that thought and exploring that and flushing it out, the idea came to me of Bitcoin being part of a strategic reserve for Chamber foundations. So a lot of you listening will already have…

a Chamber Foundation or 501C3. I know many Chambers out there are exploring starting a foundation or would like to start a foundation. And I would suggest having the 501C3 to hold the Bitcoin, just the structure for it is much better and how you can allocate it throughout its life. But foundations are already managed and restricted.

sorry, foundations already manage restricted or endowed funds. So it’s a right entity for that. They operate with long-term stewardship in mind. So it’s not just something that you get money in, turn around and use it, but it’s meant for long-term growth and development in your community. And they are ideal vehicles for building intergenerational financial resilience. So.

the proposed chamber Bitcoin reserve strategy that I would put out there. So this is where you get your pen and paper and start jotting down notes. But I would say to accumulate small amounts consistently. I mentioned before trying to buy low, high. if you buy, if you dollar cost average consistently, you’re able to take advantage of the upside. So whether you use fundraising,

Brandon Burton (24:03.646)
surplus of revenues or earmark economic development funds or maybe you do a capital campaign and you take a portion of the money raised with that capital campaign to fund your strategic Bitcoin Reserve. You could also accept direct Bitcoin donations from local tech forward businesses. If they knew that you’re building a Bitcoin Reserve,

there would be people in your community who would want to give you Bitcoin directly to participate in that. And you probably know who some of those tech forward businesses are who would be interested in that. So the accumulation is one way. So how do you accumulate it? And there’s different strategies of how to do that. But then the custody of the Bitcoin. So Bitcoin has keys.

There’s a key phrase that accesses the Bitcoin. I would strongly, strongly recommend that, again, this isn’t financial advice, but I would strongly recommend that you use a third party as a custodian for your Bitcoin. And that way you can do what’s called have a multi-signature vault, which means maybe you as a CEO

maybe your board chair and this third party all have a signature to access the Bitcoin. if you wanted to, let’s say one of the, you or your board chair, you know, were to lose the keys, you could still access it with two out of three of those individuals having those keys. The other thing is,

A lot of chambers have policies in place, so you can’t write a check or sign a check over a certain amount without a second signature. So multi-sig would kind of help with that as well to make sure that any transactions or spending of the Bitcoin is done with a lot of thought to it and not done casually or just on a whim. But there’s some good companies out there that can help with that.

Brandon Burton (26:26.702)
And it just, really reduces the exposure to losing the keys. So you want to make sure you have a third party multi-sig vault and there’s some that will even insure it. So if anything were to happen and you’ve lost the Bitcoin, you can purchase insurance on it as well, which is pretty cool. So the next point is

My thoughts on this is if you choose to go with the strategy of building a strategic Bitcoin reserve, don’t do it unless you can commit to at least five to 10 years of holding the Bitcoin. Don’t sell it. Whatever you do, don’t sell. Ideally, you would accumulate the Bitcoin within your foundation and you would never sell it because it’ll continue to increase in value over time.

And there’s ways that you can access it. So you could take a loan out against it. You can, can act as collateral to do some pretty interesting things. that marketplace for how to use Bitcoin as a collateral is just growing and becoming more innovative. But let’s say, well, if you have this reserve and

you have that commitment of five to 10 years to not sell it, hopefully never sell it, the reserve becomes a long-term economic development asset. So chambers could eventually use the appreciated value to acquire land for industrial recruitment. You could seed a revolving loan fund for small businesses. You can fund chamber-backed grants or workforce programs.

You could create interest-based scholarships or talent pipeline programs. It could serve as a rainy day fund for future crises that may come. Again, I would say, please don’t sell it, though. I would take a loan out against it. so for the example, if you’re acquiring land for industrial recruitment,

Brandon Burton (28:40.878)
You acquire the land, you get that recruitment, you turn the land over, and then you pay off the loan that you had from the Bitcoin. So you continue to grow in that appreciation of Bitcoin while you’re putting that capital to use. So hopefully that makes sense. So expected outcomes over time. So just to give you an idea, if a chamber accumulates $100,000 in Bitcoin and holds it for 10 years, just as an example.

Historical averages suggest the potential 10 year growth to be about 25 times that initial investment. So that’s huge. I always want to think more conservatively. So even if it was 10 times, that still, that turns a hundred thousand dollars into a million over 10 years. But even 10 % of the historical performance will, you know,

dramatically outpace a bond or CD yield. I would say start small, contribute steady and consistently, and in the future you’ll have meaningful economic power in the future. So there’s validation. This is already happening with other institutions like Harvard.

is Harvard’s endowment, the largest academic endowment globally. They began holding Bitcoin in private funds as early as 2019. Other institutions, Stanford, Yale, MIT, all have different levels of Bitcoin exposure. Black Rocks, Bitcoin ETF or iBit.

is now one of the fastest growing ETFs in history. And Fidelity has publicly positioned Bitcoin as a superior store of value. And why does this matter to Chambers? Well, foundations with the 100 years outlook are embracing Bitcoin. Chambers, which also should have a plan for generational impact, should consider doing the same. So thinking big, thinking well into the future, building your community.

Brandon Burton (31:05.902)
Having that resilience Bitcoin is that tool to get you there now as you present this idea to your board as you present this to your accountant as you present it as you start talking about it out loud, sometimes I’m a little hesitant because People have different ideas about Bitcoin and more and more they’re becoming positive but man about eight years ago when I got into it

I mentioned Bitcoin to people, they thought I was crazy. But now it’s obviously much more mainstream and it’s been proving itself. But people will say Bitcoin is too volatile. And yeah, that’s true. From day to day, it’s super volatile. But long term, it’s been extremely strong. And as a chamber, you shouldn’t be trading the day to day. You’re building reserves for long time into the future.

The volatility really can be a gift. And Michael Saylor has talked about that. The volatility of Bitcoin is really a gift for us long term. Somebody may say, well, we can’t risk member dollars on Bitcoin. So this strategy uses foundation funds with clear restrictions and long-term intentions. So it’s not for operating budgets or for event revenue.

It has a specific purpose for funding this foundation. Some might say our board won’t understand Bitcoin and this is why education matters. It’s important for you to learn about Bitcoin so you can help answer their questions. You can compare it to land. There’s a limited supply. There’s only ever going to be 21 million Bitcoin ever produced. 21 million. That’s it. There’s not even enough Bitcoin.

for every millionaire in the country to have a Bitcoin. So there’s definitely an early mover advantage. And Bitcoin can be broken down into smaller units called Satoshis. And you can learn more about that as you dive into your education on Bitcoin. But it’s a hard asset, has long-term appreciation. It doesn’t require ongoing maintenance. So the idea of like real estate, there’s always, know, maintenance that goes on with that.

Brandon Burton (33:30.754)
Bitcoin doesn’t have any of that. Bitcoin is digital land, globally scarce and infinitely divisible. So another risk, I guess you could say, or objection to it is what if we lose the Bitcoin? And that’s a question that makes me sick to think about, to lose your Bitcoin. So I’d mentioned before the multi-sig vaults.

use a third party, a trusted third party multi-signature vault, and that removes that risk of a single person losing the Bitcoin keys. But keys can be distributed among board members and with rotating responsibility. All right. So if you are wanting to implement this into your organization, into your foundation,

So one would be set up a foundation or sub foundation specifically labeled as a strategic digital asset reserve to adopt a written policy that says we’re not going to sell the Bitcoin for five to 10 years or whatever you want that policy to read. But that would be my my guideline is for sure. If you sell it if you sell it less than five years, you may end up losing money.

But if you keep it five to 10 years, you’re going to be on the upside. If you keep it forever, you’re definitely going to be on the upside. Part of that written policy, have it spelled out what your annual allocation target is, what your specific custody standards are. So you know how to access it you don’t lose your keys. Educate your board and your membership about what you’re

doing and how you’re going to put this strategic fund to use in the future or ways that it could be utilized in the future. And then begin to dollar cost average, just monthly or quarterly or annually, whatever interval you want to set up, but have a way to dollar cost average. then track reserve performance annually as part of your foundation reporting, you know, see what that growth looks like here to here.

Brandon Burton (35:49.719)
start getting excited because this can really transform your community and your organization. So imagine your chamber foundation in the year 2035, 10 years from now, with a reserve worth two to $10 million because you simply committed to accumulating a small amount of Bitcoin each year. Imagine funding major workforce facility.

securing land for a business park or seeding your own microloan program, all because your chamber thought ahead. This position’s chamber’s not as followers, but as innovators in community economic resilience. So in closing, I this has kind of gone a little long just hearing me ramble on without another guest or somebody to have that ongoing dialogue, but.

Chambers have always been the boots on the ground leaders in economic development. The future will reward those who embrace asymmetric opportunities early.

Bitcoin is not a silver bullet, but it is an incredible tool for long-term local prosperity. And I would encourage you to explore, ask questions, and consider whether your foundation is structured to take advantage of generational opportunities. But I hope that you found this interesting, at the least, transformational at the most. I really hope that

Chambers listening right now will take this and really transform the organization. And I would love to hear of anybody who adopts this strategy, especially 10 years from now. And you are that chamber who’s sitting on a $10 million strategic fund because you implemented something today. I would love to hear about that. But if you have any questions, reach out to me.

Brandon Burton (37:54.201)
Brandon@ChamberChatPodcast.com and Anyways, I hope this episode helps and hope you hopefully you learned a few things and sparked some ideas of how you can Set up your community for long-term growth into the future

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Workforce Housing with Natalie Hawn

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Brandon Burton (00:01.269)
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 shaping the future of business and community development in Northwest Missouri. Natalie Hawn is the President and CEO of the St. Joseph Chamber of Commerce, where she champions economic growth.

strategic partnerships and a thriving business environment. With nearly two decades of experience at the chamber, Natalie previously served as senior vice president and membership and brings a strong background in business development and public relations honed through roles with Woody Bibbins and Associates and Prior Resources Inc.

A proud graduate of Missouri Western State University, Natalie’s influence extends far beyond her city. She’s the treasurer of the Hawthorne Foundation, a commissioner on the Missouri Military Preparedness and Enhancement Commission, and a national representative in the Air Mobility Command Leadership Academy. She’s also a 2024 recipient of the prestigious Women of Achievement Award from Lieutenant Governor Mike Kehoe.

From education to the arts and military readiness to economic innovation, Natalie is deeply woven into the fabric of her community, serving on numerous boards and leading countless initiatives that drive progress. She’s a passionate advocate and connector and a true civic leader. Natalie, we’re thrilled 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.

Natalie Hawn (01:47.97)
Hi guys, and wow, that was probably the best intro ever. Way to go, Brandon. So I am here in St. Joseph, Missouri. I have a 16 year old son that just played in the district champions of his high school, six day high school here. We played a Kansas City team last night. Unfortunately, we didn’t.

Brandon Burton (01:52.929)
we go, chat GPT.

Natalie Hawn (02:14.958)
win. So it’s the end of fall football season, but we have a couple years left because he was a sophomore this year. So he’s, I’ve spent a lot of my fall supporting his team and their football. So that’s kind of been my life recently. But I am from Mid-Missouri originally. I grew up on a farm. I have four brothers and I absolutely love Chamber World and I love what I do every day. It gives us passion.

to build a better community so that my son can have a better place to live for tomorrow. So that’s a little bit about me.

Brandon Burton (02:49.025)
That’s That’s what makes fall so great is football. I love it.

Natalie Hawn (02:52.118)
Yeah, the boys of fall. love it. And we are at the home of the Kansas City Chiefs training camp. So we’re big Chiefs fans in this part of the country. And I know that’s unpopular right now. I love it that we celebrate that you should be successful, but not too successful. Because we love you for a minute. Now we hate you. Be successful, but not too successful. But we’re still diehard Chiefs fans in this part of the country.

Brandon Burton (03:08.863)
Yeah, don’t do it over and over again. We want to see other people win too, right?

That’s right.

That’s funny. Well, tell us a little bit about the St. Joseph Chamber just to give us an idea of the size, staff, scope of work, your budget, just to kind of set the stage for our discussion today.

Natalie Hawn (03:31.234)
Yeah, absolutely. So I’ve been, as Brandon said, I’ve been at the Chamber for 20 years in a little bit different role. The last four years, I’ve been the CEO. So prior to that, I kind of ran the whole membership side of the House. Now I have the opportunity to kind of dive more into economic development and really see this full scope of the Chamber. So it’s been a lot of fun. But our Chamber has about 1,300 members.

Our community is about 75,000 and we have a budget of 2 million. We do economic development and chamber. So we have a contract with the city and the county to do economic development. And we also have economic development partners that go into that budget. So we’re combined budget for about 2 million. We have a staff of 11.

Brandon Burton (04:21.205)
good. That definitely helps to give us that context. Obviously, every chamber has a different size, different resources, different focus even. But as we kind of hone our focus on to our topic for discussion today, which will be around workforce housing, that’ll help to give us that background and kind of what those needs are in your community. So we will dive into that topic as soon as we get back from this quick break.

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Natalie Hawn (04:25.165)
Yeah!

Natalie Hawn (04:30.156)
Yeah.

Brandon Burton (04:47.905)
All right, Natalie, we’re back. So as I mentioned before the break, our topic that we’re diving into today is about workforce housing. So I know this has become an issue, a hot topic rather, throughout a lot of the country, trying to figure out how do we, and it depends on the community, right? Some are trying to figure out housing for employees who maybe live outside the community, who have a long commute that are coming in, maybe the housing’s not affordable. Different scenarios that have

different needs to look for workforce housing. as you have the lens of the St. Joseph Chamber, tell us what needs are arising and how you guys are working to approach those needs.

Natalie Hawn (05:30.84)
So when I took over this role, the very first meeting I had was with one of our major employers. it hadn’t been a conversation or really a space that we had really been involved in. And they said to me, you have to figure out this workforce housing piece. We just can’t find affordable appropriate housing for our workers. And they’re having to drive a significant amount of way to work. And so I started digging into that and really

trying to better understand the need, because it was really, we were hearing it kind of across the country. This was about four years ago, but we weren’t really hearing it in our community and nobody was really, nobody was really digging in to try to solve it. So I started, I did some surveys, started having some conversations and kind of found that our members really were struggling with workforce housing and it really was a major issue to them. And I think they really hadn’t come to us because they weren’t sure what role we could play in solving it.

But we did a survey and we recently did a labor reason study and it showed that we are having labor issues, that we are significantly having challenges with people living here. And we had a population decline of 6.4%. And the top three reasons, number two was affordable appropriate housing. And so we thought, okay, you know, this is different world today for economic development. You know, it used to be that you could kind of say,

economic development, we’re going to, we have great land, we have great incentives, they’ll come here. It’s no longer that way. Now we have to kind of think about how do we solve the problems for that business? It’s such a competitive market these days because of technology and incentives. You can really live and create your business anywhere. So for the really great companies that we have here, what are we doing so they continue to expand and grow here?

to solve their problems. So we kind of dug into this workforce housing initiative because nobody was really having the conversation. And we did a study, so we partnered with the city and we did a study so that we could really make our decisions based in facts versus emotion. We intuitively knew what the challenges were, but it’s always great to really know what the data is telling you so that you can do some solution-driven.

Natalie Hawn (07:51.662)
problems around facts and data. And it really helps when you need to go out and get funding or get people to the table to be able to say, no, this really is the challenge and here’s where we are. So we found that we needed all housing, but we found that we really needed workforce housing. And I’ll break that down. We needed housing for people that make $50,000 to $100,000. The average wage in our community is $57,000. And we’re the seventh highest in the state.

So if you made our average wage, you were really having a hard time finding appropriate affordable housing. And we were getting, as we dug into this, were hearing we have 30 teachers living on couches. We had a lot of our young engineers that were having to drive in from other areas and they were having to spend a lot of time and money commuting and they didn’t wanna do that. They wanna live here, they couldn’t find any place to live.

And so as we dug into that, found that there are really what the challenge was. think, you know, our, had never got around the table and kind of thought about, we have to cultivate an environment to solve the problem of what we need. just assumed that developers and builders would provide the housing that we needed if there was a need. And that’s not the case today. And that’s why you’re seeing it across the country. So we incentivize low income housing.

through the state with tax credit dollars. And I think that’s probably similar across the country. So we have quite a bit of low income housing because there’s incentives for developers to make money. And then we have high income housing because you can make money on a custom built home. But where in today’s climate where you can’t make money is that moderate middle housing. So it’s really hard if you’re not incentivized with a tax credit.

to really be able to keep that rental rate low. So what we’re finding is the rental rates are extremely unproportionate for those folks that make 50 to $100,000. And in that housing study, we saw that we are about 2,400 units of rental or home under the need that we have in our community for people that make that amount of money. So we had to really get creative and think differently about how to solve this problem.

Natalie Hawn (10:19.566)
And so we kind of approached it like we would in economic development. So we give incentives for people that are expanding or bringing a job here. So why not give incentives for someone that’s developing housing that we actually need? Now, this is not something our community has done. So this took us probably two years to really educate.

the municipalities and the partners to understand the role they play because again, they’re just thinking well, if there’s a need there’s a demand somebody will fill it not if they’re not making money on it. It’s still business guys. So we had to just come at it a little differently. So we created a task force that was ran by the chamber and we’ve got everybody who touches housing at the table. So whether that’s your housing authority, that’s your Habitat for Humanities, your nonprofits, but also your for-profits, your builders.

your bankers, your home mortgage loaners, your employers. I’ve invited our major employers to the table to talk about what they need. The school district, because we have a huge need for teacher housing because teachers don’t make a lot of money. So we brought everybody to the table and we started facilitating the conversation. So we started bringing in speakers and topics and kind of educating the players on what is happening.

and what’s not happening and what other communities are doing. And by starting that conversation and really kind of championing the needs in the community, so educating the politicians of what we needed and educating the community of what we needed, then we were able to actually start, that’s where we were able to start making real change. So we went out and we looked at a community that was doing some great work in this space. And

we were able to kind of replicate some of the things that they were doing. So we wanted to go, how are you making this work? How are you doing this? They had, so for the state of Missouri, it might be a little different, but you could certainly do these things in your own communities. We were able to find the Abandoned Housing Act, and that was one of the tools that they were using. So we know that you have to be a nonprofit to do the Abandoned Housing Act. We have a lot in our community of blighted vacant properties that we could.

