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Category: Lessons Learned

Navigating Contracts with Angela Wilson

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

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

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Our guest for this episode is Angela Wilson. Angela is the President and CEO of the Greater Muskogee Area Chamber of Commerce. Angela provides the overall daily management of all departments of the chamber and works with the Chamber’s board of directors to ensure the Chamber’s mission is achieved. She became the Chamber’s President and CEO in November of 2019 after serving as Vice President and Director of Programs for six years, she oversaw all of the Chamber’s programs and events and all non news revenue projects, which make up approximately half of the Chamber’s annual operating budget. Angela has worked at the Muscogee Chamber Since 2012 after serving as a tourism director and executive director for the Chamber of Commerce in Coffeyville, Kansas for four years. Angela began her career with the Muskogee chamber as the program and sales director in 2016 was promoted to Vice President and Director of Programs. Angela has a Bachelor of Arts degree in communications from Metropolitan State University of Denver in Colorado. She is an IOM graduate and a graduate of leadership, Coffeyville leadership, Mugi OCC chamber Management Institute, OK, CNP, non profit management and Dale Carnegie effective communications and human relations. Angela currently serves as chair on the OCC board of directors, Mako Conference Board of Directors, and the President of the Board of Trustees for the Muscogee public schools, education board of directors. Angela, I’m excited to have you with us today, here on chamber chat podcast, I’d love to give you an opportunity to say hello to all the chamber champions who are out there listening, and to share something interesting about yourself so we can all get to know you a little better. Sure.

Angela Wilson 2:52
Thank you for having me today. It was an honor to be asked to do this. I should could throw rich Cantillon. We used to be with the Ponca City Chamber in Oklahoma, throw him under the bus for signing me up for this that he deserves it. And though I love to share, I love to help other chambers. So in any way, I hope someone takes maybe just something from this today to help them

Brandon Burton 3:17
absolutely, and I’m sure that’s, that’s what the whole purpose of this is, right? Is to bring people on and their perspectives from their their part of the world, their part of the country, and their scope of work at their chamber and and we’ll, we’ll flesh out those things that can be a value to others listening. So tell us a little bit about the greater Muskogee Area Chamber, just to kind of set the stage. Give us an idea the size of your chamber staff, budget, scope of work, just to kind of prep us for our conversation today.

Angela Wilson 3:48
Sure, and those of you don’t know we are Muskogee, Oklahoma, USA. You might have heard a song before okie from Muskogee, from Earl haggard. That’s usually what people associate us with. But we are located, for those, again, that don’t know, in eastern Oklahoma. We’re about 45 minutes from Tulsa, so we kind of sit out. We are a micropolitan community of about 35,000 people. Our chamber has about 375 members. We know, give or take those, our budget is about a $375,000 budget, and we have, right now a staff of three. I’m in that little transition where I’m down one staff and so again, we’re like all chambers. Do we reevaluate if we want to fill that position, or if we think we can, obviously we all know we can take on more work, because we always think we can, but we’re kind of in that time where we’re reevaluating if we want to fill that so normally we’re a staff of four, and we are again solely just a chamber. And. Yeah, we

Brandon Burton 5:01
love it. So I think it’s probably fair to say most chambers are operating one or two staff people below what they need, right? So probably, probably put you right in the right the sweet zone, right there. So

Angela Wilson 5:13
yeah, we always take on more work. For some reason, I It’s really weird. Yes, we can do it. Yes, we can

Brandon Burton 5:19
do it. Yeah, chambers have a problem with saying no or problem saying yes. Maybe is what it

Angela Wilson 5:24
is yeah that we need to go to get help for saying yes to everything

Brandon Burton 5:28
absolutely. Well, I’m excited for our topic today. It’s something we haven’t really spent much time on in over 300 episodes of Chamber Chat Podcast, but it’s a focus of navigating contracts. So I know a lot of chambers out there have either tourism contracts or economic development contracts or maybe a Downtown Association contract of some sort. But all these variety of different types of contracts may or may not come across the desk of the the chamber, and the Chamber might seek them out. They might be sought out in some cases, but either way, I think it’s a good opportunity for us to have a conversation about how a chamber can go about navigating and maybe even negotiating some of these contracts as a as they appear. So I think there’s going to be a lot of value for listeners today, and look forward to getting to this with you right after this quick break.

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All right, Angela, we’re back. So as I mentioned before the break, we’re focusing our conversation today around negotiating contracts. As you introduced the greater Muskogee Area Chamber, you mentioned that you’re solely a Chamber of Commerce. I know that hasn’t always been the case, but if, if you want to take the mic and kind of give us the background and evolution of of the Muskie chamber, just to kind of set the table for us. I think that may be helpful, sure.

Angela Wilson 9:08
So when I started in 2012 we had a contract with the city for tourism, and we had a tourism staff of about, I think, three other people, and again, the Chamber has an administrative fee that we take off that contract, like every contract that we have. Well at the time, every year, that contract auto renewed. We went to City Council, we did our presentation. What we did that year, we went about our way. The chamber was very heavy in tourism. We were known for having fun, doing all these parties, entertaining, you know, at all these big events that tourism was hosting, and the Chamber kind of took a back seat to that. Well, fast forward about five or six years, and that tourism budget was. Is over a million dollars. And so when people see that, oh, I can do that, they make it look so easy and so fun. And there was always people, every year, probably since I’ve been here, that thought they could do it better. And so, come about 2017 18. There was a lot of pressure from City Council. They were, they were feeling the pressure from outside sources to kind of put their thumb on what tourism was doing. And so, you know, around here, we batten down the hatches. We jumped through tons of tons of hoops. I think our president and CEO of the chamber at the time, she spent probably 85% of her time dealing with tourism, and so again, the Chamber suffered from that. So I’m over here as vice president, holding down the chamber because we’re dealing with all of this outside noise for tourism. They completely changed. Our board completely made. You know, everyone track their time like just everything was ridiculous, almost, um, and so, you know, my president, CEO, she left, and at the time, I’m thinking, Oh, God, do I want this job? Do I want it? Do I want it? And my kind of analogy of it is, I know it was a bowl of crap, and I’ve decided to eat that bowl of crap when I applied for this job. So that’s go to 2019 I accept this job, and, you know, the pressure is still there, the red tape we’re dealing with non stop. And then COVID happens, and then I’m really thinking to myself, Oh my gosh, what did I really do? Well, when COVID happened, we didn’t know what our budget was going to be. We didn’t know if people were gonna they’re not traveling, like, oh gosh, you know, layoffs, whatever. We just didn’t. Nobody knew. And so, um, we worked. I spoke with my board, and I said, you know, guys, is this really worth it what we’re dealing with, and our chamber is suffering. Um, our Chamber members. They just think we do tourism. They don’t know what they get as a chamber member. And so with kind of all of that background and just everything going on, we decided to part ways with that contract. It wasn’t easy. It was some difficult conversations with my board, with the city manager, with the mayor, but we decided we needed to do what was best for our chamber, and letting that contract go was what was best for our chamber. Now it came with a loss of that administrative fee, loss of jobs that I had to lay off people, and so it wasn’t a fun time. And you then COVID still going on. So you’re like, oh God, we can’t do events. Oh god, you know, what did we do as a chamber? Are we going to be okay? So the fall of 21 was October of 21 was the end date for that contract. So we gave it back to the city on a silver platter, and said, Here you go. Good luck. We’ll be here if you need some help, but have fun and take it on. And so the city took it in house for a little bit, and then they re contracted it back out to a third party again. But, you know, as a chamber, it was our time then to rebrand as a chamber and say, Where do we want to go from here? What do our Chamber members want? So we sent surveys out, we visited with members. We kind of rebranded of what we do. We had a whole new program of work. Just everything was completely new, and it was scary, very scary, but it took us about three years to recuperate that admin fee is about $30,000 so we took us years, you know, just biting away each year at a time, and we did it. And it was a very rewarding kind of deal to be a part of, to be like, we’ve done this, we’re okay. We never had to pull money from reserves. We never had to do any of that. And you know, it was just a time, and our members recognized that, hey, they’re really asking me what I want as a member. And so we put some new programs out there. We got rid of a couple programs, and so looking back now, is the best thing we’ve ever done. We are, I say, we live our best life. We have no other contracts. We don’t do the economic development contract. So we are solely a chamber on our own, and it is very nice. So we answer to our members. We do what we want. We want to make up something and do something. We do it. We don’t want to. We don’t, don’t, don’t want to. We don’t have to. We’re not on purse strings or Puppet Strings of any entity, if it’s a city, county, whatever it might be, just our members. Yeah.

Brandon Burton 14:59
Yeah, and I can see where it can be difficult to serve two masters, right? So if you’ve got your chamber board, you’ve got a tourism board, and they’re wanting different things, and you’ve got staff that are allocating time different ways, trying to keep all that straight. It can be a headache. It can be a burden. I can see the benefit, of course, to be able to synergize, you know, the efforts that the chamber is doing with tourism and trying to bring that all under one focus, I can definitely see that and and we’ve had episodes where we’ve talked about where that can be a huge benefit, but when it’s splitting time going different ways, it has you not able to perform to your capabilities, really, as a chamber, they mentioned for your members to be able to understand what they get as a chamber member, I think is so important to be able to put that focus back there. So since that separation, the decoupling of the tourism contract, we call it a divorce

Angela Wilson 16:01
and the COVID, I guess I don’t know,

Brandon Burton 16:05
good terms, right? Do you have visitation? Yeah, we

Angela Wilson 16:09
have. They come visit every now and then. That’s

Brandon Burton 16:15
funny, but I imagine I mean, you still have an interest in tourism, right? I mean, a strong tourism in the Muskogee area is going to benefit your Chamber members as well. So there’s still win win within that, but not having that that burden or that weight upon you to perform in certain ways and to have the expectations that you need to meet. Can you talk to us a little bit about what that approach has been like since then, and involvement with tourism now that it’s not you know that that weight that’s on you as well,

Angela Wilson 16:45
sure, and I will say when it got really bad. I mean, we had open records requests from people for tourism. The Attorney General’s office was calling me that we were embezzling all like it was just to the point where you’re like, This is crazy things, and nothing came of any of it. So you’re like, Well, we know we’ve had audits, and we do our audits every year. We’re okay, but you know, just going forward, we’ve been there to help them. When they transitioned over, they would call us to say, how did you guys do this? Or what did you do about this? And they’ve had a couple tourism directors since then. So each time they get a new one, they call us and you know, we’re there. If we need to be, we’re going to partner. We’re going to do what’s best for Muskogee at the end of the day. But do I ever want it back? I don’t think so, unless it’s just really that bad that we need to take it back in. But it was just an opportunity for us to be us and not be everyone just associated us with tourism before we were I mean, at one time, there was all women here, and they were the chamber chicks, but they were the happy go lucky face of Muscogee, because they were tourism, and so we needed to be a more professional organization and here for our businesses and be taken seriously, be at the table on serious conversations, and not just, you know, fishing tournaments and this and that and this, parties, fun things. So we have kind of really stepped it up as more of a professional organization. You know, we still have fun, but we try to be, you know, that pinnacle the top of what we can be in Muskogee, when we do things, we want to be the best at it. But with tourism, you know, we’re all partners. We all try to partner with things, with our economic development, with the city, with the county, we definitely try to break down those silos and partner and move forward and do what’s best for Muskogee. Yeah,

Brandon Burton 18:50
I can see we’re after the divorce to be able to focus more on the 3c versus the 3p right as a chamber and your focus. What would you say for chambers out there that are either considering a partnership or considering dissolving a partnership? What are some of those things that need to be thought of and really calculated into to making these sort of decisions? I know sometimes the decisions are made for you, but if you’re if you still have a seat at the table and you’ve got some input, what are some things to be considered sure

Angela Wilson 19:25
if you aren’t considering it, my top piece of advice would be, make sure that contract is strong, strong, strong, and you have your best interest at the very front of that. Because, you know, for ours, was just auto renew, auto renew, the good old boy system. Well, then all of a sudden they wanted to have batten down and hatch down this contract. And it was just, it was a waste of everyone’s time and money and effort for things, I get a contract. But looking back. Hindsight, there’s different things of who owns what. We’ve gone through that with a logo and a branding, does tourism own it, or does the chamber own it? Buildings? Did they pay rent? If they had, you know, put money into the building? Who has what desks like it is very simple, things you don’t think about. And then if your logo, if you’re going to dissolve it, if your logo has chamber and tourism, well, guess what? Your chamber is going to have to pay for all new branding, all new envelopes, all new signs, whatever it might be, business cards. There’s a lot of just little things you don’t think about that that logo and tourism was on, so make sure that you set yourself up as a chamber. Set yourself up right and solid. Consult with an attorney. Please do that before you sign any contract. Don’t just let the city or the county hand you one and say, sign this. Have those conversations with your board of if we weren’t to do this tomorrow, what would we look like? Can we still keep our doors open? Can we still be successful or and make sure it is tourism is one side and there’s a high wall of chamber on the other. Do not merge those. It can get muddy. It can get very gray, and you don’t want you don’t want any part of that either. So keep things very clear, separate, a separate checking account for your tourism, a separate checking account for your chamber. I know there’s some out there that blend those two and Good gosh, makes me cringe, but they are separate, separate audits. Just make sure everything is very clean financially. So you know, if you do have an open records request, here you go, and you’re clean. And that is another perk right now, is we don’t have, we’re not subject to open records, not that we’re doing anything shady, but yeah, but we can say no, if we really need to, but at the end of the day, make sure the chamber everything is secure for the chamber, and that’s what look out for the chamber at the end of the day. Yeah,

Brandon Burton 22:11
on a smaller scale, it makes me think of the small business owner who may be commingling their personal funds with their business funds, and, you know, working out of their other house, but not paying themselves rent, and then they go to sell a business, and, well, what do you have to sell? What? What’s here? And so keeping things clean, and, like you said, having the contracts really buttoned down, to be able to know, you know, is the tourism or is economic development? Are they paying for rent? Are they do they own certain computers and desks, and being able to have that, that separation, but within the same umbrella, Giving definition, I guess is, is the way to say it. But I

Angela Wilson 22:49
think document everything. And you know, most of the time you should have on tourism side. If you’ve purchased the desk computers, you know all that. So if you have it, but make sure it’s very clear who owns what in your office, because we had to spend many times of like, okay, this desk has been sitting upstairs. Who bought this? Or you just don’t know, sign on the side of the building, who owns that you don’t know. You know it’s one of those things. So definitely keep track of everything.

