Category: Leadership

How to Manage & Lead Change with Lynn Turner

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Brandon Burton 0:00
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Our guest for this episode is Lynn Turner. Lynn is a formally trained business coach, facilitator and people analyst with over 20 years of experience in her business Core XP Business Solutions. Lynn focuses on the core of business people and culture making them stronger and more agile so they can stay competitive in in today’s ever evolving landscape, and lead and change innovation and create better experiences for all those involved. Lynn believes that without a strong core, the best strategies and action plans will be difficult to execute, wasting precious time, money and energy. Her many years working with a variety of businesses in different industries, and unique approach helps organizations build a stronger foundation so they can not only survive, but thrive in these unusual times. Over the years, Lynn has helped individuals and businesses gain clarity about their intentions to make informed decisions so they can achieve their goals and vision for life and business. During this time, she’s helped businesses and boards facilitate strategic planning and thinking sessions innovation and change management and initiatives and high performing teams, utilizing her certifications within virtual collaborations, graphic facilitations, the Lego series, play methodology and innovation management and strategy through wobi, which is world of business ideas, and the Kellogg School of Management, certified in a variety of assessment Tools. Lynn recently attained her Master Practitioner certification with Agile brain, a revolutionary new assessment based on neuroscience that transcends traditional cognitive measurements. Lynn also volunteers her time in a variety of workforce and entrepreneurial development initiatives across the Commonwealth that focus on underrepresented populations, including women bipoc and neurodivergence. But Lynn, I am excited to have you with us today here on Chamber Chat Podcast. I’d love to give you a moment to say hello to all the Chamber Champions who are out there listening, and to share something interesting about yourself so we can all get to know you a little better.

Lynn Turner 3:19
Sure, I’m really excited for this opportunity and to get a chance to talk with you, Brandon, as well as your chamber champions, this is really exciting. I know a few individuals that have been on your podcast and and really admire the work that you do. As far as something interesting, I guess I’ll, I’ll share what we were talking about a little bit earlier. So for anyone, if you’re Googling my name, you might want to try Lynn Whitney Turner, because there is, there are lots of other Lynn Turners, and one out there actually happens to be a mass murderer. So I just want to clarify that I am not that person. So that’s why I use Lynn Whitney Turner, and

Brandon Burton 4:07
this is why we have middle names, right? So you could differentiate ourselves.

Lynn Turner 4:11
Absolutely, absolutely.

Brandon Burton 4:16
Oh man, I can imagine the confusion.

Lynn Turner 4:18
Yes, yes. And I, and I did, as I mentioned to you, I did have somebody that googled my name and said what they found. And I said, Yes, don’t drink the Kool Aid. So yeah, yes, actually, that person did pass away while in prison. So

Brandon Burton 4:35
okay, so no chance of them being confused with you now. So, yes,

Lynn Turner 4:39
exactly. Okay,

Brandon Burton 4:41
well, I know I, I touched on a little bit with your bio, but tell us a little bit about your business and kind of what your focus is, especially as it has to do with when you work with chambers. But what, what is core XP business solutions and and your focus and kind of center of work? Yeah.

Lynn Turner 4:59
Yeah, yeah. So the name core actually came out of something of my my past life, once upon a time, I was a certified aerobics instructor and personal trainer, and that has stayed with me and has really influenced my approach to the current body of work that I’m using, as well as it was influential in the name of my business. You know, with our bodies, I look at business very similar to our bodies, right? And developing a strong core helps us to become stronger and more agile, and that is really, in my opinion, what is needed in today’s landscape. I talk a lot with businesses about VUCA, and VUCA, if you’re not familiar with it, it’s a term that actually came out of the military back at the end of the Cold War, of of all things, and our military, at that point, with the dismantling of Russia, became very concerned with who is our enemy. And then if you kind of fast forward from there to 911 that was really one of the things that they were really scared about. And VUCA stands for volatility, uncertainty, complexity and ambiguity. And it’s now been adopted by the business world. Because I think many people can when they hear of VUCA, they’re like, yeah, that really explains where we’re at in the current landscape. And it’s not really necessarily about change. It’s really more about the pace of the change our world is speeding up faster and faster, and it’s really about helping individuals and organizations stay ahead of that change, if possible, so not just managing the change, but hopefully leading the change. Yeah,

Brandon Burton 7:09
well, that’s a perfect segue into what our topic for our conversation will be to stay is around managing and leading change, specifically in a Bucha world, you know, where there is so much change and volatility and uncertainty and ambiguity, how do we approach this and how do we move through it? So I’m excited to dive in much deeper on this topic. As soon as we get back from this quick break.

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All right, Lynn, we are back. So right before the break, you I think you did a really good job in introducing, kind of what our topic is for our discussion today, on managing and leading change. And I know whenever change is introduced, there’s always that pushback. You know, there’s always people in the group, whether it’s in a board or maybe it’s the lead of the organization that pushes back on the change, maybe it starts at the very top. So as you work with organizations on leading and managing through change, what’s your approach to try to help get everyone on board that? You know, change is a necessity. Change is always happening, whether you want it to happen or not, and especially in today’s world, in the Bucha kind of world, what? What’s your approach to help get their mind wrapped around it? Absolutely.

Lynn Turner 10:13
And you, you brought up some really good distinctions, right? So, change, everybody has a re a response to that word change. In fact, we, in working with an organization on a change initiative. The owner of the company was was pretty resistant, and it really even came down to language. We ended up changing the word change. And instead of calling it change, we called it continuous improvement, because that’s really what we’re looking to do through change. Most leaders and there is a distinction too, between leading change, you know, because if we’re leading change, we want, we’re we’ve already embraced it, and therefore we’re ready to move forward. But to your point earlier, for some of us, it’s being imposed upon us, and typically in those situations, we do push back. Each of us has a different propensity for change, especially if it’s being imposed upon us. And I’ve really been digging down deeper into this. As you mentioned earlier, when you were introducing me, I am a people analyst, which is basically just a fancy way of saying, I utilize a lot of different assessments. And over the past 20 years, I mean, there’s tons of assessments out there, and I follow a lot of Peter Drucker’s work, and Peter Drucker is of the belief. And Peter Drucker is a business management guru who was ahead of his time. He passed away several years ago, but he really was ahead of his time. And one of his quotes is you can’t manage what you don’t measure. So that’s really where the assessments play a role, because if you can measure something, now you can better manage it. And if you’re looking at individuals, we each have a different style, whether you’re using Myers, Briggs, predictive index, I happen to utilize disc each of us has a different style, and each of those styles respond differently to change. So it’s really too about understanding, having that self awareness about how we how we deal with change, but also understanding how others may deal with change.

Brandon Burton 13:04
Yeah, and I like the approach of changing the word change. And I thought that before, before you even said that, that I wonder if there’s a better term we can use for the word change, because there is such resistance, it can be a scary word to hear. Hey, we’re going to change this. There’s a safety in insecurity and in doing what you know has been working, right? So when you change it, there’s, there’s some insecurity that comes with that, but to look at it as continuous improvement, say, Yeah, I think we can all get on board with that, right?

Lynn Turner 13:37
Yeah, exactly, exactly.

Brandon Burton 13:41
So as we talk about leading and managing change, I assume you’re working with the leaders of these businesses and organizations to kind of get their head wrapped around how to communicate this to their their staff, or to their organization, to their members, so they’re whatever the organization is that you’re working with, so talk to us a little bit about that. But how you help them manage that that change or lead through that continuous improvement? Sure,

Lynn Turner 14:14
yeah, and it’s about understanding what is the purpose of the change. You know, why is it necessary? So it really is important to set context for for change. Is it change for the sake of change? If so, you know, people may not feel comfortable in doing that, because, as I mentioned earlier, we each have a different propensity for change. You know, some people really enjoy changing things up. Other people like things a little smoother and steadier. And there has been work done by Gallup where they looked at what are followers looking. From their leaders, and they’re looking for four key things when they’ve surveyed followers, and this can be, you know, they’ve done it for large groups, and they’ve been doing this study for many, many years, but four common themes seem to come up. One of them is trust. The followers want to trust in their leadership and trust in their decisions in the direction that they’re going. They’re looking for stability. They are looking for that stability to know that things are going to be okay. They’re also looking for compassion. They want their leaders to kind of understand where they’re coming from and understand what they’re going through in their day to day, and how this change may impact them. And then they’re also looking for hope. And hope is about what is that? Direct. Where are we going? Give me, you know, is it a positive? You know, give me something to hope for, something bigger than myself. So it is about understanding how followers what they’re looking for, before you’re in, helping to set that context about the change and how does it address each of those areas?

Brandon Burton 16:25
I like that. And I imagine followers in different organizations might have maybe different values slightly, but it’s going to stick, you know, pretty traditionally, I would think with these four categories that you talked about as a as a leader, do you need to adopt or really focus on all four categories? Or if you’re really good at two or three, can you lean into those and maybe carry through maybe a weaker category that your followers are looking at?

Lynn Turner 16:57
Yeah, and I think you have to one understand, you know, the type of leader that you are, right? We’re not. There isn’t one set type of leader, right? And and, you know, part of understanding VUCA too, is things are moving so fast that it’s going to require a village. It takes a team so understanding our own strengths as leaders, but also understanding maybe where we don’t have strengths, and building our team accordingly, so that you can hit each of those aspects with regards to what followers are looking for from leaders. And you know, one of the things that I do talk with leaders about, there was a term that I came across, I think it’s from the book talent IQ, and they talk about strategic humility. So strategic humility is knowing, at least having an idea of where you want to go, having that, you know, that strategic purview, if you will, but having the humility to say, You know what, I’m not exactly sure how to get there, and I’m willing to ask for help. So that’s also to the the name of my company is core XP that so I explained core. Core is really about developing that core. And for me, the core of your business is your people and your culture and and that’s what drives your business, that’s at the heart of your business. And everything radiates out from there. It radiates out into how you do, what you do, your internal operations, systems and processes, into your products and services. And that’s what interfaces with your customers and creates your brand image. So that’s the core. And then then two, the core for individuals is emotions. We are driven by our emotions. Those are at our core and their subconscious, and they influence our mindset, in our attitudes, which also influence our behaviors. And our behaviors are what people see. So it’s really about understanding our core and I’ll explain a little bit more about that, but that XP process is actually a process that an intellectual property that I’m developing, and it really about creating an innovative culture and mindset for individuals and organizations, and it’s really steeped in curiosity. So it is about helping you know leaders to be to really lead with curiosity, because we can. Have all the answers. It’s impossible today, in today’s Bucha world,

Brandon Burton 20:03
right? And that, if you’re looking for answers within your followers too, that that creates more buy in and and appreciation of them, seeing feeling valued and noticed by their leader, looking to them to help with that continuous improvement.

Lynn Turner 20:20
Absolutely, yeah.

Brandon Burton 20:23
Okay, so talk to us a little bit more about the core. You said, come back to that and more on that focus. Yeah,

Lynn Turner 20:30
yeah, yeah. So I mentioned earlier about the assessments, and as I had mentioned to you, I utilize disc. Disk is about behaviors. So that’s kind of in that outer ring of the individual, if you will. Because we’re onions, right? Individuals, people, humans are very complicated. We are very complicated, but our behaviors are what people see, our motivators. And you did talk about kind of those motivators. That’s another layer of us, and that’s not seen. That’s why we do what we do. Behaviors are how we do what we do, but motivators are why we do what we do, and we’re each motivated by different things. So you kind of talked about that, that you know, understanding what motivates people can help them work through the change, if you will, or that continuous improvement, but really at the core of individuals, our emotions, and that has not been an area that we’ve really been able to measure up until recently, I recently, as you shared earlier, I’ve become a Master Practitioner with a very new tool. It’s it’s revolutionary, called Agile brain. It’s based in neuroscience. It’s literally taken 125 years of motivational theory and condensed it into a pretty simplistic, not simple, but simplistic model that we are really finding incredible for for one understanding unmet needs and motivators for individuals, and also for understanding culture within an organization, because a lot of times, traditional surveys are asking you to think about how you feel, and there’s A lot of flaws in that which I can explain.

Brandon Burton 22:43
Yeah, that’s that’s fascinating, the the flaws in thinking about how you feel. And I, I’m guessing, there’s some maybe expectations that maybe you shouldn’t feel this way or shouldn’t feel. So if you give too much thought into it, it’s like, well, what’s the expectation on what I should feel, and it’s kind of skewing. Is that kind of the along the right paths of,

Lynn Turner 23:07
Oh yeah, yeah, you’ve kind of nailed it. So, you know, a lot of organizations do employee satisfaction surveys, or with chambers are doing member surveys, right? And the challenge becomes, we’re asking people to think about how they feel, and they may not share. So there’s reasons that the answers you get may not be accurate. One is, people may be trying to please, so they’re going to kind of share that very rosy picture of things because they’re trying to please others. Others may not be completely honest because they may not feel safe sharing. But the other piece of it is through the neuroscience, our emotions come from the limbic part of our brain, and in that limbic part of our brain we have no language. So I don’t know Brandon for you, but I know for myself, there have been times where I don’t even know how to explain how I’m feeling, and it’s because it’s wrapped up in that limbic part of the brain, and it’s really not until it gets to the nearer cortex, the frontal lobe, until we’re able to make sense of it and put language to it, because that’s the rational side of our brain.

Brandon Burton 24:35
That’s fascinating. I think, going back to the VUCA world, where we’ve got so many, you know, volatility and uncertainty and complexity and ambiguity. There used to be a time where maybe it, maybe it’s more of a perception than a reality, but people seem to be pretty cookie cutter, right? Like you go to school, you get a. A job. You work there your whole life, until you retire, and then you move on, and once you start introducing feelings into this like, as a leader, what are you supposed to do with somebody’s feelings? And that’s a whole nother discussion, I think, to be able to train and help leaders understand how to deal with the feelings and then motivate. Because even though even the motive, the motives that people have for why they do what they do, being based on feelings, not everybody has the same motives for showing up to work and doing their task and what it just kind of opens a can of worms that it’s a can that needed to be open. So how do you work with the leaders on this, on on managing that that change,

Lynn Turner 25:44
you brought up a few, a few different things that that are pretty interesting. So first of all, I do have to forewarn individuals with regards to Agile brain. If you’re looking to do culture work for your organization, it is not for the faint of heart. So I forewarn leaders, do not go down this path unless you are really want to know right? Don’t ask the question unless you really want to know the answer. So first of all, otherwise, I don’t recommend it, and unless you plan to do something with that information. So it’s not just about, okay, now we know whatever you gotta do something with the information, but it can be, it can be, it can be scary, right? Because maybe you weren’t ready to hear this information, but the, you know, there’s a I’ve had the opportunity to see Alan Mulally speak. Alan Mulally was the former CEO for Boeing many, many years ago, and then he got he started working with Ford, and that was during the the financial crisis, and they were the only one. They were the only car company at that time that did not take the bailout. But Alan Mulally had a belief that you can’t manage a secret, so you really have to get to the heart of things if you’re really going to solve the challenge or the problem or come up with solutions. So agile brain really helps you identify specific areas that may need some assistance. And sometimes it’s just communication. It’s not it and sometimes it’s things that the company offers, but employees aren’t aware of it, so having this information just helps you build a stronger core, if you will, of of people and culture.

Brandon Burton 27:52
Yeah, I like that coming back to the core. So how does agile brain? How does it work? Is this like, do you put on, like a helmet? Is it a test? What does it look like to actually perform this neuroscience on these followers and organizations?

Lynn Turner 28:09
Yeah, yeah. No, no helmet required, unless maybe for afterwards, when we do debris, but no helmet required for that. It’s actually, it’s really quick, and that’s part of the neuroscience. We don’t want people to have time to think. The other thing is, it’s image based, so it’s not no text. There is a prompt, and we can customize the prompt to help, you know, really get at what you’re trying to get at for the organization. So if it’s around culture, we would do it about how people feel about working at XYZ. And then basically, these pictures flash in front of you, and it takes three minutes, and you’re done, and it will show what we would call activation in different areas. So it’s basically broken down into four domains of self, which is that world within us, material, which is the external world of work and play, social, which is about our relationships and our connections, and then spiritual, which is about higher ideals and principles. And then there are three levels. There’s the foundational level, which is about being, there’s the experiential level, which is about doing, and then there’s the aspirational level, which is about having. So as you can see, I mean, Maslow’s is probably the most widely known or understood. So it does pull from Maslow, as well as a host of other bodies of work, but those are kind of the four, four domains and three levels that it looks at.

Brandon Burton 29:54
Okay. Well, that helps, because I’m picturing like nodes and stuff hooked up to your brand, and I. Like in the laboratory, all sorts of stuff. No, that that makes sense. So I’d like to ask, as I have people on the show for those listening, they’re typically leaders of chambers of commerce. For these chamber leaders who are looking to elevate their chamber to the next level, what kind of tip or action item might you share with them, especially as it relates to managing and leading change? Yeah, so

Lynn Turner 30:29
with leading change, so, you know, we talked about VUCA, and we kind of talked about that ominous volatility, uncertainty, complexity and ambiguity, there is a flip side. So the way to fight VUCA is with VUCA. So it is about developing a vision. It is about having understanding of both your internal and your external worlds, and then also having clarity and creating clarity for those inside your organization as well as those outside your organization, and then building in agility. So these all need to be built into your organization, into your culture. But one of the biggest things that I talk to leaders about is shifting that mindset, because I think a lot of leaders felt that they need to be experts, and there’s a lot of pressure to be experts, and as I think you need experts within your organization, but as you rise through The ladder and become a leader. It’s more about being an explorer and leading with curiosity. So that’s kind of the shift that I’m I’m suggesting to leaders of all kinds, whether chambers, business world leaders even, is to really shift into curiosity. And one of the reasons, when we are genuinely curious, we are void of judgment. So if we’re void of judgment and we have that curiosity, we’re able to make better decisions, because sometimes we want to get we’re too attached to certain things and improving our expertise, if you will. And that can sometimes narrow the aperture, and in today’s world, we really need to widen that aperture.

Brandon Burton 32:37
I like that. I love the idea of curiosities and void of judgment and, and I think it may be helpful even to put that out there as you ask questions and try to learn more, to say, look, this is coming from a place of curiosity, so there is no judgment attached to it. I want to learn more about you and what motivates you and and being able to create the flip side of VOCA, the vision understanding clarity and agility. I love that. So Lynn, as we look to the future of chambers of commerce, how would you, from your perspective, how would you look at the future of chambers and their purpose going forward?

Lynn Turner 33:19
It’s an important question, right? And I have been working with several different chambers, and, you know, I think it does. I’ll go back to Peter Drucker. He’s got a slew of different quotes that just really resonate. He really was ahead of his time, but he asks a couple questions, What business are you in, and what business do you want to be in, or what business will you be in for the future? And depending on how you define yourself, can tell you a lot, because if we say we’re a buggy whip company. Well, then I if we’re locked into that, that may not give us an opportunity for future growth and expansion if we’re so attached to being that buggy whip company. So I think it is about really taking a good hard look at who you are, what you do, and why you do it. What is that purpose? What is that vision? And for chambers, it is a difficult time. You know, there’s a lots of different competition out there. And I mean, where I am, we have, we have chambers in every town, if you will. So there’s a lot of competition, and the businesses only have so much, you know, so many resources as far as time, money, energy. So where do they? Want to best spend that time, money, energy. So I think it’s really about also asking yourself, what problem are you trying to solve for your your members, your community, whatever it is.

Brandon Burton 35:12
Yeah, absolutely. I love that. This has been a fun, interesting conversation. Admittedly, it’s gone some directions I did not expect. So this is hopefully listeners as well, are taking some notes and thinking of different perspectives, different angles that they can take with their their followers, with their members, with their staff, their board, to be able to figure out what, what are the emotional aspect that drives their motives to their actions, that they see to further drive engagement and participation. So I appreciate the perspective you brought your expertise and ability to speak so clearly to this topic. I did want to give you an opportunity, Lynn, to share any contact information for listeners who may want to reach out and learn more or figure out more about your work. What would be the best way for them to reach out and connect with you?

Lynn Turner 36:13
I’m sure they can email me at lynn@corebusinessxp.com and that is the web website as well, corebusinessxp.com so either way is, is fine. And you know, the biggest two thing too, I would say, for chambers too, is getting that alignment with you, with your board, making sure everybody’s on the same page and has the same understanding of language, too.

Brandon Burton 36:47
Yes, I think that’s key. Well, I will get this in our show notes for this episode so people can can find you there. But again, Lynn, this has been a fun and a fun conversation. I’ve learned a lot, and I’m sure as I go back and re listen to this episode of I’m going to pick up some other things too that kind of sink in the second time around. So I appreciate it, and I see a lot of application into the chamber world. So thank you so much for being with us today.

Lynn Turner 37:15
Yeah, thank you. Thank you. I really appreciate it. Brandon, it was great conversation with you.

Brandon Burton 37:20
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Paducah Chamber-2024 Chamber of the Year Finalist with Sandra Wilson

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Brandon Burton 0:00
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You’re joining us for a special episode in our 2024 chamber of the year final the series and our guests for this episode is Sandra Wilson. Sandra is the president and CEO of the Paducah Area Chamber of Commerce. She joined the chamber in 2013 and before that she was a community volunteer she was the first woman to serve as Chairman of the Board for the Paducah Area Chamber of Commerce in 1996 and later also as the first woman chair of the greater Paducah Economic Development Board. on a statewide level, she served as chairman of the Kentucky Manufacturers Association and on the board of the Kentucky Chamber of Commerce and leadership, Kentucky. She is a past board member of ACCE and serves on the local chamber advisory board for the Kentucky Chamber of Commerce and as chair of the board for the Carson center Performing Arts Center in Paducah. She is the ambassador for Kentucky for the Association of leadership programs. She’s a graduate of Murray State University and leadership Kentucky and leadership Paducah and 2017 that Paducah chamber was named as chamber the year and category two from ACC. They’re also a five star accredited chamber by the US Chamber of Commerce. Sandra holds IMF IOM certification from the US Chamber of Commerce that Sandra, it’s great to have you back with us on chamber chat podcast. It’s always good to get past guests back on the show. But first congratulations to you and your team for being selected as a chamber the year finalist again, what an accomplishment. wanted to give you a chance to say hello to all the listeners and to share something interesting about yourself so we can all get to know you a little better. Oh

Sandra Wilson 2:53
my goodness, Brandon. Well, thank you so much for hosting us and inviting me to be on the show today. I consider it quite an honor. And we are thrilled to be a finalist in 2024 is chamber of the year in Category Two. And we know who the other chambers are. And we look forward to seeing them at the ACC conference and visiting with them we have in the past about sharing ideas. And I think that’s really what chambers are so good at is doing is sharing ideas of what’s working in each other’s community so we can all be the best that we can possibly be for our community.

Brandon Burton 3:29
Absolutely, yes, that category two really all the categories this year, great chambers, great programs, but I’m looking at category two specifically I know them as well. And it’s a good competition all around. So whoever whoever wins, this is going to earn it for sure.

Sandra Wilson 3:48
Not be in the category with with those other chambers. So we’re thrilled about it. Absolutely.

Brandon Burton 3:54
Well tell us a little bit about the Paducah chamber Puducherry chamber and give us some perspective of the size of the chamber staff budget scope of work just to kind of prepare us for our discussion today.

Sandra Wilson 4:06
We are located in Paducah, Kentucky, and it’s in the western part of the state of Kentucky. So it’s kind of a rural area. But we’re located in the city of the rural part of Western Kentucky. And we’re the largest chamber in this area. We’re about 950 members always pushing to get to 1000 staying around that area. We have been at five staff members until the first of June, and the first of June we finally had the opportunity to hire a sixth employee. We during the last couple of years we raised money to launch a leadership center within our chamber of commerce. So we’ve hired a full time Executive Director for that will be staffing that portion of our chamber and he started June 1 So it’s been different having six here. You know you are so excited to be able to grow and add more staff. We are truly the chamber. We, our economic development involvement is we own our building we just bought our building within the last year and the greater paddock economic development is here with us are one of our tenants, we work very closely with them and helping to recruit economic development, but we’re the chamber and we work on behalf of our community, we lead the advocacy efforts for our region. We’re a hub for small business development programs. We’re the convener of people, and we love that part. You know, what we really want to do is just continually work to improve this community. So others that come here and visit it love it as much as we do. Yeah,

Brandon Burton 5:45
absolutely. What a great time to join the chamber though for the new staff member I mean, chamber the year year. Yeah. Great timing. So on these chamber, the or finalist episodes, I’d like to spend the majority of our time discussing the two programs of work that you guys submitted on your chamber the your application. I think there’s a lot there that other chambers listening can learn from and be able to scale and adapt and maybe apply something similar into their communities. So we’ll focus the majority of our time on those programs as soon as they get back from this quick break.