Natalie Hawn (12:36.832)
rehab and kind of get back on the tax rolls that we could have as affordable properties. So we started with, we started having conversations in our community and from that a group of four ladies that work at several of our major employers, CFO, HR came together and started a nonprofit called the Housing Improvement Initiative and they’re at the task force with us. A couple of them are on my board of directors and they started this nonprofit

And here’s what’s really cool about it. They have this nonprofit and they give first right or refusal to their employees to purchase these homes that they’re rehabbing that they got off of the Abandoned Housing Act. So they put their employees through a boot camp. And so that boot camp, they kind of target generational renters. And so they’re putting them through a boot camp where they can learn how to get their credit scores up. They can learn.

fiscal responsibility, they can learn how to be a good homeowner, and they give them a mentor in home ownership, and they put them through this boot camp. Once they’ve graduated the boot camp, then they become qualified to purchase one of the homes that they have. So this has come quickly. They put this whole program together, and we now have eight homes in their control. They’re buying and…

more through auction as well as through the Abandoned Housing Act every day. And then they’ve come up with creative ways to rehab these homes. So they’re working with our Youth Alliance on a trades program. So the students in our community get to go out and learn from tradesmen as they rehab these homes. So it’s a great way of kind of learning and skilling up for trades for future jobs for high school and young adults that need a trade. So

That’s been really great. And then we also partner with for-profits on that as well, where we can bring a rehabber in and they can, you know, rehab the home and we can certainly get it back out to a person to live in quicker than we do through the Youth Alliance program. So we have a couple of different ways that we do that. They sell the home then to somebody who has graduated from the program or somebody who’s qualified that kind of meets the scope. is not, it’s a…

Natalie Hawn (14:56.302)
Non-for-profit, so it’s not a for-profit. Anything they make, they put back into purchasing another home or rehab, et cetera. And the reason this is important is because about 60 % of our homes that are kind of in that affordable market of the range that are needed, they are really getting swept up by landlords. So the cash buyers, if you’re a normal buyer, you’re gonna take that cash offer. You’re not gonna take the chance on that person that needs a VA loan, that veteran.

because it’s a harder process. But they will not sell to a cash offer. They will not sell to someone that has a VA loan or has a first time home buyer. So their program is set up in a way where they’re really trying to get this into the hands of the people who really need it. And they’re targeting neighborhoods so that you can truly have change in that neighborhood. And they’ve targeted neighborhoods close to their manufacturing facilities. We are a…

large manufacturing towns. So they’ve kind of targeted neighborhoods around their facilities so they can start to build community. That is one example of really something that has come from conversation about need, identifying need, the task force. The chair of my task force actually started that program. So we were really excited, but we certainly didn’t stop there. have Doug.

so much deeper. So it’s one thing to start a task force and start the conversation, but you can also start to move the needle on real progress and change. So we dug a little deeper and we saw that one of the great tools that another community was using was a Nuisance Act. And we found out that St. Joseph didn’t qualify at state legislation for the Nuisance Act that only Kansas City and St. Louis did. So this last legislative session, we worked

hand-in-hand with our legislators and we got some legislation passed where St. Joseph got added to the Nuisance Act. And what’s cool about the Nuisance Act is it now allows us the ability to go after commercial blighted buildings, vacant buildings versus just abandoned houses. So we’ve also started our own charitable trust that we are now having, we’re working on a scoped area. So we’ve been working on our downtown. We have a lot of vacant buildings downtown.

Natalie Hawn (17:14.882)
that are owned by absentee out of state homeowners, a lot of times for tax shelter. So, but then we have people where we’re really trying to make strides and putting in a lot of investments and redeveloping certain areas of our downtown. So with the Nuisance Act, we’re able to go after that owner that maybe isn’t as progressively moving our downtown forward. And we’re able to put some pressure on them.

to either rehab their building and make it not blighted or we give them the option to gift it for the tax write-off to our charitable trust. We’ll then turn around and sell it for a dollar to a developer that will rehab it and really get it back on the tax rolls so that it becomes a thriving piece of our downtown because we have these investors that are putting hundreds of thousands or millions of dollars into

rehabbing these buildings into our downtown, only to have an investor that maybe has a vacant blighted building that is really making it where people want to come commit crimes, catch it on fire. And then that really puts the whole progress that you’re making in your downtown at risk. So we have really kind of put our money where our mouth is per se, and we’re really trying to dig in and kind of tackle some of these issues.

Brandon Burton (18:43.763)
So, I mean, a chamber is perfectly positioned to be able to go after these difficult issues and find solutions and convene those parties to get the job done. I love the idea of the Housing Improvement Initiative and the nonprofit that was built around that.

So I had a question about that, also with the Nuisance Act. So first with the housing improvement initiative. So as they rehab these homes and go to sell them, are they being listed close to market price or are they keeping the prices lower to try to attract or try to make it work for those employees or how the pricing I think could become a difficult thing.

Natalie Hawn (19:26.562)
Yeah, so they are pricing them affordable for the person who needs to purchase it. So we know that the market hole, so we have the hole in rental, but we also have the hole in kind of that first time homebuyer. So we know in our market, 120,000 to 200,000, you can’t find a home. And if it is available, they’re getting swept up by the cash buyers.

So that is really where that first time home buyer or traditional home is where the need is. So they’re making it affordable. They are not flipping it and then putting in high rates because they’re not trying to make money on it. They want to get their employee into that home for a responsible, affordable amount in a safe neighborhood. And it’s also transforming those neighborhoods because you took that vacant home.

that obviously, you know, a couple of them have had squatters in it just because, you know, so it takes that vacant home and makes it a home again. And then you put an excited homeowner in it versus a renter, which there’s nothing wrong with renters, but we know that if you put the homeowner in and they are just going to have more pride in it, they’re just going to be more excited about it. And you do that with

Brandon Burton (20:41.739)
And they’ve been through a boot camp to know how to be a great homeowner. That’s right.

Natalie Hawn (20:43.596)
And they’re giving, they’re giving mentors. I mean, they have resources and people that are supporting them and cheering for them. And then when you put them in a neighborhood, you put two or three of them in a neighborhood, the pride becomes contagious. And that slowly starts to turn around your neighborhood. So no, they do not make money on those. If they happen to make money on the project, they just put it into the next project. And then think about the employee retention piece of that, Brandon.

Brandon Burton (21:05.995)
goes back into. there’s, yeah.

Natalie Hawn (21:10.4)
So if you care enough about your employee that you have rehabbed at home, put them through a boot camp and help them achieve a dream that they’ve never been able to thought possible, how loyal are they gonna be to your place? Like it’s a great employee retention tool.

Brandon Burton (21:23.957)
Yeah, that’s an awesome point. So is there any stipulation to those new homeowners, first time homeowners, do they need to stay in the home for so long when they sell it? Does it go for STIBs to another employee? How does that work?

Natalie Hawn (21:38.776)
So they do put some clawbacks on it and they don’t limit it to employees. So the employees that go through the boot camp don’t have to buy a home from them. They just get first right or refusal. And right now it’s such a new program, you know, that they’re not churning out the houses as fast as the need. So it’s kind of twofold. You’re getting your employee trained and ready to go out to buy a home and giving them the resources they need. And they have opened that up to the community. It doesn’t just have to be their employees, but they have more

people wanting to buy them, they do houses. But they definitely try to make sure it’s a great fit to whom they sell the house to. And they do have some clawbacks in there because they’re doing a significant amount of work on this house and then selling it at a fair price. they’re putting them some, they have a lawyer that they work with that’s doing a pro bono. And they do put some things in there to have safety precautions so that the person doesn’t just turn around.

and sell it for twice the amount of money because that defeats the whole purpose. And it’s really about building a better community and rehabbing homes. Our community has been here for about 175 years and we traditionally haven’t had a lot of strategy around housing. So what’s created from that is we have blocks of neighborhoods that have abandoned housing and abandoned commercial properties. And so…

That’s where we’ve really tried to dig in and kind of create some strategy. And the cool thing is the municipalities have come along. And so now they’ve been the biggest cheerleaders and the biggest champions now. And it’s really created something special.

Brandon Burton (23:20.043)
So with the Nuisance Act, what sort of threshold is there for these vacant buildings to be able to qualify for the Nuisance Act or for you to be able to go after the owners of the building?

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Natalie Hawn (23:29.954)
Yes. So this is still brand new. So we’re still writing the book on this chapter. We just got the legislation signed into law August 28th. So we’ve literally just created the Charitable Trust and the team that’s gonna kind of tackle this. So we’ll have to do another podcast to let you know how that unfolds. We kind of have our first building identified.

Brandon Burton (23:35.764)
Okay.

Brandon Burton (23:41.406)
Okay.

Natalie Hawn (23:58.318)
And, but we’re, we’re certainly still writing this chapter. It was more of an example of there’s so much that you can do to move the needle. And we’ve learned good and bad through all of these challenges, like, you know, the Abandoned Housing Act. I’m sure we’ll learn the same lessons through the Nuisance Act. So the Abandoned Housing Act, we learned the lesson that, and the group that does this high, I’m just a cheerleader for them.

I’m not a part of their organization. Most of them are on my board and they’re on our task force. But they learned the lesson that when they purchased, they went through all of the process to get the home, it abandons all of the liens that you have in the state, but it doesn’t forgive a federal lien. And they learned that lesson the hard way on their first home. And so you do learn lessons through these processes, but it’s been, it’s

It’s been a lot of fun and it’s really exciting. When we get to do the ribbon cutting on their first home, was probably the first ribbon cutting I’ve cried at. Because it’s just, we’re all kind of, we’ve identified this as a need in our community and we’re tackling it together. Business, community and community, it’s really cool.

Brandon Burton (25:14.001)
It changes lives and it can change lives for generations. So that is, that’s awesome. That is really cool.

Natalie Hawn (25:19.52)
Yeah, it’s been really cool.

Brandon Burton (25:21.973)
Yeah, so I love having these conversations about workforce housing because every chamber who has these difficult issues in their community to try to attack and try to find solutions to, they all come up with different answers. And to be able to share some of these ideas on the podcast, you know, the next chamber out there is going to have an amalgamation of what a few different chambers did to be able to come to certain answers. So being able to put these ideas out there and help other chambers

to really get their head wrapped around what is possible, what a chamber can do, and rallying the troops in the community, so to speak, be that convener. And you guys are moving the needle on making a huge impact in St. Joseph. So that’s awesome.

Natalie Hawn (26:08.664)
Yeah, thank you. I always say that the Chamber’s role, every community, I always say you’ve seen one Chamber, you’ve seen one Chamber, because the role of a Chamber is to be what their community needs them to be. And we tend to step in and serve the role to kind of facilitate solving that problem or being that convener, because Chambers are so positioned to be a convener.

So it doesn’t mean that we’ll always be the one leading the housing initiative or the task force. Once that problem starts to get some legs and really starts to head down a path that it’s gonna solve itself, then we’ll move on to the next challenge. But we find ourselves in the spaces that nobody else is at. If somebody else is already solving the problem, that’s awesome.

But it was one of those things that nobody was talking about housing, nobody was solving the problem. It was a true need for the business community. And I’ve had people, including our city manager say, why are you, he was branding, it was like, why are you doing the housing and stuff? And then he realized nobody else was. And I think that’s the role that Chambers, and it matters to this. And I think that’s the role that Chambers play. Like you can be such a convener to any issue that’s affecting your committee.

Brandon Burton (27:14.503)
And it matters to business. Yeah.

Natalie Hawn (27:25.112)
community if no one else is doing it. And you don’t have to do it forever. Be the champion, start the task force, create the conversation, create the data for the community, then start to watch it kind of evolve and then step out of the table and move on to the next issue. That’s the cool thing to me about Chambers.

Brandon Burton (27:45.473)
and see some of your board members spin up their own nonprofit to help solve the solution, right? Solve the answer, yeah. It’s awesome.

Natalie Hawn (27:51.758)
Isn’t that amazing? mean, and to me, it’s like, I just think that’s so cool. I mean, that’s what chamber boards should be doing. They shouldn’t be worried about, you know, really those day-to-day tasks about your event or micromanaging or what you are not doing. They should be solving problems like this. You know, I have four board members that have gone down and created a nonprofit to…

change our community and change the culture of their organizations because that creates, you know, just really lifelong champions for their organizations when you help somebody figure out how to buy a house. And they never thought that was going to ever be part of their story. So to me, that’s the role chambers should be doing. And that’s what they should be using their board for is how do you really make that radical change in your community? And you have those people that

the table with your board. So inspire them to do bigger things, not just come to the ribbon cutting. I need them at the ribbon cutting. I’d love them to be there. But when you have those thought leaders at the table, you can really, really make cool change happen.

Brandon Burton (29:01.729)
There’s bigger things to be done. Well, Natalie, as for listeners who are out there wanting to take their organization up to the next level, what kind of tip or action item might you share with them, whether it’s related to this topic or something different altogether?

Natalie Hawn (29:19.47)
You know, I would say that never get too overwhelmed. The chamber world can be very overwhelming. I would lie to you if I told you there were days that I was overwhelmed. I tell my staff all the time, how do you eat an elephant? One bite at a time. And so I think the cool thing about chambers is we can be the catalyst for change in our community.

So if you’re wanting to take your organization to the next level, of do that practice with either yourself, if you’re a one man chamber, the team, kind of find that space that your community really needs and your chamber really does well. And kind of put yourself through that exercise of how can we next level. And I’ll give you just a simple example. It can even be just in the area of…

kind of how do we make about our membership experience? even running, maybe it’s your board if you’re a one man chamber, or maybe it’s your staff if you have the ability to have staff. And maybe you just take the example of kind of your onboarding or your new member process and take it as simple as kind of running an exercise of your touch points and say, how are we, what is this experience like for our member when they try to join the chamber? Do they have?

Can they do it online? Do they have to come in? How complicated are we making it for them? And kind of put yourself through that whole even just new member experience and kind of talk through the touch points and even look at how can I and our team make these touch points easier. So if we’re requiring them to bring a check into the chamber, okay, do we have an online option? Do we take a credit card over the phone or do we tell them, sorry, I can’t take your credit card over the phone, you have to bring a check in?

You know, take some time, even if it’s just 10 minutes in a staff meeting or 10 minutes of your day to think through a process that your members, for the most part, touch every day and how to make that easier for them. Little things like that can take your chamber to the next level. It doesn’t have to be a huge daunting, how do we solve workforce housing problem? It can simply be as easy as how do we make

Natalie Hawn (31:39.89)
our new member or our bill paying experience for our members as hospitable as possible. How do we make our members feel seen and appreciated even if it’s through the bill paying process? So it can be as simple as that. You just, think if we, in Chamber World, we have to take time to slow down and make sure that we are making it a great experience for our members and our community. So everybody wants to be a part of it.

Brandon Burton (32:08.415)
And I’ll add to it that I think after going, you know, slowing down, thinking through those processes, doing what you can to improve upon them, to invite somebody who doesn’t really know anything about the chamber world to go through the process and see what is the user experience for somebody who doesn’t work at the chamber, who’s not thinking about these things all the time, because that’s where you’re really going to see those gaps that you need to close. So.

Natalie Hawn (32:20.354)
Yeah. Yeah!

Natalie Hawn (32:31.146)
And I think that is the smallest thing that you can do that can have the biggest impact on your organization. If you say, I’m going to quarterly take something that we know touches 99 % of our members, literally can be your dues renewal process. And we’re going to slow that down and look at the touch points and talk about how we can make that a better experience for everybody.

It can have huge change on your organization, doesn’t take a lot of time, and it’s an easy thing to do.

Brandon Burton (33:05.121)
Absolutely. Well, Natalie, I like asking everyone I have on the show about the future. So as we look to the future of chambers, how do you see the future of chambers and their purpose going forward?

Natalie Hawn (33:17.024)
Okay, so I don’t know that I have the full answer to that obviously. ACCE has done some amazing stuff in their Horizon initiative that kind of outlines what Chambers should be looking at for the future. I will tell you guys, I don’t know, we’re gonna have to figure out from a Chamber perspective like us, how we’re gonna be utilizing.

AI because I think AI is going to be such a huge game changer for Chambers as well as like just society in general. So give me an example. So this is crazy to me. And then if and I was thinking about this, like how this could truly affect the business community because if it ends up affecting insurance, it’s going to affect all of us. But we were doing our health benefits analysis and maybe everybody knows this. This was new to me. I found out about this yesterday and I was blown away.

So we were doing our renewal. So we bid out our renewals every year. And we were bidding out our renewals and our guy brought our stuff in and he was like, okay, great news. We get to stay at this percentage point with your current provider. But I did go ahead and bid it out with other providers. And I bid it out with this new provider that’s on the scene, but they do all of your analysis through AI and the current providers don’t. And he said,

what I have to tell you and they give you like a full scorecard. He’s like, what I have to tell you is they didn’t accept your team. Like they wouldn’t, they won’t insure you guys. And I will tell you it’s because they take your credit card usage and they put it towards your health and wellness. So for example, I for a lot of parties for the chamber. I bought a lot of margaritas. They think I’m an alcoholic.

Brandon Burton (35:05.728)
Hahaha!

Natalie Hawn (35:09.174)
So I was like, this is a problem. So they wouldn’t insure us because they saw the medicines we pay for out of pocket. So it outed anybody on my team that’s on Ozempic. it also, it like, I was like, I felt very seen and heard by AI that I’m like, okay, it thinks that we’re not appropriate here because we’re buying all this alcohol. But they don’t know, but the disconnect with AI is they didn’t look to see, it’s a chamber. They throw a lot of parties.

Brandon Burton (35:30.751)
That’s funny.

Brandon Burton (35:36.521)
It didn’t have the context, yeah.

Natalie Hawn (35:38.146)
They didn’t have the context. And so that’s just one example, though. If you think about how businesses are going to start to use AI, chambers are going to have to play a role in that because that could revolutionize how the bidding processes for benefits come down in the future for insurance. And that could affect your small businesses. That could affect your chambers. I mean, they denied us. And luckily, our current plan doesn’t look at my credit card spending.

But I think it’s a good example of the reality of that in all seriousness is I think that we’re, even if it’s scary, we’re all going to have to figure out the role that the chambers are going to play in AI and technology. And I think the ones that figure it out are going to be a little more successful than the ones who don’t.

Brandon Burton (36:27.697)
And I’ve mentioned this comment, I feel like every episode, the last few episodes, but we need to make sure that chambers are transparent, that they use AI too, because your members are trying to figure out how to implement AI in their own business. And as a chamber, if they can look to you as a thought leader and you’re using AI, and if you’re trying to hide it, they don’t see you as being relevant. They don’t see you as recognizing what the real implementations are in the business environment.

Natalie Hawn (36:57.494)
Right, not to mention that, you know, they, it just makes your life so much easier. So they’re, you know, if you’re not using it and you’re not really trying to be efficient with it, then I think you have to, you know, you have to take a hard look. Cause we don’t do minutes anymore for like board meetings. I mean, it’s just, it has given us so much time back. So I think we have a responsibility then to teach our members how to do it and not be afraid of it. And, you know, think.

creatively about tools like Pacer AI and how can we use Pacer AI for our small businesses that can’t afford marketing research. I I think we have a responsibility as business leaders for Chambers to educate our businesses on how to use it, especially our small businesses that don’t have time to figure out how to use AI. I do think that’s where the future is headed and I think we have a responsibility.

Brandon Burton (37:47.743)
And.

Brandon Burton (37:51.935)
And this is the opportunity for small businesses to really take advantage if they can be guided in the right direction to really make a difference for their business. So, yeah. So I love that insight. Thank you for that. Natalie, before we wrap up, I wanted to give you an opportunity to share any contact information for listeners who may want to reach out and connect or learn more about the approach you guys are taking there in St. Joseph. Where would you point them and how should they reach out and connect with you?

Natalie Hawn (37:58.228)
Absolutely. Absolutely. Yeah.

Natalie Hawn (38:17.623)
Yeah. You can find us at stjoseph.com. You have to spell that out. I say I-N-T, joseph.com. And all of my contact information is on our website.

Brandon Burton (38:28.747)
Perfect. We’ll have that in our show notes to make it nice and easy to find. this has been a great conversation, Natalie. Thank you for spending time with us today on Chamber Chat podcast and diving into some of these difficult problems that you guys are striving to solve and making some great headway with. I appreciate it.

Natalie Hawn (38:32.854)
Awesome!

Natalie Hawn (38:46.54)
Yeah. Thank you. Really appreciate it.