Brandon Burton 23:25
Yeah, I can see when you take on a contract, it can be exciting to say, look, we’re getting a new sign, new business cards, new website like all this to rebrand. And you know, this is a new, fun, exciting thing, and there should be an influx of of income coming with that to the chamber. But on the opposite end, when you’re separating, not only are you losing the contract, the administrative funds, but also the cost to go through and change all those things too. Yeah, may not be less exciting. It’s a different kind of excitement, I suppose, yeah.

Angela Wilson 23:56
And when you have to, you know, if you have delay people off, tourism employees, it’s going to affect your the Chamber’s unemployment rate for a couple of years that happened to us. So there’s just little things that trickle downhill. But at the end of the day, looking back, it was on my end. It was worth it, if I were to take on again, like we’ve said, another contract or something else, if it was be a main street or an economic development I know now to make sure that that contract is solid. Yeah,

Brandon Burton 24:30
absolutely. So. As you’ve seen this, the separation, the divorce, the uncoupling, the de burtoning, how have you been able to see the focus on the members. What’s the member response been like? Has you been able to focus on them and the value that they get as a chamber member? Now, sure,

Angela Wilson 24:50
one of our first things we did in the spring of 22 we did a membership Blitz, and we went and visited 100 members. I. Was our goal, and just sat down with them and just said, what’s going on? What can we help you with? We don’t want anything. We don’t want any money. What are you dealing with? What can we do better? And so a lot of them just appreciated that they hadn’t seen people from the chamber in a while. They hadn’t had a chamber voice in a while. And so we took some of that feedback and just built a better chamber for that. Or people, you know, hey, I would really like you to bring back this or this. And so we’ve tried to implement those things, and people have really appreciated it. And they’re like, you know, you guys are doing a great job, and I appreciate you. Guys have been more attentive to us, and so just those little things in, you know, making what we do more relevant. This is what the chamber is. This is what our mission is. This is what our program of work is, and that’s who we are. And what can we do for you is really what we spent that next year saying, what is our chamber want? What do you guys need? We’re here for you. We’re open. And we got so much positive feedback of that, of just those little conversations. And you know, I was driving yesterday home from a meeting, I’m thinking, I think I want to do another one of those membership blitzes again, just to go out and just visit people that we don’t normally get to visit with and see. But that was probably the most impactful thing that we did, was just visiting with people and asking what they want, not what we want, what they want. Yeah,

Brandon Burton 26:37
and another listening tour sounds like a great idea, and be able to being able to see now that about three years post separation, if I if I’m doing my math correct, yes, it’s not, it’s not hard math, but I want to make sure I got the dates right to be able to do another follow up listening tour like that. And I would be curious to see what’s the the image of the chamber. How has that changed over those three years? Sure people

Angela Wilson 27:03
take us more serious. Now we’re not just the party, fun, happy, go lucky. We’re here for our members. We’re intentional about what we do. We’ve made some other changes internally of our processes for new members. We just are really intentional about what our members want, and we’re more professional level of what we we want to do, what we need to do. We’re there. And, you know, people recognize that. They say, you know, the Chamber events are always the best events, and we always try to be, you know, creative when we do our events, of the best advice sometimes I ever heard was, if you don’t want to be there, probably they don’t want to be there as well. So I was take that into consideration when we’re planning events or planning programming. Good gosh, I want to be there, and if I don’t, probably nobody else really does and not being able to don’t be afraid to try new things. Try it if it fails. So what you tried it, and you can go on down the road if something’s not working. Don’t be afraid to get rid of it. That’s probably my biggest piece of advice of as a chamber of when I came on the first time I tried to get rid of a program, I was scared to death. I thought I was gonna lose my job. Thought people were gonna run me out of town. And people came back and said, Thank you for getting rid of that. I thought it was waste of time. I was like, Oh, thank you. So that would be my thing is, don’t be afraid to change just because I hate saying this, but you’ve always done it that way. Doesn’t mean you have to continue doing it that way. Yeah,

Brandon Burton 28:43
we’ve got a whole episode about burning sacred cows, so you can go back in the archives and listen to that and and learn how you can get rid of some of these programs that are not serving you or the chamber anymore. So if they’re not serving the chamber, they’re probably not serving anybody else, and people are doing it out of obligation or guilt, and you can level it up and do something much more effective and impactful. So yes, amen, good. Good comment. Well, Angela, as we start to wrap up, I always like asking for listeners who are wanting to take their chamber up to the next level, what kind of tip or action item might you have to share with them to try to accomplish that goal. You just mentioned one. But does anything else come to mind that you’d like to share? Probably,

Angela Wilson 29:26
again, I would just echo, don’t be afraid of Chinese things and look out for the best interest of the chamber. Be that arm, be that solid pillar in the community. Not everyone’s gonna like everything you do, but that’s okay, at least they’re noticing what you’re doing and do what’s best for you. At the end of the day, you need to have your back, your board needs to have your back and your chambers

Brandon Burton 29:54
absolutely and I’ve mentioned it several times in past episodes, but if you’re focused. On what’s good for the business community. In your community, it’s hard to go wrong, and it’s hard to have too many people upset with you if you’re at least the people you’re serving are not going to be upset with you if you’re focused on on how to best serve the business community. So

Angela Wilson 30:14
yeah, I always say too, you know, I don’t know everything. We don’t know everything, but we know people who do, yeah, and so. And you know, you do want to say no to people sometimes, but I think telling giving them the resources and helping them along, they appreciate that, and they recognize the chamber did help me. You just, you just picked up the phone and called it another person, maybe, but to them, that was a game changer in what they were trying to accomplish. And they really look back about, oh gosh, the Chamber really helped me out. And then they’re going to start showing up to stuff and being there for you and having your back. So it’s just little intentional things, I think, as well being very intentional on the little things, yeah,

Brandon Burton 30:55
absolutely, totally accurate. So I like asking, as we look to the future of chambers of commerce, how do you see the future of chambers and their purpose going forward?

Angela Wilson 31:07
I think chambers even looking back on, good God, I’d hate aging myself, because, you know, I look 20, but I’m getting in the 40s now. But you know, we have evolved over the time that I’ve been in the chamber world, and it’s exciting because it’s something new every day. And I think just being relevant and keeping up with those trends of what businesses need, what communities need, what you guys are, the chambers are the forefront. And so we need to be those leaders, and we need to have that creative mindset of what’s next. And so, I mean, chambers are still going to be around, but we’re different than we looked 10 years ago. We’re different than we look 20 years ago and even 50 years ago, when people just paid their dues because it was the right thing to do. But I think it’s just exciting, because you it’s up to you as a chamber you can do what you want to do, and what your Chamber members want. So it’s kind of exciting that you don’t always have to do the same thing every day or every year. So I think just making sure you’re on that cusp of what’s you know kind of what your members are wanting, and stay ahead of them one step so you can provide those services for them, but chambers are always going to be around. What they look like in 20 years might be completely different. Yeah,

Brandon Burton 32:27
I would argue, even from four years ago, from through COVID to today, chambers look different so well, Angela, this has been a good conversation. I think it’s provided a lot of value for listeners, and I appreciate you getting a little, you know, authentic and raw about an experience at your chamber that I’m sure was full of difficulties and challenges, but being able to rise above and come through on the other side with some lessons learned that are valuable for others that have been listening today. So thank you for sharing that with us.

Angela Wilson 32:58
Thank you for having me, and yeah, there was a lot of wine along the way going through that transition, wasn’t it always

Brandon Burton 33:05
rainbows and butterflies? Yeah, I wanted to give you a chance to share any contact information for listeners who may want to reach out and connect. And say, how’d you get the courage to move forward with this, or whatever it may be, what’s the best way for them to reach out and connect?

Angela Wilson 33:19
Absolutely, please contact me if you have it’s not a dumb question. No questions are dumb. We’re involved contacted peers. That’s what we rely on and how we survive sometimes. But you can visit our website, Muskogee chamber.org, or you can email me at angela@mugicha.org, or if you go onto our website, you’ll find our contact or phone number on there, and yeah, email me, call me, whichever. I’m always open, and that’s one of my favorite parts of my job is helping other chambers.

Brandon Burton 33:53
Yeah, it’s such a great profession for being able to do that. Yes, we’ll, we’ll get the website and email and our show notes for this episode to make it easy to find you. But again, Angela, this has been great, and thank you so much for joining us today and sharing your experiences and insight with with those that are listening.

Angela Wilson 34:10
I appreciate it. Thank you for having me.

Brandon Burton 34:14
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Chamber Churn & Balance with Mike Throne

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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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Our guest for this episode is Mike Throne. Mike is the President and CEO of the Chillicothe Ross Chamber in Ohio. Mike has always been a storyteller has a sixth grader near Sandusky, Ohio he arrived home from school one day proclaiming he wanted to be a journalist when he grew up. He wrote stories as a child and use scrap paper stapled together to produce his first official issue. A five pager including a recap of pickup baseball game he and his friends played earlier that day. Sales were not good. After graduating from Bowling Green State University. He began nearly 25 year career in newspapers starting as a rural reporter and becoming an editor of two newspapers picking up numerous local state and national awards for himself and his staff. But he found his passion in Chillicothe. He as a small town from southern Ohio, he yearned to become part of the renaissance of Ohio’s first capitol. In 2018, he became the president and CEO of the Chillicothe Ross Chamber of Commerce. And again, the story of the resurgence of the place he called Ohio’s best small town. In addition to his chamber duties, he co hosts the feels like home podcast, which furthers his efforts to tell his community stories. He also serves on several boards in the community, including chairing the Board of Trustees for the pumphouse Center for the Arts. Mike, I’m excited to have you with us today, you’re on Chamber Chat Podcast, I’d love to give you an opportunity to say hello to all the Chamber Champions who are out there listening and share something interesting about yourself that maybe wasn’t included in your bio. Well,

Mike Throne 2:52
Brandon, first of all, thank you for the invitation. And it’s an honor to be on the show. And I think it’s important to note that I’m so good of an editor that I edited out the two homeruns that I hit in that pickup baseball game. But, you know, I’m really excited to be here because I think the chamber life has been pretty transforming for me. And so I like to share parts of my experience. And I think it’s just one of those things where the more I can really my mom and many people that I’ve talked to have always said I should have been a teacher I should have because summers off really sounds like a great idea, but but I like the fact that we have forums like this and other forums where we can share our experiences and help chamber executives and their staffs really grow their knowledge and and again, as you said earlier, just serve their members better. Yes, I

Brandon Burton 3:51
appreciate that. And I I like platforms like this. I may be a little biased, but I think it energizes those that listen and participate. Because you get to hear what the other guy’s doing and be able to take things and scale it for your chamber and and hopefully make your life a little bit easier. That’s that’s kind of the goal. Absolutely. Well tell us a little bit more about the Chillicothe, the Ross chamber just give us an idea size staff budget scope of work, you guys are involved with that sort of thing just to kind of set the stage for our discussion.

Mike Throne 4:21
So the Chillicothe Ross Chamber of Commerce has been around since I guess, since since the 1880s when it was first formed as a Board of Trade. But in the early 1900s It became an official Chamber of Commerce, transferring its name to a chamber of commerce. So we’ve been around for 100 plus years. And we currently have about 775 members. We’re located in southern Ohio about midway between Huntington West Virginia or Kentucky depending how you look at the tri state area, and Columbus, Ohio. We’re only about 40 minutes south of Columbus, Ohio. And so we’ve kind of got a niche is sort of a Regional Chamber. We draw a lot of members from around around the surrounding county areas. But predominantly, we focus on the Ross County area, we have a staff of three, that’s myself on events and marketing person, and membership, person as well. We bring in about, on average, about $240,000 of dues revenue each year. And total income of probably right around 375,000. We just made a switch this year, we had three, we’ve always had three positions. But we have traditionally not had an events and marketing person split out, I had my membership and events all under one when I arrived in 20, late 2018. And so this year, we had an opportunity, somebody left. And so we thought, well, this is the opportunity that we have to make our membership person a true membership person and split off the events duties. So that’s been our biggest, our biggest change this year. And so in many ways, you know, it’s only we’re not even halfway through the year yet. So we’re still trying to navigate what that looks like. And but it’s been, it’s been really successful so far. That’s

Brandon Burton 6:25
good. Yeah, I can see where membership and events and marketing where there’s a lot of overlap, and where one person may feel like they kind of need the control over all of it. But there’s definitely enough work to spread it out to two or three people maybe even but being able to have that coordinated effort between them to make sure we’re all moving in the right direction, right? Yep.