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All right, Sandra, we are back. As I mentioned before the break, we’re going to focus on the two programs that are submitted on your chamber the your application. If you would please introduce the first program that you’d like to address this today on the show and we’ll we’ll dive into the details of that. As

Sandra Wilson 8:34
a chamber, I think it’s really important that you look at what is going on in your community and what is the most important program or something that you need to take on and tackle. And for us, it it’s been the Department of Energy site here in Paducah for many years. But it took a different perspective in the last year and a half that planet that they announced in 2013, that they were ceasing operations and they would go into in what’s called Legacy environmental management. It was for cleanup of the site, which meant that they were still going to be there for probably 30 to 40 years and the cleanup stage. But it’s it’s it’s different than when it was operating. And it was different for us is the way our community needed to embrace the Department of Energy. So we’ve been in that phase for over 10 years now. And it became apparent to us because we got very involved with the national trade association for communities that have a department of energy side that’s in this phase of cleaning up the energy communities Alliance. We started going to their meetings we started meeting you know, we’ve always been the advocacy organization asking for money, but we for the for the cleanup, but we started looking at what needs to be done out there for the future. We really didn’t have a plan for beyond the cleanup phase, where there’s all He’s an opportunity for development, economic development to continue. So we applied for a grant with the Department of Energy to lead the reindustrialization study for that site to really map out the future. Because there there could be a parallel path for this site, you can have it the cleanup going on that we’re working with. Now, again, on our advocacy side, for the chamber, we are fighting for funding, we have fight for long term contracts, those are the things that we’re representing there. On the second side of it, the parallel path would be looking at how we could get the land that has been dedicated and managed, owned by the department of energy transferred back to our community so that we can begin to do economic development project programs, and overall economic development of that site. So we developed a grant request, and we’re very successful to get that, and we’ll be we’re about a year into it now. And we’ll be, you know, continuing throughout the next six months to a year as well on it. So with that, I have grant request had some major pillars in it, of course, that we have to accomplish. And one of those is identifying and infrastructure needs for the land that would be transferred back to the community. And in step one of that also, you had to, we had to do the official formal request from our community, for the very first parcel of land to be transferred back to the community. So that has been accomplished. And so now we’re looking at what the infrastructures would would need water, roads, all of that, to make that successful economic development. And then we will continue with working on prospects for economic development. We’ve been to national conferences to meet with companies that are interested in locating and an economic in a on a Department of Energy site, a joint adjacent to it or nearby. We’re working on the workforce. And really, we’re looking on the workforce for now and for the future. So that’s part of our grant that is really overlapping from what’s happening now, and going into the future for the next few years. And so those were the main things, those were really a little bit unusual for our chamber, because we’re not the economic development organization for our community. But we work with economic development very closely. And we have worked with the Department of Energy for so many years that we know knew that they have a lot of trust in our chamber, that we have built a relationship with them for the year. So they knew that we would take this very seriously, and that we would make sure it’s done correctly.

Brandon Burton 12:50
So what kinds of things were maybe surprising as you went through the study of trying to revitalize this this land? Was there anything that came to light that you didn’t expect? That has kind of course the direction that you’re going going forward?

Sandra Wilson 13:07
I think that identifying the companies that might be interested to come here has been a very interesting prospect. I mean, that we can’t really, you know, we’ve just put in the land transfer request, that had to be step number one, and then we’ll begin to identify who would be interested in coming here. So there’s a lot of opportunity there. The Department of Energy has a lot of funding available for developing new companies. But there’s just a lot of things that will come to light as we begin to work through this process. Yeah.

Brandon Burton 13:43
All right. Is there any specific industry or type of business you feel like would be an ideal candidate for what’s on a former Department of Energy? Land?

Sandra Wilson 13:56
There are some that are, you know, Newt, mislaid, nuclear clean energy potential for small modular reactor. I mean, right now we’re identifying those and who would consider coming here, there are a lot of fuel fabrication, a lot of things that are really all new to us, as a as a chamber, that we’ve been able to work with the context that we built through the many years that we’ve been involved with the Department of Energy to know who they may be. Right.

Brandon Burton 14:24
Now, as I think of a chamber of the year finalists, we’re really looking at chambers that are making a big impact on their community. And what you guys are focused on here with this Department of Energy land, this can be a huge impact to the economy in the Paducah area and just a change of atmosphere, if you will, depending on how that goes forward. So that I see it being a huge impact in the community.

Sandra Wilson 14:51
Thank you. I would totally agree. The decisions we are making today and that we are identifying for the future really are Setting our community for the futures for the next 50 years and beyond. Because it’s so critical that we diversify our economy here, we’ve had this Department of Energy site for 60, year of 5060 years, it was a great employer of some of the best jobs in our community they employed, you know, way over 1000, they still do that. But it’s sometimes in the peaks, I’ve been up to 1800 to 2000. And so we became really reliant on that, because we had such a good base. But it’s important that we continue to diversify all of that economy, you know, community, our size is not a huge geographical large county. So that is available land that we need to focus on for economic development for the future. We have said before, when we’re meeting with the Department of Energy, we don’t want to be part of just their history, we want to be a part of their future. And they have a lot of programs available for working with companies that are looking at the future of energy projects. Our state, for example, we had in our advocacy efforts for 2024, with the state priorities was all quite a bit about nuclear energy. And our state has a set aside, established a new nuclear Working Group advisory board that will be run out of the University of Kentucky. And you know, there’s identifying criteria for making a community nuclear ready. Prior to that our community had already identified and adopted resolutions by our city government or county government, our chamber economic development, our community reuse organization, stating that we are a community that’s a nuclear ready. And by that we meant we’ve been in this arena for many years. We understand it, we know it, our workforce knows that we’re ready to go for the next step. Yeah,

Brandon Burton 16:59
that’s great. I love what you said about, you don’t want to just be a part of the their history but a part of the future as well. So I love being forward thinking like that.

Sandra Wilson 17:11
Girl is also I’ll just say what he’s really put me out in the and a national forefront. I was able to speak at a waste management symposium earlier this year, and was on a panel out there where there were I think 3000 People now wasn’t I didn’t speak to that hopeful 3000, I spoke to a panel on a panel specific about cleanup of the Department of Energy side. But it’s put me in a whole new arena, really talking about that. And I also believe that it is putting a chamber chambers of commerce across the country in a new arena where you can show that you adjust to what your community needs are. And we saw this as a really strong need, we embraced it, we were very intentional on how we would move forward with it. And we are going to deliver the best product that we can for the Ark communities path forward, we call it our roadmap for the community. So that whoever picks it up at the end, knows exactly the next steps for land transfer, who the economic development prospects are and has their contacts and knows what they would want for infrastructure needs, and knows what the workforce would need to be. So we’re preparing our future at the community now.

Brandon Burton 18:24
That’s great. I love it. Love it, love it. Let’s shift gears a little bit into the second program that was submitted on your chamber that your application if you introduce that to us and kind of the the origins and how that’s developed?

Sandra Wilson 18:40
Well, when I talk about economic development, let me just say we say it all the time, it happens one job at a time. It’s great when you have a new company come in and they’re announcing three to 400 500. But you have so many small businesses in Riyadh in reality Chamber of Commerce for us. In located where we are about three fourths of our members are considered small businesses. And they’re reliant on the big employers around them for the customers and the you know, the activity that comes in for them. But they are truly what we would call economic development at its finest. And we have a small business cohort that had we’ve graduated 40 from the program, and we see how they are hiring people. They’re expanding. They’re opening new locations, because of the programs that they have seen that can be successful, how they can develop it and make their own business more successful through what they’ve learned in our small business cohort. We have all kinds of seminars, we have a lot of programs that go on, we get calls every day that how do you do a business plan? How do you get this will central to that was our Small Business Development Center, that chamber How does it how’s that but we have a close relationship in partnership with the Small Business Development Center. The way it is structured in our state is that I have to raise it was it was restricted a little bit where they had to raise the funding locally to keep their program open. When you have somebody that’s supposed to be advising small business owners, I didn’t, we didn’t want them to have to spend their time or decided that the chamber. And we went out in the community and the chamber, first of all, and we went to our economic development, our city or county and our local organizations that benefit from having small business development center in our community. And we were able to raise the money that was needed to keep that program open, and that you’re continuing to be a close partner with us and everything that we do for our small businesses.

Brandon Burton 20:42
So I’m curious and how you went about raising the money? Was it about just getting the the awareness out about what the need was and making strategic assets? or was there some kind of event or fundraiser I had, what was the approach to raising those funds?

Sandra Wilson 20:57
First of all, our Small Business Development Center had a great track record, so they could show the businesses that they had helped, and what it involved with jobs and with economic development, so when you go and talk to a mayor, or a county judge, and you can show them the benefits and the success that they’ve been having, it really helps a lot. And we were able to do that. So it was strategic meetings, and some phone calls. But we did go to a lot of meetings in person. Most all of them were our members, primarily, we did work with an adjoining county that had some support as well. But we that adjoining county is a really close partner with our own county and with our chamber, they’ve been very involved with us through the years. So we had built those relationships. I think everyone that we asked knew that they could trust us as well, that we wouldn’t be behind it if we didn’t know that it was going to be a very successful program. And so that that’s what we did, we mostly, I would say, went one on one with meetings. But it wasn’t an impossible sale, where it was more of an education. And let’s face it, everything at the end comes down to making the ask closing the deal. Yeah.

Brandon Burton 22:11
So you didn’t do like a mass email and say we’re collecting funds, it was more strategic and gave some intention behind that. So

Sandra Wilson 22:22
we knew that their partners were, we knew who the small businesses that they were helping with we’re working with, we knew that overall, no one wanted to lose this resource that we had in our community. I think that was someone the number one thing that we all agreed on. It was just how do we make sure that we’re doing the steps that we need to and somebody has to take the lead on anything that you’re going to do somebody has to take the lead to make sure that it’s being done, it’s being done in a timely way it’s being reported, and that everything that needs to be done, when you’re looking at raising funds, it was going to the University of Kentucky, that everything that needed to be done was was completed the way it should be. So

Brandon Burton 23:09
the raising of the funds, is that something that needs to be done on an annual basis for the Small Business Development Center? Or is it what what kind of interval was that where they need to come up with the funds to justify staying open, we

Sandra Wilson 23:21
set it up on a two year program. So everyone committed for two years, I believe at the end of those two years, we will not have any trouble continuing with that, because he’s already met his goals for the year right now, you know, and halfway through the year, so he’s got the rest of the year to continue. You know, just to build up on that and expand, the one thing that he probably needed to do was be able to expand into other counties. A lot of his work was being done in our immediate area in Paducah and the immediate surrounding area. But there are other counties in our community that did step in our West Kentucky Regional Chamber Alliance stepped in and made a nice contribution to help with them. And they represent 14 counties in West Kentucky. So it was a really opportunity to allow that this service to be expanded as well. Yeah,

Brandon Burton 24:11
that’s fantastic. Guys came in as heroes.

Sandra Wilson 24:17
So I mean, in regionalism, and how important it is that if our county is successful, it’s overflowing into other counties. And if our county next door has businesses opening, more than likely, you know, we’re going to benefit from that in some way. And so, really show the strength I think of working together to support something in your region that you know, is vital and is very important. What was

Brandon Burton 24:43
key to me is how you mentioned it was it was all built upon the relationships that you guys have built over the years to be able to go make those asked to make those connections build lean upon the county next door and to be able to make this happen and it is it’s what chambers do is convening and building those relationships and That’s, uh, you guys executed well on that. So great job.

Sandra Wilson 25:06
It was really fun, because it actually put us out in the community back meeting with our own members. But you know, the underlying factor too is we knew we really couldn’t continue our own small business development programs that we have, if we didn’t have that resource. It was critical for us to have that. So it was a great investment. Right? And resources.

Brandon Burton 25:29
Yes, yeah. So I like asking, especially as we have you on as a chamber, the year finalist for chambers that are out there listening, what kind of tip or action item might you share for a listener who’s interested in taking their chamber up to the next level?

Sandra Wilson 25:46
There are a lot of resources out there that are very beneficial. And I think you have to look at your own region to see how what what’s needed the most. And then you can rely on for us, we rely on our State Chamber, the Kentucky Chamber of Commerce a lot. I mean, we work very closely with them, we rely on the US Chamber of Commerce and rely on them. And as a chamber executive, we rely on the association of Chamber of Commerce executives, there are great resources available, that if you just will take the time, that and I’m just gonna say that’s probably some of the hardest thing. That’s the hardest that you have to find. Because as a chamber, executive, chamber staff person, you’re managing a lot of different tasks, no day is ever the same. No crisis is ever the same. No, celebration is ever the same. And so you have to really be always looking to see what someone else is doing. And then the chamber rolled, you know, I think we call it r&d, the RIP and duplicate, and you make it your own. And we do that, and we’re honored when another chamber does that from something that we’re doing, if they can, if we can help them to be more successful. That’s awesome. Because that’s helping more communities to be successful, more Chambers of Commerce. So identify what’s needed in your community, look around and see how you what would be the best organization for you to align yourself with on any particular issue. And it’s going to vary from issue to issue.

Brandon Burton 27:21
I love that fact, as I introduce what chamber chat podcast is all about to chamber professionals, I’ll use the tagline that it’s your weekly r&d resource, right? So every week, you get new ideas that you can rip off and duplicate. So I love that learning from others. As we look to the future of chambers, how do you see the future chambers and their purpose going forward?

Sandra Wilson 27:47
I’m gonna go back to the fact that I think you have to identify what’s important in your community, because we’re all different. We all have different challenges and different opportunities, and identify what is going to help your community and I didn’t make a determination if that’s something your chamber should be the lead on, should maybe be the second play the second roll in and pushing, sometimes you just have to push, who maybe it’s a different organization, or maybe it’s the government that should be in the lead, and you’re the one pushing them to help them better understand that there are times that you’re going to need to be in the lead and look to others to help you with that. But you’re going to have to stay relevant in your own community.

Brandon Burton 28:32
I like that trying to figure out what your role should be and what your community needs. I think a lot of chambers just jumped to the conclusion oh, we need to be the lead. And like he said, oftentimes be in that second role and helping to push it along and explain why things are important is very helpful. You’re still leading but you don’t have to take that that main charge and carry that that weight that comes with it as well. So great, great piece of advice with that as well. Well, Sandra, before we let you go, I wanted to give you an opportunity to share any contact information for listeners who’d like to reach out and learn more about how you guys are doing things there in Paducah, what would be the best way for them to reach out and connect with you. Okay,

Sandra Wilson 29:11
that’s great. I always appreciate sharing information and I can tell you that I call others all the time to ask for their advice. So you can reach us at PaducahChamber.org And my direct email is swilson@paducahchamber.org. And let me spell Paducah, Pa d u c h Paducah. And wire info if you can’t remember as well send info@PaducahChamber.org. We’ll get you through to ours and we’ll answer you.

Brandon Burton 29:41
That’s perfect. And I’ll get it in our show notes for this episode as well. So somebody can pull that up and find your email and website and all that good stuff. But Sandra, this has been great to have you back on chamber chat podcast and again, big congratulations to you and your team for being selected as a finalist for the great work you guys are doing. Under the Paducah area, and I wish you and your team Best of luck as chamber the year. Thank

Sandra Wilson 30:05
you, Brandon. Thank you for all you do for the chamber profession. We really do appreciate it. Thank you.

Brandon Burton 30:10
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Michigan West Coast Chamber-2024 Chamber of the Year Finalist with Jodi Owczarski

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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.

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You’re joining us today for a special episode in our 2024 ACCE Chamber the Year Finalist Series and our guests for this episode is Jodi Owczarski. Jodi is the President and CEO of the West Coast Chamber in Michigan. For the first five years the West Coast Chamber Jodi was accountable to provide leadership and all areas of the organization as well as serving as the integrator within the EOS framework. As a vice president and CEO, Jodi was responsible for all human resources, accounting and finance functions, as well as managing the staff, Facilities and Operations and directing the West Coast leadership program. She was made president and CEO of the West Coast chamber on September 1 2020. To Jodi’s limitless capacity for solving math problems has been essential to creating budgets and balance sheets. And her inviting personality and quick humor combined with our strategic thinking give her the edge when making when managing staff committees, volunteers, Jodi’s contagious energy ripples into our business community, and today will ripple into this podcast episode. But, Jodi, we’re excited to have you back with us here on Chamber Chat Podcast. For those who are regular listeners she was with us almost a year ago, as I look back on it, she’s back in episode 244. But we’re excited to have you back with us and give you an opportunity to say hello to everyone listening. And I like asking for an interest. Interesting tip. Interesting fact about us so we can get to know you a little better.

Jodi Owczarski 2:49
I love that. Brandon, thank you. I’m honored to be back, especially as a finalist for chamber of the year. That’s something we’ve aspired to for a long time. Well, I almost had to ask the staff an interesting fact about me. But I guess as it relates to being part of the chamber world, I actually started at the chamber as an ambassador, and was an ambassador when I was hired on back in 2017. And was in the leadership class. And part of my new role at the Chamber was to be the director for the leadership program. So I started directing the program that I was still a member of the class were so that was an interesting twist on being a part of that program.

Brandon Burton 3:30
Yeah, very meta, right, like, and leading it. You took good notes at the beginning so you can have some idea what you’re doing. Exactly. Well, tell us a little bit about the West Coast chamber, give us an idea of the type of chambers kind of work, you guys are involved with size, staff budget, that sort of thing to kind of set the stage for our conversation.

Jodi Owczarski 3:52
Absolutely. The West Coast chamber is on the west shore of Lake Michigan. We are based in Holland, Michigan, a community of about 120,000 people in the greater Holland area. In this space, we have 1233 members, as of today, every member counts. And we’ve recently expanded to a staff of eight team members. interesting for us. We have found that we are a very fertile bunch over here. We’ve had four maternity leaves in six months and a fifth one coming. So our small team has been put to the test. Seems like we take having babies two at a time around here. So we’re growing our chamber membership. One, one baby at a time.

Brandon Burton 4:44
Wow. Yeah, your your team is it’s like doubling right. Is called Workforce Development. You bring them yeah,

Jodi Owczarski 4:53
we’re dedicated right to the workforce development. We’re all growing our own.

Brandon Burton 4:58
That’s right. I love it. Well Yes Congratulations to you guys for being selected as a chamber of the year finalist. It is a huge accomplishment I know even to to be selected and I on these episodes I love diving into the programs that were submitted on your chamber the your application. So we’ll spend the majority of our time today talking about those. And we’ll dive into those programs as soon as they get back from this quick break.

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All right, Jodi, we’re back. So why don’t you tell us what the first of the two programs is that you’d like to highlight today? And we’ll dive into the details of it and learn a little bit more.

Jodi Owczarski 7:32
Absolutely. So I mentioned that I was in the West Coast Leadership Program, our community based leadership program. And as I was trying to reimagine what that program could look like, I really worked to reevaluate that last day, the program that we had called graduation, and really thought about trying to discover ways that we could do a better job of tangibly launching those leaders out into our community. And so the first year I had them go around and volunteer around town. And the group of 25 or 30 people in the class at that point, had a great time. And from that, we discovered that we there’s a little something here. And so the next year, we did it again. And we allowed them to invite a friend or colleague along and internet, we had almost 100 people out serving. And that’s when the idea really hit that we could do something bigger. And from that our first initiative was born, which is called Community Impact day. So in 2022, we decided to take the afternoon of the last day of our leadership program, and facilitate volunteer opportunities with people throughout the community that were willing to serve. And so this could be anything from painting to spreading woodchips to helping stuff, mailers for nonprofit. And so we reached out to our nonprofit organizations, we set that up. And in 2022, we had 250 People go out and serve that afternoon. It was awesome. And as we were debriefing at the end of the day, my team was kind of energized and I had that post event high and threw a a b hag out there and said you know what, let’s do it again. And next year, let’s go for 1000 people and and so we did we we went for it. We ended up with 983 which of course is short of our goal, but it felt anything but short of the goal last year when I drove through the town and could see nearly 1000 people out volunteering all wearing our community impact a blue shirts, and and we knew that something great was really underway. This year. We did it again may 15 2024 And we had over 1500 15 122 people serving this year. And next year, we’re shooting for 2025 and 2025. So it’s so much fun. And our hope is that we’re going to get other chambers across our region across the state and even across the country, leaning in and doing this ideally, even on the same day, when that’d be

Brandon Burton 10:24
cool. That would be awesome. So you thought 1000 people out in the community serving was it be hag right? Yeah. And look at your look where you are now, right like that. It almost seems like a small goal, looking back on and seeing the growth and where the vision is going today. I love how you talked about creating something to be able to launch these leaders into the community. So what is their role in this these these leaders that go through the leadership program? Yep. What’s that launch look like?

Jodi Owczarski 10:57
Great question. So I knew that going from 200 to 1000, I had to do some creative things. And the leadership class played a big part in that. So we have a class of typically 25 people, they were each responsible for choosing a site that they were going to volunteer at, and being the leader at that site, which also meant identifying all of the volunteers that were needed for that location. So they had choices of where they could go, but each site needed at least 10 volunteers. So now I knew I was going to have 250 volunteers just with a leadership class. It also gave them a great opportunity to lead at that spot. Undoubtedly, the group of volunteers moved through the volunteer projects quicker than what the organization expected. And so we always need somebody on point to say, what more can we do, and hey, let’s go over here and do this next, and just kind of take charge and continue to make things happen. And so they’re able to serve in that way. Once we saw that model work, we expanded that same thing to our board of directors into our ambassadors, so that you get another, here’s another 150 volunteers coming, here’s another 400 volunteers coming over this way. And so it was it was a quick, repeatable way to gather groups, when you start seeing teams come right from businesses, etc, that it’s the whole IT department from this manufacturer, or, you know, fill in the blank with who that is that they’re coming out as a group to do that together. And in the benefits that they see in that come right along with that. Yeah, I

Brandon Burton 12:44
can see where certain Chamber members is different businesses in the community could see it as a corporate responsibility, kind of a thing to come out and give back to the community so they can create their own teams. And I could see, you know, competition coming out of this at some point for sure, the earning or something. Yeah,

Jodi Owczarski 13:01
there’s some other pieces of this as well, where it’s like, you look at the younger generation, and what we’ve studies are showing is that investing in the community, volunteerism is critical for them. And if they see their employer investing in that way, and allowing them space, to be able to go do that as a part of their work, their retention is so much higher. And we’re hearing that from our employers. We also worked really hard on inclusivity. This year, as we went from 1000, or 983, to 12. To 15 122, we wanted to look at who’s often overlooked in this process. And we went to Senior Centers where we were sending volunteers to go serve these senior citizens. But we also went to them and said, Yes, and we’d love to take your senior citizens out. And we believe that they’ve got great value to contribute, let’s find opportunities that they can serve, maybe it’s not spreading wood chips, but we’ve got some other things that we could create that could be meaningful for them to do. And so we had that happening. Same thing for an organization that serves adults with a challenges and sent the group into serve there, but also brought that group of participants out to come and serve and it was just the coolest thing to see the pride that they had in the work that they did out in our community.

Brandon Burton 14:32
I love it. You’re answering the questions that I have before I asked them about how you grow Yeah, so exponential exponentially like that. But it’s it’s getting you know, those leaders from the leadership class involved and then extending it to the board and the ambassadors and then kind of cross pollinating with those that you’re serving also providing service and I love it. I mean, you guys are just have your eyes wide open to opportunities, and inviting and being inclusive and What What kind of outcomes are you seeing through the community as you guys implement these, these community impact days?

Jodi Owczarski 15:07
You know, there’s there’s these easy, tangible outcomes, right. So if we look at the city of Holland, for example, we went and did two big projects. Last year for the city of Holland in 2023, we built a playground, for them that was replacing an old kind of broken down one and put in a new inclusive playground, that children of all physical and cognitive abilities would be able to utilize. We also went out and painted railing along the seawall and painted miles of painting of railing along the seawall, and for the city of Highland in that three hour time block, we saved them over $120,000. It’s just remarkable right to be able to do that. And it’s, it took us very little effort. But it’s a tangible outcome on on our city. So there’s those kinds of outcomes. Our nonprofits are seeing additional, we’ve tried to coach them up along the way to say, Man, this is an opportunity for you to have all of these people learn about your organization. So as they come there, and they’re ready to get started, take five minutes, give them your elevator pitch, right? Tell them about what you do and why you do it, and what your biggest needs are. And what we’re hearing from those organizations is that the relationships continue beyond this one afternoon. They’re coming in to volunteer on an ongoing basis. They’re becoming donors and, and financial supporters of the organization. They’re becoming advocates and helping to tell the story and grow awareness of these organizations. So it’s cool to see that happen as well. And then we see the impact of the investment of the volunteers themselves. They feel differently about the community when they go to the park where they built the playground, or where they painted the railing. That’s their park, they’re gonna pick up garbage that they see on the ground, right? They’re gonna take their family there with pride, because this is a place that they had an impact on.