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Helping Businesses Make Money with Heather Thomson

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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 Heather Thompson. Heather is the new Vice President of Economy and Engagement at the Edmonton Chamber of Commerce, before taking on this new role, Heather was the Executive Director for the Alberta School of Business Center for cities and communities, as part of the founding team of the center, Heather spent much of her time mentoring the next generation of business innovators while working with leaders in the business community with an emphasis on education, consulting, academic and applied research and industry outreach. A few of her key highlights through her career include being named edify his top 40. Under 40 in 2023, she employed hundreds of business students who’ve worked with more than 3000 organizations in the Edmonton region to build digital infrastructure to support their business. She secured $2 million in funding to support local business community recovery from their effects from the pandemic, and she works with national media networks to deliver consumer behavior research to the country. And she’s working on her Master’s right now in behavioral economics, but Heather, I’m excited to have you with us today here on Chamber Chat Podcast. I’d love for you to take a moment to say hello to all the Chamber Champions and to share something interesting about yourself so we can all get to know you better.

Heather Thomson 2:31
Perfect. Something interesting. Well, thank you very much for that awesome introduction, and I’m really delighted to be here. Something interesting. Okay, well, I’ll go with maybe something that’s that’s exciting in my life. I don’t interesting, but I have two small children, and, yeah, they’re four and eight, so when it’s just absolutely crazy, crazy, crazy, crazy these days, and something interesting, I have two really strong talents that I always want to brag about, because I think that they’re just I think everyone’s gonna be jealous. But I’m really good at playing blackjack, and I have this amazing sense of direction, like I know I can read a map, I can get myself into the summer. I It takes very little for me to understand direction. So I feel really excited about that. And then fun fact is that I have been to Disneyland or Disney World or Disney something adjacent, 20 times. Wow.

Brandon Burton 3:30
Yeah, it

Heather Thomson 3:31
might come up. It might come up in our conversation. So I just kind of want to, like, you know, put that out there. But yeah, you know, I live in Canada, so I’m winter girly, especially right now, as we’re recording this, it is winter time, and, yeah, that’s me in a nutshell.

Brandon Burton 3:46
Yeah. So when my wife and I first got married, we lived about 30 minutes away from Disneyland, so her sister got us an annual pass when we got married, so we probably went about 20 times that year, and I think I’ve been once or twice since, okay? So it burned me out. Okay? That was

Heather Thomson 4:04
even my question. People like people say, Well, if you had an annual pass, you’d get sick of it. And I just, I wouldn’t. I feel like I would like, Oh, I gotta go to Starbucks. I would just go to the Starbucks, to Disney, true or false. Did you get sick of it?

Brandon Burton 4:16
So I wouldn’t say I got sick of it. What it is is you feel like you’re obligated to go, like you may not feel like you want to go, but you’re like, I got this pass. It’s going to expire in two months. We need to get our money’s worth, so you’re trying to do it. But then there’s certain blackout dates for people that have passes that you can’t go. So when it’s convenient for you, you can’t go. So yeah, so there’s, there’s little catches with it, but overall, we enjoyed it. It It was fun. The best, best place in the world. Yeah. Well, tell us a little bit about the Edmonton chamber, just to give us an idea of size, staff, scope of work, budget, those kind of things you guys are involved with, with the work, just to kind of set the stage for our discussion.

Heather Thomson 4:55
Yeah, for sure. So there’s, um, yeah, we so yeah, when we move the Cham. For coming up on a year after come January, and the image and Chamber of Commerce is the second largest in Canada. It was the largest for a little while. When I say largest, I mean based on, like membership size. So we have about 1900 members, which is a fairly large size. It was actually, to be honest, I was kind of surprised when I first took over the first took over this job. I thought, you know, a chamber should be about 10% of the registered businesses within the city limits, and the city has 45,000 registered businesses. But obviously we know that number is not accurate for a variety of reasons that we can get into. But then I actually did a little bit of dicking compared to, like Calgary and Vancouver and like other sort of peer cities. And I’m like, Oh, we actually, we do have a very large chamber. And I think one of the things is that the Edmonton chamber, which is kind of fun, is that it’s the oldest organized or I guess just the organization in the city. It’s actually older than the city itself. I kind of think that’s fun. So we really lean into that as part of the brand. Something that’s unique to us right now is that we are a 99% new team. So my former business partner, Doug Griffiths, applied to be in this role, and he he was successful, became the president and CEO, and he said, Hey, I know you love working with businesses, and that’s what I was doing at the university. And he said, I think you should come over here. And then just there was so much turnover, and just like a lot of I don’t say the word messiness, but there was a lot that we needed to sort out. And so the team went from when I first started, there was four of us, and then we went to six, and so on and so on. And here we are, nine months later, and we are back up to 20, which is so exciting. And these 20 people are hand picked. Usual chambers in Canada are a team of about 26 but we’re going to keep it at about 20 because we reallocated the financial resources to kind of expand the scope of work, of what we’re asking from people, so fewer people, but probably the same amount of operating money for salaries. So that’s a very logistical detail, but just to give some insight as to why our team isn’t as big as the other teams, but tremendous capacity. So in terms of the last year has been really like everyone, hold on. I’ve been using this analogy that is felt like we have been having to we did 47 events this year that were that were attended, and it felt like we were hosting a party while we were renovating our kitchen, and no one was to know that we were renovating our kitchen. But that’s that, that was the analogy, right? So it’s like we have no resources. We didn’t have an events team. We just got an Events Manager a month ago. So it was really all hands on deck, just trying to make sure people didn’t couldn’t see all the the sawdust everywhere. And I’m really excited for 2025 because I will say this has probably been the hardest year of my, of my working life. I’m so ready for 2024 to be over. There’s a lot of, you know, three steps forward, 2.85 steps back.

Brandon Burton 8:14
So progress, though, it

Heather Thomson 8:16
is progress. And so it’s like, yeah, the year over, I can see the progress. And let’s get into 2020 but yeah, there’s, I know a few people that are like, this year, gosh, this year was, this was hard,

Brandon Burton 8:25
right? Yeah. So as far as the scope of work for the Edmonton chamber, you guys, do you have any of the Economic Development responsibility, tourism, is it strictly chamber? What does, what are you guys involved with?

Heather Thomson 8:38
Great question. It’s actually, again, another unique thing to Edmonton in that Edmonton does not have an Edmonton Economic Development Corporation. So it used to, and then what happened was it’s a subsidiary of the city of Edmonton. So what the city did was they dissolved Edmonton economic development and they put together three different entities. So they have something called Explore Edmonton, which runs, really the tourism, hospitality, marketing, branding for the city, but they also are responsible for the hosting of those events, right? So they run the convention centers, they run the expo centers, and so they have a very large mandate so that takes care of the tourism and hospitality. And then we have something called Edmonton global, which is an organization that is funded through the region actually, so not just the city of Edmonton, but all the surrounding municipalities, and they’re supposed to go out and do foreign direct investment. And it’s actually, in theory, it’s a really smart idea, because as a region, that’s how we make money. Like collaboration is where people want to invest. And so as a region, we’re really strong as Leduc county separately, or sturgeon county separately. And see in Edmonton separately, like if we just are so much stronger, you know, going after those big those big fish, when we have our whole region to promote. So that’s what Edmonton global does. And then we have. I’m still limited, which is a focus on a tech and startup incubator space. So there isn’t anyone formally in the space of economic development from a domestic standpoint, and tourism, sorry, not tourism trade accelerator and promoting our businesses to the world, outside of the country and outside of the province. And so that’s that’s our going to be our lane. So as I was saying earlier to Brandon, we are in the business of creating wealth. We’re in the business of being really proud that we want to create wealth here in Edmonton, and we want to advocate to all all orders of government, different policies. And I’ll share a policy that just came out last week, that I’m like, pulling my hair out that I’m very vocally, really against. And then we also want to make sure that we’re getting our businesses out to the world. And that’s a key part of creating wealth and creating these connection standpoints. I want, I want people to see that their membership with the Chamber is not just a historic or grandfather thing that’s part of their budget, which we have a lot of those, I want people to see like, Oh, if I’m actually not a member, like, I’m missing out. And so that’s been a core mandate for this year of 2024 we’re thinking, why are you a member? You know the fact that we’re 136 year old organization. I know that doesn’t sound that old to me, some of your your listeners, but like I said, it’s older than this. It’s really old. I would say we’re 136 year old startup and and so we have to, we have to think, why would you be a member? And I we have a lot of chambers, you know, even in the province, that are really bad, and they’re just like a cost cutting or and they’re competing for resources. And so we have to be really, really sure that if we’re going to run this chamber and we’re going to ask for money from businesses. But they are like, Yep, this is a great use of my investment, and happy to do it. I’m not doing it because I feel obligated to do Yeah,

Brandon Burton 11:49
yeah, absolutely. Well, that definitely helps set the stage for our discussion today. And I will say just a little bit of background. You mentioned Doug. Doug Griffiths, a lot of listeners are familiar with Doug because of the 13 ways to 13 ways to kill your community book, and as I had him on the podcast shoot, it’s been a couple years now, I think, since I had him on the podcast, but he he referred Heather to me to to have her on the show because of her passion for helping businesses make money, And in different ways that she’s gone about doing that, so we finally made it happen. She’s now in a position at a chamber there with Doug as well, and and that’s what we’re going to focus our conversation today on, is helping businesses make money, which I think is what every chamber should be about in one way or another. So we will dive in deep on this as soon as they get back from this quick break.

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All right, Heather, we’re back. So as I mentioned before the break, today, we’re talking about helping businesses make money. And when I think of a chamber of commerce, that should be one of the root reasons, you know, the whys for a chamber to be in existence is to help businesses thrive, and whether that’s removing obstacles or giving them key action items or training, or different ways to be able to really accelerate their business. So I’d love to dive into what your take is and maybe some strategies of how you’ve been able to help businesses really thrive.

Heather Thomson 16:35
Yeah, I think that the interesting thing, I think I was given a really unique opportunity with the pandemic. You know, just if I, if I kind of go back in time to 2020

Brandon Burton 16:49
nobody wants to do that. I know. Emily, sorry, just

Heather Thomson 16:52
bear with me. Don’t worry. We’ll, I’ll get us through to Disneyland here in a sec. Okay, yeah, it was actually worse than that. I am. I had a baby in January, little January, and the plan was that my husband was going to take, we were to share the pad leave and and in Canada, I don’t I this is so hard to hear for American listeners, but we have up to 18 months of paid maternity leave. So, you know, we just have so much so, I mean, so this, I just want to say For context, this is very unique in in Canada, this would not be unique in the United States. So we, I take, I take my mat leave. I was always going to take mat leave until about May, and then my husband was going to take over. And then COVID happened, and my husband happened to be a essential worker, so he does H back. And so this was, like a really random thing, but one of the buildings that he was looking after, I think it wasn’t the hospital. It was like a it was like to really make sure, like the bodies healthcare. Yeah, the bodies could stay cool once they were bodies, unfortunately. And that’s like a really, really morbid thing to bring up. But just to give context that I was at home now with a three year old and a colicky baby, and COVID started, so I didn’t have any help. I didn’t have any parents. It was a nightmare. And the colic, I mean, like people who joke about colic, but like, when you’re at home, I couldn’t even walk in the mall. And keep in mind, this is Canada, right? So it’s like, we’re not going outside. We’re not meeting people in the park. It’s still very cold out. So this was, like, an extremely dark, isolating time. So I was watching a lot of news, and I was seeing so many businesses close their doors and, like, that’s it. They’re they’ve gone under. And it happened really, really fast. And I remember it was, like, just around Easter of 2020, and I was actually kind of getting a bit frustrated now, at this point, because and irritated there these businesses, like, go just make a Google profile. And so it’s like, it’s easy for us to think about it now, right? Like, everyone has a Google profile, like, so easy. It’s like, of course, I’m like, yeah. But five years ago, that was not the case. So many businesses were still operating under the assumption that, like, you can find me just by walking or just by, like, you know, knowing about me through someone and now we quickly shifted as consumers were like online, online, online, and we saw firsthand the businesses that could afford it, and businesses that kind of had some sort of infrastructure or education and knowledge were able to survive this. And so it was at the end of April, I kind of, I just talking to my friend at the city of Edmonton. And I said, What’s going on here? Like, what’s the plan? And and he said, Well, I actually think that we should talk, because I have this idea. And I had a student consulting group at the University of Alberta business school that nobody was getting any work because everything, like, as you remember, like, was shut down. There was nothing happening. And I said, I can, I can mobilize students. So in a nutshell, we created the first iteration, which was making Edmonton digital. So we we got some seed money, about $300,000 in city of Edmonton through some grant funding. And I want to be really clear about this. This is something that drives me nuts. There during COVID, there was no matching grants, and I still advocate that match. Grants need to be a thing in the past. There were so many other ways to ensure that businesses or people that are applying have assurance and skin in the game. There’s so many other ways to do that. Matching grants take out like we wouldn’t be able to do if we, if we didn’t have a matching like if we, if we had to match it, yeah, yeah. Because from a university’s perspective, we can’t use operating funding. There’s just laws against it. So just to give an idea, there was no matching component to this. So we got the money, we paid the students, and within like six months, the students had worked with 800 businesses here in Edmonton to get them up online. And so we did Etsy stores, we did Google pages, we did websites like we just whatever we could. It was like a mass mobilization of getting students to build out this infrastructure. And it was, it was really great to do so, to see the students now could do something with their time and make some money. And then the and then businesses were getting up in line. The province picked it up as well. And so we were able to expand it, and then it turned into closer to, like, two and a half million dollars in about 3500 businesses by the time we were done. It actually just ended this past fall, and so it was a really cool opportunity to look at COVID and being irritated with the news. And I have this thing where I like to take my personal irritations and turn them into, like, my new professional project. But I was, I have to say I was, it was so I was so fortunate, because I was offering in a time where the answers were Yes, right, I was hitting so many low hanging fruit for the government to find right. I was, I was employing youth. 70% of the people we were working with identified as some sort of minority group, and our target was a quarter. So like, you could just see, like we were just like, the government was like, yes, yes, yes. And we were able to provide such a larger, you know, return of of investment on what the government’s money was for us. So it’s been really cool to see that that program come from A to Z, and now we have to think, Well, COVID is done. Everyone we laugh. We’re like, oh, yeah, of course. Everyone has a Google page. It’s like, yeah, of course. But this notion of democratizing digital assets and digital tools and education wasn’t a thing before 2020 it was expensive. Businesses didn’t know how to do it. And now here we are, five hours, five hours

Brandon Burton 22:20
later. It seems like it’s sometimes five, yeah,

Heather Thomson 22:25
five years later. And this knowledge is just this, AI, like, we just were able to do this so quickly. So now we have so many things we have to do next. We have to think about this is going to be the next thing that we have to jump through and, like, I like that saying where it’s never been as hard as it is today to run a business, but it will never be this easy again, and so we have to kind of just readjust that whole like things are not going to get easier. We need to get better.

Brandon Burton 22:52
Yeah, I love that story, that background, being able to catch that vision and see where there’s a, you know, holes in the marketplace and being able to see, hey, there’s access to funds here. Let’s partner. Let’s, let’s get these students out to work and help these businesses and, and I’ve mentioned it before on the podcast, even where, even just, you know, brick and mortar retail businesses that have been that way for decades, maybe that have never explored having an online store Shopify or something like that, and just the the limits are, it becomes limitless when you can shift that way. It just becomes a matter of keeping up inventory and being able to ship and that sort of thing. But those people who can make that conversion from just brick and mortar to brick and mortar and online are going to be the ones that thrive and and really do well going into the future. Yep, so you had mentioned trying to think about some of those things or what’s next. You know, as far as how business evolves and how technology impacts business, are there some trends that you have an eye on right now that that you’re seeing is, I think this could be something to pay attention to.

Heather Thomson 24:07
Yeah, and it’s interesting, because I think I was just actually doing quite a bit of data on this. In 2022 and 2023 we were looking at space right? So now we’re looking at space of how consumers are shopping, and what we’re seeing for the first time. And this is like all but like, I’m not gonna say us economists. I’m not there yet. Man, I can’t wait to be. But a lot of economists and a lot of retailing academia, we’re just nerding out over this point of data. It’s so cool that for the first time in human history, we have more purpose driven consumers than we do value driven consumers. And so just to explain what that is, a value driven consumer are the people that care the most about like their dollar, right? They want to, they want to set, they want that dollar to go as far as possible. They’re couponing. They’re they’re about that. I. And then you have the purpose driven consumer. And so these are the consumers that are their time, and they want the great experience. And so what we’re seeing here is this is a clear cut demographic shift we’re seeing in the marketplace from the spending power. So you have people, really under the age of 45 that are the purpose driven consumers that are taking up way more space in the marketplace. And you have the baby boomers, who are the quintessential value driven consumers that are leaving right? They’re they’re not. And that’s the other thing. Like we they like baby boomers have, which are people born between 1946 to 1964 these, these individuals have more wealth per person than anyone has ever had in the history of humankind. But they’re not spending the money, right? Like, you know, who’s spending the money? It’s millennials, millennials. So those are people with 1981 to 1997 and so we’re having, and I’m generalizing here, right? We should look at the data from minerus or visa or something like that, and you’re gonna see this. And so what’s happening with that is that, how we are setting up our business world, how we are providing value for the consumer, is a really interesting time right now, because what worked seven years ago isn’t working today. And yes, there’s the pandemic, sure. Because, to your point, Brandon around you know brick and mortar needs to have an online like, Yes, right? We know that, but we also know that the consumer, from a data perspective, actually enjoys shopping in person. So I want to make that very clear. People have this notion like, I can’t compete with Amazon. I’m like, Yes, you can. You 100% compete with Amazon, and you should. Amazon leaves a lot to be desired. But what, what the problem is, is that people are thinking, I can’t compete with Amazon, because I’m a distribution center. I am a Toys R Us, where you just have a shelf and a product. Yeah, you will not compete with Amazon. You will go out of business. So anytime a business is kind of gearing towards come and buy something from me, I have a product, come and purchase it from me. Those are the businesses that are going to die. So because of this, we need way less square footage. We don’t need, you know, 5000 square foot retail days. And I remember when I worked at Lululemon, we needed a lot of space. We needed a big back room to house two weeks worth of inventory on hand. That’s not how retail works anymore. Retailers and businesses like you just need less space to operate, and that’s through sophisticated shipping. But now in North America, we have about 30% too much space. If you look at malls, we’re seeing this across the world. Malls, unless they’re extraordinary, are they’re like, they’re so depressing to look at, right? They are just they’re not, they’re not of value anymore. And even in Canada, where we have a winter climate, unless a mall is getting some serious investment and some serious diversification, they are the now the land the mall sits on is what is actually valuable, not the mall itself. Yeah, and so we’re seeing this really critical shift from how are we utilizing our space? Office market is no different. We just need less space, but we’re also in a housing crisis. And so one of the big projects that we’re going to be tackling now is, how are we right sizing our physical space to make sure that we are able to invest in residential housing? Because that’s such a critical we learned this from the pandemic. If there’s no residential base, the city is done. You’re that area you’re in is done from an economic standpoint, but we also need to make sure that we’re building the right the right things, but we’re also taking the things that are on the market currently, because it has worked for 40, 5060, years, and it doesn’t work anymore. We need to make sure that those spaces are being retrofitted to work for today. And this is a whole thing that we are hearing in very in all the provinces, who should pay for it. And so one of the things our neighbors to the south Calgary has done is that they created, this was before COVID. I just want to point that out. It was in 2018 they had a downtown residential investment, or it, sorry, yeah, investment incentive. So if somebody were to take over a building that was an office space, because keep in mind, this is Calgary. It’s 2018 they have 50% office vacancy. They said they put 150 million that if a developer were to take a building and turn it from office to residential, they would get $75 a square foot to do that, which is people like, that’s that’s, why are we getting tax dollars to developers? Well, I’ll tell you why. Now, Calgary weathered COVID better than any other Canadian city, and they’re the downtown that has rebounded the fastest in North America. They had a residential population. Edmonton had 60,000 people coming downtown every day to were a government town, yeah, well, that’s only 12,000 people who live down here. It’s 12 square kilometers. We have the hardest hit downtown. And so it’s just interesting, this whole notion of how we are now advocating that we’re in the situation. We need to figure out housing, we need to figure out space, and we need to use tax dollars to get us out of it. And it’s very. Very controversial, but we ultimately, there’s no there’s not going to be a higher return on investment than figuring out the space. Yeah, that

Brandon Burton 30:07
is a that’s an interesting problem to solve and to address. I really am intrigued on the comment you made about the being purpose driven economy more so than a value driven economy. Now, and those that that do value, the value driven aspects are the ones that are not spending the money necessarily. So, you know, in a world where you know the Walmarts and Amazons have done so well because they offer the best value, how can a chamber business or a retail business, how can they lean more into that experiential, purpose driven type of economy?