Mike Throne 6:49
Yeah. And I just felt like there was a lot of stops and starts, every time we’d have a big event. It was sort of like okay, membership meeting, slow down or pause. And I just felt like, you know, the membership duties being segmented out. We could just focus on membership for 12 months a year. Yeah,

Brandon Burton 7:06
that’s smart. So for our topic for our conversation today, for this episode, we focus or we decided to focus on discussing the chamber turn that we’re seeing throughout the chamber world. And part of that some of the balance and some of the work life balance that we need to be mindful of to try to retain us as a chamber professionals and not get too burned out and be adding to that churn too quickly. So we will dive into this discussion much deeper as soon as they get back from this quick break.

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All right, Mike, we are back. As I mentioned before the break, we’re talking today about chamber churn, but also the work life balance aspect to try to help support those chamber champions that are out there. I know from my my vantage point, my point of view from especially since the pandemic, I think that was really an accelerator of seeing this churn of chamber executives and, and staff were, you know, it was everything 100%, you know, during the pandemic, and I think at least it led to a lot of burnout, it led to a on the other hand, a lot of satisfaction, because chambers were able to see the value, the community was able to recognize the value of the chamber, but I think the the balance got out of whack a bit there. But from your perspective, what have you seen and what what comes to mind, as you see think of chamber churn. But

Mike Throne 10:59
I think it hits really, really close to home to me, in fact, of the five or six county area around me, I have one county to my north, that is churn their leader three times since the end of 2020. Another chamber that’s churned its leader four times since the end of 2020. And another county near me that has turned it three times since 2020. And then if you look around, some of the folks that I got to know in my first year, they’re gone in their predecessor, or their their successor, are also gone. I’m part of the chamber executives of Chamber of Commerce, executives of Ohio CEO group, which is a group designed specifically for executives. And we haven’t really run the numbers fully yet. But I would say, venture a guess that half of the positions and there are, you know, a lot of chambers in Ohio that have churned leaders over that span. I think COVID was a part of it. I think COVID was a very big waking event for people, to let them see just how aggressive their schedule was, and how hard they’re working. And, you know, I come from this from from the perspective of spending 25 years in the journalism business where the last three years or two years, I was the editor over two papers, and I was strung out and really just stressed out, I get home and my young kids were already in bed, and I hadn’t seen them all day, and I just really needed, I needed a change, I didn’t enjoy my work anymore. And so, you know, I had applied for this job five years before it came open. Didn’t get it then. But when it came back open again, I was a little reluctant to do it. But the more that I’ve looked at it, the more I felt like this is a good a good change for me. And I have the opportunity to work with my board to set the realistic goals, boundaries and values that will allow me to have that work life balance. And so, you know, I guess from the chamber churn perspective, I look at, you know, Glenn Shepards, report every month and see all these people that are leaving, or going from one to the other. And I just even look at my IOM class from last year, I’m currently in my second year. And the number of people that have left from that class alone just gives me great concern about who we’re getting for leaders. And then I think, how we address that, you know, I’m five years into this job, I don’t really consider myself a veteran, like many of the other folks that do this job. But we’re going to need to invest in those leaders to make sure that they don’t fall into the same traps. And I think the other part of it, too, is to create for our own selves. The boundaries that we know will help sustain us to go deep into this career if we really want that.

Brandon Burton 14:07
Yeah. So you’ve quickly become one of the old timers as everybody around you. It’s kind of

Mike Throne 14:14
a joke. You go from rookie to veteran real quickly in this industry, right? That’s

Brandon Burton 14:20
right. And at the same time, there’s those veterans that have been around, you know, their majority of their career that have a ton of value to offer to those who are new to the industry and and hopefully having platforms like this and state conferences and associations and IOM you know, that it’s opportunities to be able to learn from those that that have good stuff to pass on. What really stood out to me he had mentioned a couple of times these boundaries and values that allow for you to hopefully try to strike a balance between your work and your life. What does that look like? I guess her something because he had mentioned personal boundaries, but also that your board has been amenable to accepting boundaries and values that that you have as well. Can you talk to that a little bit? Sure.

Mike Throne 15:12
So I read a book few years ago called sacred rest, and it’s by Dr. Sondra, Dalton Smith. And she and that book talks about. And it actually came at a really important time. For me, it was produced in 2017, this was at the height of when I was really burned out. Emotionally, I loved being a journalist, I loved being an editor, we did great work, we served our community well. But inside, I was just really, really tired. And mentally, I really was going through the motions every day. And I read this book, and I started really, I didn’t really have an opportunity to apply a lot of the things that were in the book, until I kind of left that career because it was just such high energy, always on always, you know, you’re always worried about the stories that you don’t miss, and so on. And so in the book, Dr. Dalton Smith talks about getting seven types of rest. And they include physical rest, mental rest, social rest, spiritual rest, sensory rest, emotional rest, and then creative rest. And I realized very quickly, that creative rest was not something that I did not do much of, I was always just going and always in a in a, you know, an office setting. And, and so even though the journalism business can be very creative, I never took time to get outside of the walls of the office and appreciate the community that I live in, or, you know, we have great trails and other things around us. Not none of that stuff was I doing? And so I had to figure out how to get the seven types of risks, and you’re not going to get them every day. But how can I work them into my week and work them into my mental schedule. So that way I can, I can tell, you know, that I’m, I’m getting too out of balance in one area. You know, sensory rest is very, very important. Taking a break from social media, I think we need to all do that quite a bit, turning off your notifications, one of the ways that I do it is at nine o’clock every night, my notifications shut off, they don’t come back on again until seven in the morning. Most of my good friends and my work my co workers and people on my board know, if something is really really urgent, you know, they can get to me somehow, usually through my wife, they’ll call but you know, that sort of thing is where we, we need to sort of set that boundary and create that situation where you know, and in all honesty, I think it’s limiting your video meetings as much as possible to because the more we’re in front of the screens, the more I feel like it’s a little bit more draining, you have to, you know, it’s a little bit more of a challenge to do some of those things. So I really started to look at what this book offered to me. And started taking it piece by piece for one week, I would just think about, okay, how do I get physical rest? You know, and I found that I was sleeping five to six hours in the night. Yeah. And you know, I’m 55. Now I’m not 25. And it’s just not working. So how do I get more rest. And part of that physical rest, too is I do stretching, you know, I try to get up and around and in those types of things. So I think those are the things that I have really locked into. And I think the number one thing is to make sure that you enjoy your work. I have talked, you know, we talked earlier about the fact that I was just not I loved the journalism business, but I was done with it. And it was done with me. So did I enjoy that work, I enjoyed the people that I worked with, and that’s what I miss, I miss the big story. But I don’t miss the day to day grind of it. And that’s why I had to leave, I didn’t enjoy it anymore. And so, you know, I think when we sit down and we look at our daily tasks as chamber leaders, it’s about making sure that you enjoy the work, knowing your values, knowing your boundaries, setting realistic goals for yourself. You know, if you if you’re a if you’re a new chamber director, you know, anywhere is up, right? So you might say to yourself, maybe you know, 200 new members in a year is a great goal. Is it realistic, and have conversations with your board about that? And then the last one that I’ll say is that you have to create a self care plan. You know, for some people, it might, it might look like taking a walk every day for other people it will be, you know, a massage or, you know, buying yourself an ergonomic chair or, or things like that, but what is your self care plan? So that way, you know, hey, I’m kind of stressed out, I need to take a step back and say, You know what I would really like, I’d like to go for a nice long hike today, or if you’re a runner, take a nice run. And part of that self care plan is getting, you know, sometimes back in the gym, you don’t have to lift weights and get buff, but, you know, take, take a little walk on the treadmill, or, you know, work out some of the stress of your life. And so I think those those types of things can help us as we go through the daily grind of the of the job. And look, there’s some times that it’s easier than others, right? If you got a big event coming up, it’s probably going to be a high intense, you know, very arduous time, you probably are going to be lacking in some of those things. But trying to figure out how after that event is over, or that big push that you have on his over to try to get yourself back in balance.

Brandon Burton 21:12
Yeah, yeah, there’s gonna be Sprint’s for sure. We’re, it’s all hands on deck, and you got to give it your all for, you know, maybe a few weeks there, leading up to a big event. But I think that the nature of chambers, and I don’t know that it has to be this way. But it tends to be what’s evolved, at least into what chambers are where, especially as a chamber executive, you’re out and about in the community, people see you, you see people, you need to say hi, and it make those connections, make sure you have good reports as business owners, so they don’t say, man that Mike is a jerk, you came in here and didn’t even say hi, and he probably doesn’t even know I’m a member, right. So you always have your chamber face on. And then inherently there’s, I don’t know, many chambers out there who don’t have a business after hours, right. And that gets into some of the boundaries where you know, or it’s the before hours, they are the breakfast mixers or things like that. And it’s good to have these opportunities for people to gather and network and, but you probably don’t need to be at every single one of them, right. So schedule a rotation with your staff or with board members or have a schedule to where you don’t have to be the face at every one of those events. And I think that that would play well into the balance. And I think to your point on the self care, we need an outlet, right, we need to be able to have a healthy way to let go of some of the stressors that that we carry. And unfortunately, a lot of people will turn to things like alcohol to be able to numb out and get through to the next day. And then that just compounds on the issues that they see day to day. So I think these are great points, as

Mike Throne 22:57
well. And there’s a great way to know that if you go to rest quiz.com r estquiz.com. You can take a quiz, and find out what type of rest you really lack, to live your best life. And that’s Dr. Dalton Smith website. And in all honesty, like taking that quiz was very eye opening. And I I always encourage people to take that quiz because you don’t know where you’re lacking. You think you do, but you don’t know where you’re lacking. And I want to touch on a point that you said as well, you were talking about, you know, the the member that thinks oh, they probably don’t even know if I’m a member. So my first couple of months into this job. The journalism job is a very, very head down, push forward, do your thing. And so when I came here, I had certain habits. And one of them was when I lock into a project or if I’m locked into learning something, I am always going to be head down plow forward. And I was in my office here one one morning and really not aware of what was going out on outside the lobby and I came out and went and walked past somebody as I walked by, and then did my thing came back in my office and just plowed forward again. Hours later, I got a call from my board chair and he said, Hey, I just got a call from the person that was standing outside. And she said that you were rude to her that you didn’t even acknowledge her and so on and so forth. And I was like, I don’t even recall there being you know, like an entity as I walked by. And long story short, she just lost her husband about a month earlier. Literally, I could probably reach out and touch the building that she works in next door. Never met her. And then I realized you know in that situation I had caused hurt her in pain right on top of the hurt and pain that she already felt from the loss that she had. So immediately, I went over and apologized to her. And I mean, we’ve had a great relationship ever since. But you know, those are the things that sometimes we get locked into, when we’re still trying to do all the things that we’ve got to do, we have to remember that this job is ultimately first about relationships, and about how we make people feel, I can tell you a million times that the chamber is here for you. But if I walk past you, right after you’ve lost your husband, and I don’t even acknowledge you, all of that goes out the window. And so, you know, I always have people around me, I’ve got a group of friends that I trust to say, you know, you probably need to spend more time with your family, you probably need to spend more time doing this or that. And I’m blessed with that I’m blessed with a great staff, as you mentioned earlier, to send to other to have a rotation that we can do things because honestly, it is it’s too much to do all by yourself.

Brandon Burton 26:08
Yeah. Back to the thought that comes to mind is to don’t be a busy chamber exec, you know, it, yes, you are going to be busy. But what I mean by that is don’t show the busyness as you interact with people, or have the stress on your face, you know, as you have those interactions that needs to be warm and genuine with those that you come in contact with. Because you don’t always know, you know, when they’re having that bad day, or when they really need the chamber. And just to be able to be that genuine face that really is there to support them is so valuable. So I think the boundary part, though, so as you’re out in the community, you know, if you and your wife go to dinner, this is a it should be quote unquote, you know, personal time, right? A date night, you know, but how do you set aside? Or do you have to go to dinner outside of the community? I don’t know. What do you do to be able to straddle that line of balance to where your wife feels like she’s getting what she needs, and then those in the community that you interact with, feel like they’re getting what they need.

Mike Throne 27:19
So just in case my wife listens to this, I’m gonna, I’m gonna have to be honest. So my father in law, owns a business in town, he’s on school boards, and is a well known figure in our community. So if we go to dinner with them, My in laws, and my wife, my, my wife, and my mother in law, know, to just go to the table. And we’ll work our way to where they always hope that we get seated fairly close to the entrance. Because if not, we’re going to see a million people that we know, and we’re going to chat for a little bit. So I’m not great at that. However, you know, if somebody engages me with a bigger issue that I know is going to take time, I will always say, hey, look, let me give you my cell phone number, call me tomorrow morning. Why don’t I send you a text and we can connect and have coffee or lunch or breakfast? Something like that. Now, if it’s something that’s super urgent, I’ll go back to the table and say, hey, look, this person really needs to talk that maybe might have happened twice in the last five years. Yeah. But they were pretty important issues. And, you know, people are really I think we we, we always think that people aren’t going to be as respectful as they are. I think people understand sometimes. And we don’t think they do. And so if you say to them, man, I want to be fully engaged in this conversation. Because that’s what you’re telling them when you say, we can’t work through this whole thing right now. But let’s do it tomorrow, or the next day or something like that. They want your full attention. And so we just got to remember that they’re asking us because one they know we can help. And two, they want your attention. And three, they think that you’re going to help them with possible solutions. So why wouldn’t they want you to be engaged? So you know, I’m always glad handing and you know, kissing babies. It’s almost like being a politician, right? Like, you know, I’m always doing that. But at the same time, if it’s really urgent, we’ll take the time and then if it’s not, let’s let’s catch up. Yeah,

Brandon Burton 29:27
I think that’s that’s good advice. And I think it all plays back into the chamber churn. I mean, if you’re constantly being stretched in all these different ways, and your family’s not getting what they need out of you, you’re not getting the rest, that you need to be able to be rejuvenated and to give your best self. It’s all going to lead to burnout and the you know, looking for that escape hatch to be able to get out and move on. So I think these are important things to consider. And as we begin to wrap up, I wanted to ask if there’s any A tip or action item that you might share for a chamber who is really interested in taking their organization up to the next level? What would you suggest for them?