Brandon Burton 17:18
I love that skit and people involved. Do you ever see people wearing the T shirts just around the city?

Jodi Owczarski 17:25
I love saw it yesterday, the first time that it happened, I made a fool of myself, I was giddy. I took a picture. Covertly, I’m yelling across the street, I love your teacher. The person looked at me like I completely lost my mind. But we’re intentional and buying a shirt that people are going to want to wear. They’re super comfortable. They’re beautiful blue color. And so we see them all around town. So there’s no charge to participate. That’s the one expense that we have. But the sponsor dollars have come in so readily, that it’s an easy thing for us to do. So you drive through the town, you see the shirts everywhere. And it was fun even to see some of the Facebook groups, you know, if your community has a for us, it’s a Holland informed group, right? It’s where all of the the gossip and things happen. If you want to know what’s happening in the town, this Facebook group, there was a number of questions about, Hey, what’s up with all the blue shirts in town today? And then reading the responses right at the people saying, oh, my gosh, it’s the coolest thing. This happened. And I want to do it next year. And, you know, how do I get involved? It’s it’s going to take on a life of its own. This, this project has legs, and I hope that I’m going to be 80 years old and coming back to participate in community impact day.

Brandon Burton 18:47
That’s great. I love it. Love it. So let’s shift gears a little bit into your second program. I know it’s somewhat connected, but introduce us to it. The second program is you submitted on your application. The

Jodi Owczarski 19:02
two tag team really well, although they were created in separate ways. Our second initiative is called West Coast Connect. It’s an online platform that we’ve created, that has a directory of opportunities for leaders in our community to serve at board elected or skilled committee types of opportunities, as well as a directory of individual leaders who are raising their hand and willing to serve. So our community did a deep dive a couple of years ago to look at what are the top issues facing our community. And at that time, we were going through a pretty big political upheaval and realized that we were going to be late to the game and having adequate candidates for some Local elected positions, and realize that we can’t be late to that, again, we’ve got to be more prepared and identifying and equipping those leaders in advance. At the same time, we’re looking around and seeing generational leaders that are at the same tables over and over, right? You see the same people. And we know from our West Coast leadership program, we have about 1000 people that have been through this program, why do we see the same 20 people serving everywhere, it’s because they’re top of mind, we know that there are far more people willing and capable of serving, we just have to get them more top of mind. As a chamber professional, I regularly would get a phone call saying, Hey, I’m looking for a board member. And here’s what I’m looking for. Right? Ideally, it’d be a female, if that person could be a person of color, that’d be fantastic. We really need somebody who has some financial acumen and, and so you kind of scroll through your brain and you think about the people you see, and you give the same list. This helps us go so much deeper into the list of potential people serving throughout our community. It can be self serve, our organizations can go. And not only post the opportunities they have, but also source their potential volunteers. But they can also come back to us to ask for, like, who do you know, in this directory, and give us the parameters. And we can pull some reports to make sure that we come up with, you know, a list of great people for for them to be able to connect with and explore whether or not they’d be a good fit. So

Brandon Burton 21:45
I know with a platform like this, the one of the struggles at the beginning, it’s like a chicken or the egg and everything, right? If you’re trying to match the two sides together, you need to have, you know, one or both sides populated to be able to make it useful. So how do you get started with creating a platform like this to be able to matchmake? And no, you’ve got kind of that list in your head that maybe you can start with populating that. But then it said that same list that you’re always putting out there, right? So sure, what’s the approach? Yep,

Jodi Owczarski 22:15
great question. We started with our current West Coast leadership class, right there in the class, because they want to serve in the community. And so they were the first 25 people to populate, then we went back to the three most recent classes and had them do it as well. Because we knew, again, they they were looking for those same opportunities. Once we had some of those built out, we could send it out more broadly. And people could see what they looked like what that looked like, and could see themselves in it. And so at this point, we have over 227 individuals that have raised their hand and are currently on this site. So

Brandon Burton 22:55
do they create their own profile, upload a picture and kind of a resume of sorts of you know, what their background is?

Jodi Owczarski 23:02
They do. So we knew for this to be successful, it had to be a couple of things. We were we run lean as a team here. So this couldn’t be something that required a lot of intervention on our on our part. And we needed it to be as self serve as possible. So we built it on our growth zone platform that we already use for our CRM system, they’ve got logins for their accounts already, they could create them right in there. We do allow non members to be a part of this, because it’s really more about the community than just the chamber. And so we’ve set it up so that they non members could could log in and create this as well. So they can update their profile at any time to keep that relevant, if they’ve gotten a few opportunities, and they’re no longer looking for a new opportunity, they could take themselves down, put themselves back up again, when they have fresh opportunity or capacity to grow that. And it’s the same thing for the organization, right? They can log in, they create the whole list of what it is that they’re looking for. And we just approve it, clean it up to make sure it looks good. And get it posted on our website. So it’s it’s very simple.

Brandon Burton 24:16
Are the organizations that are searching, Are they members or is that open to? That’s

Jodi Owczarski 24:22
open as well. Okay. Yep. Yep. Again, we believe that this is bigger than chamber, right? This is this is whole community. And we want to make sure that everyone has the opportunity to be able to do this. So you know, when elections are coming around, we have more data behind the screen than what you can see visibly, we’re not going to share people’s personal home address in some other personal information, but information that’s helpful for us to be able to look and see, hey, I need someone in ward three for city council, who lives in that area that It has self identified as someone who cares about advocacy, and may be willing to run for run for a seat on city council in this in this geographical area, we can pull that up and and dive into that a little deeper.

Brandon Burton 25:14
Yeah. So right now it sounds like it’s been filled with leadership class participants, right? Is there any application process for anyone else in the community that wants to be involved? Do they need to go through the leadership class or what’s, how’s that structured,

Jodi Owczarski 25:31
they do not need to go through the leadership class. This too is open to anyone. We the third leg of this stool is education. So we will offer educational opportunity. So if they’ve not gone through West Coast leadership, or they’ve not served on a board of directors before you could come to a how to how to serve on a board class, right? So you understand what it is that you’re signing up for. We’ve also run things like how to run for office and had the County Clerk come in, to help equip people for what does that process look like? What are the financial obligations? What are the deadlines? What are the do’s and don’ts. And so we want to make sure that an educational component also comes alongside this so that we can help equip whoever is willing and interested to serve.

Brandon Burton 26:20
Well, that seems like a great solution. And way to think outside the box to play matchmaker there, if you will. As we start to wrap things up, I wanted to ask for those chambers who are out there listening who want to take their chamber up to the next level. What kind of tip or action item might you offer them? And it might carry a little more weight this time, especially with you guys being a chamber, the year finalist?

Jodi Owczarski 26:50
You know, that’s a great question. And I think, I don’t know what chambers are going to look like in the future and even day to day, they continue to evolve, right the way that we need to serve our community. And it’s very easy to get up on the treadmill of just continuing to churn out what we’re doing. My tip would be to take intentional, we call them clarity breaks, built in time into your schedule, on a regular cadence that takes you outside of the business. So you can think bigger, you can pause to reflect on everything from like, how’s my confidence? What am I procrastinating on? What do I need to? What do I need to get rid of or focus on? What do I need to make sure my board chair knows, I have a whole list of questions that I’ve worked through. But also pausing to think about how can we serve differently in our community? What needs are we seeing that are going unmet? And A is it something that is inside of our lane? And be how can we then approach it? If that answer is yes, it’s it’s something that we need to focus on. It’s one of our lanes, taking that time to pause and build that into a regular schedule is so important.

Brandon Burton 28:07
Yeah, I like that idea and having a name for it. And clarity breaks.

Jodi Owczarski 28:11
That’s right.

Brandon Burton 28:12
It allows you to to think bigger, and work on those bigger goals. I love it exactly. So I know you just said you don’t know what the future of chambers look like. But I always ask the question. How do you see the future of chambers and their purpose going forward?

Jodi Owczarski 28:27
Yeah, I don’t know what it looks like. But it’s not because we’re not thinking about it. So part of our regular processes is always having a 10 year target. The 10 year target for our chamber is that we will be a trailblazing organization that creates a tidal wave of positive impact. Note that it does not say Chamber of Commerce, I don’t know if we’ll still be called a Chamber of Commerce in 10 years. But if we’re doing things that are causing a positive impact in our community, that I think we’re doing the right things. So we’ll continue to adapt and to learn and to grow in ways that our community needs. So that we can show up and meet those needs in whatever way that is. Two years ago, as I as I moved into the CEO seat, we changed one of our core values from Think Big be great to be a trailblazer. We knew that thinking big and being great was not big enough, it wasn’t great enough to be successful. We’re going to have to blaze a trail, we’re gonna have to go places we’ve never gone before. Maybe the other chambers have not gone before, if we really want to be able to make an impact for our community. And so that’s the mindset that will continue to take into the future so that we can make a positive impact.

Brandon Burton 29:45
Yes, it’s all about making those big swings, making a difference. Yeah, that’s right. I love it. Well, Jodi, for listeners who may want to reach out and connect with you and learn more about how you guys how you guys are doing things there at the web. East Coast chamber what would be the best way for them to reach out and connect with you

Jodi Owczarski 30:03
know, our websites a great spot WestCoastChamber.org. All of our contact information is on there. My specific email is there as well. And that is Jodi with an jodi@westcoastchamber.org. We’d love to connect.

Brandon Burton 30:20
Very good. We’ll have that in our show notes for this episode. But this has been great having you back on the podcast and it says for a really good reason. So I’m excited for you guys and wish you and your team best of luck in Dallas.

Jodi Owczarski 30:34
I appreciate it. Thanks so much, Brandon.

Brandon Burton 30:38
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Vail Valley Partnership-2024 Chamber of the Year Finalist with Chris Romer

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Brandon Burton 0:00
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You’re joining us for a special episode and our 2024 ACCE Chamber the Year Finalist Series and our guests for this episode is Chris Romer. Chris serves as the President and CEO of Vail Valley Partnership or the VVP. Vail Valley Partnership is a Regional Chamber of Commerce, destination sales organization and economic development organization representing Eagle County, Colorado and was named Chamber the Year by ACCE in 2016 and 2020. As CEO of the Vail Valley Partnership, he brings a wealth of experience in strategic planning, business development and partnership building to the organization. With a deep understanding of the unique challenges and opportunities facing Colorado’s mountain region. Chris is dedicated to driving innovation and collaboration to ensure the continued success and sustainability of local businesses and communities. Chris is a macroscopic thinker who believes in tackling big issues through localized solutions. He is a graduate of the US Chamber Foundation’s IOM program and is CCE certified chamber executive. He’s also been named a top 25 Mind in hospitality sales, marketing and revenue management by hospitality Sales and Marketing Association International Chamber Executive of the Year by the Colorado Association Chamber of Commerce and Industry Colorado chamber executives, and was named a PEDDIT award winner by the Western Association of Chamber Executives. Chris is a respected voice in the chamber and economic development fields and is known for his ability to bring stakeholders together to achieve common goals. Chris has a is committed to making positive impact within the Vail Valley and on a broader scale, serving on advisory boards and participating in initiatives aimed at advancing community prosperity and enhancing quality of life. Chris, first of all, congratulations to you and your team on this great accomplishment of being named a ACCE Chamber the Year Finalist again, that’s a huge feat, but uh, welcome to the show, I’ll give you a chance to say hello to all the listeners out there and and I love to have you share something interesting about yourself as well as we kick this off.

Chris Romer 3:32
Yeah, Brandon, thank you so much. And you know, it is such a such an honor to be recognized by ACCE as a finalist for chamber of the year. It’s such a testament to the people and the board and the community that we represent. And it’s something that we never, ever take for for granted. You know, we really try to keep our foot on the proverbial gas pedal, to move things forward and to represent the interests of our business community. So, such a great opportunity to share a little bit of our story with you and to be recognized by ACCE for those community programs and community impact that we that we strive to make so thank you so much. I also certainly realized that an interesting thing about me is probably the fact that I can’t write a short bio, that bio was awfully long and awkward. So I would I would love to have a second crack at that and just keep it a whole lot shorter. So we could talk about the fun stuff because talking about me not so much fun talking about our chamber and our community and our programs. A whole lot more interesting to people.

Brandon Burton 4:49
I could agree with that it talking about the the great work you guys are doing is much more impactful and meaningful anyway but it is fun to get to know the background on yet and you I’ll share a fun fact I think you are the first three Pete chamber chat podcast so there should be I feel like there should be a trophy or something for you for being I’ll take a trophy

Chris Romer 5:14
I would love to take a trophy for being the first three time visitor or three time guests on the on the chamber chat podcast.

Brandon Burton 5:22
Yes, yes, you You deserve it. So well tell us about your great team, their the Vail Valley Partnership, the the work you guys are involved with the size of your staff budget, scope of work all that as we get into our discussion today.

Chris Romer 5:37
Yeah, we have. We’re really fortunate I have a great team. We have a team of eight full time and two part time. Employees We are located in Edwards, Colorado. That’s Eagle County, Vail and Beaver Creek ski resorts, home to Vail, Beaver Creek ski resorts for those who might not know what Edward’s are or know where Eagle county might be. But we’re right in the heart of, of the Rocky Mountains in Colorado. We have you had asked about our budget and membership size, we have just under 800 members. And our community is about 55,000 people. And that represents nine nine towns and we’re a countywide regional organization, our annual budget is about $1.3 million per year. You know, and I think the last part of what you had asked for in regards to giving people a perspective, we are a we’re a program driven chamber. We are a program driven chamber we have we have multiple 501 C sixes, we have c threes. And we have these different initiatives and we branch them off. And we’ll talk a little bit about more more about this, I think as we go through the podcast, but very program driven. And it reflects in in how we approach problems. And if that leads to some of our retention and other components that we may or may not touch on but we are we are very program driven group and you know, we’re not afraid to take big swings we take we take some really big swings within our community and in sometimes we strike out and sometimes we hit a double and occasionally we hit a homerun Yeah,

Brandon Burton 7:29
I think chamber works should be about those big swings make an impact. If you’re not if you’re not swinging big, what kind of impact are you making right? So I am excited to dive into this. So on these chamber the are finalists series for those who may not be familiar with the format, I’d like to really focus on the two programs and being program driven will focus on the two programs that were submitted on your chamber the your application and dive into some detail around those and why they worked for Vail Valley and we’ll dive into this as soon as we get back from this quick break.

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Alright Chris, we’re back. So let’s let’s dive into these programs you submitted on the chamber the your application, I know. It can be tough sometimes to kind of narrow down the focus and what you want to put on the application and really highlight the work that you guys are doing. But how did you land on these on these two programs? And what are they?

Chris Romer 10:08
Yeah, it’s, you know, how we landed on them is a little bit what I talked about earlier in the podcast, around taking big swings. And recognizing that big ideas require big solutions. Both of our both of our Synopsys, both of our case studies are around that idea that big ideas require big solutions. So our first Synopsys is the Eagle Valley Transportation Authority, where we lead the yes for transit ballot campaign to create a transportation authority, which is something that had been lacking in our community. Our second synopsis is the eagle county Collaborative for career pathways. That is a talent pipeline, Workforce Initiative, in partnership with our K to 12 school system to identify and train young people into the jobs that our community needs. Yeah.

Brandon Burton 11:12
So just from our background, and having on the show a couple times before, I guess I have a little bit of maybe added perspective, I think about your community and and why these, these two programs specifically would be of importance. But let’s dive in a little bit more on the Regional Transit Authority. Why? Why was that a hot topic? Why Why was that a big swing in your community? What was the need? And and how did you guys go about addressing that?

Chris Romer 11:41
Yeah, it’s so it’s so important for us. So we started this process. Actually, before the before the pandemic we had brought together, we recognized our population is growing, our ski resorts need to be world class destinations, our visitors are continuing to come. And yet our community growth, strained our housing and transportation systems, and our ability to move our workforce from one side of our valley to the other. We’re about a 40 mile wide, 40 mile long valley, and about a mile and a half wide, right, you’re surrounded by mountains and national forest on two sides. So we’re along linear Valley, and our housing prices, our median housing price is $1.3 million. So we really needed a transportation system that could effectively and efficiently move our workforce, up and down our valley or housing is a little bit less expensive, on the western end. So our basic premise is that improved transit supports workforce that helps our residents get to work home and school, it allows our visitors to better enjoy their experience. And this is a regional issue that required a regional solution. So we initiated the business community, we brought together our local municipalities and county, some of them run their own transit authorities. But there was nothing collaborative and nothing that was truly Valley wide. So we did focus groups, we did phone surveys of voters, we looked at what different models exist for funding transportation. We looked at 18 different models and governance structures, and landed on the Regional Transportation Authority as our best bet forward. Then we looked at how do you fund this thing. And we could have done property tax or a sales tax. And we made the decision. To move forward, we made the call in June of 2022, to go to the ballot in November. At the time for it’s hard to think about now. At the time, inflation was at 9.2%. So when we talk about having having courage and taking big swings, we said we’re gonna go to the ballot, and we’re going to ask people for a sales tax to fund this. And by the way, knowing inflation was over 9%. And we made that call, unfortunately, inflation dropped a little bit by the time we had the election. But we passed. We passed in November of 2022. Pretty overwhelmingly, I think, because we really helped to tell the story and identify the need and what this would create. As we sit here today. We have a complimentary free bus system that runs the length of our valley. Ridership for this past winter season was up 164% over the previous model, and it’s saving people time and money.

Brandon Burton 14:58
That’s amazing. It just it to be able to see it through to. So a lot of times when we’re talking about these programs and maybe leading a ballot initiative, you haven’t seen it all the way through to this point, but being that you’ve been able to lead that been able to collect the data, you know, have a successful ballot measure, and then to be able to see the results, the fruit of it right now happening throughout your Valley. That’s, that’s amazing. And I’m sure you’re seeing economic tickers, you know, the different indicators that you can measure to see the impact throughout the community as well. We are

Chris Romer 15:36
we’re able to see the increase in ridership, we’re able to see how many routes are are scheduled, how they’re completed. We did include funding for air service development in our ballot initiative. That’s a program that we’ve run for years at the chamber. And we always fundraised for. So we actually baked that into the ballot question to fund that. And we have two new flights this summer that we’re able to use that that funding to support two new Air Service flights. So we’re seeing the benefits on a local level, from a workforce standpoint, from a visitor standpoint. And we have long term enhancements that are baked into this as well, which included affordable workforce housing for transit employees, and included zero admissions, conversion, to help meet our climate goals for our region. So we’re really we’re really excited about not just the bus transportation, which is a big part of it. But the secondary components that were able to be part of that ballot initiative and more part of our storytelling around air service development and increasing opportunities for visitors to get here and locals to go on vacation. And to help achieve our climate goals. So we’re really, this one’s a was a big swing. For all the reasons we talked about, and a really nice success story that is helping make people’s lives easier. Yeah.

Brandon Burton 17:07
So with the bus system, it’s a it’s a free transit, right? So is there a way to track when people get on how long they’re on? Or is it just kind of hop on hop off as you go. And now there’s

Chris Romer 17:20
bus counters, there’s counters to know what the ridership is and how it increased. You know, in January, for example, of 2024, we had over 218,000 unique riders on the bus. And that’s an increase from 167,000, the year before, in the same timeframe in January. So we’re huge ridership increases. And we’re, we’re paying for it through the sales tax instead of having people pay a fare. And we have new routes because of the new authority and able to bridge a lot of what the individual communities were already doing to provide that connectivity.

Brandon Burton 18:01
Yeah. So as far as bringing workforce into the valley, is that are you able to see that direct tie in where they’re coming from the west side of the valley? Like you’d mentioned?

Chris Romer 18:10
Yeah, we are a route. Again, we saw a 64% increase in in transit ridership from the lower part of our Valley. So we can track that. The new authority tracks it, they share it with us, our work is kind of done on this one. But yes, it’s a it’s a huge success. And the community recognizes the role that the Chamber played in initiating leading and passing this ballot initiative to create the new authority.

Brandon Burton 18:42
That’s great. And it’s always nice when you can hand it off when it’s done. And you don’t have to keep ownership of it ongoing. Right.

Chris Romer 18:47
You know, we we at the chamber at the partnership, we might be experts on our community. And we’re certainly experts on on convening leaders in order to get things done. We’re certainly an expert on being a catalyst for for business growth. We are not an expert on how to run a transportation authority. Right. So we’re happy to have this one off.

Brandon Burton 19:11
Absolutely. Well, let’s switch gears to the second program that was submitted on the application around that building that talent pipeline and kind of again, the the origins of it and how it developed and in the impact that it’s making in the community. Yeah,

Chris Romer 19:27
so the second is synopsis was the eagle county Collaborative for career pathways. And that was a program that had had grown and morphed. We’ve been running a youth apprenticeship programs for a number of years. We have a very successful youth apprenticeship model. We’re involved with career exploration, in partnership with another local nonprofit in our school system. And this we really recognize that There are a handful of us doing great work. And there is still an opportunity gap at the end. So we work in sync to create viable, affordable alternative pathways to get people into high quality careers, with the idea that those need to be transparent about the outcomes and the cost, help young people obtain their relevant job skills, and ensure that employers value recognize and hire from the kids that we put through this pathway. So in Eagle County, specifically, Brandon, our businesses show an average 10% gap in securing and retaining young professionals across industry sector, with health care and education, are rising to near 30% levels of that gap. So working with our business community, our school district, youth serving nonprofit agencies, were able to target those key sectors and build the collaborative, we’re very fortunate to receive a million dollar grant by which to do this work with the idea to strengthen the systems that already support the career pathways, increase student readiness to pursue pathways and increase students exploration and experience in career exploration, and exploring those career opportunities. So it’s a really nice partnership. It’s a really meaningful program with very tangible results. Yeah,

Brandon Burton 21:43
I think that’s a struggle that a lot of chambers have is trying to retain the workforce that you put them through K through 12. And, and for whatever reason, it’s like these students graduate high school, and they want to move on to the bigger and brighter things outside of the community they grew up in, right? And, you know, what can we do to try to keep them local, show them how great this community is, and, and maybe they go away to school somewhere and you’re, you know, get some kind of education, but bring them back is such a key to be able to entice them, show them what there is in the community to bring them back why it’s a place for them. So having a program like this, I think really hits on those points of need. And I could see being something that and I know a lot of chambers have some sort of a workforce development, you know, pipeline or program with the school districts and whatnot. But to be able to draw that attention and keep them, keep them in the community is so key. So I think this is great work that you guys are involved with this program specifically. There’s anything else stand out to you with this program? As far as trying to retain this workforce here? Is there any any kind of secret sauce that you’re seeing that’s really been the AHA kind of moment, or they just with how the partnership has developed that is really made a big, big impact? I

Chris Romer 23:13
think so I think the secret sauce or the the aha moment is that this needs to be a program that is business centric, right? It can’t be a program that is just a feel good or a do good for the kids. It has to benefit the business. And it has to strengthen the systems that support not only the career pathways for students, but solves problems for the businesses. And I think that’s a that’s a big component that sometimes when we think about workforce, even in the chamber business, inherently, to serve the needs of our businesses. When we ask businesses to donate their time, we ask businesses to donate their expertise, instead of flipping that equation and saying, we’re going to do this for the business. And it happens to help the kids. We do it for the business. We do everything we do to build a stronger community and stronger businesses, the kids and the career pathway is a way to build stronger businesses. It’s not asking the businesses to help kids.

Brandon Burton 24:23
Yeah, I think that is that is a key. I’m glad you made that point, that distinction, because I think it’s easy to look at the kids and they Oh, we want to help give them a good career. And that’s noble. That’s

Chris Romer 24:35
Yes. But but that’s a that’s a that’s a secondary outcome. That’s not the primary purpose. Exactly.