Heather Thomson 30:49
It’s a great question. And this was something we came up when we were working with businesses, when I was at the university, because it’s really hard to have a business do something for 40 years, and it worked for 40 years, and all of a sudden it doesn’t, yeah, so I think the thing, the thing is, is that there’s so many different ways that you can add elements of purpose and a great experience, and without it being flashy and expensive. You know, I think one of the things that we’re that we’re seeing as as simple as possible, is just a better customer service. And this is something that, and this is the, I don’t know if the states has this problem, but in Canada, we are having a really difficult problem with our labor force, and due to a lot of injections throughout the COVID money, the younger like our unemployment numbers are made up a lot of new newcomers to Canada because our immigration, federal immigration plan was so flawed, and Canada has actually been a taste like a test case for a lot of other countries who are like, Don’t do this. Like we put so much emphasis in bringing on so many new people to Canada, which is great, but there wasn’t a lot of thought to it. So half of our unemployment rate federally is is with new newcomers to Canada. And I just can’t imagine being a new person coming to Canada and being kind of like, sold on this, like, new place to live, and not having a job. I would be like, it’s so many we’re going back, and it’s, it’s such an economic and social travesty that we have to, we have to deal with. And it and it is, it’s, you know, and the and the other half of that is young people. I didn’t see the other half, another large portion of the of the unemployment rate are young people. And what we’re, what we’re hearing, is actually a willingness to work situation. So this is, I’m curious to know, if you guys are seeing this the United States. We

Brandon Burton 32:39
are. Yeah, yeah. It seems like when COVID hit and a lot of stimulus money went out, all of a sudden people didn’t need to work. And I don’t know how they made the stimulus money last for four years, but they apparently still don’t need to work. So they still don’t need

Heather Thomson 32:52
to work. It’s crazy, yeah, and so, and that’s where, like, the customer service angle, to get back to that, that’s a hard one. You know, customer service is something that is dwindling in terms of, you know, something that we would even expect as as consumers. But so when people are like, What can I do? And like, do better customer service? Start there, and that’s anything from, like, I know there’s a pharmacy down the road, and they’re very sweet. They’ve been doing that forever from our house, and now they just have a sign, like, we’ll deliver. I’m like, great. I’m going from Safeway, I’m coming over to you. And it’s just like, they had all this extra time, and they have teenage kids, and so they’re like, we’re just, we’re gonna send them out deliver. Like, great. And so it’s just like a very small thing that it’s like, okay, that’s easy, because what we’re wanting to do is people are prioritizing their time. That’s what we’re seeing in this modern economy. And so this isn’t about convenience is going to win, right? So this is where I’m saying, like, you don’t need to go to bat with Amazon. You don’t need don’t worry about that. Convenience is really important, for sure, but I think there’s kind of a rule where you have to make it you have to make it easy, you have to make it fun, or you have to make it beautiful. So go in those categories. The beautiful one, I think, is really overlooked. And I actually get this is something I get really frustrated with, because whether you’re a value driven consumer or purpose driven consumer, people really enjoy beautiful spaces, pretty spaces. And so this is where, like, I actually have a podcast that talks solely about twinkle lights and the psychological point of twinkle lights, like, there’s my Disney reference, like, Main Street, right? Like you just, they have the perfect twinkle lights. And if you go down Main Street, you know, I just love it, because you see the garbage cans, or exactly, was it 10 feet away from one another? They had the blade signs. They have the good smell. And it’s, of course, it’s a simulated environment. I understand that, but there’s so many elements,

Brandon Burton 34:45
something to aspire to, though, exactly, I do

Heather Thomson 34:48
have to say that I know it’s a simulated environment. I don’t think any of us would actually want to live there, because it’s like creepy and pleasant Philly, but there are so you’re right, the cleanliness, the twinkle lights, you know when we. Were working with businesses during the pandemic. They’re like, I can’t keep up. And this one, one person was a forest, which, by the way, forest did very well during COVID. So I just want to say that. And this guy was like, yeah, we’re just we were sinking. We’re not getting any money. And I go there, your store is disgusting, like the windows are disgusting. Your light bulbs are burnt out. That is why you’re not making money, I can guarantee you, especially when you’re like, when you’re unfortunately, when you’re like, a Hair Studio, nail place, anything that is lending itself to already improving esthetics, well, guess what? You have to make it look even better. So there’s just, there’s a lot of things that we need to do that can actually bring that sort of purpose element. And it doesn’t have to be this Disneyland mentality or the budget, but I think that that is one of those things where businesses can actually just kind of get back to some nostalgia and get back to what’s really what used to work, even in the 50s and 60s, because people data is very clear that people are wanting those experiences.

Brandon Burton 35:58
Yeah, well, and to your point as we make as a chamber. If we can get members and retail businesses to create the easy, fun and beautiful environments and experiences, it’s going to reflect very well on our community as well, and it’s going to be welcoming. It’s going to be a place where people want to come from outside to spend money in the community as well. So it doesn’t just help the business, but it helps the overall community

Heather Thomson 36:24
Exactly. And wealth begets wealth. And I want that to be like a bumper sticker everywhere. People are thinking, Well, no, if they get it, then I don’t get it. I’m like, No. Like, can you imagine if Nashville was, like, only one music studio that’s like, no. It’s like, it’s empirically false. Yeah,

Brandon Burton 36:40
it’s not a pie so, right? Well, Heather, this has been very fun to dive into this and hear some of these ideas and research and things that that you’ve noticed, these trends that are happening, good things for chambers, listening to kind of ponder on and to see how they can implement and make some adjustments within their community. But I wanted to ask you, as we start wrapping things up for the chamber listening, who’s wanting to take their organization up to the next level, what kind of tip or action item might you share with them trying to accomplish that goal?

Heather Thomson 37:19
That’s a very, good question. I think depending on your community gaps, one of the good things, a challenge about being a Chamber of Commerce is the umbrella of value is very large, and so that’s kind of what we had to figure out here, is like we can’t be everything for everyone, and we can’t do everything. So what are we going to do that’s really impactful and kind of ignore the rest? And so I would say, figure out what’s not being done in the ecosystem and then go and fill that that gap. And thankfully, in our in our case, it was in sad case, we are not we don’t get a penny from the government. So we can be the advocate that the business community needs us to be. So we can, we can we can talk about, you know, just give you the example I was kind of alluding to. Federally, they’re removing GST for two months, starting tomorrow, over the holidays. This podcast is being done, you know, at the end of 2024 and, yeah, they’re removing GST for two months. And this is in, like, absolutely awful. It’s the worst thing we can do for the economy. Business community hates it, so it’s kind of fun, because it’s such a layup for us to, like, be such a stark advocate that this is so bad. But that’s the space we’re really leaning into. And so if we’re looking at, how are you going to be successful? Like, pick something and do it really well, whether, like, I know, a chamber of commerce, just just to the south of us, there are regional, there are massive Regional Chamber of Commerce, which I also recommend, by the way, if you’re struggling for resources, amalgamate. Like, like, you know, I know, like, someone has to fall on the sword, but just do it. But they, they, they are so great at networking. They are like, the hottest ticket in town. They are the ones that are like, come to this event. We’ve got you. You got to learn this. So their big thing is, like, education and networking and growing your your business through other people. So, so, yeah, we do lots of partnerships, and that’s the thing. Like, I don’t, I don’t need to do that, because they’re doing it. And so that’s the thing where it’s like, just figure out what you need to do.

Brandon Burton 39:27
Yeah? I like that. Find the gaps and lean into them and own

Heather Thomson 39:31
them. Yeah, yeah. And then ask for money. Yeah. I love it.

Unknown Speaker 39:34
I love that idea. I know

Heather Thomson 39:37
it’s so easy. Once you have a good idea, it’s always true. Like, well, let’s ask for money. I’m like, no, what do you like? Make the good idea first, then you can find funding. Funding is actually quite easy. I’ll say in Canada, when you have a purpose, when you have a purpose, but yeah, or and if they could get rid of matching grants,

Brandon Burton 39:52
yeah, yeah, that too. Well, Heather, as we look to the future of chambers, how do you see the future of chambers of commerce and their purpose going? Forward.

Heather Thomson 40:00
Oh, this is tough. If you’d have asked me this, like, two years ago, I’d be like, chambers probably aren’t long for this world. And I still feel like that from just from a risk standpoint, because there are so many member based organizations, right? It feels like I turn around and there’s another one and there’s another one, it’s like, Well, I’m a member of, you know, the Urban Development Institute. Now I’m a member of the Edmonton construction Association, and they’re all, they’re all money based memberships, and that’s the other thing that’s really tricky. And so I think that’s one of the biggest risks that we have, is like, how are we competing with them, making sure that our membership is the best membership, and and I think we have some ground to make up for that, certainly. And so I think as long as we we can do that and actually be what the business community needs us, and at the end of the day, producing results that are getting more money in the in the region, and I think, I think we’re good. And the other thing I would say is we have such an active membership and board, and I think that’s one of those things where it’s like, kind of that fear of missing out being part of a club with there’s so many different member orgs. Like, I honestly can make like a Disney moms in Edmonton Association, right? Like, there’s nothing to stop you. Yeah, nothing to stop them. In fact, I think I might

Brandon Burton 41:23
it’s a great idea. Yeah, exactly. But like

Heather Thomson 41:25
with the internet and even, like podcast, like anyone can do it, and so I think that’s one of the things that I’m, like, quite nervous about, is like, how are people choosing us? How are we the number one stop, and how are we worth the money? Yeah, yep.

Brandon Burton 41:39
Goes back to finding those gaps in the community and owning them and standing apart showing the value. Well, Heather, this has been a great conversation, and I really appreciate you spending time with us today. I wanted to give you an opportunity to share any contact information for listeners who might want to reach out and learn more about your approaches and how you guys are doing things there in Edmonton. What would be the best way for them to reach out and connect? Reach out and

Heather Thomson 42:04
connect my email is actually probably the best. So it’s, it’s Heather, no, it’s not. That’s probably know it I’ve been here for 10 months. It’s hthomson@edmontonchamber.com. Yes.

Brandon Burton 42:22
I can double check it for you. We’ll get it in the show notes either way, so we’ll make it easy for people to find and be able to reach out to you. But Heather, I just want to thank you again for spending time with us. This has been fun. It’s insightful and really forward leaning as we we look at these types of experiences people are looking for as they interact with the retail businesses in our communities and and really seeing where those needs are to be able to help businesses make money to prove the value of the chamber, but having our communities thrive as well. So I really appreciate you spending these these few moments with us and sharing these insights. Well, thank

Heather Thomson 43:01
you so much for having me. I clearly could talk about this all day, and I know we’re all even though we’re all pretty geographically spread out, I know that we are kind of all singing from the same song sheet and having a lot of similar problems. So I appreciate your time as well.

Brandon Burton 43:17
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AI Applications After 300 Episodes with Brandon Burton

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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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For this episode, I am the guest. This is a solo episode. It’s one of those milestone episodes, as it is, episode number 300 of Chamber Chat Podcast. When I started the podcast about six years ago, I I imagined I would be doing it for a while, but the idea of having 300 episodes now is something else, so I wanted to spend some time on this episode, just talking a little bit about some of the things that I’ve learned with the leading up to 300 episodes, but I wanted to spend a lot of time on what I’m learning, what I’m finding, to apply in the field of AI to make processes a little easier, a Little more effective marketing with AI and just some real applications, and hopefully y’all are starting to dabble with AI to some degree. So I plan on diving in with this episode, a little bit of some of those examples of ways that I’ve been utilizing AI and how it’s really just made the process of producing the podcast and and all my responsibilities just a little bit easier. So we’ll dive into that much deeper as soon as they get back from this quick break.

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All right, we are back. So 300 episodes. When I started this in February of 2019, AI was not on the scene yet, and everything I did was very much manual processes. And there still is quite a bit of manual process to the podcasting and editing and editing and so forth. But it seems like every week, there’s some new innovation in the realm of AI that is really making everything a little bit easier and more efficient. So this episode, I’m going to dive in on some of those things that I’ve. And utilizing and see what could make sense at your chamber, and see how you might be able to utilize some of these tools as well. So first of all, probably the longest running type of AI that I’ve been using is a software platform called otter, and that provides transcripts for each podcast episode. So as I record the the episodes, I take that mp three file, I upload it to otter, and it does a transcription. Now I will say the transcription is not 100% so as I use that in show notes for each episode. I have a disclaimer at the beginning saying, these are auto generated transcripts, so it’s not perfect, but I do try to skim through it and clean up some of the things that I know it misses. For example, the title chamber chat podcast, I would like it to be capitalized, and it doesn’t capitalize it all the way through. So I have to go through and and it’s easy enough to do a search on the screen and see where it pops up. There’s other times where it doesn’t recognize the words correctly. So for example, chamber chat, podcast, it might hear it as chamber tap podcast. So when I do a search, it misses it. So as long as you don’t need 100% accuracy with the transcript, but you need something relatively good that helps us search engines. It really is a great option. I like that. It breaks up who’s speaking, so you can type in, you know, the names of who, who’s speaking, and it matches it to their voice, and it provides a little transcript summary. So the next step with the AI production is, I’ll, I’ll put the uploaded file, the mp three of the episode, into otter. I’ll get that transcript with the automated summary, and then I go over to chat GPT. I take the summary and I feed it into chat GPT to give me social media posts that highlight what the episode’s about and to try to encourage people to to get on their podcast player and give it a listen. So within chat GPT, it’s important to tell chat GPT how you want it to act. So I’ve got a command that I’ll use, and I’ll say, act as a social media expert and take this transcript that I provide to you and and put together a potentially viral Facebook post. I usually start specifically with a Facebook post, so it’ll generate the the posting, you know, tailored towards Facebook. And then I have another software that I use to schedule my postings, called Metro cool. So with Metro cool, I can go in schedule the Facebook post on when I want that to go live or when I want it to hit the scene, so to speak. And then I’ll take the And granted, the auto the AI generated social media posts. I always tweak them. I never just copy paste, because you get all the extra characters that it puts in there, hashtags that don’t necessarily make sense, things like that. So I always make some edits to it before I just post it out there. But then I’ll take what I use on Facebook and within metric cool, it has an AI component to it where I can say, optimize this for social media platform. So I can say, optimize this for Twitter, and that way it takes it and compresses the amount of characters so it fits within, the requirements of Twitter. So that’s a neat tool that I use, saves me a lot of time, allows me to really batch a lot of the production process that I do, but also schedule things to go live when I want them to go live.

Another use case that I’ve used AI for is a lot of you are familiar with the bringing local back platform that we released just a few weeks ago, and with that so there’s AI built into that platform to help build out your members websites and business listings and coupon codes and all the different things that are related to their business profile, and that’s within the bringing local back platform. Now, when we were preparing to launch bringing local back, I thought, let me put chat GPT to the test. So I went to chat GBT explained what it is that we’re doing with this, this new platform and launching it. And I told chat GPT to act as a marketing professional and to create a content calendar to promote and to solicit registrations for webinar, for bringing local back. And along with that, I gave a list of resources. I said, I have an email list, I have social media followings, I have a podcast, I have a website, you know, all these different ways that I can use to market and promote the platform that we were getting ready to launch. So I put that into ChatGPT, it spit back out me a nice marketing plan. It had email campaigns, the structure to them, what the topics would be. It had ideas for podcast episodes. It had email and social media campaign, so it was all right there. I thought, This is great, but the only way I’m going to really make this be effective for me is I need this to be some sort of a calendar, some sort of a checklist that I can go through. So I asked ChatGPT to export that social media calendar to an Excel sheet so I can check boxes along the way as I go. I had no idea if it would do it or not, but a couple seconds later, it gave me a file to download that had an Excel file with everything there. Now from there, I did do some customizing, because it had all of the email campaigns grouped together all the social media strategies, grouped together all the podcast stuff, grouped together. So I did mix it up so it wasn’t all heavy email for two weeks and then heavy social media. So I wanted to be a regular campaign where it kind of intermingled all of those different platforms. So that actually got really good response, lots of good registrations for that platform, for the the webinar launch. And I was very, very pleased with how that worked, so much so that I’ve, I’ve leaned upon it in other areas to to create marketing campaigns and and things of that nature. One thing that I’ve been doing lately is trying to automate some processes. And I’m sure at your chamber you have some systems and processes that you would like to automate. And just going to ChatGPT and saying, I have an idea to do X, I want it to do, you know, ABC, and have the output be XYZ, and ask ChatGPT, what do you think? And is there a way to do this? And it will give you back step by step answer on how to implement whatever it is that you’re trying to do. So it’s just a fun exercise. Even if you just have an idea of something that you want to try, it will generate a roadmap that will help you understand and to see how it may be possible. So I’ve done this. I’ve been using chat GPT very heavily for the last several weeks in trying to extract code for Google Apps, App Scripts and things of that nature, to again, automate processes. So take an idea, plug it into chat, GPT, and see what happens. It’s kind of cool. Another new tool that I just learned about this week, and I thought I’ve got to give that a try, is it’s called notebook LM, and it’s a AI language model from Google. And it really you can put all sorts of different data resources in it, and it will compile the data resources it’s meant for. If you think, think about going, you know, taking a college course or something, and you take notes in class, or you, you’ve got your your notebook and and notes from the teacher and whatnot, and if you wanted to put all of that into notebook LM, then it will give you different feedback. So it can give you quizzes. It can give you, you know, just different different formats, question and answers, where you can kind of really digest the the information in different ways, but one of my favorite things about notebook LM is it will create a podcast so you can give it the information that you want it to extract information from, give it a little bit of context, and within a couple of minutes, you have a podcast episode. It blew my mind, so I had to give it a try. I’m going to insert this. It’s just a couple minutes of a podcast episode that was totally generated by AI, by notebook. Lm talking about this being the 300th episode of chamber chat podcast. So here it is.

Unknown Speaker 15:21
Can you believe it? 300 episodes, 300

Unknown Speaker 15:24
it’s incredible, isn’t it?

Speaker 1 15:26
Seriously, when we started Chamber Chat, I don’t think either of us imagined we’d hit such a milestone.

Unknown Speaker 15:31
It’s really something special.