Mike Throne 30:08
Yeah, you know, I think it’s, it’s the same. I always tell people, like, don’t be afraid of nothing that you don’t know something. And always be learning. You know, I learned from your podcast from listening to other people, I’ve learned a ton by going to our state conferences, I go to, you know, if you can’t afford to go to ACC, I really do. You know, encourage people to go to that conference as well find ways to connect with your fellow chamber executives, or let your staffs network with their their similar positions near you. Because that is less intensive, it might just cost a lunch or coffee or breakfast or something like that. But I mean, I have learned so much from the folks that I just picked up the phone and said, hey, you know, I’m new to this job, or I’m new to this problem. But I hear that you’ve gone through it, or that you can be helpful. You know, and since I’ve, you know, again, jokingly, we said that I’m now a veteran, but like I’m getting those calls now. And you know, when you when you look at those, those folks calling, you can’t see it as an annoyance. Again, if it’s a boundary issue, then I think it’s really important to say, I can’t give this the attention that it needs to have today. So let’s catch up tomorrow or at our first opportunity to do so. But reach out to those that are maybe they’re brand new, like you and say, let’s tackle this together. Or, you know, there’s strength in numbers. That’s the number. That’s the number one thing I can tell people, I could not have done this, and achieved what I’ve achieved so far. If I just tried to do it all on my own, I would probably still be with my head down, making all my members mad. And, you know, and not not achieving anything. Although I don’t think the folks out in that. Office would let me do that for very long, I guess. But, you know, I just think it’s really important. You don’t know what you don’t know, that was advice that was given to me in my journalism career, probably 20 years ago. So don’t act like you don’t like you do know it, reach out and get the help that you need to start to whittle away at the the issues that you see in your community, and be a help.

Brandon Burton 32:29
Yeah, I love that. I like asking everyone to 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?

Mike Throne 32:41
Well, I’m excited about you know, I think we have changes and challenges that we’re going to have to meet right, but I’m excited that this business provides for us an opportunity to help every help people every day. And I think that’s not going to change. Now we’re gonna have to change with the things that are, you know, that are changing along with it, AI is going to be a huge challenge. You know, membership dues and the way they get they get computed and, and paid are a challenge. And so the purpose of chambers has always been to convene and connect. And that’s not going to change. But the way that we convene and connect, is probably going to have to change, one of the things that we have been doing quite a bit of in the last year is instead of blanket, throwing out an event to folks targeting the folks that we think need to be in the room. Because it used to be you could just throw a BA B and tell everybody to come, you could, you know, have a chamber educational session on any myriad of topics and 20 people would show up, and it was no problem. It’s less of that now, people are busier, they’re still dealing with the after effects of COVID, and workforce issues and childcare issues and transportation. And so you’ve really got to figure out should this you know, if you’re going to do an educational event, should it be hybrid or virtual or in person? How long should it be? If it’s going to be in person? How long should it be if it’s going to be zoom? And just have really smart conversations with your folks about what events look like in 2024 and beyond. Because we want to connect as many people as we can, and we want to convene as many people as we can. But we don’t want to bore people to death. And you know, my former profession did a bad job of that. We still did the same stories about the same things and didn’t change for a long time. We didn’t buy into electronics and we didn’t buy into technology. And by the time we decided to react all that stuff, it was far too late. We Can’t let the chamber profession do that. And it’s my hope that folks will start asking better and smarter questions about all aspects of what they do. Because it’s the best way for them to really, and and again, you know, you’re going to have to ask that of your members, don’t sit in an office with three people in a room and say, Hey, what do you think we should change, because we think we’re great. But other people might have great input to offer there. And so find ways to engage those folks in your membership that will help, you know, provide the best way to fulfill your purpose moving forward.

Brandon Burton 35:36
Right, I love that. And they, to your point about connecting and convening those in your community and your members. There was a book I read a while ago called you’re invited. And it’s all about the the art of extending the invitation. And so that blanket email to all the membership to really handpick and say if we’re going to do some kind of a summit on real estate, you know, let’s have all of our Realtors and our lenders and title companies and really handpick who’s coming if we’re going to do something on, you know, a certain aspect of employment, you know, let’s make sure we’ve got a restaurant sector and connect those people together so they can talk about what are the struggles that they’re seeing what’s working for them, and to realize that they can all be there to help and support and, you know, the the networking part, if we go to a networking event, and everyone’s there trying to sell us insurance, that doesn’t really do much for everybody else there. But if you can really connect and network those people that support each other’s businesses, that’s where the magic happens. Yeah, so absolutely. So Mike, I’d before I let you go, I wanted to give you an opportunity to share any contact information for listeners who might want to reach out and connect with you as a, as a mentor. Just learn about how you guys are doing things there at the chilla coffee Ross chamber.

Mike Throne 36:58
I appreciate it again. Thanks for the invitation. This was great. So yeah, we’re the Chillicothe Ross Chamber of Commerce in Chillicothe, Ohio, our website is ChillicotheOhio.com that’s C H I L L I C O T h e ohio.com. I know only five communities in the whole country have a Chillicothe, so you may not know how to spell it. My email is just my first initial and last name. It’s mthrone@chillicotheohio.com. I’m also on LinkedIn, on Facebook. The Chamber itself is on Facebook and LinkedIn. And you can reach out to any through our channels there as well. I also you mentioned the podcast earlier in the in the broadcast. But yeah, it ‘Feels Like Home’ has been we’re in our fourth season right now. It’s basically we just want to spotlight the great stories that are going on our community, people that have started businesses, people that are making an impact in the community through service or things like that. So you can find us on pretty much anywhere you get podcasts, Spotify, Apple podcasts, we use Buzzsprout as our feed. So you can find this on Buzzsprout as well. But we would love for folks to take a listen. When I went to the ACC conference a couple years ago, I was talking with someone from Texas, and they said, Hey, I heard you on a podcast. What what is it? And I said what it was? And they said, Oh my gosh, I listened to that podcast, and it blew me away. I felt like a quasi celebrity for a little while. So that’s right. Listen, please give us a review and send us an email. We’d love to hear from you. Absolutely.

Brandon Burton 38:48
So that’s awesome. We will get all that in our show notes for this episode. And I’m a huge fan of chambers doing podcasts. I think it’s a great way to storytel Tell the story of your community interview those businesses as influencers in your community. And for those who haven’t seen it, I do have a chamber podcasting guide. It’s a free resource for you to learn how to get a podcast started. It’ll be linked in the show notes as well. But feel free to check that out.

Mike Throne 39:17
I did a session at CCO a couple years ago on podcasting and I used your your podcast as an example and pointed folks to your guide. So awesome. Thank you. I learned a lot from that guide. So I appreciate you. Awesome,

Brandon Burton 39:30
appreciate that. But Mike, this has been fun having you on chamber chat podcast with us today. I appreciate you coming on and being candid with the experiences that you’ve seen and and these lessons you’ve learned to find that balance in your life and to be able to find that that meaningful rest. I really appreciate you.

Mike Throne 39:48
Thank you Brandon.

Brandon Burton 39:51
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Tricks of the Trade with Travis Toliver

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

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

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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 Travis Toliver. Travis is the is currently in his 10th year serving as executive director for the Waverly Chamber of Commerce and the Waverly Main Street Program in Iowa. Travis continues to use his acquired skills to help better the Waverly business community the state of Iowa in the upper Midwest. He proudly serves on the board of directors for the Mid American Chamber executives Waverly Area Development Fund, and several other local organizations. Travis is past board member for the Iowa Association of Chamber of Commerce. During his two terms as board chair Travis helped to lead IACC through a management change a rebrand and name change, and a revamp of IAC ces conferences and education programs. Travis is a 2020 IOM graduate in 2021, Travis was appointed by Iowa Governor Kim Reynolds to help empower rural Iowa initiatives grow Task Force, which focuses on addressing the recruitment and retention of emerging leaders in rural communities. Travis, we’re excited to have you with us today here on Chamber Chat Podcast, I’d love to give you an opportunity to say hello to all the Chamber Champions who are out there listening and share something interesting about yourself so we can all get to know you a little better.

Travis Toliver 3:20
Well, thanks Brandon for having me on the show. I really appreciate it a big fan of the podcast and just glad to be one of many amazing chamber directors out there that have been featured on your on your show. So thanks for having me.

Brandon Burton 3:33
Absolutely. We try to only get the best. So you fit that criteria.

Travis Toliver 3:39
That’s a high bar.

Brandon Burton 3:41
Well then tell us a little bit about your organization about the Waverly Chamber of Commerce and Main Street programming as a kind of group together with the two the two friends there but tell us about Scope of Work size a chamber staff just kind of set the stage for our discussion. Sure. Well, the

Travis Toliver 3:58
way really Chamber of Commerce was founded in 1937. And so we’re, we’re over 85 years old. And in 1989, we really became one of the first main streets communities in Iowa. About five years later, the two organizations decided to stop chasing the same money in town and merged together as the Waverly Chamber of Commerce and Main Street program. We have nearly 300 business members and investors in our organization. We’re in a town of the size of 10,000 people. We also the home to Wartburg College, which is a four year liberal arts college of the Evangelical Lutheran Church of America. And we’re also the home to an array of amazing businesses from big corporate entities such as TruStage GMT, a lot of manufacturers in town, Nestle, anything that’s powder base that Nestle makes is made right here in Waverly. So our town always smells great. Right on down to right on down to small businesses and mom and pop businesses that

We We really cherish and our community. And so we’re really located in northeast Iowa, just north of Waterloo and Cedar Falls, were a wonderful stop along the Avenue of the saints to 18. And just really enjoy in this community, our organization, we have four staff members, myself, and another director who does our tourism and special events, our full time. And then we have two part time, folks as well, who helped us with marketing, and another one with administrative responsibilities, our books and those kinds of things. We have an amazing board of directors, I’m always blessed every year to have great people serving on our board. And then probably another additional 80 volunteers that help us throughout different communities or sorry, committees or different community events that we host. And so it’s truly a volunteer led organization. And I’m serving in my 10th year now as executive director and really find myself in a great place and love love being here. That’s great. I love doing these shows, because every chamber is so different. So we get a little bit of perspective from different types of chambers and the different work that they’re involved with. So

Brandon Burton 6:13
I’m looking forward to the perspective that you bring to the show today. Thank you. Yeah, so as we discussed, you know, some back and forth ideas about what to cover on this episode. Today, we settled on the idea because you had a lot of good ideas. So we wanted to kind of hone it down a little bit to just some tips of some tricks of the trade rather. So some of the things that you’ve learned throughout your career as a chamber executive, and just some of these things that maybe somebody new in the industry can hopefully pick up and adopt earlier on. And maybe those who’ve been in the industry a while longer, who are kind of banging their head against the wall might feel to take some of these tips as well and be able to implement them into their life as well to hopefully make things a little easier. So we look forward to diving deeper into that topic and discussion as soon as we get back from this quick break.

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All right, Travis, we’re back. As I mentioned before the break today we’re talking about some tricks of the trade when it comes to chamber work. And I imagine over the last 10 years, there’s been a few things that you’ve figured out maybe or I don’t want to say shortcuts because I think shortcuts kind of cheapens the idea of things but ways to be more efficient will say absolutely.

Travis Toliver 9:54
Absolutely. And you know it’s great to get on podcasts like this or or get on a webinars are conferences that talk about really big picture stuff. But sometimes I feel like when you just kind of narrow it down and like you said, drill it down to just the little nitty gritty tricks of the trades that helps you be more efficient. Certainly, as chamber directors, we know that our time is precious and valuable. And we don’t get a lot of time to do the things that we really need to be honing in and focusing on. So I thought I’d put a list together of things that would hopefully help others that I’ve learned, and certainly will, will keep improving upon. Absolutely.

Brandon Burton 10:30
So I think it may be best just for us to kind of work our way through the list and tell us how you utilize these different tools, these different tricks? And yeah, absolutely expand on it from there. So yeah, the first one I know is we set up this appointment, I use Calendly as a tool to schedule and to book guests onto the show. And in your quick dimension, the E is Calendly as well. So talk to us a little bit how you use the scheduling tools like like Calendly, to help alleviate some of the pressures in your life?