Brandon Burton 24:40
Yeah. So you get the businesses on board by letting them know this is about you. This is about strengthening your business and providing good talent, you know, to keep the strong. I’m glad you made that distinction. That’s great. So I like it, especially as a as a chamber the year finalists? I think chambers can can look at you as kind of the top of the game right now, you know, as a chamber, they are finalists, and for a chamber listening who’s trying to elevate their chamber up to the next level, what kind of tips or strategies might you offer for listeners to try to accomplish that goal and to try to give that their organization that boost they’re looking for?

Chris Romer 25:24
Yeah, it’s it’s such a great if thought challenge for for chambers of commerce, to think, how do we what is that? What is that one tip? What’s the one thing you would share? And I’m going to answer that by suggesting and challenging chambers, to move away from thinking that what we do have it fixes technical challenges in our community. We don’t have technical challenges. Technical challenges are things that can be fixed by engineers, they can be fixed by surgeons and people with specific training. There’s not too many of us that came into this business, trained to run a chamber of commerce, right, we’re trained in a more of an adaptive way. So that’s my takeaway. Recognize that you have adaptive challenges, not technical challenges. And let me expand on that a little bit. Because I expect that doesn’t make much sense. Without context. When we think of adaptive challenges, the things that we face in our community, maybe it’s early childhood, transportation or workforce, maybe it’s homelessness, it could be any number of different things. We have the white. So then the question is, so what? Right, so what right that that’s a problem. And then it’s now what? How are we going to do that? So the framework, and the challenge to listeners thinking about adaptive challenges? is learning learning the what? Listening, taking action, I think we collectively do a great job of listening. Every chamber listening to this listens to their businesses listens to their community does surveys, they listen. It’s the question of taking action, how do we take action? How do I identify the steps to take action. The two last parts I’ll add on this is adaptive challenges have long term implications. They’re not transactional, they’re not, we’re going to do this, they have long term, community benefit, long term benefit to the chamber to the, to the community, to the businesses. And we’re really never ever going to fix quote, unquote, fix, and adaptive challenge. All the things I listed early childhood, workforce, housing, workforce development, talent pipeline. It’s homelessness, when we say fix what we mean is make better chambers have a very unique positioning and a position of trust within their communities, to tackle these adaptive challenges that are hard, they’re long term, and fixing the endzone always moves. So fixing these challenges really means making it better. And that that changes year after year, initiative after initiative, it never really goes away. And that creates stability. And that should hopefully create fundraising opportunities and grant funding and membership retention, and all the things. So that’s my one takeaway, and it was a really long answer. But I really want to share that if we can do that. And we can shift our thinking away from technical into adaptive, that chambers are going to fly, we’re going to thrive, because we’re going to be so uniquely positioned that no one can do what we do.

Brandon Burton 29:01
Yeah. So I like the idea that that adaptive challenges have long term implications. And I know you mentioned at the beginning of the episode about retention, and that kind of plays into here. Is there. Is there more you wanted to touch on with the aspect of retention before we wrap things up? Um,

Chris Romer 29:22
no, I don’t think so. I mean, I think that if anything, it’s really just when we talk about retention, there’s so many ways to spin that as retention of employees retention of people in our communities retention of business, retention of membership. I think if we as chambers, have had this mind frame of tackling big problems in our community and approaching it in an adaptive relationship driven manner. Then our work becomes central to the success of the community. And if we become central to the success of the community, we have solved retention at each of those levels that I talked about.

Brandon Burton 30:06
Yeah, absolutely. I love that. So the question I asked everyone as they haven’t on the show is about the future of chambers, which I think you kind of touched on with your your tip there. But how do you see the future of chambers in their purpose going forward?

Chris Romer 30:21
Yeah, I did lead into this a little bit or leak into this, if you will. But the I think the future of chambers is really, really bright, with a caveat. And that caveat is if we roll up our sleeves and tackle the big problems, our purpose, our purpose needs to be around that, that problem solving. And again, when I say problem solving, I mean, making things better versus versus traditionally fixing things. But we can make things better. I think all the finalists that you’re going to be talking to throughout this series, probably have one, if not both of their synopsis, focusing on how they made their community better. And I think that’s a lesson for everybody within the chamber of business. And if we can focus on our purpose being problem solving, and how we do that, knowing that it’s really hard, knowing that it’s long term, knowing that it causes some sleepless nights, knowing that it’s probably not going to go over well with everybody in our community. And we’re going to have the courage to do those things. Boy, the future of chambers is so bright.

Brandon Burton 31:31
Yeah. encouraged as important in that, as you mentioned, so absolutely. Swing big and have courage. Chris, this has been fun to have you back on chamber chat podcast. I love the pieces of advice you share the experiences you have, and especially the impact you guys are making. They’re there in the Vail Valley. I’d like to give you an opportunity to share any contact information for listeners who’d like to reach out and connect with you and learn more about what you guys are doing there at the VVP we’re what would be the best way to connect with you. Yeah,

Chris Romer 32:06
you can find all of my contact information on our website at VailValleyPartnership.com. That’s VailValleyPartnership.com. I can be reached at cromer@VailValleyPartnership.com. And you can find me on most of the social channels and my phone numbers on the website as well and all of that, but VailValleyPartnership.com is your best place to go.

Brandon Burton 32:31
Very good. So back from Episode 21, I think was your first appearance and we’re at episode 285 Now, but this has been a blast, Chris. Thanks for being with us. Again. Here. You’re on chamber chat podcast today and wish you and your team the best of luck.

Chris Romer 32:48
Thanks so much, Brandon.

Brandon Burton 32:51
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Newnan-Coweta Chamber-2024 Chamber of the Year Finalist with Candace Boothby

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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.

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You’re joining us for a special episode in our 2024 ACCE Chamber the Year Finalist Series and our guests for this episode is Candace Boothby. Candace is the President and CEO of the Newnan-Coweta Chamber in Georgia. It’s a position she’s held for almost 21 years. She is a certified chamber executive, the top professional certification nationally and only one of two CCEs in Georgia. Candace is known for high energy and innovative approach to organizational management traits which assist her in developing many successful initiatives. Her ongoing commitment to excellence resulted in the Newnan-Coweta Chamber receiving the coveted Five Star accreditation from the US Chamber of Commerce and maintaining it for the past 16 years, placing it in the top 1% of chambers nationwide. In 2015. Through her leadership, the Newnan-Coweta Chamber was named the National Chamber of the Year the first chamber in Georgia to receive this designation. Professionally, Candace received her accreditation and public relations in 2002. Graduated from with her IOM in 2005 received her Georgia certified chamber executive recognition in 2007. And in 2013 obtained her CCE designation. She has served on numerous community and professional boards throughout her career including the chair of the Georgia Association Chamber of Commerce in 2013 to 2014 and two terms on the ACCE Board of Directors where she also has chaired the Chamber of the Year program and currently chairs and currently chairs the Fringe Benefits Inc board. In 2021. She was named the Legacy Award recipient by her Georgia peers.

A Texas native Candace. His career spans 37 years 35 of them in Georgia after graduating from Baylor in Waco, Texas. With her Bachelor of Arts degree in journalism, she got her start in chamber work at the Greater Killeen Chamber in Texas. She brightened her background by working for a State Technical College at a Baptist Hospital, a large metro Atlantic public school system and community not for profit. Before coming to the Newnan-Coweta Chamber in September 2003, which became the third chamber she served.

Candace, I’m excited to have you with us today on chamber tap podcast. Congratulations to you and your team for being selected as a Chamber of the Year Finalist again, this is very exciting, but wanted to give you a chance to say hello to all the Chamber Champions who are out there listening and to have you shared something interesting about yourself so we can all get to know you a little better.

Candace Boothby 3:59
Well, it’s great to be here. Thank you and I were sharing earlier, this is my second time to visit with you. And I want to just give a shout out to everybody out there and chamber world. We all know how much we love what we do. And I think that reflection of that is when you do get moments in time opportunities like this. But like you said, I’ve been in my current community 21 years in September. I love what I do as much as I did the very first moment I started in the chamber industry. We all know there are ups and downs that it gets in your blood, and it just doesn’t go away. So we do have an organization we’re about 740 Plus members give or take whatever day of the week. It is our budgets a little over a million dollars. We are located about 25-30 minutes south of Hartsfield Jackson airport. So I like to say I’m, we’re close enough to the gravitational pull of Atlanta to take advantage of all their benefits. But we have a sense of place and a sense of community that’s uniquely ours. So I am proud to be where I am today talking with you. And something interesting. I think you said Brandon about me. Okay, so I’m native Texan San Antonio was my home. I have family in Waco and Macedonia has and variety of places and the only family member to have left. The one day I just happened to be I went down a rabbit hole, following a chamber member who was on a genealogy trip. And I thought, Well, why don’t I just click on My great grandmother whose name was gravestone, Spearman, and I knew that she had connections to Georgia. And she married a man from Louisiana, and they settled in East Texas, Pittsburgh, if anybody knows where that is. And so I did. I googled her. And I recognized my grandmother and all her brothers and sisters on that page was very detailed, was clearly my family. And so I thought, well, let me click on her mother. And I did and I discovered that my great great grandmother was born right here in 1845. And can’t wait Academy. Which What are the odds? Right, so then I clicked on her parents. And I discovered that her father is buried in our historical cemetery across the street from the chamber. That’s like my great, great, great grandfather. So here I am, native Texan, moved to Georgia, when I was 22 ended up in this community and the pleasure of being able to serve here for so many years, discovering that I’m from here, originally. So it’s kind of like one of those moments, I got all excited, because I’m like, what, how many generations is that, and, you know, you have a lot of communities depending on where they are in their lifecycle that might have a lot of history. And you have to be born here, or your grandfather has to be born here, you know, for you to be actually considered from that community. Right? Yeah. And so when I did my math, I called up one of my board members who I knew was one of the older families in town. I think he was eight, eight and a half generations, something like that. And I use 20 generations as my litmus. So I did my math. I called him up. And I said, Hey, Garnett, how many generations are you? And he told me and I said, Well, I told him what store and I said, well, guess what? I win.

Then I told my board chair at the time, and he said, Oh, you’re a homing pigeon. So I feel like that’s why I’ve always felt an affinity for Noonan and Kavita County. It’s been my blood. And they’re no joking, right? Literally.

Brandon Burton 8:01
Yeah, I’m assuming the chamber office as long as you’re there, it can never move because that gravitational pole to that historical cemetery across the street.

Candace Boothby 8:10
Thank you. Yes. There’s a lot of gravitational poles going on.

Brandon Burton 8:13
That’s right. That’s right. Now that’s awesome. How do you guys say, sounds like great chamber, obviously being selected as a chamber, the year finalist again, after winning back in 2015. And that speaks a lot to your chamber and to the the repetitive nature of being able to be selected and to be able to rise to the top of the ranks among chambers again, so great job to you guys. And I’m excited to dive into this episode with you and really spend time talking about the two programs that were submitted on your chamber the year application, and we’ll dive into those as soon as we get back from this quick break.

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All right, Candace, we’re back. So as I mentioned before the break, we’ll spend most of our time today talking about the two programs on your chamber, the your application, if you would like to introduce the first program to us, and we will dive into that and kind of the origins and how that became something of interest for you guys to take on. And we’ll explore that topic, but please introduce it.

Candace Boothby 11:05
Okay. So the first program is the Forward Coweta Summit. Originally, we were calling it the growth summit that, you know, that has different connotations, so we just called it the Forward Coweta Summit. The purpose of this program is really just to educate the citizens create civic engagement and conversation around key topics. So we are a very fast growing community. We’re fortunate in the sense that our governments have made really good decisions over the years. So our growth has not outpaced us. But we’re kind of at that tipping point. And so we also have such a younger generation, it’s important that we bring them into the dialogue in the conversation. So we have actually used the forward can we to summit as a platform to really strategically engage a younger audience. We’ve got several tools that we’ve put into place as a result of that. We started big picture the first year, which was last year. And it brought in some really cool speakers throughout the metropolitan Atlanta area, just to talk about what they’re doing in their community, how they managed growth, what they did in certain areas, how do you create the sustain of vision, this year, we’re actually narrowing it just a little bit. And we are going to focus a little bit more on talent retention and recruitment, in addition to quality of life. So we had great participation, we a lot of strategies on the front end, where we went out and did one on one conversations with each of our elected officials in Jena to personally invite them to be there that day, we had great success doing that. Then we sent out a calendar invite, gosh, probably five, six months in advance. And then as we got closer, we we actually had hired a company to do our marketing. And so we did a very aggressive marketing campaign. Leading up to that day, we had about 300 that participated. And it was the right people to be in the room, which was our, our goal, because we wanted all the key stakeholders in the community, you know, and again, when you do something new like this, people are thinking, what are they doing? Why are they doing it? What’s the purpose, but we have done an Inner Inner community visit right before COVID, which was our first and so kind of dipping our toe into putting that conversation table together, if you will, around future issues. So it’s all a part of a bigger strategy, because if you look at our mission, it’s all about championing economic prosperity. And so this, we don’t do anything that’s not aligned with our mission. And we certainly get asked a lot by different people to do a variety of things, as most chambers do. That this one is probably one of my favorite programs, because it does bring all the right people together to the table to hear the information that you want to want them to hear to start the dialogue. And so this year, we did put a group of young next gen leaders to help they introduced the speakers last year and and have been a part of the process just giving feedback. And so now when this year is over, we’re going to start putting some We haven’t decided what we’re going to call a bit probably a little I don’t know conversation groups to break down some of the topics. And probably one of our biggest goals, outcomes that we’re looking for long term is more private investments. So we have a lot of investment by our government. And it’s fantastic. But we know that in order to really, I guess implement a bigger greater vision, it’s going to require more private invest MIT. So that’s, that’s kind of where we’re headed with all the conversation.

Brandon Burton 15:06
I love that I love having those goals to work forward in the picture of what you want next year to look like. And the idea of being able to bake in some other key factors to how a chamber operates. Like you mentioned, how can the next gen leaders introduce speakers and getting them involved and feel like they have a place in the community and with the chamber? In particular, I love that. You mentioned having the marketing company kind of create the campaign and get 300 participants and being the right people and says you’re considering the stakeholders that you wanted to be there? What did that look like? Who all did you want in the room? And then how did the marketing go out? Or is it open to the community? And at at large? Or was it targeted towards certain demographics of some sort? Or how did how was that planned out and thought through. So

Candace Boothby 15:57
it was open to the community at large, although we didn’t target the community at large. It was certainly open. Our number one stakeholder was our county commission and our city council, starting with the mayor and the county commission, Chairperson, because that’s, that’s where the rubber meets the road. And those are our most important community partners. So that’s where we started. And then we sort of backed our way into meeting with several of the county commissioners, the city council members, and we sort of backed our way into less formally, making sure that we had representation from our school board, from some of our smaller municipalities. And then we turned our attention to some of the larger industries. So we have a lot of internal groups within the chamber. So of course, while we’re doing a lot of the personal outreach, all of our target groups within the chamber as well as our members at large, they were the recipient, the target groups received the calendar invite. And then the bigger broader audience received the Save the date postcard, which came out five months in advance, and then the targeted emails. And then I think our social media campaign kicked in the event was the end of August, though it kicked in. Gosh, I can’t remember I want to say it was the mid to latter part of July. So it’s the last Wednesday in October, so you weren’t planning for this year. And in looking at last year’s timing, we’ve readjusted this year schedule just a little bit. So the calendar invites went out earlier, the Save the date cards are actually going out today. And the social media campaign will kick in mid July, and we haven’t heavily started promoting that will kick in the week after July 4. And, and then from that moment forward, we’ll be having conversations with people. And there is another group that I failed to mention, we did a survey during the events and before the event and after the event. And there were 50 people that that indicated they would like to be involved in this process. So while we’ve communicated with them, we haven’t done anything formal. So when this timeframe rolls around two to three weeks prior to that we’re going to connect with that group, and give them an assignment during the conference or during the summit, to listen for certain things. So that afterwards, we can get them together and do a larger debriefing than what we did last year with just our smaller next gen group.

Brandon Burton 18:42
Wow, I really liked that idea of being able to. So how was that question phrased on the survey then to because they can see, you know, do you want to get involved that can mean a whole lot of different things about what involvement might look like in a summit like this,

Candace Boothby 18:57
that haven’t looked at it in a while. But if I remember, I think it was something like this more gauging their interest in the topic and the conversation and desire to be engaged in conversation moving forward about where we’re growing as a community. So it was rather broad. But the fact that we have that many people that actually said, Yes, I was a little surprised, because that’s your built in audience right there.

Brandon Burton 19:24
It is. I imagine if you if you needed somebody you could pull from that group for one of the conversation groups that you’re talking about doing or something that you have a pool of people that are willing and want to be more involved. So I love that idea.

Candace Boothby 19:38
Thank you.

Brandon Burton 19:39
Yeah. Well, let’s shift gears a little bit to the other program on your chamber. The your application was called go digital. That Correct? That’s it. Tell us what that’s about and kind of the origins and how that’s been developed?

Candace Boothby 19:54
said go digital. We were very fortunate. Our county administer Strader approached me, I lose track of time, sometime you’re in a year ago, you’re gonna have to go about the ARPA funds into the American rescue plan funds. And he said that they were going to earmark just shy of a million dollars for the chamber. But we had to submit the traditional grant, which we did. And then we received two grants. One was for a talent development program. And the other one was for good digital. And I think we had about 400,000 applied to the go digital program. So I love this program. Because what it’s done, we were able to identify, during COVID, there were a lot of our small businesses, because they did not have an online e commerce presence, they were not able to, to really be as successful as they could have been otherwise. So we targeted companies who needed help with their digital assets, specifically, but not exclusively, online, e commerce. So we have a fantastic volunteer, he used to be our board chair, he’s retired senior VP of Finance for Yamaha just does a lot of great stuff with us. So he has been the project leader since the beginning. And he put together a group of digital asset providers, so member companies, and actually, I guess they were all members, we get a little loose about that, like, for instance, on the grant side, you did not have to be a chamber member to receive a grant. And we want to help all companies. And if it’s an opportunity for us, then to expose the chamber to somebody maybe and then turn them into a member. That’s, that’s great, that he pulled together a group of probably eight providers that worked on, you know, developing websites, and social media campaigns and all the things video that you would consider part of the digital assets. So they created the criteria. And they created everything, all the requirements. So there were requirements were the company that applied had to go through training. They only got a percentage of the money on the front end. And they had to complete the project before they received the remaining money. And so we were able to help. And the grants ranged from 2500. To just shy of 20,000, I believe, we were able to help a little over 60 companies believe we’ve given up most of the money we saw, we were able to get just a little bit more transferred over from our other grants into digital aid. So we can do a bit more this year. One of our providers, I thought did something quite clever. So we do a total resource campaign in the fall. One of our products is called other chambers do this as well try it Tuesday, and where we Wednesday, where you go out and you film them. And you see you try that you film them with trying something or show us what you’re doing depending on which day you purchased. And then we put those videos out on social media, we have a page on our chamber website, we promote them to our members. So one of these providers used some of her grant money for her clients to purchase them. These videos, which helped us out I didn’t know she was doing it until much later on. I thought this is brilliant. So when you look at our schedule for the trial to see where we Wednesdays throughout the year, probably of the 24 I’m going to say that at least 12 Or her clients. Wow. And so it’s enabled them to be able to get video for their websites at a very, very well. They didn’t pay for it because it came with a grant. And then we partnered with one of our providers. And he does all of our video for us. So it gives it a little bit more of a professional look. That’s been a great program. It’s it’s, we did a cover story on the program in our Thrive publication back in March. And there’s this big photo of all lay they weren’t all there. But most of the grant recipients are sitting on the wall in front of the courthouse and standing and the courthouse is right there in the background. And they’re waving at the camera. And then on the inside was a wonderful story about some of the outcomes. Some of the companies who talked about just having access to this grant and implementing it how much it’s helped their company grow. So that’s the stories that we tell now is the success stories. Yeah,

Brandon Burton 24:51
I love that. And that gives you a ton of content to tell stories over and over and impact the Chamber’s making it

Candace Boothby 24:59
I have to tell you a sidebar though. Have you seen that cover that magazine?

Brandon Burton 25:03
I have not? No. It’s on our website. Yeah. So that’s me, and I’ll put it in our show notes for this episode too. So people, when

Candace Boothby 25:11
you look at it, it’s the most beautiful blue sky and the most beautiful cherry tree and full bloom. So when we took that photo, it was February. And the tree had no leaves, the grass was ground. And it was it was kind of a gray day. And so I sent it there is a company that we occasionally use in St. Simons called 365 degrees marketing, they do such an amazing work with photos. And they, they’re the ones that created our logo and brand 15 years ago. So I sent him this photo, and I said, this is gonna go on the cover of thrive, and I need it to have your colors featured. So they and I said, I just need a few leaves on the tree and, you know, give the sky you’re pretty blue. Will they sent it back. And the tree was it didn’t just have leaves, it was a cherry tree and full blue. And the sky was this beautiful shade of cobalt blue. And the court has got a lovely new roof. The grass was green, I stare at that cover and pay cash. That’s the prettiest picture ever.

Brandon Burton 26:19
That’s great. That’s a way to sell the community. Right? Your dress? Yeah, that’s awesome. No, it’s so important for businesses to be able to have their online presence to be able to have their ecommerce sites if they’re a retail store, you know, have products that they sell in a brick and mortar, to be able to sell them as out the back door, as we say. And I forget what the stats are. But the percentage of sales that go online versus brick and mortar is it can be, you know, double or triple within store sales are if they’re set up in the right way. And the community is

Candace Boothby 26:57
huge. Yeah, well, here’s one example. So downtown in the square, the Noonan square, there’s this chocolate shop, that it’s it’s let them eat toffee. And they had no website. So when COVID hit, give a love their chocolate, and so they were calling them, you know, and that’s a bit of a challenge. So they were one of the first ones to sign up to be a part of this program. And it has made a world of difference in their ability to expand their customer base.

Brandon Burton 27:28
I bet. So with how the funds from the grant were set up, was there anything that goes into training on how to make that conversion from vo to be able to sell online? Because that’s it’s different right than doing business, just bringing someone up at the cash register versus having the logistics to be able to pull the product and package and ship and assuming that’s the type of business that they are and where they’re shipping material. But how do those that you talked about the eight, the eight providers? Did they provide some of that training and get them up and going with that the grant

Candace Boothby 28:06
there? Yes, there was required training before they applied for the grant. Okay, so as far as drilling down that deeply into onto the E commerce side, I’d have to ask Phil, that question. But I know that there was a needs assessment that was done. And when specifically like the websites were created. So here’s a great example, there’s a travel agency that didn’t have a great online presence. And so when they were done, they had not just the online presence, but the tools to take it to the next level. So I think it was probably a case by case basis, once they went through the first training based on what their needs were.

Brandon Burton 28:53
Yeah, I can see that. That’s such a great idea to be able to, to kind of tag some of those ARPA funds for this type of work to be able to get businesses online and, and like I said before, it makes such a huge impact into the community and for those businesses and they have families and they’re earning a living and all these things just helps perpetuate that throughout your community.

Candace Boothby 29:18
I will tell you this, I think one of the things, least for me, and other people that I talked to, that they’ve enjoyed most about it is for the ones that now have the video that was filmed as a part of either try it Tuesday or Wednesday. That has been eye opening for me because it’s allowed me to be able to go form a different kind of relationship with some of these companies. So there’s a lady that has goats and she makes goat’s milk and she’s got a beautiful storefront in downtown soy. So you know being able to go visit and see her product and when I interviewed her I got to hold the nine day old goat by the name of Daphne A which was kind of cool. And I would never have known about like the dent guy or the junk sweepers. But then to actually be able to sit down with them and drill down, it’s given us another outlet to get to know our members, you know, just a little bit better at a different in a different way.

Brandon Burton 30:18
Yeah, yeah, yeah. And I think we could go down a whole rabbit rabbit hole of the trade Tuesdays Wednesdays and, and I’m sorry, we don’t have more time, because I know that people listening are like, tell us more about that. Tell us more. But as we start to wrap things up, I do like to ask, especially with you guys being a chamber, the year finalist again, you guys are doing something, right. So for the chambers out there who wants to take 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.