Speaker 1 15:33
It really is. And you know, it’s all thanks to you the listeners. Absolutely,

Unknown Speaker 15:36
this deep dive is really a celebration of you guys.

Speaker 1 15:39
It is. And what better way to celebrate them by looking back at the incredible journey we’ve been on together,

Speaker 2 15:45
totally. So what makes Chamber Chat so special? Well, for

Speaker 1 15:51
me, it’s about making the chamber world a little bit smaller. You know, chamber pros are busy. People busy. They wear so many hats. Yeah, it’s hard to find the time to attend every conference, read every article, connect with every

Speaker 2 16:03
colleague, exactly, and that’s where Chamber Chat comes in,

Speaker 1 16:06
right? It’s like a well, it’s like having a cheat sheet right, a direct line to the best practices and innovative ideas from across the chamber industry. And

Unknown Speaker 16:16
you don’t even have to leave your desk exactly,

Speaker 1 16:18
whether you’re on the treadmill or, you know, stuck in traffic,

Speaker 2 16:21
or even just taking a break from planning your next big event.

Speaker 1 16:25
Exactly, Chamber Chat is there ready to inspire and equip you with the tools you need to

Speaker 2 16:30
succeed? It’s true. And you know, when I think back over the past 300 episodes, what really strikes me is the sheer diversity of voices we’ve heard. Oh,

Speaker 1 16:39
absolutely, CEOs, young professionals, rural chamber leaders, big city folks, we’ve had it all.

Speaker 2 16:46
We’ve explored everything from membership growth to advocacy to what was that one episode building community resilience? Oh

Speaker 1 16:54
yes, that was a powerful one. I think it was. Wait, was it? Michael Johnson from the small town chamber,

Speaker 2 16:59
yes, him talking about bringing his community together after that factory closed, talk about resilience, right?

Speaker 1 17:05
That’s what I mean. Chamber chat isn’t just about theory. It’s about real stories, real challenges, real triumphs from the front lines of the chamber world.

Speaker 2 17:13
And let’s not forget about the man behind the curtain, Brandon Burton. Oh

Unknown Speaker 17:16
my goodness, Brandon, where do we even begin?

Speaker 2 17:18
I mean to dedicate yourself to documenting the voices and experiences of so many chamber leaders 300

Unknown Speaker 17:24
episodes. That’s dedication.

Speaker 2 17:25
It’s remarkable. He’s created something truly special. And it’s not just about the podcast itself. It’s the community he’s fostered. The

Speaker 1 17:34
Chamber Chat community is incredible. It’s a place where chamber professionals from all walks of life can come together to learn, to share, to support one another. And

Unknown Speaker 17:43
that’s something really worth celebrating.

Unknown Speaker 17:45
It really is.

Speaker 2 17:45
So as we celebrate this 300 episode milestone, I think it’s important for us to ask ourselves, How can we, each of us, take action exactly,

Speaker 1 17:54
what can you do today with the insights and inspiration you’ve gained right

Speaker 2 17:59
dive into the Chamber Chat archives. What resonates with you?

Speaker 1 18:04
What challenges are you facing that maybe, just maybe, someone has already addressed on this show

Unknown Speaker 18:09
exactly, and you know, don’t keep it to yourself, right?

Speaker 1 18:12
Share what you’ve learned with your colleagues. Connect with other listeners. Let’s

Unknown Speaker 18:16
keep this incredible conversation going.

Unknown Speaker 18:18
Here’s to the next 300 episodes.

Unknown Speaker 18:19
Cheers to that.

Brandon Burton 18:20
All right, so what did you think that was kind of cool, right? Having the conversation. These are two AI bots, so to speak, talking back and forth, really, just I fed them my website, chamberchatpodcast.com, and that’s what it came up with, which is pretty amazing, but I really like what they talked about at the end, about let’s take action, right? So hopefully, as you’ve tuned in and listened to chamber chat podcast, you’ve heard from different chamber leaders, people from you know, different walks of life, different experiences, that are bringing things to the table that can help make your job at the Chamber better, that can help you better serve your members and your community. That’s the goal of the show. So it’s my hope that as you take these things, implement, do your rip off and duplicate your R and D, Please share the show with somebody who you know, who may be new to the chamber industry, if you take a minute and think about especially over the last couple of years, since 2020 there’s been a lot of turnover in the chamber industry. And if you think of anybody that’s new to the chamber world that could benefit from hearing from a documented resource of over 300 chamber leaders at this point and extract value from that to help jump start their career. Please share chamber chat podcast with them and encourage them to subscribe and listen to it regularly, because there there really should be great takeaways, great value that anybody especially. Those that are new to the industry can take away and really help their career get off to a great start. So I want to say thank you for being with me, for listening to the podcast, for sharing it with others, for paying attention to sponsors of the podcast. That’s what makes us keep going, is having sponsors. I know as a chamber leader, you understand the value of sponsors, and having people act on that to continue having sponsors. So thank you. Thank you. Thank you. I can’t do this show without you, and 300 episodes is really a testament to being able to have a great fan base, a great listenership, and it’s my goal to just keep this going and keep providing value. So please share it out. And I’m always happy to hear feedback or ideas of potential guests as well that you think would be good for the show. People you see making a big impact, let me know. But anyways, that’s all I’ve got for this week, and I’m just incredibly humble and grateful to been able to be at this for nearly six years now and 300 episodes. So it’s been quite the journey, and I look forward to a lot more. Thanks a lot.


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Co-Workspace Initiative with Moe Belliveau

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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 Moe Belliveau. Moe has more than 22 years of experience in small business and entrepreneurial management experience including five years in retail management. Two years leading a privately owned nonprofit organization and nearly 20 years as a small business owner mode joined the chamber in 2014, bringing a unique set of skills in administration financial management, community relations, business development, grant program development and administration, economic development and collaboration with other organizations and municipalities. She embodies big picture thinking without losing sight of the details. She is currently the past president of the Massachusetts Association of Chamber of Commerce executives. After rising in the ranks of leadership. She has been a commissioner of the city of East Hampton economic development and industry commissioned since 2015, and advisor to the Hampshire County Regional tourism Advisory Council since 2014. And as served as a member of various boards across the region. She and her husband Mike live in East Hampton with their dog Pearl, and spend their free time working on the land and their farm stead, Hendricks Harvests. Moe, 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.

Moe Belliveau 2:41
Well, hello, Chamber Champions. I’m delighted to be here. Thank you for the invitation, Brandon. And something interesting about myself. I don’t know if this is interesting. But I am a fiddle player.

Brandon Burton 2:55
All right, fiddle player, you don’t run into fiddle player every day, you might you might run in those circles that don’t run in those circles that fiddle player. So yeah, that’s awesome. Yeah, very good. I should have mentioned as I went through your bio, that you are the Executive Director for the chamber, the Chamber of East Hampton in Massachusetts. So that should help give some context as well. Yes. But tell us a little bit about your chamber just to give us an idea of size, staff budget, scope of work, all those nitty gritty details so we can kind of get our mind shaped around what you present to us today. Sure.

Moe Belliveau 3:33
So we are the Chamber of Greater East Hampton, located in East Hampton, Massachusetts. I our membership hovers around 151 75 200 kind of bounces around. And our budget is about 175 180. there abouts. What else do we need to know we are an office. So we’re tiny, right? So it’s, it’s myself and a part time admin person. But I like to say we’re tiny but mighty.

Brandon Burton 4:07
I love it lean and mean tiny and? Yeah. That’s right. Yes. Yeah, no, oftentimes, it’s chambers, I have to run lean and mean like that, that often will lead to some of these innovative things that are of interest to be able to share here on the podcast. So

Moe Belliveau 4:26
I like how I like to think of myself as being agile, you know, we’re not yes, so big that it gives us flexibility to try a lot of things. You know, not everything always works out. But I’m happy to say most of the time it does and get to be we can turn on a dime if something’s not working out or doesn’t serve our membership or the community or whatever. So that’s the plus side of being tiny. Yeah,

Brandon Burton 4:50
being agile and that also goes to your board trusting you and being able to work well with the board. You get too big of chamber. I don’t wanna say too big but some of the have really large chambers where they might have 60 or more board members. And that becomes tough to make quick decisions or to pivot. Yeah. There’s value there, but it’s different for sure. Yeah. Yep, for sure. So for our topic of conversation today, and you guys have been behind an initiative of creating a co workspace, their communities. So I know this is something that some chambers here and there have kind of dabbled in. And I see it as a way of really building a sense of community, usually among other small business owners and people looking to get stuff done and looking to collaborate. So I’m excited to dive into this conversation as soon as I get back from this quick break.

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Alright, Moe, we’re back. So let’s dive into this. I want to hear all about this co working space that you guys have this initiative that your chamber is behind tell us where it got its origins, what it’s about who it serves, all of the good details, the

Moe Belliveau 7:50
nitty and the gritty. So we started talking about the work hub on Union, the CO workspace before COVID hit. Yeah, we own our building here in East Hampton, which is kind of unique also, I think amongst chambers. But in in this area anyway. And so we were tossing around, you know, this isn’t really the best use of this space, you know, it’s 1100 square feet, and it’s just myself and a part time person in that space. And essentially, it was two desks in a gigantic conference room, you know, not driving an awful lot of traffic. And we just wanted to have add more life and you know, serve a broader purpose. And so we were lucky, so COVID to, to kind of propelled us into this direction in the direction of economic development. So we’ve evolved our mission also around economic development, professional development and leadership, education, technical support, entrepreneurialism, all that sort of thing. And so this kind of falls underneath that umbrella. And we consider this to be a program under the Chamber’s umbrella. And we were kicking this idea around, and we were lucky enough to we applied for a massdevelopment grants a seed grant to help us with market feasibility and design feasibility. Once upon a lifetime ago, I used to be a corporate interior designer, space planner and project manager person. And I kind of figured that we could probably maybe fit maybe 10 people in that space, various situations. And as it turns out, we can fit up to 18. At any given moment, we have a conference room, and a little phone booth so that if you need to make a private phone call, you can do that. But we ended up so we had the seed grant, and that kind of got us started. It was the information that came back from the marketing feasibility study. He was yes, this is the program, this is the project that this chamber needs to be involved with, do it do not pass go run. So the board said, Okay, let’s take the next steps. And so we were also very fortunate enough to receive another grant from massdevelopment to help us get started along with some state funding, through an earmark through our legislative team. And that kind of got us on our way. So that’s kind of a little bit of a background. But you know, when people think of CO workspace in this area, I think maybe in particular, because that’s what we have around they’re very large. And I don’t compare us to that it’s we’re only 1100 square feet, it’s again, tiny bit mighty. And it also is, in conjunction with a an entrepreneurial program, which is, we just signed on to the I don’t know if you’ve ever heard of CO starters, but it’s a entrepreneurial program, nine weeks as a licensed program, we just purchased the license. So it says they’re going in, they’re working in conjunction with each other hand in hand in entrepreneurial support. Our focus with the CO workspace will for both programs really is those folks who are in the shadow economy, those folks who are working out of their basement at the kitchen tables, and trying to give them support so they can move from informal businesses to formal businesses. Yeah,

Brandon Burton 11:33
and I think there’s in every community, there’s a, there’s a lot that are shadow businesses, as he called them, they’re operating at home, or maybe don’t feel like like they’re doing some business or bringing in some revenue, but maybe they don’t see themselves as a, quote unquote, real business because they don’t have a staff or they don’t have a building, or they don’t have a meeting space, or any of these kinds of things that might hold them back from really excelling and growing to that next level. So being able to create a workspace like this, really, I can see where it pulls them out and helps them leverage what they already have with other other people other skills, but the chamber just really adds fuel to the fire. Yeah.

Moe Belliveau 12:15
And it’s, it’s exciting. So you know, it’s we’re really working on, you know, creating an innovative co working space where local professionals, they can converge foster collaboration to meet the needs of solopreneurs, freelancers, home based businesses and entrepreneurs and creating small businesses that think job growth while addressing downtown revitalization, because we’re also experiencing a piece of that going on on our street. So yeah, you mean it’s perfect,

Brandon Burton 12:48
right? So is, what’s the what’s the model look like with the coerce space? Is it? Do people pay a monthly fee to kind of use the space? Do they get it in a lot of desk? Like, what access do they have.

Moe Belliveau 13:03
So this is really exciting, because it also gives an opportunity for the chamber to offer opportunities for members as well as non member. So the membership, if that’s what you want to call it, I haven’t even really nail that down and when you want to call it out, but the membership structure is around. If you’re a member, it’s one you can have one pricing, if you’re a non member, you have another pricing, and we hope that you decide to become a member, but you don’t have to, you still have opportunity to participate and engage. And yeah, it will be more of a like a like a like a gym membership, sort of like you know, you get a key cat card, you can come and go. It will be like I think it’s I don’t know how to say this, but three days at a time. So you can be three days for 24 hours. So that’ll break it up. So that’s kind of how it’s looking so far. Okay. Yeah. And I think it’s a good opportunity to give a give a an insight look to what we’re up to what the chamber is thinking about how we’re planning for the future, because the chamber will also continue to operate out of that space. Yeah. So there will be chamber Access for All right. Yeah. So

Brandon Burton 14:28
and no, you had mentioned there’s that private phone booth in their effort of some chambers even doing like a podcast studio where they can rent that out and maybe model are there other other perks that you guys have to offer with the CO workspace or

Moe Belliveau 14:43
no, there will be there’ll be coffee, there’ll be snacks they’ll be you know, we’ll have photocopying that sort of thing. I hope I believe once I get this piece settle down, there will be a virtual office opportunity as well. So if you need an address or that sort of thing, you Yeah, we’re looking to figure that out. So lots of opportunity. Lots of opportunity. Yeah,

Brandon Burton 15:06
that virtual address I think could be a huge that could be kind of a game changer with the whole structure. So

Moe Belliveau 15:12
yeah, yeah, there’s a lot of things that I need a little details that I need to iron out at this point, because we’re looking at wrapping up construction probably within the next two weeks or so. And then furniture will be moving in. So it’s, it’s speeding up. Yeah.

Brandon Burton 15:29
So you had mentioned about the the entrepreneurial programming, the licensee has purchased. Talk to us a little bit more about that. And what the program is, he said, it’s a was a nine weeks, six weeks? Yeah, nine week program. So

Moe Belliveau 15:43
yeah, it’s the CO starters program. It’s a national program. There. I believe they’re based in Texas, I think, I think it’d based in Texas or Tennessee, I think it’s Texas. So um, and it’s a curriculum of over the course of nine weeks, which gives the participants which, which they’re called co starters, because we’re starting something together. Yeah. gives them the basics, you know, and it’s a progressive program. So, you know, so you’ve decided that you want to start a business? So what does that mean? What does that look like? Who is your customer? Who is what is your market? What is? Why is it important to have legal representation? Why do you want to talk to a payroll company, perhaps, you know, an accountant. So all of those little details, you know, cost of goods? And how do you figure that out? And what does that mean for you. And so it’s really very exciting. This is our very first cohort, and it’s moving right along, we have two more weeks left, and then we’ll have a big celebration in May to celebrate them, and they get to share with our guests what they’re up to, and what they plan on doing, and we get to celebrate them.

Brandon Burton 17:04
So I’m always curious, because for a chamber, it’s easy to focus, the businesses that are on Main Street Are those your new businesses that open their doors, and you’re welcome and do the ribbon cutting and the whole thing, but to find those entrepreneurs that really need the support that a chamber can offer, that are working out of their home that are working in the shadows, like he had mentioned before? How, what’s the secret sauce to to finding these shadow businesses, those people that could benefit from this CO starter program? And from this co working space? How do you find them? How do you attract them? What? What’s that look like? Well, that’s

Moe Belliveau 17:46
the challenge. And we have a marketing partner here. The daily handshake is that they’re going to be helping us work on that and helping to get us helping us to get the word out. But it’s a it’s an it’s a lot of excitement that’s being that’s organically arising from the community. Our board is excited and chatting about this and sharing why it’s important. Why is it important for those who, who may not even use the word cup? Right? Or, or who might not even use the customer’s program? Why is that important? Well, economic development in our city is very important in our region, it’s very important, right? It helps to stabilize a lot of things like, you know, food insecurity, you know, if you if you don’t have steady income, that, you know, a lot of things become unstable, you know, your family will family’s well being job security is also contributes with job, you know, providing jobs as these folks grow and continue to what’s the word I’m thinking of expands, but there’s another entrepreneurial word there. So the scale. So all of that’s important because of those things and the life that’s going to be driven that’s going to be participating in the light. I mean, in the work Hall, you know, it adds to the economy to the economy around us right now, utilizing services, restaurants, you know, there’s cleaners, there’s, you know, folks can just conveniently dropped in they come to work. And so all of that just ripples, ripples, ripples. And the most beautiful thing is, is that it’s not only for the here and now. It’s it’s ripples out for, you know, potentially decades. Right, right. I’m explode. It’s so incredibly excited about the CO starters program because we’ve also coalesced a team of we regional local resource. So supporters or resource team. So like the Small Business Association, the SBA, and other other local regional partners, and they’ve all come in support of that program and the work hub, so that we can be. So all everybody kind of does their own little bit of programming. And we’re not looking to recreate any of those wheels, what we want to do is try is to highlight into raise up, all of us together all of our resource partners. And so as they go through the post orders, the participants go through the program, they’re being introduced to these folks, they can put faces to names, you know, they can participate in these other programs. And then, at the end, when they’re done with all of these things, they’re not just standing there going now what? Right, because the now what team is ready for them? Yeah, who they are. And so

Brandon Burton 20:58
now what team have?

Moe Belliveau 21:02
Yes. So you know, now they know who they are. And maybe they connect and give a call to our friend, Roberto Nieves from common capital here in the area. And if, you know, maybe he doesn’t have the answer, or isn’t. They’re not ready for him at that moment. But he knows who they can connect them to. Because we have an ongoing monthly meeting and roundtable that we get together so that we can learn more about each other. That’s awesome. That’s support.

Brandon Burton 21:32
Yeah. So with this, you mentioned, you’re kind of wrapping up this first cohort. I’m curious if you don’t mind sharing, but how many business owners you have in this first round. And we have maybe some examples of where they came from how you found them. I’m just saying I get the the thoughts going with those listening of where they might be able to find some of these businesses that are operating in the shadows.

Moe Belliveau 22:00
Sure, sure. So we have six participants within our, our cohort, my goal was to have 10 We have two facilitators who are just incredible. I’m delighted to be working with both of them. And I’m a super excited for our participants, because they get to be led by these two incredible women. And and we put it out through social media, we had, you know, it was mostly social media that we put that out to, and we had, you know, quite a bit of, of applicants come in, but through that A, we ended up with six was very excited about that. And they vary, they vary. There’s a couple who have been in business for, you know, maybe a year or so. So they’ve started their venture, but realized, you know, what, I need a little bit of focus, I need a little bit more of a foundation, and then the others are in various stages we’re at in various stages of ideation. Okay, so at this point, they’ve become more clear and more more focused as to what it is that they’re trying to do and how they’re going to do it. Yeah.

Brandon Burton 23:15
So can you share with us a little bit about the facilitator aspect of it and where you find the facilitators? Do they need to go through certain training to be able to operate under the license? How does that work?