Travis Toliver 11:07
Well, yeah, and a lot of these are, you know, anxiety based, right. They’re, they’re supposed to be anxiety relievers. And so Calendly came along, somebody mentioned it to me, and I looked into it, and found that I was just really frustrated with how long it took to go back and forth with somebody to set up a meeting. And then found Calendly Sure, there’s other scheduling apps out there just like it. But it really helps to eliminate a lot of the back and forth. And so when you’re trying to set up a meeting, sending a link to your calendar, to your calendar, that Calendly links to, and having the other person choose a time that works best for them, is really, really helpful. In addition, I would also say to that if you’re going to use Calendly, and you maybe don’t want all of your free time to be options on there, make sure to block off other times on your calendar for yourself as well. If you’re working on a project, or you know you’re going to be out for a meeting or something like that, just make sure that those those times are noted on their calendar so that they’re they don’t become options on Calendly as well. But yeah, it really eliminates the back and forth. And I was really excited when you sent me a link to your Calendly. I was like yes, another person that’s using it. Fantastic. Yeah, and

Brandon Burton 12:19
I’ll say I’ll add just a couple things that I’ve learned in using it is one there, like you’re saying, there’s a lot of features within Calendly, where you can set your available times you can say if you only want to meet with people on these three days of the week, because then you’ve got office time or you know, office hours the other time, you can set that. But right. I’ve also learned that I need to be more disciplined in adding things to my calendar, like for my personal life. So if if my kid has an awards thing at their school, I need to put that on my calendar such as an you know that time slots occupied on my calendar. So when someone goes to Calendly, it doesn’t double booked me. Yeah, right.

Travis Toliver 13:03
Right. And if you really want to drill down to Calendly has a feature where you can embed certain time marks on your email to a person. So if you have certain options that you only want to give somebody, you can embed those into an email, and then just give them those choices and nothing more. And that’s very helpful as well. I think there’s also a kind of a polling option, so that you can pull multiple people on an email for different times. It’s just got a got a lot of great features, and they keep enhancing it year over year. And so it does cost a little bit to be a part of, but I think it’s certainly worth the investment.

Brandon Burton 13:41
Yeah, and I want to say, I just got an email the other day saying that the I’m hoping it was Calendly and not a different platform I use, but they’re saying about a pricing increase, and it was gonna work out to be like, I don’t know, 87 cents a week or something increase and like totally worth it.

Travis Toliver 14:01
Totally worth 88 cents that my question about 87 Yeah, 87 we’re

Brandon Burton 14:07
in a good deal, right. So along the lines with scheduling and managing your calendar and protecting your time, but also being available to those that you need, how to utilize out of office to work into your calendar time.

Travis Toliver 14:25
Yeah, so you know, a lot of people only use their out of office when they’re actually going to be out of the office, right on vacation or maybe a conference or whatnot. But I have found that if I that you can also use out of office when you need to you have some time to yourself, again, some of those white spaces that we talked about with Calendly on your calendar. If you want to block off time to maybe do some research or do some reading or just you know, maybe just simply get through emails. You know, putting it out of office on just letting people know that To expect a delay in your response, I think it’s very helpful. It’s, I think, maybe borderline too transparent. But at the same time, it just lets people know that, you know, hey, you’re focusing on something right now, and you’ll get back to them when you can. I think so many times people get caught up in responding to emails so fast and being a part of conversations. And this is just kind of my trick to make sure that emails are maybe a secondary priority, during certain times of the day, so that I can focus on, on things that really do need to get done. And so just just letting people know simply that there’s just gonna be a delay in your response, if you can gauge it out even better, if you can say, hey, you know, I’m not going to get back on my emails until you know, 4pm, or something like that, or the next day, I think that’d be very helpful to to let people know that, you know, there’ll be expecting a response from you in a certain amount of time. But again, just trying to carve out that whitespace for yourself, and, and just letting people know that you’re, you’re, you’re not going to be responding so quickly. And I think that’s very helpful to them. Yeah,

Brandon Burton 16:03
when I think of all the responsibilities that are put on a chamber staff, you know, there’s, you’re getting pulled so many different directions. And if you utilize your out of office response to say, something to the effect of, you know, I check emails between 8am and 10am each day, and, you know, if it’s after 10am, expect a response tomorrow, or, you know, that sort of thing, whatever your parameters are, it sets an expectation because we have become a world where people expect that instant response, and even in an email, how often have you email to somebody and they email right back. And then like, you might as well be texting, right, because the back and forth that the emails Exactly. And in I’ve used a tool called Boomerang. So if you use a Gmail platform, Boomerang is an add on. So even if I see the email, and I can type it out the response, and then I can schedule kind of a delay in when it gets sent. So I can say, send it tomorrow morning. That way, the person on the other end doesn’t think that I’m sitting here doing a back and forth with them. But it gets off my list. And I don’t have to think about that email anymore.

Travis Toliver 17:14
That is a that is a great tool. And of course, Outlook has that ability as well to schedule emails to go out at a later time. And I think for night owls out there that don’t mind, you know, opening up their laptops on their couch at 10 o’clock at night and started going through emails, that’s a great way to respond, rather than shooting off emails at all hours of the night. Some people surprisingly enough, you know, looking at their emails if their phone lights up. And you know, I typically try to, you know, turn that feature off at a certain time of the night, but others don’t. And so if you don’t want to be that person that gets caught, you know, sending out emails that obscure hours of the night. That’s a great feature. Absolutely. Yeah,

Brandon Burton 17:52
I utilize that quite a bit. So all right, good. Let’s get to No, no, but I think it’s important to block your time, you know, to be able to protect certain time and know, I’m going to be out visiting members, or we’ve gotten these events going on, like, I’m not going to be in front of the computer to respond to emails or my phone to respond to emails. And if it’s urgent, people can always call, you know, right, they can still get a hold of you. But email doesn’t need to be the first option for those urgent things. Absolutely.

Travis Toliver 18:21
And I would also mention to to make sure you block off that time on your calendar as well. So it doesn’t show up on your Calendly. Yes,

Brandon Burton 18:28
good idea. So I think this is progressing. Well. So as we talk about calendaring, you know how that translates over into email and managing your calendar and your time and the whitespace. But you had mentioned using Outlook, and I know other email platforms have similar options. But how do you utilize your Outlook to kind of prioritize those emails as they come in to you?

Travis Toliver 18:57
Yeah, so this is what I struggled with for years. I think all of us get an obscene number of emails each and every day from really important information to advertisements and just junk. And I was getting frustrated with trying to find different organizational methods to really get my my emails in a priority list, right? And to try to triage them in some way. And a few years ago, I had an assistant that came up with the idea of using the rules tool on Outlook. I’m sure it’s something else on another platform, but using rules to identify certain senders that might be of more importance than others for their emails to go to a certain folder, and then try to triage that way. So the way I set my email up, and it’s good that we get a lot of emails, it means we’re doing a lot of things. We’re involved a lot of conversations people want us to be in the know and that’s great. But I found myself finding that I was just getting better Ready with emails, a lot of important emails are getting buried under non important emails. And so this was just a really great way to eliminate that. So I set up three different folders, folders, one, two, and three. And this takes about, Gosh, I think maybe one or two months to really get implemented. But every day, when you start out, you set up these folders in your inbox or your your your outlook. And every day you go into your inbox, and each person that sends you an email, you’ve got to really think about how important that sender is to you. And so if it’s a board chair or board member of staff member, the mayor, the city administrators, somebody from, you know, some key stakeholder, a CEO of a large investor or something like that, I find those people to be you know, people that I really probably need to get back to pretty quickly. And so I set up in roles that all their emails, go directly into folder number one. Folder number two is folks on the secondary level that you know, people that don’t necessarily need an immediate response or don’t usually send as important information as others. But you still want to get back to you in a timely manner. Those folks go into folder number two. And then honestly, folder number three just ends up being mostly the rest of the emails, which usually is newsletters from other chambers or other organizations that you’re involved in, in your community, different businesses that might be sending out periodical emails, those go into folder number three, and fold number three, honestly, it gets checked maybe once a week, maybe even twice a month, sometimes just depending on how much time you really have. And so I have found that triaging my emails in this fashion really helps me to prioritize my emails by the sender, and how important that that person is for me to get back to so then when I open up my laptop in the morning, I don’t go right to my Inbox folder, I go to my number one folder, and I work through all those emails first, then I go to number two, and then knowing that most of the E newsletters and advertisements Go to Folder number three, I will then actually after number two, go back to the Inbox folder. See if there’s anybody new that’s emailed me that needs to be assigned a folder. And then honestly, the rest of the emails that are in that initial Inbox folder, are just usually junk. And so I just go through a deleting spree, and then get back to the other folders to go through more emails, it has lessened the anxiety of having hundreds if not 1000s of emails sitting in my inbox, especially after you come back from a time off or a vacation or a conference. It’s just a really helpful tool to be able to manage your emails easily and, and, and even my board members and folks that I’ve put in the folder number one have mentioned Wow, it’s so great that you’re getting back to me in a in a better in a timely fashion. And, and that that made me very, very happy that I was that the process was working and and I’m able to to manage my emails better. Yeah.

Brandon Burton 23:10
So just maybe a personal question in that folder. Number three, yeah, those are ones maybe once a week, maybe twice a month you get to? What’s your thoughts on unsubscribing? From some lists?

Travis Toliver 23:27
Well, yeah, absolutely. If you’re if you if it’s information that you’re really not reading about or don’t need, certainly unsubscribe for sure. But I do enjoy sifting through just newsletters and updates from other organizations, other chambers that I’m on their email list for because we’re always looking to steal rip off or duplicate ideas, right? So but I tried to just, you know, kind of skim through those and get that information. And then and then delete. But yeah, I don’t unsubscribe too much, unless it’s something that I just absolutely will not use or will not read. And I don’t know how in the world I got on their email list. So just unsubscribe and tick them off. But, but honestly, you know, go through, and I really try to make it a point to have that folder empty by the end of the month. I’ll let it build up. But I do take off some certain times of the day or even at night. Just kind of sift through those emails, see if there’s any pertinent information, I need to gather some ideas or anything from other organizations. And then then let them go. Yeah, that’s good.

Brandon Burton 24:30
And I think we can have a whole nother discussion about how to get your chamber newsletter to end up in folder number one for people instead of folder number three, okay.

Travis Toliver 24:38
There’s a way to do that. That’s absolutely true. Yeah.

Brandon Burton 24:41
So are there any newsletters or things like that, that may be by default would be a folder number three type of folder, but you tend to put in a folder one or two because the value that’s provided? Yeah,

Travis Toliver 24:55
for sure. Are a lot of our state organization. As you mentioned earlier in my bio, the Iowa Association chambers of commerce, which I used to be a board member for, they have great information, great little tidbits or tips, kind of what we’re talking about right now tips of the trade. But also I need to know about, you know, different roundtables or conferences coming up that I should be aware of. So I think organizations that are a little bit closer to home, tend to fall into folder number two, certainly, that US Chamber of Congress, certainly, if you’re a member of that organization, a lot of great information, that’s a folder number two. And so and then certainly, if there’s any organizations that you’re you know, a board member for or related to in any way, you want to make sure that you’re staying up to date on those, those will get tossed in the folder number two, but I mean, really, it is a it is a small amount that gets sent to Folder number two, you really got to be diligent about that. Because, again, you want to value your time and make sure that it’s being used appropriately. And so I would say that if there’s an E newsletter out there from an organization that you find extremely helpful, and you love reading, and it’s just a must have in your inbox. Yeah, put that in folder number two, for sure. Or even maybe even folder number one, but I wouldn’t, I wouldn’t get on the kick of doing too many of them, or else all you’ll be doing is reading newsletters all day long. Right?

Brandon Burton 26:21
Right. So hypothetically, if you were to get an email Tip of the Day from Harvard Business Review, which, which folder would that end up in for you,

Travis Toliver 26:33
that actually goes into folder number one, because I really enjoy reading those. And so yeah, that’s our next item on the list. If you’re a leader like me, that really enjoys learning more about just better management skills, HR skills, those kinds of things. Subscribe, please, please, please subscribe to the Harvard Business Review manager Tip of the day, it’s really easy, you get a you get a email, I think it’s like around five or six o’clock in the morning. And it’s like one of the first emails that I read. And it is just a fantastic little nugget each and every day of how to improve your management skills, your HR skills, just so many different scenarios that they put in front of you with great solutions, great ideas on how to combat different situations in our professional lives. And so as we continue to try to grow and foster good and better leaders, not only in our field, but in all areas of the business industry. I feel like if you’re not subscribed to the Harvard Business Review manager Tip of the day, then you’re really missing out on some really great free information. In fact, this is gonna sound like I’m a hoarder. But I really do keep all those emails, I drag them into another folder, just specifically for that, because if I get into a situation, and I’m looking for advice, or resources, that’s one of the first places I’ll go into, I’ll go into that folder. And I’ll type in maybe some keywords that will bring up emails that in the past that have addressed, maybe the issue that I’m confronting, and get some really great tip ideas. So it’s become kind of a little email storage of management and HR knowledge for me that I just keep right there in that folder.

Brandon Burton 28:13
Now, that’s a good exercise showing the value that you’re getting out of that, that email newsletter, right that absolutely. So being able to have that bank, that library to be able to go back to and topics arise. And like I know I read something about this and the Harvard Business Review email and you go search for it. And that’s great. Yeah, so great, great tip to share. What other kind of tips or tricks of the trade or we may be missing or, or didn’t touch on?