Candace Boothby 30:50
So I’m gonna have to go back to my roots. So I’m a big believer in systems and processes. And I think back to, I don’t know, when I first came in 2003, and we discussed, accreditation, and the board wasn’t convinced they really wanted to do it. And so what we decided we would do is we would look at those categories. And we would spend our time identifying gaps, and then closing the gaps. So we did that for about six years, until finally we decided, gosh, if we’re going to put this much work into it, and you also have programs, if you don’t do them within two years, you really shouldn’t use them with some great programs, we need to go ahead and just put this together. And if we’re going to do it, then we need to make sure that we have everything in place to create a five star because you want the five stars, right? So we did that. And so everything that we shored up and the the gaps that we closed and the work that we did, later, really strong foundation. So my advice, and I think had we not had that foundation, it would not have positioned us then to have the data and the numbers and the programs in place. That allowed us then to not just qualify through the numbers, but then to actually, you know, be able to submit the application and be then chosen as a finalist. We also have and have been blessed with a lot of great, not just board chairs, but board members. So I remember when we interviewed back in 2013, I took one of my former board chairs with me to do the interview. And he was as knowledgeable about the organization almost as knowledgeable as I was, and had been integrally involved in a lot of our initiatives, that speaks highly when you have volunteers who are that immersed in the culture of the organization, that they understand it at the same level. So I guess my advice would be if you have the the systems and the processes, the foundation and the infrastructure, it will sustain you. And you can have a year where you maybe your results aren’t what you typically would have, or you have a rogue board member or you have a toxic staff member or whatever it may be. All those things will happen throughout a career of you know, many years. But that infrastructure and that stability that you’ve built, and those systems that have seen you through that is what will create the sustainability and allow you to grow to the next level. So I can actually track that to 2007 when I changed our work environment to be a little more entrepreneurial, and less restrictive, more encouraging of working outside, in the outside of the office if you can be more productive, and then our systems and processes and that’s when we started seeing the results. And then from there, you know, like you’ve read with the bio, we’ve been able to achieve the five stars since that first application in 2013, and then be able to qualify and compete, and then win back in 2015. And then be a finalist this year. So that’s my advice. It’s not sexy, but it is foundational, and it’s systems and processes and keep your eye on the ball and alignment would be my other piece of advice. And then use your data to drive your decisions. All of that. You wrap it up in a pretty little ball and put a bow on it. Yeah, like

Brandon Burton 34:41
you say it’s not sexy. But you had also mentioned before you don’t do anything that’s outside of your mission, right so you can have your systems and processes surrounded by your mission. That’s going to put you in the right course.

Candace Boothby 34:53
But we do like the wow factor. So I years ago I had a board member say to me, we have the state ache but where’s the sizzle in the aroma? So we always want to have the sizzle in the room. And the other thing is always be open to change, embrace change, just because you’ve done it, don’t keep doing it. So every year when we start looking at our program of work for the next year, we always push back throughout the year, we’re pushing back, is this still where it needs to be? Do we still need to do it? There have been many programs we’ve sunsetted. And that we have to that we’re reimagining right now to bring back. But I think that keeps it fresh. And that keeps people like me who like a challenge and change and energy that keeps me motivated as well.

Brandon Burton 35:36
Right? Absolutely. Well, Candace, I like asking everyone I have on the show, as we look to the future of chambers of commerce, how do you see the future of chambers and their purpose going forward.

Candace Boothby 35:49
So if there are chambers out there that have not read the horizon initiative, I would strongly encourage them to do that. ACC is in the midst of revamping them. But I think all nine of those initiatives are important, I think at the root of it, though, is leadership, there’s one called catalytic leadership. And you can have great communications good technology, you can, you know, be very much aware of what’s happening in the community and what the issues are. But if you don’t have a leadership, that’s going to understand how you embrace that, and how you package it, and how you move it forward, then the rest of this stuff doesn’t really matter. So I think, for chambers to be relevant in the future, there just needs to be a constant attention being paid to building leaders, and it’s harder in today’s world, because people don’t have as much time, the role of leaders in the community is shifting a bit. And, you know, so you have to sometimes redefine who the leaders are, that the leader at the Chamber is the one that has to help keep the eye on the ball and keep that out, or in the forefront. And making sure that new leaders are being identified and brought in and put at the table. And, you know, it can be exhausting. But without the catalytic leadership mindset, you’re not really going to be able to, you know, engage the public or, you know, be aware of what’s happening internationally and be able to be successful in aligning your chamber with that. It takes leaders with ideas, and motivation and courage to be able to do those kinds of things. So that’s my little advice for the future. Love

Brandon Burton 37:39
it, and so much wisdom in that. Candace, is there any contact information you’d like to share for listeners who might want to reach out and connect with you and learn more about what setting you guys apart as a chamber, the year finalist? Sure, and

Candace Boothby 37:54
I’m always happy to share. I’ll share whatever resources we have happy to talk. So you can reach me at the NewnanCowetaChamber.org and my email is very simple. It’s just candace@newnancowetachamber.org.

Brandon Burton 38:10
That’s perfect. We will get that in our show notes for this episode, as well as a picture of the cover of your beautiful magazine and downtown square and courthouse for everybody to pull up and check out but Candace this has been great having you back on Chamber Chat Podcast. I wish you and your team best of luck in Dallas as chamber the year.

Candace Boothby 38:30
Thank you. It’s always a delight to see you and I guess we’ll see you there. Right. Absolutely. Okay. Well, thanks very much for having me. I appreciate it.

Brandon Burton 38:39
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Chino Valley Chamber-2024 Chamber of the Year Finalist with Zeb Welborn

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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.

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You’re joining us for a special episode and our 2024 ACCE Chamber the Year Finalist Series and our guests for this episode is Zeb Welborn. Zeb is the President of the Chino Valley Chamber of Commerce and Wellborn Social Media dedicated to promoting local businesses through growth and digital marketing. And award winning executives Zeb is passionate about connecting with driven individuals and fostering community development through initiatives like Upskill Chino Valley, recognized as the 2023, Executive of the Year by WACE, he continues to excel in leadership and service. Zeb, I want to welcome you to Chamber Chat Podcast are excited to have you with us today and say big congratulations to you and your team for being selected as a chamber the year finalists this year, wanted 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.

Zeb Welborn 2:09
Well, thank you so much. So we are very excited about that opportunity. Thank you for the opportunity to chat with you here today. Yeah, we’re our team is very excited about it. And then let’s see something interesting about myself. I was a national champion soccer player back in my younger days, and I bowled the 300. So those are the two things that I have on my resume that are not on my resume. Wow.

Brandon Burton 2:35
So you’re not competitive at all right?

Zeb Welborn 2:40
Yeah, there’s definitely a little competitive streak in me for sure. Yeah,

Brandon Burton 2:43
that’s awesome. Those are, those are two really cool facts. So tell us a little bit about the Chino Valley Chamber just to give us an idea of the scope of work size staff budget to kind of preface for our conversation today.

Zeb Welborn 2:57
Sure, so the Chino Valley Chamber represents two cities, we represent Chino and Chino Hills, both of them have a population of I think around 95,000 or so. So it’s almost 200,000 people. It’s a high growth area. So there’s like Chino was named one of the top 10 boom towns in the boom towns in the country, either last year or the year before. I have friends that come out from the military, they’ll be back in town every two or three years in the city looks totally different every time it comes out. So we’re we’re in the suburbs of LA and in Orange County. So all of the people that are working in those areas have kind of shifted out to where we live. Our budget is about $1.1 million. We have about eight staff members. When I started our budget was about $150,000. And we had three part time members including myself, so that was about six years ago. So we’ve grown a lot in the last six years as a as a community but also as the chamber. So that’s something that I am super proud of is kind of helping our chamber turnarounds and challenges they’re facing when I got brought in and now we’re kind of rocking and rolling. And I’m super proud of the work that that that I’ve done but also that our team has accomplished as well. Ya know, that

Brandon Burton 4:12
is something to be proud of for sure. That’s some some great growth. And I will say I I lived in South Orange County for a while and it seemed like everybody was moving out your direction. So I’ve seen the growth you know, almost firsthand I’ll say secondhand, you know, seeing a lot of people we knew moving out your direction. Yeah, lots of growth though. Lots of opportunity. So on these chamber, their finalist episodes we’d like to spend the majority of our conversation most of the time in this interview talking about the two programs that were submitted on your chamber the your application. So we’ll we’ll dive in deep on what those two those two programs are as soon as we get back from this quick break.

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Alright, Zeb we’re back. As I mentioned before the break, we’re going to spend some time talking about the two programs that were on your application for chamber the year. So introduce this with the first program is that you’d like to highlight with us today.

Zeb Welborn 7:01
So I’m hoping I can remember that too. We do a lot of different programs. But one of them for sure is our upskill Chino Valley program. So that is one that we initiated two or three years ago, and it was to address the needs of our workforce development shortage in our area. So right after COVID. I mean, when COVID happened, we’re very proactive to making sure that our business had access to resources have access to all of the things that they needed. And so we got a lot of recognition for the work that we did during that time. And a lot of businesses, you know, stayed in business because of the work that we were able to do at that point in time. But then immediately following, as you’re driving around town, you would see just help wanted signs everywhere. So our community had help wanted signs everywhere. Everybody was doing hiring. So you know, that was a big challenge facing our businesses. So then, concurrently, I was taking some classes with the US Chamber, and some other just other professional development learnings. And I came to realize that this workforce development shortage, and this is a stuff that they would teach us to the US Chamber is that this is going to be impacting communities for a while. There’s kind of this forecast of the 10 years of challenges, at least when it comes to workforce and finding good qualified workers. So that’s one of the things that we wanted to try to tackle for our community, how can we make sure that we were being better to better supportive of our businesses to help find their workforce needs. So we looked at it in the short term, but we also looked at in the long term, so trying to create solutions in the short term and long term. So we came up with four things that we thought that if we executed on these things, it would help not only solve the short term issues, but it would help solve the long term issues. So the short term issue is workforce development. So we started doing a lot of job fairs, a lot of one on one placements, we started partnering with our workforce, San Bernardino County Workforce Development, our local Chaffey College, our local school district. So we created these partnerships, we’re trying to build a pipeline of workers for our businesses. And so through that we’ve placed at least 350 job seekers in local jobs in our community, we have helped place at least 100 I want to say about 100 interns from the high school and college level with local businesses to help build the next generation of workforce in our businesses, and and build those connections between business owners and leaders and in the educational institutions that are around us. We did a lot of work with Chaffey College to help make sure that we’re building those strong connections. So that’s a short term solution, I think, or means short term and long term. But then the longer the more longer term. approaches were three things. So it was economic development. These are things that chambers normally do but economic development, leadership development and entrepreneurship development. So economic development, well we started doing was these roundtable discussions. So we’re doing two a month where we’re bringing in businesses from a specific sector or specific industry, or we’re bringing cross industries together, identifying pain points, and then creating action items and our chamber can take action on. So we’ve been doing that extensively for the last two years or so we’re about two years into our program. The next one is leadership development, we did not have a leadership program in our community. So we started one. So leadership developed, we have 25 leaders, we go and tour different business locations and sites around town connecting our businesses with business owners that are running some of the larger businesses in town and making sure that our leadership is strong. If you don’t have strong leaders, you’re gonna have employees that leave. So we want to make sure we develop strong leaders in our community. And then the last thing is entrepreneurship development, which is just enhancing the work that we do and are educating businesses on how to be better in business. So I think one of the gaps is where we’re making sure that we have business owners training, the business leaders that are coming up in our community and making sure that we’re having business owners training our up and coming entrepreneurs in our community.

Brandon Burton 11:03
So with that, the two that really stood out to me is the leadership development. So I know we have a leadership development and entrepreneur development. So with the leadership development, have you guys gotten to gotten through to full classes yet? Or where are you at in that, that process? And what does it look like at this point with the leadership development? Yeah, so

Zeb Welborn 11:26
we’re just about to finish year two, it’s been a great successful opportunity. Oh, and I didn’t mention this in the beginning. But that upskill Chino Valley program, we essentially pitched it to one of our legislators, and so they allocated a million dollars of state funding towards our programming. So that allows us to execute on this work. It’s a lot of work to do that stuff. And so I’m always like, how, how can we get the funding to actually execute on his work? So we pitched that, and that was something that they thought was needed for our community. So we were able to secure those which allowed us to do all this work. So this is our second year, we, our first year was highly successful, one of the things that we commit to doing as a community good project during that leadership program as well. So they do something good for the community. Last year, they bought AED machines to help in case somebody goes into cardiac arrest, we put them in three different businesses around town. So there’s a cost that was incurred that so we helped raise that those funds for that. This year, we’re doing helping our local community theater or children’s community theater. So we’re raising funds so that they can train more kids in the in the theatrical arts. And and it’s been, it’s been great. So yeah, you’re too we’re almost done. We got about two months left. Awesome.

Brandon Burton 12:40
And then with the entrepreneurial development, I’m always curious with entrepreneurs, and how to how chambers get connected with him in the first place to match them up with other business owners. And you know, a lot of times entrepreneurs have that bug of I’m going to do this by myself. Yeah, I can. I’m going to figure this out. And it tends to be the hard path, right? So what what are some of the ways you guys are connecting with entrepreneurs and helping to kind of bring them out and connect them with the right people.

Zeb Welborn 13:09
So I feel like I feel like I’m an entrepreneur, right. So I joined actually joined my chamber as a member back in like 2010, or 2011 or so. And when I joined, what I was looking for was mentors, I was I didn’t want to make those mistakes. I wanted to find people in my community that I could look up to that I could learn from. And there’s a couple of people that I thought of like there was a guy that ran our newspaper, there’s also the guy that ran the local golf course. So these are two guys that I was kind of hoping to connect with. And they were they were loosely connected to the chamber. So I joined the chamber not knowing when the chamber really was good. But I thought like, what I was really looking for was the business organization that I could turn to that I could get mentorship. And there wasn’t really anything in my community except for the Chamber of Commerce. So when I came across the chamber, and I kind of went into the first day, it wasn’t exactly what I was expecting. But there wasn’t anything else. And so my thought was was well either I could work like a you try to make that happen inside of the chamber community. Or I could try it like you said, do it on my own. So I obviously opted to get involved in my chamber and see if there are ways that I can help make this a system that worked out well for people like me, they get to come into business and get advice and mentorship from successful business owners. So that’s one of the things that I’ve had a passion for since I started and and now we’re, we’re we’re doing that. So we’re trying to there’s lots of different ways to go about doing that. I’ll share that we do a lot of business trainings and business development. So we do a business workshop. It used to be once a week, but we’re doing it once every other week. Right now, because we found that that cadence worked out better for our members, but we are trying to shift some strategies around to offer more. One of the exciting things that has happened for us and this is very new. So this was before I submitted our proposal was we just got accepted. So we submitted an appropriations request for an audit To bring an entrepreneurship center into our community that would be facilitated and managed by the chamber. So that’s something that we submitted for it’s been approved through the first phase of the process, we have no idea if it’s actually going to get funded or not. But at least it’s very exciting because that was a selected project out of, I think, 10, or 15, they’re able to choose every year. So we’re one of those 10 or 15. So we’re excited because we feel like that could be a good opportunity for our business, and business community. So that’s something we are excited about. And so we but we’re making ranking progress to try to develop more entrepreneurial programming, to making sure that we are have a space that we can do that stuff with, and that we’re bringing potential entrepreneurs and aspiring entrepreneurs and collaboration and connection with people who have made it happen and Bennett themselves here in the Inland Empire. Yeah.

Brandon Burton 15:47
Oh, that is great. And I’m sure along the way, you’re seeing you know, upticks in those different, you know, measurements to be able to see with with workforce, and hopefully seeing a few less help wanted signs and, and being able to fill some of those voids and needs throughout the community. As we kind of shift gears Do you would you like to introduce what the second program is that you guys submitted on your chamber, the your application?

Zeb Welborn 16:18
So if I had to guess I would say was the entrepreneur, the leadership program that we discussed already. So that was the part of it. So that leadership program is something that we are very proud of? It has, we have, we’re coming up on 50 graduates in the next two months, and I think it was just something that was missing in our community that we really needed. And that we wanted to. Yeah, it was just that there’s been a lot of things that have happened in our community that are kind of ostracized, ostracize people from one another. And when we bring people together, prior to those situations happening, solutions come together much more quickly, their people are able to collaborate much more better. And so building these relationships and connections with these different entities in town just plays a huge role in making sure that our community can stay connected, and looking at opportunities to focus on growth versus opportunities, where we’re looking for division amongst each other. So that’s something that we’re excited about the the collaborative work that we’ve been doing with our businesses, making sure they’re connected with our city and, and legislators and educational institutions, and all those things. When we do that. We feel like we’re doing really good work.

Brandon Burton 17:29
Yeah. So I love leadership programs and the whole purpose behind them. And I know every chamber has a little slightly different approach and how they go about it. But do you guys put a limit on how many, how many participants? How many students are involved with leadership programs? Is there an application process? Who reviews that? What? What’s it like to become part of the leadership class?

Zeb Welborn 17:52
Yeah, so we do, we do have like an interview process. So it’s, the number is 25 that we shoot for. And that’s because, you know, some of our touring locations have a restriction on how many people can go through it. So we found that 25 is a good number, because it’s manageable. And also, we’re able to tour the sites with one visit versus multiple visits. So that’s been a good number for us. They do do an interview. So they have to be interviewed and selected in and we actually went, I went through the corona leadership, the corona Chamber Leadership Program. So I kind of modeled a lot of what we do after them. And my understanding is, is that they model it after the Riverside chamber. So we still in use a lot of stuff from each other. But that’s, that’s what we do. And then we don’t really do any leadership training, we mostly build collaboration and connection and do tour visits. So we go visit different locations, give these business owners an opportunity to talk about their business and the work that they do. And then they provide a tour to our members, they get back behind the scenes look at what other organizations and businesses have to go through on a daily basis to make sure that their operation runs successfully. And so when you do that, there’s a lot of eye opening things that happen you realize how intricate and how much goes into these businesses and organizations. And so it gives gives people a bigger perspective. I mean, the biggest thing though, the biggest advantage is just the collaboration and connection is built because we’ve seen firsthand how many people get connected with each other for bigger projects that help support our community and a high one, which is we had somebody who was going through our program. She’s a leadership coach or professional business coach, and we toured our local so we have the California institution for men is located in our community. So we toured the prison and while we’re touring the prison, she got connected with somebody who was Aristotle I got in the I would love to speak to your your inmates to talk about you know, things that they can do to turn their life around and So she gets she came in and spoke to the I guess it was a large contingent was maybe like 100 200 inmates about leadership and challenges. And so that was a connection that was built through that. And because of that, I feel like it did good things for our community for the inmates that were there for the business owner. That was the business coach that was going through it. And so it’s just kind of like a win win win. That was a result of the work that we helped facilitate.

Brandon Burton 20:25
That’s really cool. So throughout the year, the leadership program, but how many visits site visits do you guys do? Or do you shoot for?

Zeb Welborn 20:34
Yeah, it’s what we go once a month, and it’s three site visits a day, so. So it’s one day, it’s about a full day. So they started around nine, and a three, so not not quite a full day, but nine to three, and we visit three different locations. So we’ll do one or two in the morning, and then we’ll have lunch, and then we’ll do one in the afternoon. And then we call it a day. Sometimes it’s fuck. It’ll move around based on the sites that we’re visiting. But that’s kind of the rough outline.

Brandon Burton 21:05
Yeah. And then just out of curiosity, how are you selecting the sites to go visit? Is it based on the applicants are just trying to figure out needs or what what goes into that thought process?

Zeb Welborn 21:17
So I’ll say it’s industry specific, we look, you know, we want to highlight each of the image industries that are represented in our community. So the first couple of days is with our city. So we go toward the behind the scenes of the cities. And then we have a healthcare day, there’s a Manufacturing Day, there’s a logistics day, there’s a small business day. What else do we do? Well, we visit public safety. So we have kind of a Public Safety Day. So I guess, those are the things that we do try to focus on. And we tried to make them days so that there’s a theme behind them, but sometimes just the way that the visits work out, we’ll move them around. But that’s the main gist. Yeah,

Brandon Burton 21:56
I like that idea, though, having a theme for for those visits each day. And kind of building the mindset around that about why is public safety important in our community. And as a developing leader, how does that play into my development and being able to make those connections going forward. So I see that across the board with the different themes that you guys tried to target. So I appreciate that. So I’d like asking everyone that I have on the podcast, especially as you guys are a chamber, the year finalist this year, kind of at the top of your game, so to speak. It, I’d like to see if there’s any kind of tip or action item that you might offer for chambers out there who were interested in taking their chamber to the next level.

Zeb Welborn 22:46
Well, when I saw when I joined the chamber that thing, as a as a member, I just remember thinking like this is not the hub of the business community. This is not what I was anticipating being like the business organization that represents business. And I don’t know if that’s the same case, for chambers across the place, I guess what how I would describe it is, when I showed up to different meetings and stuff, it was a lot of people that had retired from their careers. And we’re kind of doing a second career to make income on the side. So I was by like the youngest person by 30 years that was participating in those programs. It didn’t have the people that were running like big successful businesses in town participating in those programs. And so in my mind, I was saying like, like, this doesn’t make any sense to me, like there should be a way that business owners in a community can come together to support one another to grow the business community at large. So that’s kind of like, I guess, just my thought when I was coming into it. And so I’ve just worked really hard on trying to build that. So I think the thing that surprises me sometimes is the approach some of my colleagues make is, like, I looked at us as leaders of our business community. And so when I say leaders, one, we should not be operating the best business in our community. So we should have be running the most successful business in town, we shouldn’t be modeling that business behavior to our business owners, and then we should be compensated like successful business owners. And so when I started my role, like there was no way I could live in my community with the salary that they were offering. And so, but it’s not just like given to us, like we have to work for it. We have to be those leaders in business, we have to run a successful business. And then if we do run a successful business, we have to seek compensation for the work that we do in that regard. So I think that’s my one piece of advice is treat it like a business, be proactive and growing that business. And then if you focus on doing those two things, I think you’re gonna be putting yourself in a great position to lead your business community because you’re modeling what it is to be a successful business and your businesses will will learn from that more than they would if you’re just trying to help them and suffering at the expense of supporting your local businesses. I think it’s important to model successful business behavior to the members of the chamber. Yeah.

Brandon Burton 25:06
And I think yeah, at our heart, I think most people know that and believe that, but to hear it said, and to kind of reinvigorate that, yes, we do need to be that model that template to be able to show how to run a good business. So then businesses can look to you and trust what you have to say, if it builds trust in the within the business community. If you’re just a hot mess of a chamber, it’s really hard to, to get buy in as a business to think that this chamber knows what to do you know what to offer me any kind of advice or anything like that. As we look to the future of chambers of commerce, how do you see the future of chambers and their purpose going forward?

Zeb Welborn 25:55
So that’s a good question. I, I mean, I see it, and I’ll just speak for my community, right, I saw a lot of opportunity when I came in, like, I feel like I’m an entrepreneur, and then I kind of moved towards where the opportunities are most prevalent. I feel like there is a great opportunity for Chambers of Commerce right now. I think that everybody is trying to get connected with business owners. And there’s a lot of light, and I’ll just say like federal funding, but it’s not just federal funding, it’s even like, when you’re running your business getting connected with business owners, it’s not an easy thing to do. Businesses are more strapped than ever for time. And I’ll say that attribute that to the internet, social media, digital marketing, you’re on 24/7. Whereas in prior to the internet, you did not have to be on 24/7, you could work the normal workdays, and then you have the evenings and weekends off. And and now if you’re an entrepreneur, you’re you’re grinding it out 24/7. And that’s how I’ve been doing it for the last 10 years. So I just know how busy chambers have. I know how busy businesses are, but they do need people to speak up for them in these roles and capacities. And so we’ve been participating in these collaboratives, where there’s like this, this federal funding that is coming or the state funding that is coming for programs that are designed to help support businesses, yet there are zero businesses at the table in these conversations. So that’s where everybody is trying to talk to business owners, but business owners don’t have time to sit around and waste time in these meetings that seem really unproductive and don’t get anything accomplished. Even though there is going to be a strong outcome at the end, they don’t have the time to invest in that type of work. So they need a representative, those organizations that are looking to support business community, they need a representative. And so chambers are uniquely positioned in a way where we have immediate access to the businesses that are represented through our membership. And we can turn and talk to them. And we can pick up the phone and they will answer and they will respond to our emails, and they will get in touch with us. And that’s what is needed by a lot of these entities trying to get in touch with businesses. So I think I see a lot of opportunity, I still see a lot of opportunity for our chamber and the work that we’re doing. And I feel like other chambers have that same opportunity as well. Yeah, I like that.

Brandon Burton 28:07
I like that response was that I wanted to give you an opportunity to share any contact information for listeners out there who may want to reach out and connect with you and learn more about how you guys are doing things there at the Chino Valley Chamber, what would be the best ways for them to reach out and connect with you.