Moe Belliveau 23:27
Yep, so our facilitators, they’re both local. We have Cynthia West, who is a small business owner here. She is the owner of sonnet and Sparrow, right here in the center of East Hampton. And then we also have Angie Montalvo Greene, who is the regional director for the LGBT chamber here, who is also located there. Western Mass office is also located here in Massachusetts. So she’s on our team. And it’s amazing. So as part of the program, they are, they get a stipend for their time and their dedication. And it’s in they go through training. Yep, they’re trained by CO starters. They’re certified by CO starters. And it’s it’s the real deal. It’s, yeah, it’s not just Mo, like, oh, well, let’s just let’s, let’s build a business plan. I’m really excited about the program. It’s really amazing. I

Brandon Burton 24:29
love that that creates a team effort to in it’s not like you said, it’s not just mo reach into these businesses. This is so right. There’s curriculum, and it’s a it’s a real deal.

Moe Belliveau 24:41
Yeah. And it’s a method and it’s a logical progression, and it’s building and building and building. So that’s

Brandon Burton 24:47
right. Now, I will say at the beginning of this recording, you had mentioned the revitalization of downtown and I had a little vision that you know, maybe the chamber occupies one of those For bigger co workspace as he continued to grow and develop this thing, I could just see it snowball. So well, I

Moe Belliveau 25:06
have to say, and I’m very excited about this. But the woman who worked with us on the marketing feasibility study, she said, you know, my biggest fear for you is that you’re going to fill up so fast that you’re going to wish you had more space. Yeah. I said, Well, that’s a problem I’ll deal with when I get there. Yeah. cross

Brandon Burton 25:25
that bridge. Yeah, we’ll see. Yeah, yeah. Well, I would like to ask for chambers 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 and trying to accomplish that goal?

Moe Belliveau 25:43
Oh, dear, well, you know, ah, these times in chamber, we have, I think, really worked hard. to, to, you know, what, let me back up a minute, you know, we’re living in a time, right, where they change, constant change, we had a major disruption in 2020. And, and ever since then, change has been in our face, and it’s not going to stop, it’s just going to keep on going and keep on accelerating. And chambers all over the country really rose to the occasion, and really stepped into a void, I think, which was really pretty amazing. But I also think as we move on, and move further away from 2020. Being open, and and moving forward with curiosity, and learning, where it’s just going to be constant. Learn, do learn do as opposed to once upon a time you could learn, do the thing, and then you retire. Right? But now it’s going to be now I, in my opinion, learn do learn, do learn do, and if we don’t keep doing that, so you know, learning from our, our, our membership, you know, what is it that they need, be willing to change and let go of what maybe it’s not working and take a risk to see what might right now like, this is all scary stuff. I’m like, Oh, I’ve never done this. Yeah.

Brandon Burton 27:20
Well, and the halls learn, do learn do for a chamber? Yes. So you’re going to learn, do learn, do. But also keep in mind that your members are doing the same thing, like that environment is constantly changing. And we’re in a world where the education the learning is I like to think of it as just in time learning. Yeah, you need to learn how to do a podcast, because that’s the thing. Now there’s courses, there’s ways to do that right now. Yeah, if you need to learn how to do XYZ, there’s YouTube videos, there’s trainings, there’s people, you know, mentors that you can learn from, there’s all these different resources where it used to be the hand to go and get the formal education, you learn, you do and you retire, like, like you said, now it’s learn, do learn do, and you need to constantly be able to find those resources. And hopefully, the chamber is one of those resources to keep these business members up to date on latest trends and to help them learn on demand when they need that, I

Moe Belliveau 28:19
think to being a role model, right? Leading by example. Yeah. Yeah, model it. Right.

Brandon Burton 28:28
So and that that may be leaning into the next question I have is, as we look to the future of chambers of commerce, how do you see the future of chambers and their purpose going forward?

Moe Belliveau 28:39
Oh, my goodness. What do I yay, how do I see that? I think it just goes back to the learned, learn, do and we need to be aware, and listen and hear. And if we can do that, I think we can’t be afraid of changing. Yeah. And I like to say that, you know, the East Hampton chamber is not your grandmother’s grandfather’s chamber anymore. You know, and I think, once upon it, you know, how we have been in the past served those times well, but I also think, too, that we get to a point that it’s, it’s can be nerve wracking to let go right. And

Brandon Burton 29:24
things didn’t move as fast. You know, years ago, 60 years ago, things did not move as fast. Now, today, when you mentioned the further we get away from 2020. I mean, here we are for over four years from when the pandemic started, and it’s starting to become a memory and now what we are in the throes of right now, but I think, you know, my son, my oldest son was he was ending I guess he was in his last year in middle school, getting ready to start high school when the pandemic started and now he’s graduating. And so like there’s, there’s time that’s passed. And we’ve learned a lot through the pandemic, after the pandemic, and just that changes constantly there. So we can’t be our grandmother, grandfather’s chamber, because we need to stay current and stay up to see that the times. Yeah.

Moe Belliveau 30:19
And there’s going to be, you know, there’s going to be disruption. Again. Yeah, you just don’t know when and so I think, you know, yeah, I think that, you know, and it’s just going to accelerate, you know, I’m also discovering, too, as I move along, you know, not only is the change, you know, accelerating, it’s the rules that were attached to what was right are changing as fast as the change is happening. If that makes any sense at all.

Brandon Burton 30:48
It? It does. And who writes the rules is changing, too. It’s all upside down now. So

Moe Belliveau 30:56
I think to what I’ve learned is that, you know, 2022 took the extra step, just sketch. Yep. Right. But now we get to do whatever. Right, each chamber is different, although, basic, in some ways, the same, but different per per their community. Yeah.

Brandon Burton 31:16
Yeah. But no, this has been a fun conversation. I love the the innovative work that you guys are doing with it around entrepreneurs and creating this CO workspace and training these businesses that are operating in the shadows, help them pull them out, make them legitimate, make them make them be the real businesses that have that confidence to go out there and mix and mingle with others and scale and, and there’s that word scale, scale their business. But thank you for spending time with us today, sharing your example sharing some of these trends that you guys are setting right now. And, and I can see where other chambers are gonna hop on this this type of model in the very near future if they’re not already. So.

Moe Belliveau 32:04
Thank you for inviting me.

Brandon Burton 32:05
I wanted to ask you if there’s any contact information you’d like to share for listeners who might want to reach out and connect and learn more from you? Sure.

Moe Belliveau 32:13
So you know, our website is EastHamptonChamber.org. You can always connect with me. I’m happy to chat with anyone regarding any of this. I’m at moe@easthamptonchamber.org. Um, yeah,

Brandon Burton 32:30
very good. I will get that in our show notes for this episode, so people can find that and reach out and connect with you. Thank you. This has been great.

Moe Belliveau 32:40
No, I appreciate it was fun.

Brandon Burton 32:42
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Chambers Leveraging AI with Kaytee Lorentzen

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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 is Community Matters, Inc. With nearly 20 years in the chamber industry and over 100 media awards presented to their chamber partners, community matters provides the R&R that every chamber needs, revenue and recognition.

When it comes to publishing a Chamber Map directory or Community Guide, Community Matters has a trusted experience to help your chamber accomplish your goals. With different advertising sales models and publication styles, Community Matters will help you create a non-dues revenue machine!

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Becki Womble 1:03
I’ve been using Community Matters for probably six or seven years now. And in a previous life, I sold commercial printing so I can highly recommend Community Matters because it’s a complete turnkey job for any busy chamber exec and it’s a wonderful, beautiful printed product whenever you’re finished. And I just I’m very sold on Community Matters. And with a printing background I just big endorsement from me.

Brandon Burton 1:44
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Our guest for this episode is Kaytee Lorentzen. Kaytee is the Director of Communications and events at the Greater Bloomington Chamber of Commerce. She spearheads the Chamber’s multifaceted marketing communications initiative engaging with a diverse array of stakeholders including Chamber members, the public media board and staff members. Her role involves closely collaborating with every department to craft coherent and compelling communication and marketing materials that cater to their unique needs. Beyond communications, she meticulously organizes and oversees the myriad of events that the Chamber orchestrates ensuring that they align with the organization’s objectives and standards. Kaytee has been a part of the chamber team since May of 2021, initially as a marketing and communications coordinator before stepping into the role as marketing and communications manager in January 2023, and subsequently evolving into her current position in September 2023. Before joining the chamber as a staff member, she was a member of the chamber with her photography business for four years. Kaytee holds a bachelor’s degree in journalism with a concentration in photojournalism from Ball State University. She’s a graduate from the Indiana chamber Executives Association, who’s your chamber Academy in June 2022, and is currently pursuing a master’s degree at Purdue University. And Kaytee, I am very excited to have you with us today here on Chamber Chat Podcast. I would love to give you an opportunity to say hello to all the Chamber Champions that are out there listening and share something interesting about yourself so we can all get to know you a little better.

Kaytee Lorentzen 3:37
Yeah, absolutely. Thank you so much, Brandon, for having me on. I’ve been listening to your podcast ever since I have been a chamber professional. So I was super excited to get this opportunity. You helped me grow into this position. So I appreciate that. And everyone that’s been on the podcast as well. Just a little something interesting about myself. That isn’t in my bio. If I had a you know, a separate universe life, then I probably would have been a detective. I love true crime stuff. It’s kind of weird. Much I Love it. But even growing up I was, you know, doing forensics, trying to figure out fingerprinting and putting clues together. So that is what, but I would be in a different life. That’s

Brandon Burton 4:21
That is interesting. And there’s something to that the thrill of solving a mystery. You know, my my wife, she works at our kids elementary school. She’s the front desk receptionist and every now and then she’ll come home from work and say, I should have a detective badge. Like my GED today, you know, usually it’s some you know, kid in the neighborhood that’s caused some mischief, and they get caught on a ring doorbell camera or something. So the police will bring it to the school and say Do you recognize this kid? So she solves the mysteries. But there’s there’s something to that at the thrill of solving a mystery for sure. Oh,

Kaytee Lorentzen 4:55
yeah, like watching it on television shows I’m all about okay, I wonder if this happens. Next. Right,

Brandon Burton 5:01
right. Well tell us a little bit more about the greater Bloomington chamber just to give us an idea of the size staff scope of work. The tight you know, what kind of work you guys are involved with just to kind of set the table for our discussion. Yeah,

Kaytee Lorentzen 5:14
absolutely. So the greater Bloomington Chamber of Commerce is located in Bloomington, Indiana. We are the home of Indiana University. So go Hoosiers, which is very ironic considering I go to Purdue University for graduate education. We Are Rivals so that’s really fun to be a part of. But the greater Bloomington Chamber of Commerce, we have six full time staff members and one part time staff. And all ton of interns. Currently we have one high school intern to undergrad scholar intern. So they’ll be with us for all four of their undergrad years, and two grad fellows which are also going to be with us for their whole grad program. So that’s how many we have a ton of people here. And we have about 850 members currently, Bloomington itself, the size is about 80,000 people. And then Monroe County, which is the county that Bloomington resides in is about 140,000 we say we are the greater Bloomington So yes, we do have a lot of Bloomington businesses but also more Monroe County and surrounding.

Brandon Burton 6:25
Very good that that definitely helps to give some perspective and even going through your bio just in the marketing communications as you’ve had different roles, shows you guys are you’ve got to you’ve got a good amount of staff and get a good team there to work with. So that’s awesome. Well, our topic that we’ve settled on for today is very relevant and timely for all the buzz that’s going around right now around chat GPT and AI and generative AI and so we’re gonna dive in deeper in that discussion today. Katie has done some some great presentations on this at different conferences. So we’re going to kind of tap into her her wealth of knowledge to be able to share some of that, with all you chamber pros as we as we move forward in this conversation. We’ll dive into that as soon as they get back from this quick break.

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Donna Novitsky 9:03
Howdy. It’s Donna Novitsky here, CEO of Yiftee. Fun fact about local businesses, did you know that small businesses employ 57% of the US is non government workforce. Many of these small businesses are your Chamber members, we are here to help you help them. As you heard last week, we do digital gift cards for 500 plus communities and we call them community cards. Our chamber partners get a custom gift card branded for you that works exclusively in your member stores. The program is free for you and free for your members. We even give you reports so you can tell them how much business you brought them. Sign up for a live Zoom demo with me or one of my teammates yiftee.com/demo or email sales@yiftee.com. That’s why yiftee.com. That’s it for now back to the show.

Brandon Burton 9:57
All right, Kaytee, we are back And so I’m excited to learn how you’re using generative AI and just AI in general, as a chamber professional, where you see the use cases and where it’s helped to save you time make your job easier. And does it save you time at this point? You know, or is it just the learning and everything, but it ends up making your job easier. I’d love just to hear how you’re integrating this. And hopefully spark some ideas for listeners maybe want to explore some of these aspects of utilizing AI at their chamber.

Kaytee Lorentzen 10:32
Absolutely. So first and foremost, like artificial intelligence is just this plethora of things. So it pretty much all ultimately is intended to make computers do things that when done by people are described as having indicated intelligence. So I was very skeptical at first, I’m not one of those people who typically jump on bandwagons. So in November of last year, or sorry, to it would be November 2022. At that point, when it came out, I was like, I don’t know about this chat. GBT, it kind of seems a little not in my realm. Then I tried it. All I did was just asked a few questions. And I was like, wow, I just opened the door to something that’s going to make my life so much easier, just by asking it simple questions. And the more I’ve been using it, the more I have learned how to write the prompts that are necessary for it to generate the kind of answers that I’m meeting. So for example, the one thing I use it a lot for is just rewriting a lot of our website copy. It sounds very dated, and some of its not customer focused. And that’s more of what it needs to be. You want it to say, like I asked it, this is what we currently have on our website for our membership benefits. Can you rewrite this in more of a customer focused realm or point of view, and also give some examples of why it’s important for somebody to join the Chamber of Commerce. And they will give you a full list like, a lot of the time, if you ask it for list, it’ll give it to you. And now that I’ve used it so much, it thinks that I like list all the time. So it will continuously give me list until I say please stop putting into the list. I just need a paragraph. Yeah. And then it typically apologizes. It goes, Oh, I’m so sorry. Let me fix that for you. Right, right. The big thing that I’m doing right now is just rewriting a lot of our website copy. I’ve also used it for social media copy. I’ve even asked it to create social, like a social media plan. Small Business Week was something I was like, Okay, I want to do something different. I don’t just want to say, yeah, it’s Small Business Week, let’s celebrate small business. Let’s actually make some sort of content with it. And so it was able to give me five different days of social media content that all I had to do was just pretty much copy and paste and find some graphics and photos to go with it. Yeah.

Brandon Burton 12:59
So talk to us a little bit more about rewriting the website copy. Are you literally are you copy and pasting paragraphs from your website, login in chat? GPT? Are you able to give a link to the website and say, scan this page? And tell me how how does that interface work for those listening?

Kaytee Lorentzen 13:15
Yeah, it depends on what program you’re using, and what version of the program you’re using. I know, some websites will do that. But not all of them, like I primarily use to actually btw and chat GPT for. So I use the paid version. But I don’t put a link in there. I literally copy and paste the exact information so that way I like because a lot of our content is pretty long website page. So I just was like, No, I just want this section rewritten in this point of view, and then obviously, the main thing is, I always say, double check, it’s work. Because you never know what is gonna pop out and you want to edit it. I don’t ever think that you should copy and paste directly from whatever chat GBT or you know, whatever generative AI system you’re using, you need to go in and, like have oversight, it gets you 80% of the way there. But you need to go in and edit and finesse it and make it more your voice.

Brandon Burton 14:16
Yes, so you shared your experience in November of 20 I guess it’s 2022 right when chat GPT was made public and available for everybody to use. And I remember going to Thanksgiving dinner my brother in law was like Oh, you gotta check this out. And he’s he’s a very loud in your face kind of person anyway, so he’s shoving his phone everybody’s facing you ask it a question and just very excited about it and like, Okay, calm down. You know, so I asked him a few questions and and really the responses I got back because I was asking business related questions. You know, how can I create a social media posts from my podcast or tell me about a chamber of commerce, like what Chambers of Commerce do and just that feedback I was getting from it initially. You needed to verify, you know, the stuff it was kicking out. And granted, this is Chad GBT three. So it wasn’t it hadn’t scanned, you know nearly as much of the of the web and things like that. But an example of just this last week, I’ve got a daughter in fifth grade, she came home with a math problem in her homework that she wasn’t able to figure out. And my, I think it was my son who’s a senior single as chat GPT. And, like, first of all, it seems like cheating or, and then your homework to plug it in. But like, we worked through the problem, got the answer? And then I’m like, I’m gonna try this, you know. So I asked chat GBT exactly how the question was on the homework. And immediately it spit back an answer. And it wasn’t the right answer. So I gave it some clarifying, you know, prompts along with it, then it apologize, spit back and other answer, and it never came up with the right answer. And after verifying, like more and more of the criteria with it, it kept apologizing, but then we kept giving me the same answer over and over. And like, okay, and this is still catch up three GPT 3.5. So it wasn’t the paid version, maybe that would have gotten me better results, but goes to the point of you need to verify you can’t just trust everything that it puts out as being doctrine, like you got to, you got to really read it, you got to make sure it’s accurate. And some may say, Well, does that really save you time then? So how would you approach that with if you need to verify everything? How does that aspect work and time saving, or you know, the application into real world scenarios?

Kaytee Lorentzen 16:36
I think it varies on what you’re planning on using chat GPT for so if you’re using it for research, that can definitely still take you some more time, it hasn’t been able to scan everything, and it’s still learning, it’s still, you know, it’s still a child, and it’s learning new tech. Yeah, it’s still a baby, it’s still trying to figure out what it’s doing. But for me, I use it more for things that I know are fact based, like hard numbers type of thing. I use it more for like the colorful language. For an example, there was one way someone emailed us and I was trying to explain to them, I don’t think you understood what I was trying to say. But also saying it in a much better way. Because right, there are some times where your brain just you know, when that clicker icon just keeps going on a blink word screen. That’s how I felt with this. I was like, I don’t know how to say this. So I just asked chat GPT. And it gave me a much better way of writing it. That actually was exactly what I wanted to say. But I just didn’t have the words or the sound mind at that point. I think it was like 430 on a Friday or something. And it put it all together and flowed nicely. So that was something I more use it for is earliest for chatty BTW I use it more for that aspect. Even if you asked it to give you a source, sometimes it makes it up. So but at least if you can look up and see if that source even exists. And that sometimes works. I think I’ve only used it a few times with statistics. And then what I’ll do is I’ll just copy and paste this statistic that it gives me and look up where it is in Google. Yeah, just to verify, make sure that’s fine. But yeah, it varies, because I’ve also heard similar situations with homework, where someone it was I think it was NPR that I was listening to. And they were saying, Well, my daughter was doing homework. And they and I’m a history major. And it asked if this particular person in history was pro separation of church and state or against it, and it gave the wrong answer. And they were like, That’s not right. So I if you ever ask it fact, based information like that, then I would at least just copy and paste what it gave you and ask it as much question as you can to get where they got it from, quote unquote. And then you can find it on the internet pretty quickly. So

Brandon Burton 19:10
is there a value to giving it feedback to say that’s not a correct answer? Or yes, I’m gonna challenge the answer a little.

Kaytee Lorentzen 19:18
I think so because it’s learning based off of what you are giving it as well. So like if you there’s even after every single prompts that it gives you, was this, what you were looking for? Was this not and then there’s a thumbs up, thumbs down and you just put that in there it actually is teaching it. That’s another way that it’s learning on giving the correct answers. So if other people start asking similar questions or something like that, it’s it’s now learning based off of our responses, right, right.