Travis Toliver 28:48
You know, I think one that I had on the list, I think it was the last one that we were going to talk about. This has nothing to do with our devices or anything like that. But during COVID I found I was looking for a way to gather some folks on zoom that could be kind of like an advisory council for me to bounce ideas off of you know how to better manage the crazy situation that we were all in. From a financial standpoint, marketing, from all different aspects. I didn’t want to bother my board because my board you know, we meet already once a month and they’re busy with their own their own lives. But I came up with the idea of reaching out to all my passport chairs that I could get in contact with and ask them if they would sit on an advisory council for me as the executive director and just meet so we can talk share ideas and and come up with some some some really great solutions. I found that these people are still highly invested in our organization even though they have not been directly so She had with it for a very long time, most of them are retired, most of them are, have a lot of free time on their hands. But at the same time, they still have a heart for our organization, you know, at one point they lead our organization. So they have to, obviously have an appreciation for for what we do. And so to reengage those, those individuals back into our organization, just by simply me asking them for their help, for their knowledge and their advice. And their experience has been extremely helpful. And so I would strongly suggest to any chamber director that if you are in need of a, of a little Council of people to just directly advise you, you know, reach out to your passport chairs and bring them together. And we have, you know, we don’t meet regularly, I’ve tossed this idea out to the other chamber directors who have then started meeting regularly with this group. But even if it’s as needed, just to reengage those folks and make sure that they’re involved in the organization that, obviously at one point they, they were a passionate leader for, I think is, is really special. And so I really covet my relation, in my relationships with with all those past board chairs. And then in turn, it gets them re involved again, and they get updated on what’s going on. And most of them have re signed up for our E newsletter to make sure that they’re getting into the to the organization, a lot of them are individual investors in our organization, they continue to be involved that way as well and supporting us. And so it’s been a really great tool to have, especially during that crazy time when we just were getting fed information like a fire hose and didn’t really know what to do or which way to turn. Those folks really helped me to stay grounded and push the the organization forward in uncertain times.

Brandon Burton 31:47
I love that idea. Because otherwise, what do you do with these past board chairs who have such a love for the community and the organization and everything else, they’ve been so involved, and then you’re just gonna let them go by the wayside? Like I mean, it makes a lot of sense to gather them together. And, and I like the way you approach it is having them be your advisory committee. So it doesn’t have to be a regular meeting. But when something comes up, you’re like, Oh, this is a tough situation. You can bounce it off them get some good sound advice. The one thing that comes to mind with this idea is, how would you I don’t know if it’s ever come up. But I can imagine maybe at some point, maybe the current Board Chair feels like, Hey, I’ve got a vision, I want to take this organization, you’re just listening to the voices of past board chairs. How would you address that? If that were to come up? Has that ever been a thought?

Travis Toliver 32:41
I’m actually it really hasn’t. But I do involve my current Board Chair in those meetings.

Brandon Burton 32:47
There you go. That’s a good way to overcome it. Yeah, absolutely.

Travis Toliver 32:51
And so you know, when it comes to the strategic planning, and those kinds of things, I think having that current board chair, you know, also talking with the past board chairs, not only get some, some gives some great information, but also gets some great feedback as well. And certainly an earful of what worked and didn’t work back in somebody else’s day. And it just, you know, I think tapping into those past experiences, really helps not only myself, but certainly our current board chair, in being able to shape their their thoughts about the future of our organization. And, again, I’ve been very blessed to have really great passionate leaders who have wanted nothing but great success, for the things that we do. And it’s been amazing. And I don’t know if I’d be interested to know if other board, other chamber directors feel this way. But I feel like with each board chair that I’ve had, over my tenure has brought their unique set of skills to the forefront, with whatever situation is going on with our organization, it just feels like the right timing, to have that person in that seat. On that year, when there has been an issue that has come up or some kind of obstacle in the way or project to be done. I’ve always had the right person in that chair to basically hone into one of their amazing skills to be able to see the organization through that. That situation, whatever it is. And so yeah, I just I think engaging past board chairs, along with our current board chair is a great thing. And then the current Board Chair knows they’re going to become a member of that group down the road not too far away. So it’s good for them to get involved as well. Oh, it’s

Brandon Burton 34:35
a great training ground and it’s a good way of being able to pass along culture to you better you’re not standing alone as that current Board Chair you’ve got to support as well. They’re in essence Advisory Council for the current board chair as well. So

Travis Toliver 34:49
absolutely. And I believe to that if we as directors move on to something else. The incumbent board, sorry chamber Director will find that very helpful and very useful. So I’m glad that we’re talking about this, because actually reminds me to reach out to those folks and maybe get another Zoom meeting set up and, and engage with those folks again, and again, you know, they can be, you know, anywhere we do it over zoom, you can have it in person, I guess, if they’re able to come. But, you know, we’ve found that a lot of our board chairs have have left the community or retired somewhere else. And so doing it over Zoom is just a fantastic way to just reengage those folks. So that’s awesome.

Brandon Burton 35:34
So I know, we’ve been talking about tips throughout the whole episode. But I always like to ask as we wrap up an episode for those listening, who are interested in taking their chamber up to the next level, if you might have any tip or action items that they might consider implementing at their chamber to accomplish that goal of going up to the next level?

Travis Toliver 35:56
And that’s a that’s a great question and certainly falls in line with everything that we’ve talked about thus far. I would just say, from a personal standpoint, just be open to new ideas, be open to to constructive criticism of events of any programming that your chamber does solicit feedback, whether it’s good or bad, you know, we I think So oftentimes, we only want to hear the good stuff, or we don’t want to have people step on our toes or make our feelings feel bad. But I am just one of those folks that I really welcome change. And I want to make sure that we’re constantly improving on the things that we’re doing. And so if there’s other opinions out there about how we can do something better, I’m all for it. And I have a, I have a dear friend, who always reminds me to stay curious. And so I love to ask a lot of questions. And I tell upcoming leaders, whether it’s through mentoring or other things to, to listen louder than you speak. And so when I go into businesses, I say hi, or introduce myself, and just start asking questions, and I listen, and just really take note of what it is that our businesses or our members are saying, and so that we’re going back to the table with me and my staff, and we’re trying to figure out solutions or, or taking input on events or different things that we do and trying to make them better, so that we’re serving everybody the best way that we can. So listen louder than you speak, stay curious, ask questions, solicit feedback, all those things, I think really help us as as leaders, and certainly is a win win for our Chamber members as well. And that’s, that’s, that’s what it’s all about, right? It’s all about our members and growing our businesses and our communities. And that’s, I think one of the best ways we can do that. Absolutely.

Brandon Burton 37:53
I love that listen louder than you speak. That’s a great leadership principle in general, because as a leader, once you start talking, everybody else kind of shuts down like he’s talking, what does he have to say, but if you can listen louder, let those ideas come in. It can help formulate your own thoughts and be able to help you know take the the ideas that other people are offering so they have more buy in to whatever it is that you end up deciding on because you have that extra buy in so great leadership tip there. I like asking everyone to have on the show, as we look to the future of chambers, how do you see the future of chambers and their purpose going forward?

Travis Toliver 38:33
I think with each passing year is it gets increasingly more difficult to show the value of our organizations because you know, we’re not selling really a tangible product, right? We’re, we’re selling, promoting and marketing and different events and those kinds of things, bridging people together. And so I think as long as it kind of bouncing off of what we were just talking about, if you can find ways to show more value in the things that we do as chambers for our businesses, for our communities, it can only help reinforce the necessity for for businesses and individuals to to be a part of this organization that is supposed to only really do good for our business community. Right. And so just showing the value, and then telling your story making sure you know, here in the Midwest, we get caught up a lot of times of really being humble and not wanting to toot our own horns. But in this day and age, you really have to tell your story or tell your organization’s story and make sure that your your your the name of your organization or your logo is right out there in front and saying hey, we are doing this for the community and we’re hoping that you find a value in it that you want to be a part of it as well through your investment. And so just continuing to find More and more ways to show value, I think is the the key for the future and the longevity of chambers of commerce.

Brandon Burton 40:08
I love that always, always been on the lookout of how to express and show that value. So absolutely key. Yeah. So Travis, this has been a fun conversation kind of a rapid fire these ideas and principles you’ve implemented and hopefully people are listening, taking notes, you know, hitting that back button a few times and re listening to some of these points. But I wanted to give you an opportunity to share any contact information for listeners who might want to reach out and connect and learn a little bit more about some of these approaches that you take, what would be your best way for them to reach out and

Travis Toliver 40:42
absolutely, well, everybody’s free to reach out to me via email is travis@waverlychamber.com. We really wa VRLY Like behind me here chamber.com You’re also welcome to call our office at 319-352-4526. Or if you happen to be in northeast Iowa drop in and say hi, we’re downtown Waverly 118 East Bremer Avenue. And we would love to chat with you for a few minutes and show your community. But yeah, I’m always open to people emailing me and asking questions. And in turn, hopefully I can learn something from them as well. That’s

Brandon Burton 41:21
right, that email might end up in folder number three, but he’ll get back to you in the next couple of weeks. So there’s full transparency here. Right? Exactly. I love it. I love it. You got to stay on top of things and be able to take control of your time so you can be as effective as possible. So absolutely, absolutely. Well, I will get all that in our show notes for this episode make it easy for people to connect with you. But Travis, I want to thank you for spending time with us today here on chamber chat, podcast and for sharing all these tricks of the trade and things that you’ve learned through your experience. So thank you for being with us today.

Travis Toliver 41:56
Well, thank you for having me, Brandon. Appreciate it. And thank you for what you do for our industry. We appreciate it.

Brandon Burton 42:02
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Chamber Industry Research with Bob Rohrlack

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Below is an auto-generated transcription. Because this is auto-generated there are likely some grammatical errors but it is still a useful tool to search text within this podcast episode.

Feel free to join our Chamber Chat Champions Facebook Group to discuss this episode and to share your own experiences and tips with other Chamber Champions.

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 the Chamber Chat Podcast. I’m your host, Brandon Burton. And it’s my goal to introduce you to people and ideas to better help you serve your Chamber members and your community.

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

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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
To learn how Community Matters can support your chamber with your next publication. Please visit communitymattersinc.com/podcast To request your free media kit and request a proposal to find out what kind of non-dues revenue you can generate.

Learn how you can partner with Community Matters, Inc. to produce your next Chamber Directory, Community Guide or Map.

Brandon Burton 1:45
Our guest for this episode is Bob Rohrlack. Bob serves as the President and CEO of the Tampa Bay Chamber of Commerce. The Tampa Bay chamber is the Florida Association of Chamber of Commerce Professionals 2020 chamber of the year for the large chamber category. Bob earned his doctorate in business administration degree from the University of South Florida. His dissertation research research the factors that influence Chamber of Commerce effectiveness. His award winning research has been published in scholarly peer reviewed journals with over 30 years experience in the Chamber of Commerce and Economic Development profession. He’s led programs at the local, regional and state level. He is a certified chamber executive and past chairman of the Florida Association of chamber professionals, where he was also named the 2017 Florida Association of chamber professionals Executive of the Year since joining the Tampa Bay Chamber. They became the first chamber nationwide to be invited to the White House for an economic briefing discussing issues important to the region. The Tampa Bay Chamber has been awarded the three star chamber of Valor award from the US Chamber of Commerce for their work with the military community. Bob was appointed by Speaker The Florida House of Representatives Dean Cannon to the government Efficiency Task Force, their goal is to recommend $3 billion in savings over four years. He chairs the Subcommittee on Health and Human Services. He’s an honorary commander at MacDill Air Force Base, a board member of visit Tampa Bay, Tampa Downtown Partnership, the Association of Chamber of Commerce executives and the West Shore Alliance. He is past board member of the Florida Chamber of Commerce. Dr. Rohrlack graduated from the Economic Development Institute and the University of Oklahoma and the US chambers IOM program at the University of Georgia, where he also teaches several classes in their program. He’s also an adjunct professor at the University of South Florida. But Bob, I’m excited to have you with us today here on Chamber Chat Podcast. I’d love to give you an opportunity to say hello to 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.

Bob Rohrlack 4:20
Sure. Thank you, Brandon. I appreciate you hosting me and it’s good to be here to talk about the industry that I’ve been in my entire career. It’s a lot of fun and a lot of great things going on. The Tampa Bay Chamber has right about 1400 members. We’re staff at 22 and we’re focused on our 10 year vision plan. Vision 2026 That is our guideposts for everything we do with the organization and keeps our board focus keeps the team focused on priorities with programs. One of the cool things I got to do with the Chamber for our military initiation event last year, we had it at the Florida aquarium here in Tampa. And part of the event to get to civilians mixing with the military folks, well was a scavenger hunt. And I don’t know if it was a good thing or a bad thing. But the chamber team had the idea of me being in the tank with the sharks as part of this scavenger hunt to find me, but I had to get scuba diving certified to be able to do that. So now I’m a certified scuba diver, which is great to open up a whole new hobby, an adventure, but just one of those other duties as assigned, I think in the chamber industry.

Brandon Burton 5:33
That’s awesome. And it’s a great excuse to scuba service. My wife and I, we, you know, we love going on cruises, because we’re scuba certified. So we get to go on a cruise and have three or four different ports where we could dive and sea creatures, and it’s just a fantastic opportunity. So hopefully you’re taking full advantage and being there. Absolutely. Yes. A lot of fun water. Yeah, yep. Yep. So you know, you touched a little bit on the Tampa Bay chamber as far as the membership size staff working on your tenure mission plan. Didn’t tell us a little bit more of the scope of work you guys are involved with? Are you standard chamber to tourism? What what are what type of work are you involved with,

Bob Rohrlack 6:17
you know, the Tampa Bay Chamber, originally the Tampa Board of Trade, Tampa Chamber, Greater Tampa Chamber now Tampa Bay, because our influence has really become much more regional, and what we do both from our membership perspective, the issues we work on, and our team is located throughout the region. So we really focus regionally on what we do.