Zeb Welborn 28:25
So my business got me involved in chamber was social media marketing. So I was fairly early on the social media marketing train, so you can find me very easily. My dad was a reporter for the Orange County Register. So I think he named me with the intention of that my name would make a great byline in a news story, you know, like the the article by Warren. So nobody has my name, Zeb Welborn, you can find me anywhere @zebwelborn, I am on all the socials. And I’d be happy to connect with you if anybody wants to chat or ask any questions. Yeah,

Brandon Burton 29:02
that was very kind of your father do give you a name that nobody else says. Well, it’s

Zeb Welborn 29:08
it’s good and bad. So if I if I if there’s something that comes up bad about me, it’s very easy to find. But if if I’m doing good work, then that’s also easy to find as well. So it’s a is that?

Brandon Burton 29:20
The right path? Right? Yeah, exactly. I

Zeb Welborn 29:22
don’t think it was thinking about the digital marketing age where you can search up, you do Google searches. That wasn’t a thing back then. But yeah, for sure.

Brandon Burton 29:30
That’s right. That was it. I appreciate it. It’s been fun having you on the podcast today and learning where you guys are doing there it’s Chino Valley Chamber and make an impact in your community. And I wish you and your team the best of luck is chamber the year.

Zeb Welborn 29:43
Awesome. Thank you very much.

Brandon Burton 29:46
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Strategic Planning Pitfalls with Carol Hamilton

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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.

Let’s hear from Becky Womble, President of the Bastrop Chamber to hear about her experience with Community Matters.

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 Carol Hamilton. Carol is principal of Grace Social Selector Consulting, LLC, and host of Nonprofit Mission: Impact podcast. Carol helps organizations and teams become more strategic and innovative or greater mission impact. She facilitates strategic planning, mapping an organization’s impact and organizational assessments for nonprofits and associations. Carol, I’m excited to have you with us today on Chamber Chat Podcast, I’d love for you to take 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. Well,

Carol Hamilton 2:42
thank you, Brandon, thank you for having me on the podcast. It’s an honor. Yeah, I so my name is Carol Hamilton, Grace Social Sector Consulting. And I, I was trying to think about, you know, what, what interesting thing could I share, but I think one that informs the work that I do is that I am the younger sister of a person, my brother has significant disabilities, he’s autistic and profoundly deaf and developmentally disabled and growing up with him, you know, as as, as my older brother, I definitely saw the way in which the world was not built for someone like him. And so for me, when I’m doing my work, I’m always trying to contribute my small part, to really building a world where everyone can thrive where there really no exceptions to that. And so that’s that kind of what is what motivated me to, you know, come into the to the nonprofit sector and want to be part of movements and groups and organizations that are really trying to help build a world where everyone can thrive.

Brandon Burton 3:52
Yeah, I like that it’s nice to to have that that driver you know, behind you that that background that really motivates you to you know, for greater good. So, I think that I imagined that will come into our conversation today and inclusion aspects as a topic today. But based upon your work and the kind of the focus that we wanted to take our conversation today on the podcast is going to be focused around common strategic planning mistakes. So I’m sure you have some examples and things that you can share with us from your experience and meeting with different organizations and going about strategic planning and I’m excited to dive in deeper and learn from these experiences as soon as they get back from this quick break.

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All right, Carol, we’re back. So as I mentioned before the break, we’re talking about strategic planning mistakes. So for chambers that are tuning in, creating a strategic plan is a integral part of their organization being able to know their mission and purpose going forward. And as they go about creating strategic plans, what are some of these key things that you see that stand out that organizations maybe ought to be aware of? And some of these mistakes, etc, that maybe we can help these chambers avoid some of these pitfalls? By sharing some of your experiences? Yeah,

Carol Hamilton 7:13
yeah, I think pitfalls are probably is a good way to put it. Because certainly nobody goes into the process trying to, you know, have it not be productive and effective for the organization. But I think one of them, and I’ll be a little, I don’t know, whether controversial or contrarian here is that the common wisdom around boards and staff, and I’m sure that there are many of your listeners who are probably maybe on the volunteer side of local chambers, but where they do have staff, it’s been seen that the board, or traditionally been held that the board is the one who’s in charge of strategy. And I, you know, that’s certainly an important role for the board. But I like to take a whole organization approach where really every brain, every part of the brain, both that analytical side, and all the complexities that people bring, all of them are important to the organization’s future, and kind of opening up the conversation, to include more people into how you structure and frame up your vision and will really serve the organization well to help have people be motivated and more motivated to be behind. Whatever you ultimately as a group decide are your big, big goals, the big vision that you’re moving forward. So I would invite leaders to, you know, bring and bring more of a kind of big tent approach so that when a lot of people talk a lot about buy in, and then you know, if they do it with a small group, and then bring the plan to other people and wonder why they’re not excited about it. I would say get the people in the room with you, they’ll get excited about it. Because they’ve been they’ve had a hand in creating that vision. Yeah,

Brandon Burton 9:05
and I think that’s such an important part of creating a vision is getting buy in from as many people as possible and being able to feel like they had a voice and creating that plan. So as it’s unveiled and in you get rubber to the road, you get more people that are willing to participate and help move that mission forward. I like how you, you mentioned how typically, you might see how a board that might be a pitfall, right, where if it’s just the board sitting in a room creating a strategic plan. Maybe they’re missing insights from others in the community. So when you talk about getting more people involved, if you are looking at a chamber of commerce, what examples might you give of other types of people or organizations or what where would you look to to get more involvement in creating that strategic plan? And or chamber. Yeah,

Carol Hamilton 10:01
and I think when I say that it doesn’t mean that everybody is ultimately at, you know, the the planning session or the retreat, it’s that you’ve taken the time to get feedback from a variety of stakeholders, you’ve identified who those stakeholders are, who are important to, you know, moving the vision of your organization forward. You know, the people who are you’re very involved volunteers, your staff, your members, but then wider than that people in the community that you have partners with other other organizations that you have alliances with, the people that you serve, all of those folks will be important, they won’t necessarily all end up in the room making the decisions about the organization, but taking that time to talk to people and get feedback. And oftentimes, that’s where an external party consultant can help out because folks will be more willing to kind of share candidly, with someone who doesn’t have a stake in the outcome. You know, in terms of that, that feedback and input, and will also help to synthesize all that information, because it’s a, it’s a big lift to talk to a lot of people, and then you’ve got so much information, it can feel overwhelming, but how do you sift it down to some of the important nuggets, that then you as a as a smaller group of board, and staff can really chew on and say, Okay, this is what we’re hearing from people, this is what we’ve set ourselves about what we want. And this is a, this is what, you know, this, this is the significance that has for us in our future going forward. And oftentimes, I find that, again, that kind of fear of that big tent is that folks will be overwhelmed by the number of opinions, ideas, all the different things. And in terms of when I’m talking, when I’ve done this work with groups, I’ve actually found that they’ve been surprised by how much agreement there actually is. And pleasantly surprised. And it often will bring issues onto the table that maybe they were thinking and they talked to somebody in the hallway, but you know, after the board meeting, but they they weren’t weren’t willing to bring up in the in the formal session, and so that this process can give, make it safer to have those conversations about critical issues.

Brandon Burton 12:33
I like the point that you make about bringing in a consultant for that specific purpose, because I think there’s a lot of value in bringing in somebody from the outside. I’ve seen myself in that role it were a, I’ll joke about being the bartender, you know, we’re the members, the members of the organization, they’ll tell you all their gripes and all the things you know, that they see wrong with the organization, and the things that they like, and the things that they’re excited about. Sure, exactly. But things that they may not be as open to just telling the chamber directly or to get the face of the chamber executive and say, I disagree with this or that or so having a third party come in, there’s a lot of value to be able to flesh out that real, meaningful data, that information that you can get from people that you wouldn’t get just having your normal day to day conversations. And I think for a chamber staff to be able to try to collect all this feedback, on top of doing their day to day job, it’s a big lift to try to do that and make sense of all the information they’re bringing in. So having a consultant somebody who’s focused on that, and being able to go through with all that information means and present it in a way that makes sense. And you can look at a report and kind of go over and say, Okay, it’s good feedback. So in soliciting that feedback, you’d mentioned talking to individuals. So I imagine there can be an interview portion of soliciting feedback, talking to some of those key stakeholders, surveys, what what are some of the ideal ways you see in soliciting that feedback that have been effective from your experience?

Carol Hamilton 14:24
Yeah, so it’s going to depend on each organization and, and the scope and the scale and, you know, their capacity, the budget, all those things, but generally, it’s a combination of interviews, one on one interviews, focus groups with, you know, groups of people up to eight to 10, and then surveys, and so, some combination of those will will, you know, enable you to really get into what people perceive as the strengths, the challenges, the opportunities, and all the things that are important for the Future of the organization. And I think another mistake that organizations make is thinking that strategic planning is just about about having a retreat. And so for me that that date, that kind of listening tour that you can go on, is a really important fundamental piece to get that good snapshot of where are you at this moment? Where is the organization right now? You know, what are people are saying, across the board? Are challenges and things that are getting in the way? And then what are the strengths that everyone’s seeing and the opportunities? So really being grounded in that kind of what’s our current reality? Right.

Brandon Burton 15:39
And before that retreat happens, you need to have good accurate data to go off of exactly decisions. Right. Exactly. There’s the planning before the retreat that that takes place. Yeah. So

Carol Hamilton 15:51
that’s, that’s part of that data gathering process. Yeah. So

Brandon Burton 15:55
as I’m thinking of these interviews, I think my first thought goes to with the chamber to go to the members of the chamber to get feedback from them, I think it may be important to even solicit others in the business community who are not members to find out what what do they see the role of the chamber being? Why are they not members? You know, they have they been members in the past? What can we get from that experience? But also, committees, right? So there’s different committees within organizations and getting their feedback on their role? And how they see that being a part of the greater organization? And how can things maybe be more efficient? And I don’t know, I’m just trying to think of all the different sources to gather data from to be able to create a rock solid strategic plan. Are there other areas that you would think have to go to for to gather that information?

Carol Hamilton 16:57
Yeah, I mean, you know, usually, I’m working with the organization and a set of small, smaller set of folks from the organization, usually a combination of, you know, staff leadership and board, to really identify who all those important stakeholders are. So the organization will know, you know, who’s really important for us to talk to, and so we’ll work together to come up with that list of okay, who are we going to kind of reserve that one on one interaction with who are we going to invite to more of a group experience? Who are we going to reach out to via a survey? So really thinking through those those important points of you know, who, who most matters to the future of the organization? And also, what do we want to learn from them? You know, what are the big issues that we see that we’re curious about, that we also we kind of know, our perspective on, but how, you know, is that in alignment with how other people are seeing it? So kind of getting that cross check of, you know, is how we’re seeing the things aligning up with everybody else? And, and where’s their agreement? And where’s their, you know, some some divergence of opinion. I

Brandon Burton 18:07
like that. And you said, Something stood out to me, you said, what do we want to learn from them? And that should be the basis of all these interactions? Right? Right, what do we want right from them. And that takes me back to the thought of inclusion when you shared the tidbit about your brother and kind of that lens that it gives you in looking at your work? How do you go about inclusion, and specifically getting these opinions of voices that may not be heard, as regularly as they probably should be?

Carol Hamilton 18:42
Yeah, I mean, I think it’s important to think about, you know, as you’re making those decisions about who you’re going to prioritize, to interview and do focus groups, and surveys is really the power dynamics within organization of, are you only favoring people who already have the most power and already have the most voice and already have the most influence with the people that you you talk to one on one? Or are you doing more of a cross section or of the organization so that you get that rich feedback from a variety of people. So it’s it thinking about it in those terms that will help help define and really put inclusion at the at the center. As an organization, if you want to grow, you know, being able to see the wider net is going to be important. So,

Brandon Burton 19:39
yeah, so we’ve talked a lot about gathering that information, the data, and then the retreats is usually what people think about when you think of a strategic plan. So let’s focus a little bit more on the actual implementation of the plan. What how should that look? What are some of those pitfalls that you’ve seen that people need to be aware of to avoid as they go about implementing their strategic plan?

Carol Hamilton 20:07
So before we jump to the implementation, there’s one thing I wanted to say about the retreat, which I think is also another pitfall that people can fall into. And it’s kind of the, I think it’s the thing that leaders fear when they bring a lot of people in. So they fear a retreat that ends with just flip chart after flip chart, after flip chart, have nice ideas. And they haven’t taken the time to talk together. And I actually asked people to do this at the very beginning, before they start brainstorming ideas of how are we going to decide what we’re actually going to do, because you can never do it all. And you can’t do all the good ideas, you know, so you need a way to discern which ones are going to be the ones that you focus on. And so having that conversation upfront of how are we going to make some decisions, and then ensuring that somewhere in the process, you are making some decisions and discernment is so important. Because otherwise you end up with this laundry list plan that isn’t really a plan. It’s just a wish list. And so if you end up with a wish list plan that that gets in the way of implementation. But yeah, I think that’s that’s another key point that being clear with everybody all along the way that you’re going to have to focus on a couple things, you’re going to have to make some decisions. And if you can be clear with everybody, okay, these are the things that we’re looking for, you know, we’re looking for things that are going to grow revenue, we think we’re looking for things that are going to increase member satisfaction that are that are going to, you know, improve our reputation are going to, you know, contribute in some way to community health, whatever it might be. You’ve, you’ve agreed ahead of time, what those criteria are, that they it all aligns with our mission. So that then when you have that long list, you can go through and actually make some decisions.

Brandon Burton 22:12
Yeah, no, that makes that makes a lot of sense. I know. A lot of times, people and even other organizations will come to the chamber and say, here’s a great idea of something that you should do, right? And then it becomes that wish list of others. So I can see where you can have those turns ended up being a long wish list. Yeah, it’d be great if we could do this and that, but when it comes down to it, you need to have the resources to be able to execute and be able to do it well, right? You don’t want to just take something on and then have it be lackluster, and have it end up being a bad representation of your organization because you’re not doing it well. So yeah, moving beyond that wish list and having a solid plan is is huge. That’s important.

Carol Hamilton 23:03
Yeah, so and that list of criteria that you come up with can be great in that instance, of all the different people coming and saying, Well, you should do this. Well, we can run it through this kind of rubric decision making flowchart, if you will, and decide whether it actually fits, you know, fits our goals or not. But I think in terms of moving from, okay, we’ve got a plan, you know, it’s got three to five big goals, no more than that. We’ve identified, what are some of the action steps that we’re going to take, we’ve really gotten clear and gotten shared understanding about what does success look like for each of those. So oftentimes, I’ll see plans that have that big goal, have a couple action steps, but don’t necessarily go that next step of saying, Okay, if we take this action, what do we expect is going to happen? What do we think that’s going to look like that in the way so that we can know whether we’ve had the success. So this is where you get, you know, your your performance indicators, whether that’s some of them will be, you know, quantitative, but some of them may be qualitative, some of them may be, you know, we decided we’re going to take a new approach in membership. And we’re going to work with somebody to come up with a plan around that. And so, you know, the first success item is going to be we, we have a plan. So there’ll be a variety of different things. So with that, then thinking about okay, so this is a plan over three to five years. How do we actually what are we actually going to do in the next six months, just focus on that and not try to predict what you’re doing in year three, I see a lot of people getting caught up in wasting time, trying to nail down every detail over the five year three, three to five year period. And I say just take that for next six months, that next year. And that’s where you do your implementation plan of who’s going to do what by when? I

Brandon Burton 24:56
like that. It’s hard sometimes to Do you get caught up in the big vision, the big plan and you forget that it’s the day to day actions that execute on that five year plan. So as you talk about these performance indicators, it’s probably good to review what those performance indicators are in some sort of a regular interval. Do you have any suggestions on how how often to look bad like, because you can also get caught up on the data and continually look at it and not move the needle or feel like you’re moving the needle? So what’s a? And there’s probably not a straight answer for it. But what would be your guideline to being able to check those performance indicators and see, you know, how things are trending?

Carol Hamilton 25:42
Yeah, so so the two step for me of really making a plan, integrating it into your into how you do your work, is creating that that shorter term implementation plan, but then also coming to agreement about, okay, so we’re going to check in on this at this meeting. Every you know, quarter, or every six months or every year, whatever, you have an agreement again, ahead of time of how you’re going to do that. And then to remember that the strategic plan it you know, we talk about things being living documents all the time, but somehow, in people’s head, once the board has approved it, it becomes this, like, you know, written in stone, sacred document, and it’s not, it’s a plan, things will happen that you can’t anticipate strategic planning is not about predicting the future. It’s about setting your intentions about where you want to put your energy. So you’re going to have to readjust, you’re going to So it’s that kind of balance between, we have some goals, we have some strategy, we have some structure, and we’re going to be flexible. It’s not an either or it’s a both. And so having an agreement about how you’re going to do that, and who’s going to be able to make some updates is really important as well.

Brandon Burton 26:53
Yeah, I think that pandemic taught everybody that need to be able to be flexible. It’s a plan, but we need to be able to pivot and make adjustments where needed. Yep. Yep. So that’s a great point to make. Are there other things when it comes to strategic planning pitfalls that we haven’t addressed that come to mind that we want to make sure to touch on?

Carol Hamilton 27:17
Yeah, I think, um, you know, it’s, it’s when you’re actually doing that decision making about what are you going to focus on over the next three to five years, it’s balancing, you know, we want to stretch, we want to improve, we want to grow. And we don’t want to, again, it’s kind of a different version of that long laundry wishlist. But if the if the aspirations are so beyond where the organization is, it’s also going to fall flat because it just doesn’t match the capacity. So not to just say, Okay, this is this is all we can do, because that’s all we have right now. But being realistic about where you are, and what’s going to move you forward to actually, you know, so that you have the resources to do what you want to do. So having not having those two things be decoupled. Yeah,

Brandon Burton 28:08
reminds me and I’m terrible at attributing quotes, but I’ll say the quote, you can look up whoever said it, but something to the effect that individuals underestimate what they can accomplish in 10 years, but overestimate what they can do in one year. So Oh, my God, or one week, right? Yeah, one way Yeah. You go out and you say, and this year, I’m going to do all these things. And really, it’s like, no, like, you got to eat the elephant one bite at a time. Right? Right, we’re in a 10, five, or even less strategic plan is three to five year plan. Because we see the quote unquote, failures on those smaller timelines, we don’t feel like we can shoot big because we’ve we’ve seen the smaller steps not come through, but we sell ourselves short in realizing what that cumulative effect of having those small effects has over that longer time horizon. So

Carol Hamilton 29:01
yeah, so it’s, it’s the tricky part of trying to find that Goldilocks spot of, you know, just enough stretch, and also, you know, tempered with some realism about, you know, what can we accomplish with what we have? Yeah. And then what do we need to get if we want to do you know, when we want to do more?

Brandon Burton 29:19
Absolutely. Well, Carol, as we start to wrap things up, I like asking for chambers who are listening who are interested in taking their chamber up to the next level, what kind of tip or action item might you have to share with them as they try to accomplish that goal of raising her elevating their, the level of their chamber?

Carol Hamilton 29:40
Yeah, I mean, the the tagline that I use for my podcast is, you know, people who are in the non in the nonprofit sector, who wants to do good in the world without being a martyr to the cause. And so, I think the thing that I’ve been hearing a lot from people recently is when leaders get in their own way of having the organization be overly identified with one person, and to step back and realize that it’s a group effort where it’s always a collective effort. That’s why we have organizations. And so how can you take small steps you were talking about that eating the elephant, one bite at a time to start building leadership capacity throughout your organization. So, you know, asking a staff member to share and facilitate part of a board meeting, if you do the whole thing all the time? You know, just taking small steps, what’s one thing on your to do list somebody else could do? And they could learn from it. I know, it’s easy for you to probably you could probably do it faster. And it might take a little longer to give them all the context. But I think the more we’re building leadership capacity, the the we’re also contributing to the strength of the organization long term.

Brandon Burton 30:53
Absolutely. And I think that’s such a key point to not have the organization be about one person. So it’s about relying on your board and your organization’s your ambassadors are all the different committees and different things that are involved. And I don’t know who eats elephant anyway. But well, right.

Carol Hamilton 31:13
Doesn’t mean they don’t appreciate it. And it doesn’t sound very tasty.

Brandon Burton 31:17
That’s right. Sounds tough. But I also like asking, as we look to the future of chambers of commerce, how how would you view the future of chambers and their purpose going forward?

Carol Hamilton 31:29
Well, I guess, I would hope that chambers would join me in my, my goal of trying to contribute to a world that really thrives for that really is built so that everyone can thrive without an exception. So whatever businesses can do to to contribute to helping their community thrive. And have it be you know about about all of us, versus, you know, a few people I, I would love, I would love the chamber movement to be part of that.

Brandon Burton 32:03
Yeah, I think that’s great. Carol, for listeners who might want to reach out and connect with you and learn more about your offerings, and how you might be able to help their organizations, what would be the best way for them to reach out and connect?

Carol Hamilton 32:17
So my website’s GraceSocialSector.com. You can find me on LinkedIn, although my name is pretty common. Carol Hamilton. So also check out Nonprofit Mission: Impact. It’s on all the podcast platforms. You can find me there.

Brandon Burton 32:35
So that’s awesome. And everybody listening is listening to a podcast so they know how to find exactly so looking permission. Carol, this has been great having you on Chamber Chat Podcast. I appreciate you setting aside some time and being with us today and bringing the value and experience from your perspective and strategic planning and helping to give these chambers that are listening to an extra boost as they go about doing that and there are organizations that really appreciate thank

Carol Hamilton 33:03
you so much. Thanks for the opportunity.

Brandon Burton 33:05
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New CEO & Change Agent with Ali Rauch

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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.

Let’s hear from Becky Womble, President of the Bastrop Chamber to hear about her experience with Community Matters.

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Our guest for this episode is Ali Rauch. Ali is the President and CEO of the Opelika Chamber of Commerce. While she’s celebrating just three and a half years in this role, she is not new to serving in the Opelika Chamber. She has served many years on the OPA like is 20 Under 40 leadership program board of directors as well as the Women’s Business Council and total resource campaign. In just three short years, she’s led her team to at best of the best five star accreditation to the US Chamber of Commerce raised two and a half million dollars for the Chamber’s forward Opelika good Strategic Community Economic Development Initiative and with the support from her team led a record breaking reach sponsorship campaign in 2022. She also spearheaded a comprehensive brand refresh. Additionally, she was selected to the US chambers business leads fellowship program, and is in the midst of her IOM certification all while changing the landscape and scope of services they open like a chamber offers to their community. Prior to her role at the Chamber, she worked in a wide array of industries including software manufacturing, higher education and most notably franchising and food services, where she served eight years as the director of marketing for Chicken Salad Chick vs had a hand in helping the brand grow from just three stores to 160. She brings a unique perspective to her leadership role at the chamber. Ali is a graduate of Southern Illinois University, where she graduated summa cum laude, and earned a Bachelors of Science in speech communications. She also holds an associate’s degree in communications from Lakeland College. She followed loved hope like it were her future husband, Todd chose to attend Auburn University following his military career and they’ve called up like their home ever since an Ali, I’m super excited to have you with us today here on chamber chat podcast. I’d love to give you a moment to say hello to all the Chamber Champions who are out there listening and share something interesting about yourself so we can all get to know you a little bit better. Well,

Ali Rauch 4:09
thank you so much, Brandon, it is an honor to join you today. My bio is quite comprehensive. So some of my little facts are certainly in there. But I think what I’ll do since I’m looking at your San Francisco helmet, my fun fact is going to be that I’m a shareholder for the Green Bay Packers and I am a massive fan grew up on grew up in the Midwest, actually in Illinois in the middle of bear country. But we were the one Packer family in our town. And so I’m a very, very passionate fan and very much looking forward to our opportunity to win and get into the playoffs this weekend. Absolutely.