Brandon Burton 19:49
And I think you know, although some of the information you get may not be totally accurate need to verify if you’re having some writer’s block going on or looking for ideas Just to be able to put a prompt in and receive, you know, a ton of ideas and, you know, pretty much instantaneously, things that will get those creative juices going in your mind, again, that I’ve heard it said that it’s not to replace your own thinking in your own mind, but it’s to supplement it’s to add to what you’re already doing. Yes. Yeah. I know, in an example that I had, there was a chamber professional that I mentioned, how much they enjoy the podcast, and you know, very nice email about what they have appreciated. So this is great. Would you mind putting this as a review on Apple podcasts? And they try it and try it couldn’t figure it out? Like, can you tell me how to leave a review? Like, let me ask Chet GPT. So I just did, how do you leave a review for by and just copy and paste it? And I could have typed the response and said, Here’s how you do it. But to look up each, you know, the website and give a link and here and there and back and forth? Just that plug it in chat? GPT it was all right, copy, paste, send and it was done. And it was easy. It was easy.

Kaytee Lorentzen 21:05
Yeah, as long as you just review it and be like, Yeah, that’s exactly how you do it, then you can just copy and paste, which is nice. And that’s kind of what I’ve done. Even for scripts for videos that we do. I’ve asked it to make it you can even ask it. Can you make this more of a TED Talk style, and it will completely read rewrite it? I did that actually the first time I presented this at the Indiana chamber Executives Association Conference. Hi, how do you write my intro? I didn’t like how it was like, have a we tried TED Talk style? Yeah, very different. It was, it almost felt like when you were reading it out loud, exactly how it starts. Right. Any TED Talk? So

Brandon Burton 21:50
maybe let’s talk about that a little bit about the prompts that we put into to any AI, generative AI assistant. What kind of things do we need to consider? Because I think we’re very much a lot of the public is very much still in the mindset of Google, right? You put in? What is this? He put in a question, get a response. So talk to us about a prompt, and maybe becoming a prompt engineer, so to speak.

Kaytee Lorentzen 22:17
Yes, yes. So that is something I’ve definitely been trying to hone my skills on, is learning how to create the best prompts. I always say, garbage in, garbage out. So whatever. If you give it like subpar information, it’s going to give you a subpar answer. So you want to make sure that it has as much information as you can possibly give it. Like if you’re trying to make a all do something pretty simple, like a social media post, if you tell it your audience exactly who it’s supposed to cater to, you can even tell it more of like your customer persona, it will give you a much better answer and a less generic answer, it’ll become more personalized. So that’s a lot of the time why I copy and paste a lot of our content when I’m asking it to rewrite it. So I say take this and move it to something more like this other thing. So that could be you know, saying it needs it needs to have more colorful language, can you make it sound more professional, this needs to be more towards small business owner, not necessarily the big business, so you can change up exactly what you’re wanting it to do. But the more specific the better it is.

Brandon Burton 23:37
Yeah. So as you’re given that response reminds me I had recently read a book called The AI whispers method. And it it’s a, it’s an AI generative fiction novel. So it takes the whole hero storyline and plugs it into to teach you how to use AI. And it talks a lot about generating prompts. And even asking, like, for example, with Chet GPT, to act as a math teacher or act as a math professor to give me an answer to this problem or act as a sports historian and tell me why, you know, this scenario is happening or so being able to get that context of act as if or act as a different, you know, expert in different fields, it’s able to tap into different resources and really understand what it is that you’re looking for. So as I played around with that there’s a lot of power in the act as prompt when you plug that into chat. GPT

Kaytee Lorentzen 24:45
Absolutely. That’s actually something I do for our customer journey type of thing. I said to chat GPT act as if you are a brand new business. You’ve never heard of the Chamber of Commerce. You We are interested in it because someone mentioned that it’s a great thing to join, why should they join? What are their pain points? What are their objectives? What are the rebuttals to those objectives? So you can really start tailoring your content to better address their pain points and why you’re the solution to their problems.

Brandon Burton 25:19
Right. I love that. So let’s, let’s maybe circle back a little bit more to the generative AI. Discussion. So you mentioned you, you’ve used it to rewrite website content, you use it for social media posts. What other applications are you seeing in the chamber world, specifically for using generative AI? That

Kaytee Lorentzen 25:40
is a fabulous question. So for me, I have been using it more obviously, for the marketing aspect of it. I’ve even asked it to write event descriptions. So what makes people come into the event more? What makes it more appealing, besides just saying, you know, come to this chamber event at this day, on this time at this place, we look forward to expanding your network hope to see you there. It sounds the exact same every single time. So how do I change it up and make it sound more exciting? What makes that chamber member have to be at that event. So I use that a lot for to change up the descriptions. I’ve also asked it to make correct like full social media campaigns, not just the captions itself. Also, like I mentioned earlier, the market research different emails to members. So like how, like, if you’re saying I want people to fill out this survey, what makes someone fill out this, if you ask to attribute it, right, this email, enticing people to fill out this survey that doesn’t. Obviously, we’re all nonprofits, we don’t have a whole lot of money to give out as an incentive. So without incentives, I’m creating different types of plans for customer journeys. The one that I’ve used the most often is writing up ours, we have a sponsorship book that we do all at one time, kind of like why GM does. And so I’ve asked it to rewrite our sponsorship book and why people should sponsor it and why it’s important to sponsor it. And then lately, I have noticed AI disclosures on your website, writing a disclaimer for your website, we actually didn’t have quite a few like the privacy policies, those things that you’re supposed to have on your website. And so I was like, I’m gonna see if Chad GPD can come up with something very like simple and then obviously run it by our lawyer, just to make sure everything sounds great. But it really helps take out a lot of the guesswork for us. We didn’t have to do you know, how many hours of research trying to make sure that what we had in there? Would it be? Sound for us to use, even if it’s just like a blanket one? I think ours is our AI disclaimer is probably two paragraphs, just saying, you know, we use AI, there are things that may be generated by AI that come out here, but there’s always human oversight, ultimately, is what it says but in some more legalese term. Yeah.

Brandon Burton 28:15
Like that. So I guess that brings up a good talk at a good point to talk about as well, where I know I’ve been at chamber conferences and breakout sessions you you lead some these breakout sessions, where we talk about AI? And the question always comes up as far as the legality, the copyright issues if you’re especially like image generation, right? So if you’re asking generative AI to produce an image for you, who owns the rights to that, is there copyright issues if you’re bringing in certain elements into that? So if you would speak a little bit to the legality and regulations around AI and what we need to kind of be aware of and kind of look out for as we kind of navigate through this new world of artificial intelligence?

Kaytee Lorentzen 29:03
Absolutely. This is definitely something we need. As chamber professionals. If you’re using AI just to keep up to date on there are quite a few websites that you can track legislation. And there’s a lot on AI. Currently, right now, as of August 30, of 2023, the US Copyright Office issued a notice of inquiry in the Federal Register on copyright. And AR pretty much just means they’re going to be studying it to see kind of whether legislation or regulatory steps are even warranted, and also just steps to advise Congress on any legislation that does come through. But anything right now made by something other than human is not protected by copyright. So if I like the API disclosure I was talking about I can’t if someone else wanted to copy and paste it and use it, they legally can. And I can’t cry that that’s copyright. So that’s it. One thing that we have to look at, right now a lot of people are getting frustrated with the image portion of it, I haven’t used that aspect too much, because I still feel like there is a lot of stock photo that I can use in that aspect. And I don’t need to just create an image that we don’t have. But other people are saying that it’s very unfair to the artists, which I do, as someone who’s a photographer, I get that completely. And it takes, you know, scanning my work to use someone else’s yet that’s not exactly something I’m a fan of. But I am interested to see where that’s going to be going and legislations and any what Congress is planning on doing on that. And I do think that they’re in a very interesting position right now. And I think they do need to take that whole issue very seriously, that AI is here, and it’s going to, it’s, you know, people are still scared of it. But it was very similar to like, when the internet happened, it, everyone was scared of it, it was this big thing that everyone’s like, this is going to change the world. It did. But now if we look back, if you don’t have a website, you’re not really relevant. Or you’re not considered trustworthy. So if that’s something similar what AI is gonna do, that’s, I’m just very interested to see where it’s gonna go, what regulations we’re gonna have. So just keeping up to date, making sure that we are using it legally, then that is something that we do need to do, and do our due diligence on it, as you know, people that are in the community seen as a trustworthy and leader.

Brandon Burton 31:42
Yeah, for sure. Now, it’s definitely important to keep that on the forefront with any legislation that comes out. But I think to your point with the internet, you know, if you didn’t adopt the internet and have a website, now, you’re kind of irrelevant. And I see a very similar course with AI. And just the AI technology has been adopted quicker than any other technology in the history of mankind. I don’t know, besides like the fire, maybe I don’t know. But. But as far as the technology goes, it’s been adopted very quickly. And I could easily see in five or 10 years maybe doesn’t even take that long, that there’s going to be two types of chambers, right? There’s going to be the ones that use AI and the ones that are no longer around, essentially, because they’re not relevant. And they’re not able to really leverage the power that comes from Ai, especially when you’re dealing with limited budgets, and being nonprofits and all that. There’s a lot of leverage. Yeah,

Kaytee Lorentzen 32:38
and I completely understand why it would seem intimidating or scary at first, because I was in that same exact boat. But as soon as I tried it, I was very surprised at the fact that I felt like it was something that anyone and everyone can use. Even if you’re just asking simple questions like, can you give me a recipe for a very simple meal like something, it’s something you can just play around with and have fun. And the more you use it, the more you find things that you can use it for? Yeah,

Brandon Burton 33:09
I’ve heard people will take, you know, just random ingredients they have in the refrigerator and say I’ve got these seven ingredients, give me a recipe of something, I can make it it’ll do it. So where would you suggest somebody gets started with a journey in AI and just kind of getting their mind wrapped around it? Yeah,

Kaytee Lorentzen 33:28
I would say just pick up like one or any of the generative AI tools that we have available. Google’s version is Bard. And then there’s chat GPT. There’s all just, obviously, Google, because Google or cert, go in your search engine, and ask it for a generative AI tool, and just start asking it questions. And the more you do it, the more you’ll get better at asking the I don’t want to write questions, but better questions, you refine the questions, you refine the questions to get the answers that you’re looking for. And then you start, that’s when your wheels start turning and figuring out where can I apply this in my professional life? Right.

Brandon Burton 34:10
So I didn’t give you a heads up that I was going to ask you this question. So if we need to edit it out, we can but I’m curious. What are you excited about on the forefront that you see coming with AI in the next weeks, months years?

Kaytee Lorentzen 34:24
I’m just excited to see the evolution of where it’s going. It just reminds me of like when the first iPhone came out, like and just seeing how it evolves and where it’s at now that it’s pretty much a part of our daily lives. If you’re an Apple user, obviously. It’s something that I am just excited to see where it’s gonna go. I’m excited to see how our legislation will take this and you hopefully use it for the good obviously, there’s always some bad actors, but I think Oh, For all this is going to be something that’s extremely well received in, in our world. Right?

Brandon Burton 35:07
I think there’s just a world of opportunity available. And quite honestly, I don’t know if legislation can keep up with the trends and the way things will develop. But we need to be plugged in and not be burying our head in the sand pretending like it’ll go away because it’s not going to go away. Well, Katie, as we look to the future, actually, let me back up before I ask that question for a chamber who’s listening who wants to take their chamber up to the next level, what kind of tip or action item might you share for them to try to accomplish that goal?

Kaytee Lorentzen 35:42
I would say, the tip to use is embrace playing. I know that sounds so weird, but embrace that it’s something new embrace change, it will make a world of a difference. Because I can even tell you even in my office, as soon as people started embracing this tool, it was a game changer. Like our membership director, she now uses that a lot to help personalize each individual sales email, instead of just having like this copy and paste mentality of the same type of email, she can personalize it a lot more saying, this is the industry this person is in. And now she says that she really can’t go without it. Our operations manager uses it to help create some Excel documents, like it’s different things, the more you play with it, and embrace the change that it can bring, the better I think we’ll all be.

Brandon Burton 36:41
Absolutely, it reminds me. Last year, our church, we were putting together a fundraiser for our youth program at church. And I was trying to get the text together for the flyers that we’re gonna go out and promote on social media and everything. And I was just having the hardest time trying to make all the words fit on this flyer without being crowded and like telling what we’re trying to accomplish. And I told my wife, this Super Chat GPT will say I plug it in, give it the prompts, and it spit back and answer those beautiful, perfect, and we use that going forward. Like if I would have just done that from the beginning, it would have saved me so much time and headache and just beating my head against a wall trying to figure something out. That wasn’t coming to me. And it was it’s a great tool. So I would encourage everybody to embrace the play and embrace the change. Because I think initially, you and I both had this similar initial reactions I get I’ll know about this chat GPT steps, the more you get into it, you see more and more applications where it can assist you and make your life a little bit easier. So as we look to the future of chambers of commerce, how do you see the future of chambers and their purpose going forward?

Kaytee Lorentzen 37:53
You know, it’s funny as I was like, you know, how do I answer? Because I knew this one was coming, right? Because I hear from everyone. So I asked chat GPT what they thought. And it gave me a gave me a list of nine different things. But I would like to kind of summarize what because a lot of it is things that I thought of but I was like how do I make this sound? Great. I do see a lot of the future of chambers using innovation and technology adaptation, obviously, for me using AI and GPT. I do see that. And I think with that we will become leaders in the business space in general. I think it will bring forward I’m trying to think of the correct word that I want to use. But it will bring forward this leadership of how the standard should be set on business and how they can embrace it as well. And I think that we’ll have a lot of Gosh, I’m trying to figure out

Brandon Burton 39:04
here, but you can plug it as chat GPT

Kaytee Lorentzen 39:09
Pretty much yeah, just focusing on the technological changes focusing on small business and it’s going to just help leverage that and just, you know, promote this business atmosphere that I think will be that will occur encourage all of that.

Brandon Burton 39:33
Yeah, I can definitely see that and we need to be embrace the innovation that comes with technology. Yes.

Kaytee Lorentzen 39:43
You pretty much said exactly what I was wanting to say. All

Brandon Burton 39:45
right, well, whether you know it or not, you said it at some point in there because I wrote it down and he said well, Katie, I want to give you an opportunity to share any contact information for listeners who want to reach out and learn more, maybe Do you see some of the slides or anything you’ve shared at different conferences or whatever you’re willing to share and help out with them? What would be the best way for someone to reach out and connect?

Kaytee Lorentzen 40:09
The best way is probably through either email or through LinkedIn. So my email is just klorentzen@chamberbloomington.org. And my LinkedIn, you can just find me, Katie Lorentzen, and I spell it differently. So I’ll spell it here for you guys. It is Kaytee and then my last name Lorentzen. And either a message on either of those are typically the best way to get a hold of me just because I am all over the place. And my phone is always on me. So those two apps right there for me.

Brandon Burton 40:45
That’s perfect. And we’ll get that in our show notes too. So people can pull that up and have easy access to reach out. But I appreciate all the value you offered to listeners today here on chamber tap podcast for sharing your experience of exploring and being innovative using generative AI and I just, you know, it’ll be fun to look back at this episode a year from now and be like, Wow, things have really advanced in the last year. So I know I’m excited. Yeah, but thank you for being with us today. This has been a fun and enlightening conversation. So thank you.

Kaytee Lorentzen 41:18
Thank you for having me.

Brandon Burton 41:19
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Data & Technology with Jaime di Paulo

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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 is Community Matters, Inc. With nearly 20 years in the chamber industry and over 100 media awards presented to their chamber partners, community matters provides the R&R that every chamber needs, revenue and recognition.

When it comes to publishing a Chamber Map directory or Community Guide, Community Matters has a trusted experience to help your chamber accomplish your goals. With different advertising sales models and publication styles, Community Matters will help you create a non-dues revenue machine!

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Becki Womble 1:03
I’ve been using Community Matters for probably six or seven years now. And in a previous life, I sold commercial printing so I can highly recommend Community Matters because it’s a complete turnkey job for any busy chamber exec and it’s a wonderful, beautiful printed product whenever you’re finished. And I just I’m very sold on Community Matters. And with a printing background I just big endorsement from me.

Brandon Burton 1:44
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Our guest for this episode is Jaime de Paulo. Jaime is President and CEO of the Illinois Hispanic Chamber of Commerce, a prominent organization dedicated to networking advocating for and developing the Hispanic business community in the Midwest. Since assuming leadership and 2019. Jaime has spearheaded numerous initiatives and collaborations positioning ahcc as a finalist in the 13th world chambers Congress, the largest economic forum for chambers and businesses worldwide. Jaime’s exceptional exceptional leadership and contributions have garnered recognition and accolades. He became a distinguished member of the Economic Club of Chicago and infinite influential organization connecting leaders in Chicago’s economic circles. The government of Mexico officially acknowledged him as one of the most influential Mexican Americans in the Midwest, highlighting his significance with the region’s economic landscape. Moreover, he received the 2022 American Mexican Association’s Leader of the Year Award, which celebrates his dedication to the community and his role within the broader Latino community. Driven by his commitment to empowering Latino entrepreneurs, Jaime has worked to strengthen the Latin X incubator program in collaboration with 1871, a renowned business incubator. This initiative supports young Hispanic tech companies, fostering innovation and providing them with opportunities to secure capital funds. Outside of his professional pursuits, Jaime is married and is a proud father of three sons and a daughter. Hi, man, 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 that are listening and share something interesting about yourself so we can all get to know you a little better. Well,

Jaime di Paulo 4:01
thank you, Brandon. I want to thank you first for inviting me to this wonderful chat and thanks to the listeners because we are out there doing the good work or that empowers more businesses. And, you know, feel proud of what we do. I mean, I would just sharing with you that the Our job is very significant, and it means a lot to small businesses. So kudos to all my chamber colleagues out there listening. You know, I was born in while I had I Mexico, I grew up in the United States. My father was American. And you know, when I was when I went to high school, I went back to Mexico, and I became a DJ. I was a renowned DJ back in the late 80s in that club in Acapulco called the baby oh, so some of you have been there some of you have not but if you compare it the baby oh, it was the comparison to studio 51 in New York City and next. So it’s a it was a big Back in the day, so you know, I lost my hair since then. But anyway,

Brandon Burton 5:05
that is awesome. I love getting these these fun facts about people and never would have guessed it. But that’s a, that is a great fact about you. So thank you. Well, tell us a little bit about the Illinois Hispanic Chamber, size of the chamber scope of work, kind of airy cover staff, that sort of thing. Just to kind of set the table for our discussion.

Jaime di Paulo 5:29
We one of the bigger chambers around we have 19 staff members, and we’re about to hire eight more we just announced last week. So we just, you know, we do a lot of government contracting. Our main focus is making sure minority owned companies have access to government contracting, because we see that as the future of our companies to scale. So that’s the reason why we are a bigger chamber than the norm. We have for example, we have an SBDC. In our Office of Small Business Development Center, we have what is called a PTAC. It’s not it’s called Apex which is a Procurement Technical Assistance Center, which helps minority owned companies get certifications so that so they can access government contracting. We contract with the United States Department of Transportation, for example, we in Region eight with we represent six states we help minority owned companies access us do T contracts, including water and airports and, and you know, and highways and all that. And then we also have a big contract with the Illinois Tollway, which is the, the you know, the Tollway authority here in this in the city of Chicago in the state of Illinois. So we make sure minority owned companies get hired and started working for them to scale this company. So we are a little bit bigger than a normal chamber. We have all these programs in between that’s why we bigger we our budget is about five and a half million dollars a year including that one and a half million dollar grant thing that just got to the beginning of next year. So we are growing certainly, since I started with a seven employees now we are you know 19 plus a couple full times 27

Brandon Burton 7:09
Yeah, I was seven so we put a big. Wow. Yeah, you guys are rockin and rollin and get your work cut out for you. That’s That’s awesome. I love it. So personally, I’m excited to get into our topic for discussion today. And as we kind of went back and forth a little bit we focused on the the areas of data and technology. And I know those are kind of hot topics for individuals and chambers at this time, especially with the emergence of AI and you know all sorts of things in that realm. But we will dive in much deeper into this conversation as soon as they get back from this quick break.