But with the 10 year vision plan, our mission is to serve our members and enhance our community by building business success. And we do that with our vision plan that has a foundation of organizational excellence, that our members can have confidence that we are running the chamber to the best business practices we can we just presented to our executive committee, our 14th year in a row, clean audit, showing them that we are managing things well, and being responsible with their investment. But that on that foundation stand our three pillars, one that we are the hub for business where businesses come to learn best practices, and skills from each other and build their network. To that we are catalysts for change in our community, that we are advocating for the important issues to make this great region even better. Transportation being our number one priority on improving the choices for transportation throughout the Tampa Bay region. And our center pillar is that we’re an inclusive organization. And this has been our plan since 2017. So we kind of joke that we were inclusive before being inclusive was cool. And our goal is that our membership reflects the demographics of Hillsborough County, which is the most diverse county in the Tampa Bay region. So we’re measuring through ethnicity, male female ownership of business, veteran ownership of business, the industry type industry size. So when we go to talk to our elected officials, and we say we represent the business community, we can say we truly do represent. So that’s been our goal. We’ve been making great progress towards some of those diversity measurements. on the industry side, we’re matching right on to Hillsborough County, which is great. So it’s how do we keep growing that and making the organization stronger because of the diversity inclusivity in our organization? Absolutely. Know that, that helps a lot to just, you know, let us know the type of work that you guys are involved with. And I love that you were able to state your mission statement without looking down and reading it. You know it it’s part of your being.

Exactly.

Brandon Burton 8:51
So as we transition over to our topic for discussion today. Just for those listening, I’ve had several people say you need to have Bob on the podcast. Yeah, he did. His whole Dr. program, about Chambers of Commerce wrote is his dissertation about the effectiveness of chambers of commerce and he just would really have an a neat perspective that we can all learn from so taking everyone’s advice here we are today. We’ve got Bob on the show, and we will dive in much deeper into the chamber industry research that he did, as he went about, you know, writing his dissertation and going to read a soccer program since we get back from this quick break.

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Donna Novitsky 11:14
Hey there, Donna Novitsky, CEO of Yiftee here, and we are all about the shop local movement. We’re working with more than 500 communities like yours and 15,000 small businesses like your members. We’re big fans of Brandon and his Chamber Chat Podcast, so we’re helping to sponsor the show. But while I’ve got you here, what’s a Yiftee? You ask? It’s a digital gift card branded for your chamber that people spend only at the local shops that you authorize. In 2022 we drove 10’s of millions of dollars to small businesses in the US. The program is free for chambers and free for your local shops. You can sign up for a live zoom demo with me or one of my teammates yiftee.com/demo or email sales@yiftee.com. That’s why Yiftee.com. That’s it for now back to the show.

Brandon Burton 12:11
All right, Bob, we’re back. As I mentioned before the break, we’re going to be covering more of the chamber industry research that you uncovered and maybe some of those eye opening indicators or facts that maybe stood out to you. But for those listening, maybe just give us a little bit bit of background, what made you decide to go down this avenue as he went about your Doctorate in Business Administration?

Bob Rohrlack 12:40
Yeah, that’s a great question. As I mentioned, our vision plan, vision 2026. I looked at it and I knew I was the guy to put that first plan together and help help the volunteers working with staff and membership the week got that plan started. And as chamber Folks are always you know, we’re never thinking about the day we’re in, we’re thinking about the next month next year and down the cycle of okay, I want to be in the best position to lead the organization on the second 10 Year Vision Plan as we transition to that, which now is four years away. So it’s okay, I need to be investing in my education. So I talked to leadership at the chamber at the time said I really want to work on this program, the director of the dean of the business school at University of South Florida was a board member. So obviously, he was very encouraging. But I really want to focus on researching on how to make this organization even better than we believe we are. And I got the support from our board to do that. So that’s when I started diving in. When you take the classes in a doctoral program, every class is teaching you. Here’s how to do this part of research when you start to work on the dissertation, whether it’s statistics, which everybody groans, taking those classes, or how to do a proper literature review, how to do an interview properly, all those things you need the skills you need to know. And in one of the classes, I was having a tremendous and I knew everything I needed to do focus on chambers of commerce, because eventually I was going to pick some type of topic related to chambers, and you have your your dissertation is a question that cannot be a yes or no question. So I was really struggling trying to find scholarly peer reviewed literature on Chambers of Commerce. So during a break I spoke to the professor said I’m really struggling here and can’t find things. And without missing a beat. He said, Well, you can’t find anything because chambers aren’t worthy of doing research on Oh, and that was my reaction. I was like, Wait a minute. And the light went off and I realize I’m not a 19 year old student anymore. I don’t have to take the professor. So well you know This profession has put food on my family’s table for 30 years, it’s put a roof over our head. For 30 years, I’m going to be doing research on chambers of commerce. And I walked away, and I was not happy. And I thought, I’m now motivated, this is what we’re going to work on. So I kept digging, realize there is not much scholarly research on chambers of commerce in the United States. There are on some chambers in Europe, but they have different business models on how they’re running chambers. So really had to focus on that. So I took the universe, of chambers of commerce of associations to get to the Galaxy, of chambers of commerce, then to the planet chambers of commerce in the United States. And my research question was, how are Chambers of Commerce leaders align for greater effectiveness? And that became just the research I just kept narrowing down on, I interviewed chambers of commerce, CEOs, and the Chamber of Commerce, volunteer leader for the same chamber, all different sized chambers throughout the United States, asking them, how did they define effectiveness for their organization? Shockingly, everyone got stuck on that question 100%. They didn’t know how to define it. Some would say their budget, some would say members. And I said that’s not effective. That’s not measuring effectiveness that’s measuring your marketability on what you’re doing. So just keep digging into that effectiveness. issue. And it was really interesting. Going through it. As I went through those interviews, identified 72 different characteristics. loaded all the interviews into tremendous software application that helped me filter through the topics, I was able to combine that down to 32. The top five were significantly greater than the remaining topics. So I wrote my dissertation on those top five issues, and what they were

Brandon Burton 17:13
so everybody listening, but tell us what are those five effective.

Bob Rohrlack 17:21
In order of being identified, it was leadership, advocacy, convening, competition, and self promotion. Now on leadership, the CEOs thought their volunteer leader was most important to their effectiveness, the volunteer leader thought the staff leader was the most important to their effectiveness, which is a good issue on supporting each other and realizing the importance of working together as a team. And that would be my best advice to any leader of a Chamber of Commerce. If you’re not working in a team relationship with your chair, you need to focus on that. And if you read the line of succession doesn’t show people that are going to be working with you as as a team member, bringing their skill set to match with your skill set. You need to look at how you’re aligning your leadership. So leadership, very important. Advocacy being the voice for business. When I arrived at the Chamber back in 2009, which this is my third time working at the Tampa Bay chamber. But when I came back as CEO, the decision had been made to spin off the Economic Development Department, which we have a history of spinning off organizations to go be successful tourism, regional development, the economic development, the Downtown Development Group, all were born within our chamber and spun out to be standalone strong organizations. But the view was spin out economic development that contracted public sector dollars with the city and the county would go with them. We now are fully funded privately. And it allowed us to grow our advocacy voice to become much stronger, not in a bully way. But in a hey, what we say matters. We need to be working together that wound up developing relationship with our elected officials that they’re coming to us saying, are you all going to take a position on this? Can we present to your policy and advocacy committees on this issue we’d like to work with you on furthering this topic. So it’s created a better partnership. So advocacy is very important. The convening, bringing our members together, we all learned the value of our chambers during the COVID time when we couldn’t come together. We immediately became a virtual chamber as everybody else did. And we kept telling our members now more than ever, you need your town square. We are your virtual town square, you can’t go to the town square. And we saw our retention rates go up because we just kept reaching out and contacting our members and being that virtual connecting point for them. So convening is critically important. A lot of times chambers get criticized on oh they just have events. That’s all they do. Being that place where they business people can come together and the business community can gather is important to the community. So don’t let that criticism slow you down. Competition was the fourth factor, competition, not those that are against you. But for those good volunteers that you want, and those budget dollars that you need to succeed, there’s a lot of competition for their time and their financial resources. So you have to prove your worth, in that loud, crowded arena, that they want to focus on you. And they want to be part of who you are and what you’re doing. So competition for their time, and competition for their scarce valuable resources. critically important. And the fifth item was self promotion. Everything we do in the chamber world staff does all the work we give our volunteers all the credit, we know that a majority of the work, I should say in case any volunteer ceases. But we don’t tell our story well enough on volunteer, Jane Doe did this at the Chamber of Commerce, they worked with us at the chamber to get this done. So telling our story on why it matters. And the impact of what we do matters to our members is critically important. So that self promotion through storytelling is really what can make your organization strong, impactful humanizes a big organization, and gets people to say I want to be a part of that. So those five factors are the ones that I wrote about in more detail in the dissertation.

Brandon Burton 21:33
Absolutely, those are, I can see why those five factors kind of rose to the top. And I can see as you as you gave attention to competition in the community for for resources and volunteers and time that the competition factor is going to point to those other factors as well right to be able to show your value, and why they should be you know, giving money and time and effort towards your organization. So I’m also a big fan of the self promotion, the storytelling, I tried to get chambers, you know, across the country to do podcast and especially coming through the pandemic when you couldn’t convene together and traditional ways. There’s ways of telling stories, telling the stories, your members telling the success that your chamber had and helping other businesses be successful. So there’s a lot of different avenues of doing that with the self promotion. Are there other other I don’t wanna say factors? Because that might, you know, muddy the definitions here, these five key factors, but are there other elements that stood out to you in your research that you found eye opening? Or maybe he hadn’t given a lot of thought to before that that just stood out that are worth mentioning?

Bob Rohrlack 22:48
Well, you know, I’m gonna flip the question upside down. Because there was, there were two things that stood out that I was really surprised with, in a not so great way. Okay. Those five factors didn’t really surprise me. But I was surprised at the alignment between the volunteer leader and the paid staff leader. The they all lined up except convening and competition were flipped from the staff to the volunteer. But what gave me great concern, and you actually picked up on it when you commented that I’ve memorized and I know our mission statement, not one interview, when asked about how do they define effectiveness? How do they measure their effectiveness? mentioned their mission statement? A strategic plan, a mission plan? Any kind of plan? Not one? Oh, wow. Why do you have your plan? If it’s not how you, you know, measure, figure your your effectiveness? And how do you know you’re being effective if you don’t even mention your plan. So that taught me that we really need to make sure we are aligning to our vision plan and that it matters. And we’re putting it in front of the members all the time and helping them to focus on here’s how to engage and be a part of who we are. So if there’s one takeaway, besides, people can download the dissertation, know your mission statement, not just that you can recite it, but that you know it and you’re thinking how to apply it and live in your organization. And if you have a strategic plan and vision plan and operation plan, some type of plan, know your plan, not memorize a big plan, but know how to apply and how to how to plug it into what you’re doing. Our entire team at our chamber knows, if you have an idea, don’t even come to present it if you can’t align it to at least one of the pillars that I mentioned previously. The more pillars you can align it to the better your chance of getting support both financial and time. But that vision plan matters. We report every year how we are aligning to that vision plan. The day after the annual meeting. I tell the team we start writing the story for next year today. a CIO, you have, you’ve got to know that and that was the big surprise takeaway that people didn’t talk about their vision plan, their mission statement or any kind of strategic plan.

Brandon Burton 25:12
Yeah, that is that is I mean, it’s not surprising just for the experience that I’ve seen, but at the same time, it is kind of shocking that that’s not more central in decision making, and, and being able to measure success and effectiveness. And our our chamber

Bob Rohrlack 25:29
years ago, was known as chamber does your whatever the issue or the idea of that your chairman was, that’s what everybody got rallied around. When they pass the gavel, they dropped the issue, we picked up the next issue. It’s hard to align people and keep moving progressively as an organization to impact the issues you want to impact if you’re turning all the time. So we our vision plan serves, these are the bumpers, here’s how we’re going to work towards these issues. And it really was impactful during the COVID years, when we were trying to be impactful to the members, but kept working on that vision and relaying that to the members. And what we were doing is we reached out to every member and touched them as much as we could let them know we cared about them, and how are they doing through the process,

Brandon Burton 26:17
right. And when you’re constantly changing direction each year, every other year, it makes it really hard for your community to understand what the chamber does, right. And when you talk about, you know, the keys and measuring effectiveness of the chamber I think of with ACC does a good job. I think when it comes down to the chamber the year you know, each year they select these finalists after doing the the chamber benchmarking surveys and everything. And being able to measure effectiveness in their community with the impact that these chambers. So they’re measuring effectiveness by impact in their community, which you should be able to look to your community and they see these things that you’re doing to to further a positive cause throughout the community. And of course, it is intentionally left vague as I say that because it should go back to your mission and your vision statement. And every chamber is going to be slightly different with that. But for the most part, it’s promoting business and promoting good community environment.

Bob Rohrlack 27:21
Right. And as we were looking at starting to vision plan, and so we want to be a diverse organization, we realize our diversity of our members wasn’t matching the county, what are we going to do? So we started researching that and looking at who’s doing what to support minority businesses. We kept digging kept looking. It was a three year study period for us. We couldn’t find quantifiable research and data on the status of the minority business community. In our county, again, our county being the most diverse county in the region. So I got support from the board. We hired an economist, and we studied the minority business community here in the county. And what we found out and this is several years ago was about 48% of the privately owned businesses are black are Hispanic owned, that’s a great stat to have our community. But at the time, their impact was only 5% of the GDP. That is a problem. So that we kept researching what how can we plug into this not stepping on somebody’s toes without replicating another program, what we could do. ACCE helped us we looked at other programs around the country. But we wound up developing our minority business accelerator program. It’s a two year cohort program. Companies have to apply to be in they have a small amount of skin in the game. And it’s a deep dive helping them work to make their business stronger so they can grow. As then we track them for three years after they finished the two year cohort program. It’s it’s proven to be very successful slow start is folks, does the chamber mean it and they really want to do this. But now we’re we have companies coming to saying I want to get in I want to get in, I want to be part of this program. And we’re seeing the diversity of our membership as an organization change in the right direction as well, which is one of the big benefits we were aiming for. So the process of studying the issue, being knowledgeable on the issue before we acted on the issue helped us have a stronger impact that we’re still having in that area today.