Brandon Burton 4:50
Yeah. And I’ve been I’ve been impressed with Jordan love and him stepping right into that role and they’ve done a great job. So yeah, awesome. Well tell us a little bit about the scope like a chamber, just give us an idea of the size of the chamber scope of work. You guys are involved with staff budget, that sort of thing, just to kind of set the table for our discussion today. Yeah,

Ali Rauch 5:12
you bet. So Opelika is in the Auburn Opelika MSA. And so what that means is, if you’re not familiar with Auburn, or Auburn, or Leica, it’s in the southeast in the kind of east central portion of Alabama. So Auburn is home to Auburn University, that college town, and we are that sister city, that has long since been the kind of hub for business in the area. They’re kind of the hub for education, and we’ve been the hub for business, we’ve got a community college in our town, we have a massive amount of industry. And over the past, you know, 20 years, our city has really focused they manage our economic development. So they have focused a lot on diversifying our industry. So we’ve just got a really healthy business community in our town, we have a population of about 33,000. But if you look at the overall surrounding community, we’re between 120 and 180, depending how far you go out in terms of total population, and our chamber, although 33,000 is our town, and if we were to just really cover that, I think we would be considered to be pretty large, we have a membership of just under 1000. In fact, we are looking forward to breaking that 1000 In the next couple of months, we’ve been very, very close. And we have an annual budget of just under a million dollars. And that has almost doubled since I took on took over about three and a half years ago. And so when we talk about kind of the the massive amount of change that we have undergone, that has been part of it. And let’s see, we’ve got a staff of eight, just became a staff of eight, we started as a staff of four, now staff of eight with our most recent hire, which is a business and Workforce Development Director, which we’ll get to when you talk about some of the projects we’ve worked on. And yeah, I think I think that about sums it up.

Brandon Burton 7:17
Very good. That is exciting kind of teaser, you know at that membership growth, and then just about doubling the budget. And so hopefully everyone’s ears are perking up about what what did these changes that you brought into the chamber. And we’ve we’ve titled this episode as new CEO and change agents. So as Ali’s come into this role as we went through her bio and everything, she’s brought a unique perspective to the chamber world, and taking what she knew and working with the chamber and being able to take what she heard knowledge from the outside chamber world and kind of marrying these two together has really been a great change agent. And I’m excited to get into what some of these changes are and how you’ve been able to introduce them and just the experience that you’ve had. But I also want to just put it out there for listeners that it always can feel maybe a little overwhelming when you hear about all the change or things that you need to be doing. And so for those listening, you don’t need to do at all, you know, just listen and see what makes sense for your community. And maybe none of it is things that you need to apply right now maybe you’re already doing a lot of these things. But as we know change is inevitable. So we need to always be looking for what changes and adjustments we do need to make within our organizations to continue staying relevant. So we’ll dive much deeper into this topic as soon as we get back from this quick break.

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Gina Rozier 10:45

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Donna Novitsky 11:13

Thanks, Gina. Wondering how you can have your own community card for free. Check out yiftee.com for next steps. Now back to the show.

Brandon Burton 11:25
All right, Ali, we’re back. I’d love to just hand you the microphone. Tell us what are some of these changes, I’m sure you’ve got a long list there that you can just barely rattle off some of these changes that you’ve helped drive since you’ve come in this role as CEO. But what are some of those more notable changes, and what has been kind of the the impetus for that?

Ali Rauch 11:47
I think the biggest change that we have really undergone at the Opelika Chamber has been just the overall direction of who we are as an organization. The chamber has been around for 82 years. So it is long standing, it is trusted. It has been very well taken care of for many, many years. But it was very much in a state of complacency. Everything was fine. But it wasn’t exciting. It wasn’t I don’t know, it just it was just there, you know, and I loved it, I was involved. So it wasn’t bad. It was all good things. It just, I come in with a lot of energy. I don’t know if you can feel that for me. But I am a very energetic, very positive. And so one of the first things that I did was to dive in, of course, you got to look at your bylaws truly understand those. But the first thing that we did was we we changed our mission or vision or core values. I rewrote our personnel manual, a ton of policies about the overall direction is what was that first major thing. And honestly, the thing that forced my hand to do that was our accreditation was due with the US Chamber of Commerce. And so this was nine months into my first year as CEO, I’ve got all this paperwork to do. And I’ve done it in my life. And so I was able to take a look at the last 15 years worth of like you do accreditation every five years. And so I was able to look at the last three applications and really get an understanding of where we’ve been. And then I took that as an opportunity and gave myself a deadline and said, Well, you know, we need a new personnel manual, when we need new HR policies. We’ve got to make sure our branding is on point. All those things were kind of sparked by that accreditation change. And so I did not ever think we could possibly get to a five star accreditation and for us to have jumped in my first time to go from four to five star was just I celebrated a lot.

Brandon Burton 13:58
That is awesome. Yeah, it

Ali Rauch 14:00
was huge. But so kind of the core foundation was a big initial change. And we change our vision to be a leading catalyst for a better Opelika. So it really widened our umbrella of what we can do on behalf of our community. While our mission actually changed to be strengthening our community as the champion for business, because we really found that people have no idea what a chamber is literally no clue. Most of the time they think we just do business after hours or cocktail parties or ribbon cuttings. And we wanted our team, our board, our volunteers, everybody to be able to have a simple, singular line that says what is the chamber, we strengthen our community as the champion for business. And so changing that was was a big moment for us and making sure that business was the leading edge element of that. It’s very, very easy to try and serve everybody. But you have to remember, we’re here to serve the business community.

Brandon Burton 15:07
Yeah. I love that just that little tagline that slogan, you can say to we strengthen businesses a champion. We’re busy for our business community. Is that right? Is that how you said it

Ali Rauch 15:18
strengthen, strengthen our community as a champion for business? Yeah, yes,

Brandon Burton 15:22
yes, I had the essence there. So that’s something that every chamber can take, though, you know, do your R&D, you know, take that simplified phrase, that’s something that your board that your volunteers that your staff that new members should be able to understand as a part of your organization. This is what the chamber does. And then from there, obviously gets into mission and vision, things like that. But I love that just having that simple phrase of what is the chamber do, this is who we are, you got that simple response. It’s true.

Ali Rauch 15:53
And one thing that was really great about that, too, is not only did we update our mission to say that, but then our work reflected that. For me, I came from the private business sector, my whole career had been in business. And I also was a marketer. And so I had this unique perspective about what businesses want. And they they are joining the chamber most of the time, to help build awareness and to build relationships on behalf of their business. So because I had that marketing perspective, and understood what they are looking for, from an ROI perspective, we changed a lot of what we offered and what we focused on, so that we could deliver what the businesses need, you know, sometimes you gotta kill those sacred cows and do things they Oh, well, we’ve always done them. But is that what your business community needs? That’s a good question to ask. Yeah,

Brandon Burton 16:47
I was gonna ask you about that, with your marketing background coming into the chamber world, I know that there’s a there’s some overlap, but there’s also you come into it with eyes wide open of this is what businesses are looking for. And here’s an organization you’re coming into that has been doing, I’m guessing a lot of the same things for a long time, and maybe needed a refresh. So being able to take that, that vision that you’ve had that experience and being able to apply it to the chamber, or there may be some other areas where you’re able to apply your marketing background into creating the identity for your chamber and, and phrases like that, that you just shared? Where else have you seen that background and marketing come in handy in this role,

Ali Rauch 17:30
literally everywhere. So you mentioned in my bio, that we did a a brand refresh, that was huge, you know, I had had been a part of brand refreshes for two different years, I built a brand from the ground up at Chicken Salad Chick. So coming in, I knew we needed that fresh face. And I had high expectations and kind of I want I mean, it needs to be relevant and modern. And today. And so redoing all of our email newsletters, all of our communication, we launched a brand new website last year, we refreshed our magazine, and that one, an ACC e communication and excellence award last year ACC which was amazing. But I think one area that is probably out there that I’ve been able to use it that is unexpected is that we created a conference, it’s actually coming up in a couple of weeks. It’s called the All Things marketing conference. It is just literally a baby that I have created, that my team has come on board and helped and we have made it happen. And and so it’s a one day JAM PACKED conference that people can attend from all over, you’re welcome to if anybody wants to check it out, go to a black chamber.com. But so, you know, like, like a regular conference, you’re gonna pay a fee to attend and include your meals, but you’re gonna listen to a lineup of speakers. And for me, I was getting questions from businesses, especially restaurants, all the time asking for my marketing expertise. And I realized I can’t teach everybody one on one. What if we were to actually teach everybody at once and this became an annual thing. And so I, you know, grabbed grabbed a few of my members who I consider to be really great marketing experts for their specific fields, pulled them together, created a committee and said, This is what I want to do, what would it look like? And so the one we have coming up on January 19 has, we’ve got two keynote speakers, six different breakout sessions, plus a bonus section session, and we’re going to teach everything from traditional marketing to digital advertising to content creation. And numerous people are not only active chamber volunteers, but also former chamber employees like we get it and our keynote speaker is a lady named Lena Trivedi. And if you haven’t heard her story, I encourage you to go to Apple TV and watch the beat The bubble starring Elizabeth Banks. It is essentially the story of how Beanie Babies became what they were. And Lena was an employee at PTI at the time and was really a pioneer of E commerce. And so she’s going to come down and speak and share her story. And, but we created that from the ground up. And now, you know, that’s the opportunity for us to serve 200 to 220. Businesses, if not more, we’ve got the room to grow. But we have an opportunity to teach our business community what they need to know to be better marketers, which is, I would say, 75% of what the businesses need our help from is marketing, because they just most of the time, don’t know what they’re doing. And, and they are an entrepreneur, so they’re passionate about what they’re passionate about, but not necessarily marketing. And so my skill set has just really come in here to create this conference from the ground up. And it’s awesome. It was just this moment of pure, like, Joy. And like, I just, I couldn’t believe it. We did it last year. And now we’re on our second year, and it’s gonna be

Brandon Burton 21:06
awesome. That is awesome. And I think that, you know, strikes a resonance with, with businesses, small businesses, especially where we had talked before we hit record, that the reason that I started the podcast is really to help small businesses that ultimately, that’s what it comes down to my whole career. And chamber publishing has been about helping small businesses and, and there’s some chambers frankly, it becomes more of a membership organization that it kind of stops there and the help, it’s hard to see that connection of where that help and support is for small businesses. And the businesses recognize that I mean, just the honest truth, as I’ve met with Chamber members in a wide variety of different chambers over the years, a lot of them have a hard time making that connection. So having a conference like this, it really offers that direct support for marketing, which is it’s a tangible thing that they can take back to their business and see positive results, see an increase in sales, see that that needle move from efforts at the Chamber is putting out there and making available these opportunities for. I also know in my background with with chamber publishing, I’m talking to businesses about advertising. So I’m seeing what their strategy will call it. And or lack thereof, or lack thereof, most of them don’t have a strategy and any advertising they do. It’s more maybe branding, you know, they’re they’re putting a branding ad out there. But there’s no call to action, there’s no way to collect any information and remarket it like there’s so many different layers that you can put on to marketing and advertising that the small businesses either they don’t know, or they don’t have the bandwidth, or they don’t know the tools that are available. And I just love that you guys are doing this. This is a this is what chambers should be doing to help small businesses be successful. So kudos,

Ali Rauch 23:04
and meanwhile, thank you, I appreciate it. Meanwhile, it’s also an opportunity for us to feature a few of our businesses that will then gain clients as a result of this conference. We sell sponsorships for this conference through our annual reach or total resource campaign. And and then we have ticket sales. So like, this is also like a revenue generating opportunity. And it’s just bigger than what chambers have traditionally done in the past. Yeah,

Brandon Burton 23:32
yeah, for sure. So, as you have helped to introduce a lot of these changes the brand refresh this marketing campaign, that magazine, there’s been a lot of things. I’m sure there’s other things we haven’t even touched on yet. As you go to introduce these changes, do you find that you have some autonomy just within the organization, you and your staff, or our most of these things? Indeed get Board approval? Or where does that threshold come at your organization?

Ali Rauch 24:05
We, I am very blessed to have a board that trusts me. Pretty implicitly, it’s wonderful. So I have a very supportive board. Typically what will happen is that myself and my team, we do a lot of things together. So this is not like the, hey, Ally’s done all this now. I couldn’t do it without them. So we, we will come up with our ideas and we’ll say this is what we want to do. New programs, all things marketing, Summit, things like that. That was just us. We decided to do that no board approval or anything like that. But with you know, the mission and the vision and things like that. That was something that our staff decided on and the set and then presented it to our board for approval. And so that was certainly a big honestly, it was very easy discussion. It was a unanimous vote. So that made it because we’re being Very thoughtful and doing our homework in advance. They trust us and support those decisions. You know, one of the biggest things that we decided to do that was very involved for the board of directors was our forward over like a campaign, which was our strategic economic development initiative to raise money. Because we are, you can’t tell I’m I’m actually sitting in my office, which was a home that was built in 1895. And I’ve got, I have turned two closets into what we now call co offices, because you just got to make it work. And we’re at max capacity. And, and honestly, we also don’t have a space that our businesses can actually use the way they need it. And so what started out as a need for more meeting space or business space, but also kind of transformed into, hey, let’s start tackling bigger challenges in our community. And so our Florida Blanca initiative raised were actually 3.1 million right now. And that’s going to enable us to work on workforce development for our region, build out some more entrepreneurship training programs, and then also move into a renovated building that will host not only event space for us to be able to host most of our own events, but there will be a visitor center, a boardroom and a business incubator and other things. And so that was very much a, I hired a consultant, we worked with power 10 to do that. But all of that the board was very involved with because I needed them to actually execute it. Because you know, you think about a lot of your board members are going to invest in something like that. But they also have to be willing to put their name and face on it. To say, Yes, we support this. So that was one that was very, very high, highly involved from our board of directors.

Brandon Burton 26:55
Yeah. And it’s awesome to have such a supportive board of directors. And I know a lot of listeners out there do have very supportive boards. So hopefully those relationships are good and cohesive and allow for that autonomy that I’ve set. I was going to ask you about the capital campaigns that you kind of alluded to there, as well as your total resource campaign. So are both of those newer things implemented since you’ve taken the role of as CEO? Or is there have had those been part of the organization before? So

Ali Rauch 27:28
our total resource campaign had actually been a part of the organization for quite a long time, I think we were in year nine, when I started, and I was a volunteer for our total resource campaign for two years prior to joining the job or joining the chamber as the CEO. So that one was long standing. However, we learned, you know, I inherited a team that had had been there for quite a few, I mean, 1415 years, they they were tenured and experienced, and also a little bit tired. And and so when some of the changes that I made, encouraged the retirement or moving on other people, you know, I’m I’m young, I’m aggressive, energetic. So I just kind of changed things quickly. And that became uncomfortable for some some people. And so when they decided to move on to other things, that was the first one, I actually got on a conversation with Jason from YG, MCRC. And he just straight up told me he’s like, I don’t know what you’re doing, but it’s not what I recommend. And I was like, Oh,

Brandon Burton 28:42
I love that. Jason. Yeah.

Ali Rauch 28:45
Well, I have to be right there with it. But it was true. We we had just been, you know, Hey, turn on our website. And that was it. And there was not strategy, there was not thought and so we are conducting a capital campaign, which is brand new, very aggressive, we need to raise $3 million happening right over here. And we started asking for money in March of 2021. That year, September of 2021. We did a brand new refresh of our reach campaign. So first, wait, no, wait, I think we maybe it might have been a year apart. But either way, we had a total resource campaign going on and our capital campaign going on simultaneously, which was stressful. But it’s doable, because typically that money comes from different buckets, you know, a total resource campaign, those dollars are typically going to be coming from your business’s marketing budget, whereas a capital campaign those dollars are going to be coming from a higher level investment perspective and you’re talking to different people to sell those things. But the capital campaign was certainly new but that reach campaign we saw We now call it reach not a TRC. But thinking of all the branding changes that we do, but we did a brand refresh of our reach campaign, which means that we not only renamed it, but we took away every like week started as if we were brand new client with Jason. And YGM. Because we realized we needed to think more strategically about what we offer and what our price points were, what the benefits were. And so although it’s been around for 12 years now, it was new brand new two years ago, because of that refresh that we did. And that’s really where we went from averaging about $175,000 in sales for the last five to six years or so, to. Let’s see, I think we got up to Oh, 368,000 that’s where we ended. Yeah.

Brandon Burton 30:56
Yeah, that’s awesome. That is awesome. Wow. So you’ve touched on a lot of things here. I can see for for listener out there, maybe that the overwhelm sitting a little bit, but hopefully, they’re taking notes and just seeing some things that might they might want to revisit at their, their chamber. But I wanted to ask you, for those listening, who are interested in taking their chamber up to the next level, maybe give them a little bit of a refresh, what kind of tip or action item might you share with them to try to implement and try to maybe reinvigorate life in their organization?

Ali Rauch 31:36
I’m gonna make two recommendations. And the first one we talked about before we pressed record, read Horseshoes vs. Chess by Dave Adkisson. That was, I was a brand new CEO just a couple months into my job when that book came out. And I read it. And it made me think big. It may he outlines the future of chambers, which, you know, we’re not going to be those if we’re going to be doing what we should be doing for the future. We’re going to be working on meaningful things, not just ribbon cuttings and after hours, and so read his book, and process and think, What does your community need? So that would be recommendation number one. And then my second recommendation, I actually is firsthand advice that I was given by Jim Page, who was the longtime CEO of the West Alabama Chamber of Commerce in Tuscaloosa. Because the first conference I went to, I just, I had so many pages of notes. And it was like drinking through a firehose, and I was like, I have so much work to do, what am I going to do? And he literally sat me down and he said, Pick 123 things. That’s it. 123 things that you want to try and work on. Nothing more, because you can, you know, how do you eat an elephant one bite at a time, you got to you got to pace yourself? You’ve got to prioritize and tackle

Brandon Burton 33:01
three bytes at a time, right?

Ali Rauch 33:03
123? Yeah. No, that doesn’t help ask you to you know,

Brandon Burton 33:09
that’s right. That’s right. Now Jen has excellent, excellent mentor and to take advice from him that that’s very wise. And, and Dave’s book, Horseshoes vs. Chess. For those listening, you know, for a long time he was on an episode and 111 when the book first came out, kind of gave a synopsis of the book and how it came to be. But it really is that book, I think, is the definition of what a chamber is or should be. And as your role as a chamber CEO or Executive Director, whatever the title is, leading a chamber really gives a great definition for what your role should be what your work should look like, and what the future of chambers looks like. So that kind of leads right into the next question, actually, is I’d like to ask and everyone I have on the show that how do you see the future of chambers and their purpose going forward?

Ali Rauch 34:04
I think the future of the chamber is really about doing bigger, more meaningful work. You know, for us, we have never in a million years had the responsibility of making sure our businesses have the people resources that they need to be successful. And we just a few months ago, were, you know, given the reins to lead our region for workforce development. That’s a huge job. And that’s a big deal. But there’s also opportunity for funding that comes from both state and federal levels that can help grow our organization significantly, not just as an organization, but the impact that we’re making. So I think the future is just very doing more meaningful work and thinking about that meaningful work. I think that the Chamber of Commerce And I’ve learned in this role, we have a significant amount of influence and prominence in our community. You know, I have great relationships with the mayors in the area with our state representatives and our senators, you know, our, our kickoff for our Florida like a campaign after we had raised just over $2 million was Katie Britt, who at the time was the president of the Business Council of Alabama and running for Senate. And now she’s a state senator from the state of Alabama. And so we have great relationships from an advocacy perspective that we can contact and, and talk about those bigger challenges. So, advocacy is a key part of it. But I still think that although that might always be a part of what we do, doing the more meaningful work that achieves what your business community needs, which is going to vary for everyone. But that’s where I see the future of chambers.

Brandon Burton 35:59
Absolutely bigger and more meaningful work. I love that alley. This has been a fun conversation, energetic it’s full of life. I’d like to give you an opportunity to share any contact information for listeners who might want to reach out and maybe learn more about some of these changes even from implemented and how you’ve gone about introducing them and getting buy in and all that good stuff that we didn’t get to touch on every aspect or in this conversation today. But what would be a good way for someone to reach out and connect with you?

Ali Rauch 36:31
Yeah, I I certainly welcome this was. This was almost like draining a firehose of all the things and so please don’t get overwhelmed by that I am I am here as a resource. I would love to either chat with you chat with your chamber, whatever whatever it is that I can help with. You can find me my email address is Ali a li at OpelikaChamber.com. You can find me on all the social social channel channels. You can find me on all the social channels at Ali Vice Rauch. So a li v ice ra uch. But really, I mean I’m an I’m an open book and give me a call shoot me a text my cell is 334-737-9354. And all of this can be found on my website or on our chamber website. OpelikaChamber.com. Very

Brandon Burton 37:24
good. And we’ll get all that in our show notes for this episode too. So we’ll make it easy for people to find you. But Ali, this has been great having you on the show. I appreciate you setting aside some time to be with us today on chamber chat podcast and wish you the best with the future chambers that future changes that you have to implement. They’re at your chamber and and going forward into the future. Thanks a lot.

Ali Rauch 37:46
Thanks, Brandon.

Brandon Burton 37:49
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Culture for Huge Results with Bryce Riggs

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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. You’re joining us for a special episode as part of our 2023 ACCE Chamber the Year Finalist Series.

Let’s hear from Becky Womble, President of the Bastrop Chamber to hear about her experience with Community Matters.

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Our guest for this episode is Bryce Riggs. Bryce currently serves as the executive director of the Seneca Regional Chamber of Commerce and Destination Seneca County, the county’s Visitors Bureau. Since taking this position in July 2020. Both organizations have received a breath of fresh air and a surge of energy. The chamber has significantly grown their membership by making it the highest membership it’s ever seen. Historically, the chamber is on its way to becoming one of the strongest in Ohio. While destination Seneca County has become the one stop shop and trusted resource for the community and visitors of Seneca County. The Seneca Regional Chamber of Commerce received the 2023 outstanding chamber of the Year from the Chamber of Commerce executives of Ohio, and destination Seneca County has received six statewide awards from Ohio Travel Association within the last two years. Bryce, I’m excited to have you with us today on chamber chat podcast, I’d love to give you a moment to say hello to all the listeners and to share something interesting about yourself so we can get to know you a little better. Perfect.

Bryce Riggs 3:07
Hello, all Chamber Chat Podcast listeners, as Brandon said, I am Bryce, I think interesting about me is I got a vast background in terms of I’ve worked in economic development, I’ve worked in development work with fundraising, and now the chamber and I think, you know, they always say there’s not one job that prepares you for the kind of role like this in the chamber. But I think I’ve been fortunate that I kind of see the business background side of things. And I’ve seen, you know, the kind of development as we all know, without fundraising and raising those dollars for our organization, we really can’t do that fun and transformational things that we want to do always. And so fun fact about me is that, you know, only 30 years old, but I’ve had some really unique experiences that have kind of helped me prove it prepare me for this role with the Chamber of Commerce. That’s

Brandon Burton 3:55
awesome. Yeah, there’s not the perfect resume per se to to become a chamber executive. But you know, certain things do tend to give you experience that you can definitely lean upon as you go about that as a career. So take a little bit of time to get a few minutes. Tell us a little bit more about the Seneca Regional Chamber size of the chamber scope of work you guys are involved with, obviously, you’ve got the tourism side as well. Staff budget, that sort of thing, just to kind of set the table for discussion. Yeah,

Bryce Riggs 4:26
we were unique as as a chamber because we do do the tourism side as well. We see especially in the state of Ohio flow a few of us left because I have to say there’s kind of two different missions and for both organizations in the chamber and destination, Seneca County, so it’s been a joy of keeping many folks happy across the board from our chamber partners as well as our tourism partners. Staff right now three and a half team members. We’ve historically been but three team members, majority of the time of the existence of the chamber We brought on a part time marketing specialist within this last year, and we’re pretty fortunate from a staff level wise. And we have one employee that’s been there for 20 years, who’s our voice of reason we call her and our seasoned vet. And obviously a lot of institutional knowledge we have, that’s Denmark, Toronto, we have Marissa Stevens, who’s the movie organization now, going almost three years, and then for me almost four years with with the organization, but three and a half years. But with that, and then also with the Chamber budget for 2024. I’m proud of the kingdom of outspending, but also the king of raising additional dollars. So $322,000 for the budget for the chamber, for 2024. And then for destination Seneca County, about $170,000. We have for the budget for destination Seneca County, really big thing with us is like the setting, you know, really, the value that we provide back to our membership is, you know, we’re big about listening and understanding their needs. We do a membership survey every year where we understand, hey, what’s important to you. And the big thing is just as things change, as times change, making sure that we have the information, we have the tools, we have the programming that makes sense. As an organization, we’re unique, where we put out all our events for the for the following year and our annual meeting in October, as we do our ama in October, we release a full slate. But you know, as things change, for example, the Damar Hamlin situation with the NFL last year with a cardiac arrest in the field, we were able to do a CPR, AED and first aid training within two weeks close with that scenario. And so we’ve continued to keep that as part of our plans. But we just I think, you know, like any other business partner we work with, we want them to be nimble and make decisions quickly. And I think that’s kind of what we’ve been good at is just, you know, being accurate, the community being very transparent and being, you know, engaged.