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Donna Novitsky 10:09
Hey there, Donna Novitsky, CEO of Yiftee here, and we are all about the shop local movement. We’re working with more than 500 communities like yours and 15,000 small businesses like your members. We’re big fans of Brandon and his Chamber Chat Podcast, so we’re helping to sponsor the show. But while I’ve got you here, what’s a Yiftee? You ask? It’s a digital gift card branded for your chamber that people spend only at the local shops that you authorize. In 2022 we drove 10’s of millions of dollars to small businesses in the US. The program is free for chambers and free for your local shops. You can sign up for a live zoom demo with me or one of my teammates yiftee.com/demo or email sales@yiftee.com. That’s why Yiftee.com. That’s it for now back to the show.

Brandon Burton 11:07
All right. Hi, me, we’re back. As I mentioned before the break, we’re focusing our discussion today around data and technology. And I know as a chamber, it’s super important to be able to make data driven decisions, right as we go about, you know, working in our organizations and knowing what the course of action to take on different things. But I’d love to know how you guys are implementing data and technology. And I know they’re related, but also kind of separate at the same time. So feel free to just take us whatever direction you’d like there and and we’ll we’ll go down that path. Certainly,

Jaime di Paulo 11:42
we belong to a small niche group called the Aspen Institute that help us download data. I was in New York City last week with the McKenzie group, and they just released new data on the state of Latinos in the in the United States. So everything we do is related to that particular data. So we got to make sure we have a significant impact on that data. For example, when this when the SBA talks about small businesses, they’re talking about 500 employees or less is a quick fact that in nationally, Hispanic or Latino businesses are under 20 employees. So when the SBA talks about small businesses, we’re not I believe, we’re not even on the picture, because we’re so small, so Chambers of Commerce just becomes very, very relevant to help those businesses scale, right. So everything we do, every program that we implement, everything we do is related to data, we and then in the technology side, we are fortunate enough to have our our offices at 1871. If you Google 1871, you’re going to see is the one of the number one or two incubators for technology in the world for businesses. So our office is right there. And the where the technology is made with it, technology happens. And we believe in technology. And we also believe that minorities should have an opportunity to develop new technologies, new applications, or whatever are solutions, and have the venture capital injected into those companies. And because we are offices there at 1871, we’ve been able to move that up a little bit. For example, 90% of new technology companies a surface every day in the world are Hispanic owned, but what percent of those Hispanic owned 90% Get get capital injected to it. So there’s a big disparity. And so our job here is to make sure the venture capital gets injected into minority owned companies awesome. We realize the data for example, we created a policy institute in our chamber. And we figured out how to create a scorecard using artificial intelligence. And in because of our 30 years in business that we have, we have a lot of data. We actually know what a procurement means and everything in between. So every bill that comes to the state of Illinois, we track and then we can create a scorecard for our legislative elected officials. So now we know who’s our big champion and who is and who we got to work with AI in terms of legislation stuff, using artificial intelligence, web scraping and all these other tools and utilizing the same model. We match it into contracts, for example. Right, so now you’ve seen we create a program called Kodama, you mentioned I was in Geneva and the world in the world Chambers of Commerce symposium and this past summer and because of that particular program that week, that particular solution that we curated is called Kodama contract radar Maximizer, which basically it matches contracts with capability statements in seconds. You know, when I mentioned we 20 employees or less we are busy working, we don’t have the staff or the knowledge to go search for contracts or government contracts, right. So This tool is going to revolutionize how people, you know, access those contracts because now you have everything on your hand, you just give me your capability statement or match it with the technology. And we’ll put in front of you contracts. So you basically qualify for it. In seconds. We are testing it right now, we did a couple of pilot programs in Lake County in the northern Chicago, we working with the City of Chicago to disclose our spending money. So now we know what kind of bunch contracts are happening. So we gonna be able to match him with companies. So we are about to launch a nationally and this thing is going to be an incredible tool tool for me chamber to use to help their

Brandon Burton 15:38
whims. That’s awesome. He said, It’s called Kurama.

Jaime di Paulo 15:41
What am I CLR AMA, contract radar maximize your website is there.

Brandon Burton 15:51
So let’s hone in on that a little bit more. I mean, I’m just full of excitement as I hear you talk about that and match in the contracts. And so when you have a chamber member, what would their experience be? Like, you know, applying karama? How would they access it how what what information they put in to get that instantaneous, almost feedback.

Jaime di Paulo 16:13
For example, if you, I’m sure everybody has heard of the government, federal government, they have what it’s called next codes, right? Every every, for example, you in construction, there’s a special number they gave you. So when you search for contracts, you use that particular code to identify yourself as a construction or, or cement or brick layer, or landscaper, or whatever it may be. So now utilizing that code and web scraping stuff analysis, or vectrus was called vectorize, which something I don’t understand, but my team does

Brandon Burton 16:51
have a team. Yeah, young people that

Jaime di Paulo 16:53
do the technology, we’re now able to if you put everything in like a company comes to us, we teach them how to do a capability statement, which is basically a one pager of who you are in one piece of paper and that particular. So it has different codes and different keywords that we can run into the system we came up with in the system will will search and will spit out the contracts you actually qualify for according to what you told us who you are as a company. Okay.

Brandon Burton 17:24
And then as far as going after those contracts, you guys provide any kind of support to help them figure out how to do that. And you had mentioned that earlier helping them get contracts? Yeah, how’s that process? Look,

Jaime di Paulo 17:38
we have what is called a PTAC, Procurement Technical Assistance Center that actually helps you have staff that will take you by the hand and show you how to apply. We’re working on technology right? Now this is going to actually self populate the application at what point the what you told us, so it’s coming. I mean, we a little bit step below that. But you know, a year or so we’re gonna have that on hand. So what I’m envisioning in nobody here, you’re gonna be able to fill out 80% of the application automatically. So yeah, finances and you know, that kind of stuff. But that’s something we, you know, you got to work with you on accountants.

Brandon Burton 18:17
So what kind of advantages do you see for your members in utilizing this type of technology and these tools that you’re making available for them?

Jaime di Paulo 18:28
Well, you know, when you go to even the playing field, for example, you know, that these huge companies out there, they have personality, all they do a search for contracts, now, we’re going to have the necessary tools for zero small companies have access to those contracts. So we’re going to revolutionize how the United States does government contracting, for example, right? So if you are a minority, like Hispanic, African American women, veteran or Asian, you are considered a minority in the United States. And so those are the guys who try to push so they can even they play? Yeah,

Brandon Burton 19:03
I’m glad that you said that that way, even in the the playing field. So I think that’s what AI that’s what it does, you know, a lot of people have the concept of AI is for the big companies are the ones that have the budget and understand how to use it and all that. But really, AI is going to level the playing field across so many different platforms. That I’m glad that that’s the vision is it levels, the playing field and brings your members up to a competitive level across the nation.

Jaime di Paulo 19:30
You know, AI can be a scary thing, but it can be used properly. It’s a wonderful tool, and nothing we use in it properly. Right? So who knows what AI is going to take us in the future. But at the end of the day, we need to take advantage of those tools and use it to the event to to scale our companies, right?

Brandon Burton 19:48
Yeah. So do you have somebody internally that’s working on the technology with the AI to develop these these platforms, or do you consult with somebody or how’s this being developed? So, within your chamber,

Jaime di Paulo 20:01
we actually have to two engineers, you know, just coding full time and the director of the program. Wow.

Brandon Burton 20:11
So not everybody has that on their staff. But where would somebody get started, you know, maybe a local chamber, you’re wanting to implement some of these things? How would you suggest they get started,

Jaime di Paulo 20:24
we, we don’t we still working on the model, we don’t know how we’re going to do it, we license it or just give it away, or we got to make a little money on it. But our intent is to bring up our companies and across the United States, we’ve been in conversation with Walmart, for example, you know, in government contracting, every contract is public information. Private is not so having this tool, access private corporations, like for example, Walmart, Target and Home Depot, whoever it is, we need to create partnerships directly with those companies. So we will talk into Walmart and the Google and some other companies so they can have access to this to this tool. So they can do some hiring. But it’s gonna that’s gonna be a little bit more difficult, because it’s not public information, those contracts. So yeah, work to be done.

Brandon Burton 21:18
Gotta get them to play along with you, right? That’s right. So the the technology incubator, I’d like to maybe hear some of the things that you’ve seen, you know, birthed out of that incubator there. I get excited here and about this technology programs, and you know, what people are into and what’s kind of cutting edge, but what are what are some of these things that you’ve seen come out of there? No,

Jaime di Paulo 21:45
it’s amazing what goes through our, our offices there, we got companies, for example, we have a Latina woman, micro cycle is her company, she she basically figured out that I mushroom eats concrete, how I have, but she’s been taking marketing that technology, and it’s a solution for the landfills, for example. Right? So she’s been scaling at a pace you have never seen, right? We have a company that, you know, that connect hero, it’s using utilizing technology in the retirement homes, and connecting them with families. It’s an amazing thing. And these two companies, for example, they’re they’re growing big time. And those are companies that we helped start, you know, so it’s, and we have, you know, work, we just graduated a cohort of 25 companies last week. So, you know, we have about 400 companies we’ve worked with, and 80% of them are still still in business trying to get that capital so they can scale up. So some of those, like, cycling clinic here on it, and a few others are beyond that, right. So it’s very cool. Spot hero, for example, I don’t know if you heard of that, that came out of the incubator. It’s not a Hispanic guy, but it came out of the incubator, I had an opportunity to meet him, it’s a tool you use for to find a parking space, low costs around, okay, Spot hero, so, so as many companies like that,

Brandon Burton 23:21
I like it, I like hearing these these different ideas. And it’s got to be a sense of pride, seeing these people come with an idea and watching it grow and watching them be successful and looking for that additional funding to continue, you know, adding fuel to the fire, so to speak.

Jaime di Paulo 23:37
And he was a good one, there’s a guy whose name is Ricky, like a loud, young Latino guy. His family has a cleaning, Office Cleaning Service, right? So thinking outside the box, this guy actually created the technology in training, so so he can help companies, show people how they can become a cleaning company, so they can have access to cleaning contracts, and the guy is making millions for that app. And so who I wish I would have thought of that. I mean, that. So it says good example, that this guy probably and I want to go pee in offices. But he kept the family business with using technology. Now they’re scaling up big time. So that’s the goal here because you know, in our communities, for example, in Chicago, there’s a famous street car 26th Street, which is basically 99% of those businesses are Hispanic gone. But those are immigrants that came to United States with nothing and they started a business and now what’s happening their sons and daughters are graduating from high school from from college and they don’t want to go and work at that particular restaurant. They want to work in technology downtown. So how you combine both right so that’s been a big issue in our chamber. How are you going to encourage your sons and daughters to take over the business and using technology? This So restaurant guy that has 45 restaurants in the city, Chicago, and the sun just to cover the businesses, what are they doing, they kept the business, same recipes and everything. But adding technology now they’re they’re packaging tacos and put them on grocery stores. So that’s the kind of stuff that we’ve seen. And we’re very excited about keeping the restaurant as it is, but using technology to scale and policing design and data that went to college. Right. So that’s, that’s pretty encouraging. That’s very cool.

Brandon Burton 25:28
Yeah, that is very cool. I like that all these examples that you’re you’re showing, or they’re helping others continue as well. So it’s not it’s not replacing another business is not, you know, harming another industry, but it’s, it’s bringing everybody up to a higher level,

Jaime di Paulo 25:46
leveraging that technology for the own use. Really? Exactly.

Brandon Burton 25:50
Yeah. So is there anything else as far as the data and technology that you want to make sure we hit on before we we move on?

Jaime di Paulo 26:01
No, I think you know, chambers should use technology to I mean, you we have a lot of tools out there that can enhance our chambers to the benefit of the members, right? Databases. I mean, the keys are chambers keeping your database and then the, everything you do is not in writing in them or happen. So that’s how we created the technology we created. So this tool, the Kurama tools, because we have 30 years of data. So now we actually know what a pig, what’s a contract that based on data and notes. Right? So that’s how you do it. Really? Yeah.

Brandon Burton 26:37
Yeah, I guess, to your point, when you’re training an AI model, to do something for you, you have to feed it data to be able to learn what it is you’re looking for, and what it needs to put out. So as long as you can, can collect the data up front and all along the way, every interaction, every touch point should have a data point to it, that you can go back to and be able to plug it in, as you see applicable down in the future.

Jaime di Paulo 27:07
You using key words, for example, saving those key words, it’s, it’s called web scraping. So you can actually take a document and show the document, identify this key words, and then it’s tracks that key words and puts it somewhere else. Now you have a you know, now you chamber instead of being, you know, business incubator, at the small business incubator for businesses, you take out the then you just keep small businesses and incubator and those two words are keywords. So now the tool searches for those key words and legislation. And if any bill comes out or any of those key two key words you identified, it flags it, and now you have a couple of key words you can track and you can lobby or whatever.

Brandon Burton 27:53
That makes a lot of sense. That

Jaime di Paulo 27:55
was easy. Well, it sounds easy to explain, but you need to have the back office doing it.

Brandon Burton 28:00
That’s right. That’s right. And then get that machine up and running. Right. And once it gets going, just just keep feeding it that good data. So as we, as we start to wrap up here, I like asking for chamber listening, who’s wanting to take their chamber up to the next level? What kind of tip or action item might you share with them to consider implementing it their organization?

Jaime di Paulo 28:28
Well, you know, first, you know, as every chamber knows, we don’t we don’t we don’t do miracles, right? You get out of the chamber, when you put into the chamber, you know, it’s like, uh, you know, like, I tell my members, look, this is Mina chamber member is like having a, you know, a gym subscription, right? If you don’t go, you don’t, you’re gonna you’re gonna see results. So, partying from that, we need to, you know, people do not come to you just because you name is the Chamber of Commerce, you need to have parents, right, you need to have programs, classes, events, whatever it is to attract people to the chamber. I think that’s the key. So I call them carrots, right? So you wiggle the carrot, and then they’ll come, but you need to Google it. Good, right. So for example, you need to make sure this, you know, chambers were known for network events. Right? Now, it’s a lot of competition and network events. So we’ve got to start thinking outside of the box and how to do events, very more unique and those events because there’s a lot of groups out there doing, you know, after our event, so think outside the box, get some more carrots, encourage corporations to get involved in actually, you know, encourage those corporations to hire those small companies that you represent. That’s the key. And then for example, what I try to do is, for example, a big corporation comes on board as a corporate member. I actually have like, a piece of paper that encourage them it’s not a legal document or anything Ellison just make him sign something as promised, I will give an opportunity to your members to apply for right something that is good to sell to the small businesses so they can come in and be part of the chamber. Sometimes it’s good sometimes they don’t. Right. I

Brandon Burton 30:16
like that. Just a commitment to Medicare and Yeah,

Jaime di Paulo 30:21
nothing. Nothing about it. It’s just on paper, right?

Brandon Burton 30:25
And of a pledge. Yeah, I like that. But I’d like to ask everyone I have on the show as we look to the future of chambers. And I feel like we’ve been talking about this throughout this whole episode here. But as we look to the future of chambers, how do you see the future of chambers and their purpose going forward?

Jaime di Paulo 30:43
Well, chambers are the key. There, they’re a necessary tool for small businesses to scale, we have the knowledge, we have the connections, and we have the access to well to your clients, or contracts or whatever it may be, your members need. So Chambers of Commerce will never go away. Because of that reason. Everybody needs somebody, you know, you if you’re an accountant, to focus on your accountant, but you don’t know anything about marketing, we can help you do that. We can help you bring clients to you, we can help you promote your business, we can help you do other things. But you need to focus on your business and give us give the chamber an opportunity that can help you business scale. So it’s like an artist, you know, an artist should be should be drawing pictures, right? Not marketing themselves. So you need to, you know, understand that. That’s what chambers do we help you market your business, we help you scale your business, we’ll help you with connections with with financial, financial institutions. Because the number one thing is small businesses. theme is access to capital. One is me, not every bank is suit for anybody. So we have many we have like a smorgasbord of banks, we can actually know what the what’s the right banking institutions for your particular business, right. So that’s the kind of stuff we bring to the table, the chamber, so we never gonna go away. I mean, if you don’t work, you’re gonna go away. But if you add value to those businesses, you’re good,

Brandon Burton 32:15
right? Yeah. Yeah, absolutely. I like that idea of, you know, chamber is necessary for businesses to scale. And if your chamber believes that, if your chamber is promoting that, if you’re putting that out as a carrot to attract the businesses, because you have what it takes for them to scale, then you’re right, chambers are not going to go anywhere, and they become necessary in their communities. Okay, we

Jaime di Paulo 32:40
create example. Right? And then we we chambers do a lot of workshops, right with our members, but we never had something structured certified. Right. So we went to the city colleges, which is a local community college. So I told the chancellor, look, let’s create a curriculum, I certify curriculum and and show people how to run a business properly. We did that. So now we launching you know, we had two cohorts or two classes, it’s a 4040 hour class that teach you about finances, marketing, legal stuff. Inventory. So now you we have a certified program, you can people actually go and get a credit, credit, credit, college credit, take this particular class and you when you graduate, you know how to run a business properly, because we know that businesses get into businesses because many reasons and not necessarily everybody is suitable to run a business. So teaching them how to use to how to run a business properly is the key to the success of your business. And so you utilizing the local colleges, you know, get you all members can become teachers, the classes, it’s a win win for everybody, really. So.

Brandon Burton 33:51
Yeah, absolutely creating those good partnerships. Well, as we wrap up here, I wanted to give you an opportunity to share any contact information for anyone listening who might be interested in anything you talked about and maybe wants to learn more or just connect with you in general, what would be the best way for someone to reach out and connect?

Jaime di Paulo 34:11
Well, our website is, you know, IHCCBusiness.net HCC meaning Illinois Hispanic Chamber of Commerce. My personal email is jaime@ihccbusiness.net. Those two if you Google our chamber, you can find me on LinkedIn Jaime de Paulo. We have I’m very active on LinkedIn. Our website, you can find me there and you can you know, access all the programs or you can email me for sure and then I will get back to you.

Brandon Burton 34:48
That is perfect. And we’ll get all of that in our show notes for this episode as well so people can pull it up and reach out and connect with you. But Jaime, this has been great having you on Chamber Chat Podcast. I appreciate your time. Taking the time and, and telling us you know what you guys are doing in the realm of data and technology and these AI tools, and you guys are just full of exciting stuff going on right now that really, I think will end up being models for other chambers to follow. So thanks for blazing that trail and sharing some of these insights with us today. I really appreciate it.

Jaime di Paulo 35:19
Thank you, Brandon. I appreciate your time and you know, don’t give up.

Brandon Burton 35:23
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