Brandon Burton 7:05
Yeah, I love that example. I like having the kind of that map for the year saying, here’s our main events and things that we’ve got scheduled but to be able to be nimble enough and not so rigid that when something of importance comes up, you can say yes, let’s fit that in and have some focus on that. And not have it derail the rest of your plan for the year as well. So I think that’s super important. So as we kind of settled on a topic for this this episode, we’re going to focus most of our conversation today around creating a culture for huge results. And we’ll get into you know why we came across that as soon as they get back from this quick break.

Visit ChamberNation.com to learn more.

Howdy it’s me, Donna from Yiftee again. Today we get to hear from Christine in upstate New York about her Shop 716 Community card program. She was able to use sponsorship funds for a generous Buy One, Get One program that benefits her whole county.

Christine Langenfeld 9:44

Hi this is Christine Langenfeld with the Amherst Chamber of Commerce located in Buffalo, New York. We have partnered with Yiftee on our Shop 716 e-gift card program that has been incredibly, incredibly impactful for our small businesses. So happy to have incorporated this program in our shop local initiative here in Western New York. I highly recommend them and give them a chance to show what they can do.

Donna Novitsky 10:13

Thanks, Christine. So folks, check us out at yiftee.com and sign up for a demo or shoot us an email at sales@yiftee.com.

Brandon Burton 10:24
All right, Bryce, we’re back. I mentioned before the break, we’re recording to focus our conversation today about creating that culture for huge results. And sometimes it takes a different perspective, maybe an outsider’s point of view, to be able to see where there’s some gaps and opportunities within an organization. And I may be making some assumptions, but you guys have seen some significant growth in a variety of different ways. Since you’ve come on board there at the at the Seneca Regional Chamber. So I’d like to maybe have you highlight what some of those big growth areas are. And we can kind of dive into what has kind of fueled that growth and the culture being built there at the chamber.

Bryce Riggs 11:10
Probably the big thing is, I should have noted this early, earlier, but membership wise, about 540 members give or take. But you know, we’ve seen since I started in July 2020, we unfortunately, 65% increase in membership. And for me, it’s increasing membership is nice. You know, we have other chamber partners that, you know, do those membership drives, and they really get people out. And they’re really kind of one time, some folks or one time infusions of cash into an organization, which is nice to keep things afloat. But the big thing for us is the retention standpoint, you know, once we get them on, do a process. And we’ve kind of created a process within the last year and a half about the onboarding and making sure that you know, everyone kind of gets the same experience when they come on board. And that’s kind of help with our retention rate 94% retention rate that we’ve had consistently over the last few years. And, again, you know, influxes of cash are nice for the organization. But how do you keep those coming back and keep you know, our partners happy membership services are great. We’re, you know, we get a lot of responses on that, that allows them the opportunity to dialogue with us. You know, ours is all anonymous, so you can kind of dialogue and kind of put it all out there, my feelings don’t get hurt. Because we only grow as organization, we realize our shortfalls. And then really the big thing is T we’ve seen with a membership growth has been kind of non dues revenue has grown over 164%. Within the last, we moved to a new sponsorship model in the end of 2020 2021, where we asked our partners one time for sponsorships, when I started in July, with COVID pushing things back, it’d be like five events and basically five months and it was, you know, I was the guy who was calling and saying, hey, it’s Bryce. I’ve fortunate part of this community. So it wasn’t really much of an introduction, but it was, hey, we have this event, the golf out and you think you can make an investment to help support us? Oh, yeah, that’s fine. Okay, then, you know, the coffin takes place. And then the educators practice, hey, it’s Bryce again. Can you cut me another check. And so like, like anything in life, that asked me a better way. It’s we moved to a one time ask model in 2021. And that’s been super successful for us. We have 14 years platinum $3,000, gold 2000, Silver 1000, and then bronze 500. And we just package everything else we’ve done in the past. And we just said, Hey, this is the price tag of $3,000 are our largest donor, historically have given us 2250 On average, every year, and it’s okay, let’s bump up to $3,000. And we’ll do it one time mass model. And that’s been super successful for us. As an organization right now, we’re actually going through our our fundraising model kind of drive at the end of the year. And you know, last year, I’m gonna pull it up real quick. Last year, we raised $175,000. And literally one month this year, we’re still at $165,000 gotten to the end of the year. I’ve a few that will over will do. Oh, I’ll do what we did last year. were fun, obviously, with inflation and other factors muddies the water tight, but I think the biggest thing for us is the chamber. It’s more relationship relationship based, rather than the monetary aspect will me get through this. It’s basically Hey, Steve, this is Bryce with the chamber. You have a team and the golf outing. Just let me know who your four golfers are and then you know we’re looking forward to seeing you and then you know, the conversations over with and so when we call it’s no longer oh my gosh, the

Brandon Burton 14:47
Chamber if I may check the budget. Yeah. What

Bryce Riggs 14:50
do they want, you know, they want to call in again for the golf outing or con for this up it’s really allowed us to take our relationship with our members more to that, you know, prefer Hold to the more personal because they realize now that like my call, if I’m gonna ask me for anything is, I’m gonna ask them for money. It’s like asking them how we can help her, Hey, I saw you’re doing this about can we stop by and take a picture to help promote it? Hey, you’re doing this? How can we help you with that? And so it’s kind of allowed us to transform the organization a little more than we’ve done in the past. Yeah,

Brandon Burton 15:23
that’s great. So on the membership, and maybe I misunderstood, but how did you? How did you go about that big increase in membership? Did you guys do a membership drive? Or is that just built kind of grassroots? had had you guys approach that?

Bryce Riggs 15:40
The biggest thing is no membership drive is all grassroots. And I always said, when the chamber gets you energy gets new leadership, there’s always an opportunity to, you know, say that first year, and in my opinion, is the most important year, it’s, you know, sometimes you’ll take over a chamber that maybe in the past, it’s been stagnant, or very successful. And it’s like, okay, you have to pave your way on why you’re different. What’s your value proposition? And so for us, a lot of it was, you know, what, before, when we meet with a new member, our value articulation was not great. It was like, Hey, join the chamber, because it’s good for the community while when COVID hit, and things hit the fan. People love the community, I love the community, but real relook at our budgets. And it’s like, okay, this is good for the community. But this is also good. And this is good. And so now you’re kind of in a match with other great community organizations. But okay, my getting returned value back. And so we kind of lost our four point approach in my first month and said, Hey, look, this is the four reasons why you should join the chamber, where we had some kind of topics underneath each one of them. And the time, I’d say it was kind of crazy, because some of the stuff didn’t really make sense, because we didn’t build the plane yet. We just kind of like, found a bag of goods that we, you know, had yet done it yet. But it’s like, look, this is where we’re gonna go, we’ve lost trust in us. Again, I’m from the community. So for me, it was I’ve had a track record of doing things the right way. And so with us, it was just like, how do you articulate that value back to someone. And then I think it just became, you know, my first month, we had like, 15, new members, my next month, it was 15 new members and kind of like a forest fire. Once you create that spark, it’s like, Look, you have to take advantage of it. And our biggest thing is that we will not accept a new member of the Chamber of Commerce until we meet with you in person. And so it’s not just me. We have other chambers, it’s their membership director, or their membership coordinator meets with them, the CEO doesn’t. To me, I think it’s like the worst thing you could do. And so for me, I take my staff, my entire staff, just the three of us, the part time employee, this now that the three of us go out, and we go to their business, we meet with them on this morning, I was at a museum that was 45 minutes away. And we traveled there as a team, we came back as a team, because the day they knew who we all are, I think call the office and I’m not in and don’t answer the phone. They’ve met them before. Dan knows who they are, what’s important to them are the four points, how we can best assist them, if they run into Mrs. On the street, corner, residence, who they are, what their balance and organization. And so for us, it’s again, how do you take those relationships pass the professional, the personal side of things, I think is huge. And that for us? Again, it’s that it’s that wildfire that we’ve just continued to keep it going. And we just you know, for us, when someone goes to kind of check to the chamber at the end of the year, in July, it’s you know, I want them to look at us as a staff and saying, Hey, right, when I don’t cut this check to the chamber, it’s not at the chamber. I’m not gonna check the price to debt to Marissa. And I think it’s that personal touch, that kind of, you know, makes the ties a little bit stronger between the

Brandon Burton 19:03
organization’s for sure definitely helps with that, to have that 94% retention rate that you guys are seeing now. I mean, when you have that personal touch, you meet the members, you have that introduction, they get to know all the staff, you better understand their business. I love the example the the museum this morning, you gave this 45 minute drive there and back all together as staff. Imagine on the way back, there may be some discussion and ideas shared amongst staff about how to help this new member, you know, who can we connect them with? Or what would help make them successful? And there’s so much value in traveling together and doing that, you know, as a team. So

Bryce Riggs 19:47
I would say you know, there’s that I think we all are bought into it. And it for us it’s like look, you know we all where we see someone we know who they are what they do while they’re doing it and it’s the lie on to say that why this one is what makes the difference? So

Brandon Burton 20:02
I’m anticipating people listening are like four point approach. Okay, what are these four egg? Do you mind giving us the pitch real quick? What your what the four points are? If you’re granted, every chamber is different, you’re offering different things, potentially. But what? What are those four areas that you focus on when you are approaching a potential member?

Bryce Riggs 20:21
Yeah. So when we dive in, you know, we kind of enters we are first as a staff and home or the personal side of us again. And then without my destination said, I didn’t count because when I first started, the tourism bureau wasn’t very active, it was kind of the inactive arm of the chamber. But for us, we kind of explain who they are, what they do, why they’re important to the bigger picture. And then, you know, we flip over to the four point approach. And we talked with the membership survey, and we say, like, look, we don’t, we don’t determine what’s important to you, we listen to you, we understand, when we can talk more about their business, they can understand where their gaps are at and how we can help fill those gaps. And then we kind of go through the four points. And based on their story, we kind of dive into like, for example, the museum, they’re getting ready to go through their new location, there’s moves. And it’s what’s the promotional side of things, and we kind of dive in here, we’re an information source, we get a ton of phone calls, but we do a ton on social media, last this year actually will reach 2.6 million people on all our social platforms for our reach. And then for the visitors bureau, we have an additional 2.9 million will do as well. So we kind of talked about quantifying that the personal experience. And so when we talk about our members, we talk to them as people not as businesses, it’s kind of how it all connects to each other. And then we’ll step up you know, for them ribbon cuttings, bread and butter of a chamber, which we do things a little bit differently. We’ll do last year we did over 40 ribbon cuttings last year, we have a photographer, we invite elected officials, our ambassadors, which are super engaged our board, most were mechanics, we do our we have over 30 to 40 people attend each one. So there for us, it’s an it’s an energy opportunity. It’s the excitement people kind of bought in. And one thing I should know, too, we sent out a calendar invite for all our first contacts for every organization that’s, that’s a member, we send out a calendar invite with a description for all events we do, including ribbon cuttings, so even if you can’t go you at least understand new business, who owns it, where they offer, what are their hours, we said to our political officials, our media, and so those are always a good thing as well. And then we’ll jump to like relationships. So we have after five networking events, like most chambers do, which I won this last week, our golf outing, is wildly popular, we had 55 teams are out in last year, and then two flights sold out. And then we’ll talk about our Casino Night that we do as well. And then just different membership engagement opportunities to build relationships. We have flank. networking groups, like a digital Management Council we have. We’re both the Human Resources association. So kind of different people within the organization can be engaged as well. We have resources and savings is our third point usually talked about, and that’s obviously saving people money in which people appreciate. So we run a chamber cash program that looks just like a cheque. And a lot of people are moved to like 50. And there’s other things but we’ve been fortunate in the last last year, we sold over $110,000 in chamber cash, which keeps money locally infuse our community with a member a member benefit card that we do as well. It’s been really popular 55 different discounts different restaurants and businesses for the community and our big sales when I first started, we engage often with like the top tier management, so the CEO, CFO, CEO, but okay, how do we take the chamber message and bring it down to the employees. And so we now have the stack slammed, and it looks like gift cards. And we can all remember businesses, their employees inside joke, I’ll be at the local watering hole, and three people in front of me will plug the chamber card and get their 50% off at the at the restaurant. We’re there. And so it’s kind of nice to see, I joke, it’s kind of a call at that point, but I’ll take it. But it’s again, the Chamber messaging of this is the chamber and every time they scan it, it goes to our website. And so it’s that name ID not just with top tier, it’s through the whole organization. You Your energy programs, your you know, health insurance programs, as well thought of that. And then last is education, where we do power hours, which is the professional development from our members to our members. We’ve had to talk about like, you know, like AI is a topic for January, we have one with Canva and in March, we have a CrossFit crash course in June. We have a golf one on one event. So just some fun, professional personal opportunities. We Someone says, which is more than a personal. So it’s like the Myers Briggs test, you take it, we bring someone in, it kind of puts people in groups, you can talk about what the results mean. And then like leader, substantive accounting, which is our leadership group, and other educational opportunities we offer to our members throughout the year as well. So you’re really that’s kind of the four point approach. And then we kind of, you know, based on what they tell us, we say, hey, based on what you said, this is probably a good fit for you, we’ll get you connected, we’ll make sure you get the info. And then it’s like, again, as many as you can, how do you connect the chamber to the organization provide that values when they go to renew, when they decide they want to join, there’s enough value there that they’re like, hey, this makes sense. I have to I have to join. Yeah,

Brandon Burton 25:45
makes a lot of sense. I love that it’s condensed down enough to four points. So hopefully, any member of the staff can take that and kind of tell the story of the benefits that your chamber has to offer to these businesses that are considering joining. So that’s awesome. So let’s say maybe shift a little bit and talk about, you know, things that you guys do maybe organically there at the chamber to keep the passion for the staff on a high level to keep them engaged and, you know, involved with the community and really just loving what they do. Yeah, I

Bryce Riggs 26:20
think it’s the biggest thing is, that’s kind of our our sweet spot. That’s our secret sauce I tell people is that our staff here is fantastic. And I don’t live in a world we live in, it’s as a as a nonprofit organization, it’s hard to pay quarterly, it’s hard to make the opportunities available to our staff. But my biggest thing is like look itself from the top down as us and so my, my staff sees me out in the community, they see me community events, they see me out, you know, all these opportunities that exists. And, you know, the big thing with us is that we invest in our staff to go to these things. And so if I have done, I really don’t want to go to this event, and the chamber will pay for our staff to to go do continuing educational opportunities to go to community events. We’re fortunate with some of the non dues revenue increase that we’ve had over the years, that, you know, obviously, it pays to play to a lot of these events. And it’s tough, because it’s like not every chamber has the budget to be able to do this. But for us, it’s just like, we get along well, we communicate well. We keep things fun. And that’s for us. It’s it’s important. If it starts with the staff, if your staff is energetic engaged, it’s kind of hard to go sell, sell something that you don’t believe in my staff, we do gene Fridays we do you name it, right? I buy flexible hours, if you work in the evenings, which a lot of my staff does, you know, you can take some time off here and there throughout the throughout the week come in at 10. Like that. One thing is we do as well, three o’clock Fridays, and close the office every eight to five, Monday through Thursday. And then Friday, we do three o’clock, I kick you out. I don’t care how much work you have left to do. I don’t care how stressed you are. I kick you out. Because I think it’s like, Look, you gotta go live life. As is. It’s crucial. And so like for us, again, I’ll say it just starts with the staff. And you know, if you don’t pay your staff, you know, livable wage, that’s great to talk to my staff, and do we do yearly reviews. I do all my yearly reviews, in conjunction with the budget. So line rock conducted in November, I sit down the staff, I ask them questions, I send them a Google Word document, they type in their responses, and it’s a dialogue. I put their stuff and I put my comments and we meet for lunch. One on one and we discuss kind of like your thoughts, my thoughts. And then if Yannick I say looking, you know, next year, this is what we’re able to do based on your, you know, health insurances issue, okay, great. Based on that issue, we’re able to do this. And so my biggest thing is, if you unify consistent feedback, reviews aren’t supposed to be surprises. But for us, it’s important to say you got to show the nonprofit role you can pay them, you can allow them to grow as humans, you can model them have fun. But that’s the big thing is like, Look, you don’t take care of your own team. You’re not gonna go very far as an organization in the, you know, on the chambers or one, one man one woman shops, and so I you know, I fortunately have a board that allows me to do what I do. And so I just, you know, I, I told us that the board with a discussion this last year that said, Hey, how much you’re gonna give your staff increases? And I just said to him, Hey, I love you, but it’s, that’s not your role. My role is to determine based on what their performances, this is what I’m able to do and the performance bonuses every year, but I’d say give me the freedom and flexibility to pay my staff the way they should be compensated and we don’t, and I’ll ask, I’ve put in the budget and then you know, he gets approved as a overall bigger Make sure I

Brandon Burton 30:01
like that. I like being bold enough to say, yeah, let me invest in your business, right? Stay in our lanes, right?

Bryce Riggs 30:09
Correct. Yeah, the day the executive committee is responsible for my executive review and my salary, and let’s, let’s be talking about that within this framework. But just know that, you know, my job is to get my staff in a place where they’re making competitive wages, and their benefits are great. We just launched a simple IRA this year for 2024. Based on again, concerns and needs for for additional benefits. We’ve done, you know, again, I’m willing to invest my staff and they go to war for us every day. You know, my job is to go to work for them so that they can get what they need to be successful.

Brandon Burton 30:47
Yeah. I love it. Well, as we start to wrap things up here, I wanted to ask if anyone listening what who’s interested in taking their chamber up to the next level, what maybe tip or action item might you have to offer them to elevate their chamber and kind of play it at that next level?

Bryce Riggs 31:09
So the biggest thing is, I always indicate, you know, be consistent, be persistent. When I started out, I was fortunate that I was kind of given the opportunity and said, hey, you know, you have, here’s the keys to car drive out you want. I’m not ignorant in the way that I understand it, is you have guidelines, and I have for a framework to do that within. But I would say like, Look, if you’re trying to be transformational, do things differently. It’s like, you got to be consistent with your approach, be persistent with our approach. Our big thing is community, community community. If you read our newsletter, you’ll know it’s from our community, you’ll know the people that are in it. If you see our social media, you’ll know it’s about the people. So everything is just like, look like push the pace. What do you get told now want to figure out how to get around it? You know, some sense knows, you know, doesn’t mean No, today, but might be like a maybe a later thing. Or maybe there’s another way to get to it. So you know, my first job, I was a telemarketer I was always taught you to do to rebuttal before you finally hung up the phone, and I very much live by that model. And so my thing is just people, you know, to make chambers that I’ll be honest, that we interact with, don’t push the pace, you know, our final status quo, which is great, but I think COVID kind of allowed folks to see kind of see through that. Our job is, you know, often the world that we live in the chamber world, the economic development agencies are here, and the chambers are here, or the community development is here. And chambers is always below it. And so my big thing is like, look, when we get talked about in the community, I want people to know that, like, look, we’re on the cutting edge, we’re doing things differently. And that, you know, we’re doing what’s best for the community. So people be persistent and be consistent and just have fun. That’s the big thing is, I’ve been here for three and a half years. And you know, early on, we’ll see I’ll Bryce you’re gonna burn out, you’re gonna do this. It’s like, yeah, there’s some days on central office. And I’m like, this sucks. But you know, I would say it’s not, it’s not hard work, it’s a lot of work, just power through. And if you set yourself up, put your bets out there. You know, like, look, I gotta do this, this, this, and this to get where I need to go. Yeah,

Brandon Burton 33:28
I’d love the honesty of some days. It just sucks. Yeah. Gotta move forward, you have a bigger picture of why you’re doing it. And I love the idea of consistent being consistent being persistent. And there’s so much value in that. And it leverages a lot of power if you’re consistent and persistent on pursuing those goals and, and the potential of your organization. So as we look to the future of chambers, how do you see the future chambers and their potential or their purpose going forward?

Bryce Riggs 34:01
Yeah, I would say, you know, that really, the big thing is, again, that that personal touch. I think if you two things I find is that shortfalls with the Chamber World Industries, people run their nonprofit, like a nonprofit, I say I run my organization, like it’s a business because it’s a business and you got to invest in your people invest in your marketing, you have to invest in everything, right. I remember my first year I started and we didn’t have you know, anybody at all, but here I am, like, look, we’re ordering, you know, 5000 folders for new members because guess what, we’re gonna we’re gonna go out there, we’re going to spread the word and we’re going to tell people what we got going on. I think that’s the thing is don’t you know, you know, don’t the day you stop investing in marketing this day, you stop investing in your peoples that day that you know, things are on the decline. You need to keep doing that. And I say that really the big thing as well as getting into that personal touch. You know, You gotta stand out a lot of organizations are in need United Way’s you name it right that a lot of Salvation Army’s, they need money and you’re you know, to say that we’re on the same playing field as them but sometimes we are as chambers. And so we do things such as you know, every Christmas card we do holiday cards we send out, we send to all our members home addresses, because again, it’s you could send a Christmas card or holiday card to their their business. But it’s great, you know, it’s that the business relationship, we’re trying to get the next thing. So I just say, you know, if you’re consistent persistent with that personal touch and approach, that’s why the Chamber’s gone is that, you know, we got to stay competitive in the marketplace in terms of funding domestic competitive for, you know, even like the tourism side of things, right? We pick, we have that arm of us. And that makes us more competitive, because we can offer a different service than maybe another chamber couldn’t. So sometimes in communities, that tourism site opens up. And that, you know, huge opportunity to get those dollars, go out there, go put yourself out there and really go for it. You might have to hire another staff member to get those dollars. But the more things you can add, and the more things you can do to be a resource to the community, I think that’s where we’re going is that you’re going to find only a few organizations are going to do the key things in the community. And you got to be willing to change and adapt to it. Yeah,

Brandon Burton 36:25
I think that’s an interesting twist you had mentioned with the the Christmas cards to send them to their home address. So you’re obviously collecting that information when they join the chamber? Or do you ever get any pushback and somebody’s like, I don’t want to give a home address. And this is about business organization.

Bryce Riggs 36:42
This is why I tell you that I’m a little creepy. So three years ago, I started I started doing white pages. And I started an honors office and I started going through and finding things and I’ll be honest with you, if we don’t ask them for their home address. It’s you know, that’s available on the internet, you can do that. This last year. We just said December, was sent last Thursday, our cards went out and got people’s addresses on Saturday. Most of them did. But for us, it’s like look like I bought look at that information. It’s a nice surprise. People are like, Oh, I never gave them that address. But it’s together that touch. So

Brandon Burton 37:22
then are you putting it in your membership software with their accounts. So the next year, it’s got

Bryce Riggs 37:26
its color Christmas card address, it’s a separate one. So okay, it just moved to gross within the last year. So with that we’re making the adjustments and add ons, but I’ve spent many long hours doing that from finding information to some people might be, you know, meaningless. But I come in late at night, and I just kind of churn and burn until I get thrown. But it’s important because again, people come to us and say, Hey, I have your card in my house. That’s really nice. And we’re always first card. And it’s all we go to their house. So it’s always important and

Brandon Burton 38:00
awesome. I love that touch. Well, Bryce, I wanted to give you an opportunity to share any contact information for listeners who might want to reach out and connect about some of these approaches or how you guys are doing things there at the Seneca Regional Chamber, what would be the best way for them to reach out and connect with you?

Bryce Riggs 38:17
Yeah, go ahead and call my cell phones 419-889-3932 And that’s my cell phone. Just reach out to me. We weren’t happy to share information about you know what we have going on or you can reach out to me and briggs@Senecaregionalchamber.com and shoot me an email but I you know, there’s a lot of different folks that I’ve met along the way. I do a monthly zoom with people across the country, their chamber professionals because like, look, you know, the day you think you’ve figured it out, as you know, that uh, you run your nonprofit, like a nonprofit is the day to day, life becomes a lot more difficult for you.

Brandon Burton 39:00
Yeah, for sure. But we’ll get that in our show notes for this episode too. So people can can look it up and reach out and touch base with you and learn more. But I appreciate you spending some time with us today here on chamber chat podcast. I love hearing these stories of you know, you get a fresh approach and an organization and throw some fuel on the fire and watch it burn. You guys are doing an awesome job. So keep that momentum keep that consistency and persistence. And I think there’s going to be even bigger numbers. Yeah, a year from now or two years from now. So I appreciate you sharing these insights and experiences with us today.

Brandon Burton 39:25
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