Brandon Burton 29:32
Yeah, and I think it’s so important to look at key aspects like that to be able to see where, you know, these column, the key indicator where you you see a percentage of minority owned businesses in the community, but then the impact on the economy in the community and seeing that disparity and being able to make a difference there. And I see. Oftentimes when you see minority focused chambers that pop up, whether it’s a Hispanic Chamber of Commerce or African American Chamber of Commerce, they tend to sprout up in their origins because they don’t feel like they’re being represented well in the business community. And if there’s a seat at the table, if they really are being looked at as any other business and really trying to have that, that positive impact in the economy and and building one community, instead of fragments, here and there, it really gives everybody a place to call home and really that convening power of businesses in general,

Bob Rohrlack 30:30
right, and we talk to the diversity chambers, from the point of we get it, it makes sense for you all to want to get together with your common bond. But don’t forget to make sure we’re all working together as well. So we don’t create islands, because islands will just feed what we’re identifying as the problem not getting us to the solution. And so, we’ve worked very hard to show that we are in this together with every other chamber in our region. And you know, we all succeed better together than trying to go along, just working from that philosophy.

Brandon Burton 31:04
Absolutely. So important having that that synergy, even amongst the chambers in a community or in a region to be able to align those, those purposes. So Right. So Bob, I wanted to ask, if for a chamber listening, who is interested in taking their organization up to the next level, what tip or action item might you share with them to to help accomplish that goal?

Bob Rohrlack 31:32
To do that, you got to know where you are, you got to know what’s working and what’s not working. But the why and try to stay away from anything anecdotal. The data driven, was when we were asking our members for diversity information. Some would give it some what not. So we made a stronger push to get that information. And we got a little bit of pushback, why are you asking Is it because you measure what matters, we want our organization to be more diverse. And then a great unintended consequence, as we focused on that. And we were more open about it, other organizations in the region. So you know, we need to be thinking about that, too. We need to be focusing on that. There’s another organization that when our when companies graduate, from our minority business accelerator, they give them a year membership in their organization to help introduce them to what they’re doing. So we’re seeing that we’re all going to succeed better together this way. But know the data of your organization? How did you get to where you are? What’s been your economic trend? What’s been your, your membership trend? on whatever issue you’re working on? How was it trajectory? What’s the trajectory for it and the market and go to your leadership, with data, and nothing deals with an issue better than just being able to put data in fact, in front of them? Not anecdotal? That was one of the problems when we were researching the minority program, I met with a lot of different groups. I got a lot of anecdotal suggestions. And you ought to you should do this, do that, where I came from that that and the other. And I said, that’s wonderful. Can you get the program information? Can you what data do you have, that you can share with me? No one had it. I said, Well, how can you advise where to go if you don’t know where you are? So you really need to know what the situation is, whatever your topic is, and how you’re working on it.

Brandon Burton 33:26
Yeah. And in today’s world, it’s easier than ever to collect data. That’s right, and to be able to reference it and digest it in a way that makes sense to chart a path forward.

Bob Rohrlack 33:35
And some folks may know this, I didn’t until I started the DBA program. We all know Google and searching on Google. But in the academic community, there’s a whole nother lane of Google called Google scholars. And it’s the peer reviewed academic research angle. And if you don’t have access to it, talk to your university about helping you to be able to get access to it. But that will get you the the research papers that have been done on the topic you’re looking for. And there’s a ton out there. I know everything about chambers, that I’ve tried to start in Africa, and other areas that didn’t really fit in apply to what we’re doing United States. But as I was trying to find United States research, I saw how much is out there for other areas. So definitely tap into Google scholars.

Brandon Burton 34:28
It’s a great tip. So, Rob, I like asking everyone to 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?

Bob Rohrlack 34:42
Another good question. When I first got into the chamber world, a long time ago, it was we’re the business organization we help businesses succeed and grow about so they can hire more people and that’s our focus. There are other groups focusing on the social issues in the community. That’s great. They’re good they need to focus on that as well. But this is the lane we have. And it was a pretty hard and fast lane. If anything we’ve seen over the last several years, it’s not that way anymore. We need to be more concerned about how those issues are impacted. Everything that goes on, for example, we did an event late last year on human trafficking, and the impact that it has to the region, for the reasons of human trafficking, and the sex exploitation industry, but there’s also normal jobs that you would see regular jobs, where people are being trafficked to work in jobs that form well below minimum wage that you may not even know. So how do we help elevate from that, and the human trafficking connection to incarceration, to the foster care system, to unemployment, it connects throughout the whole economy. So we wanted our members to be more aware of it. And we have people who work within the industries in organizations to combat that Industry Council will help people as they’re exiting, and just trying to work on that. So that’s just an example of chambers, I think, really, in the future have got to figure away, and it’s unique to each community. What are some of the social service issues they could partner with and get their members to help and be involved in the economy is not as rigid as it was, it’s impacting everything. And we’ve got to have a more caring approach. Beyond just business success.

Brandon Burton 36:42
Like that, it’s going to show more of what that impact is that effectiveness of the chambers to get involved with the social service issues this year, right as he called them. But Bob, this has been a fun conversation. It’s been it’s been fun to to learn more of the research that you found and, and the work you had to do to to get down to this research, since it wasn’t just available to research on your own. I wanted to give you an opportunity to share any contact information for listeners who might want to reach out and connect with you learn more about the research your dissertation, what would be the best way to reach out and connect.

Bob Rohrlack 37:21
Yeah, the best way, you go to our website, TampaBayChamber.com. And see the different things we’re doing our vision plan is there and in the measurables, how we’re tracking for the vision plan. And I can be reached through email, first initial last name, so brohrlack@tampabaychamber.com. But if you go to TampaBayChamber.com, you can find me there. And then it’s googling the dissertation that will come up. And then the other articles that I’ve had published because I’ve made that a goal to get more research on chambers of commerce in the United States, in scholarly publications. So I’ve had a couple things published already. So just just, they can all be found. But I’m happy to help anybody anyway, I can.

Brandon Burton 38:11
Good deal. And we can try to do too. And our show notes will have your contact information, but we can try to link directly to your dissertation. So people want to go there and find that and maybe save some Google searching and poking around. And I can just go straight to the show notes for this episode. But Bob, this has been a good conversation, you’ve shined a lot of light on the work that Chambers of Commerce do and in particular with how they go about being effective in servicing their communities. So thank you for sharing this with us. It’s been an insightful conversation from a very unique perspective. So I do appreciate that.

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Chamber Industry Success with Anissa Starnes

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Below is an auto-generated transcription. Because this is auto-generated there are likely some grammatical errors but it is still a useful tool to search text within this podcast episode.

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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 host, Brandon Burton. And it’s my goal to introduce you to people and ideas to better help you serve your Chamber members and your community.

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

Becki Womble 1:01
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Brandon Burton 1:29
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Our guests for this episode is Anissa Starnes. A lot of you may know Anissa, she is certainly no stranger to the chamber industry. She started her chamber career 32 years ago and has worked for and with Chambers of Commerce since that day. She is passionate about helping to recruit and retain strong talent for the industry and helping chambers strengthen their programs of work and revenue. You may know her as a faculty member of the US Chamber institutes for organization management, where she educates on board governance, revenue generation and all things related to chamber success. And Anissa has been retained for over 25 executive searches and has spoken in front of more than 35,000 people evangelizing on marketing storytelling and the importance of work life harmony.

Anissa, 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 and share something interesting about yourself so we can get to know you a little better.

Anissa Starnes 2:42
Great. Thank you, Brandon, I certainly appreciate you having me here with you and your audience today. And it’s a pleasure to be here with you. And as far as something interesting, gosh, the first thing that just popped into my mind is because I was telling the story yesterday, I actually ran a full marathon at 26.2 marathon before I ever ran a 5k. So I went big from the very beginning. I ended up doing four full marathons and then back down to half marathons and then five K’s. But I just decided to set that goal for myself and went big from the beginning. And it’s taught me a lot of life life lessons, as far as setting goals and training for them. And I’ve always said once you run a marathon, it really takes the word can’t out of your vocabulary. So it’s something I’m pretty proud of.

Brandon Burton 3:43
Yeah, so I don’t use the word can’t with it. But I’ve been a runner for probably the better part of 15 years, but I just have no desire to run a full marathon.

Anissa Starnes 3:53
I didn’t either Brandon, I really, I kind of got tricked into it for a charity fundraising. And I never loved it. It was for me all about the go and the metal at the end in the cold beer when you can celebrate but certainly never loved it either.

Brandon Burton 4:12
Yeah, done the half marathons and I’ll do that. But before I’m I just, I have no interest. So yeah, congratulations. I knew

Anissa Starnes 4:21
I did a half first I would never do the full because then you know, you have to double it.

Brandon Burton 4:26
Right. So it’s all about the mindset, right. So that’s right. Well, and so at this point, I usually will ask the guests that I have on to tell us about their chamber size staff budget. Rather than do that. How about you just give us kind of how you got to where you are now in your career and working with chambers. What does that look like? And what’s your involvement been, you know, from 32 years ago when he started to now?

Anissa Starnes 4:51
Yeah, absolutely. Well, I’ve been on staff at four different chambers all in the Carolinas. I started my career at the Charlotte you chamber where I live now and is my home, stayed there for almost 10 years and then move to chamber just a little south of Charlotte, and then to two other chambers in the Carolinas, took a break during that time and was the CEO of a nonprofit called Girls on the Run International, which is headquartered here in Charlotte, and is a self empowerment program for girls third through eighth grade. But even when I was with Girls on the Run, I was still teaching Institute and still very involved with chambers and went on to work for about eight years at Constant Contact, where I’ve probably met a lot of your listeners, through my work at constant contact in their chamber management program, and loved that. And then Constant Contact was purchased and bought out. So our division went away and went out on my own at that time and became a consultant. And so I’ve been here, there and everywhere, but always around in and around chamber work. And a year ago, a year ago, march 1, actually, I joined why GM total resource campaign, many of your listeners know Jason Eb, who’s the founder and president and CEO of YG. Em, and he and I have been friends for many years and have talked about working together. And we finally jumped off and did it a year ago. And it’s been a lot of fun. A lot of hard work. But it’s working out for us. That is fantastic.

Brandon Burton 6:35
How did you get your start your introduction to the chamber?

Anissa Starnes 6:40
Oh, gosh, everybody has one of those great stories, where we didn’t even know what a chamber was when we got there. But my sister worked for an employment agency and needed somebody to work six weeks a temporary assignment, while some one was on maternity leave. And I did not even know what a chamber was. When I got there, I was the assistant to the assistant to the president and CEO. And my job was to help plan the annual meeting. And when I say help plan, I use that loosely, my job was to get the name tags in the name tag holders basically, and but the person did not come back to work from her leave. And I was offered a job supporting the membership department. And I thought I would stay there for you know, a year or two until I decided what was next in my life. And I’ve never left. So I had a great mentor in Carroll Gray, who was my first chamber CEO, who eventually, you know, saw something in me and sent me to institute and really mentored me into the fact that it could actually be a lucrative career. And I fell in love with it, like so many people that are in the industry today. And so I’ve just, you know, kind of stuck with it.

Brandon Burton 8:00
I love that. And what a happy coincidence or placement or whatever you want to call it. I’m glad that you got placed to work on a temporary assignment. It’s made very well every day. That’s right. So as we wanted to introduce our topic for discussion today, and very loosely, we’re going to be talking about chamber industry success. And that can mean a whole lot of different things. We can take a lot of different angles to that. But just to give an idea. Some of the things that we’ll touch on in our conversation today is recruiting and retaining chamber staff being more career ready, fighting burnout, the importance of having a personal board, avoiding mission drift, and also the importance of finding the funding, if there’s two strategic partnerships to create those opportunities. And we will dive into this discussion as soon as we get back from this quick break.

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Brandon Burton 11:59
All right. And so we are back from our break. So we have a lot of things that we’ll touch on in this episode. And I imagine it’ll go at a pretty quick tempo. But as we start off, why don’t you touch on some of the the recruiting and retaining? What are some of those things that chamber staff should be looking for in that arena, towards having a successful chamber and just success in the industry?

Anissa Starnes 12:23
Sure, I think first and foremost is attitude. You know, I have been so blessed to have such great mentors my entire career, and more than one have shared with me, you know, look for the attitude, you can train the experience. But chamber work is not something you go to a four year school unnecessarily can learn all of the ins and outs. So looking for that right person that’s going to bring that positive attitude and that willingness to do whatever it takes every day. Because as we all know, when you get to work, no matter what your title is, you never know what’s going to happen to you that day and and what your responsibilities are going to be. So having that positive attitude is just key to success.

Brandon Burton 13:07
Absolutely. I think that is a huge factor to pay attention to as you’re looking to hire somebody but also anybody listening who’s already in their chamber role. Just pay attention to your attitude, pay attention to how you’re responding to members and, and staff and your board and volunteers to attitude. Really. They can go a long ways. absolutely can. Let’s let’s touch on being career ready. What are some things that the Chamber staff can do to be ready for their career, but also to help advance and further developing their career?

Anissa Starnes 13:42
Yeah, I think this, this would be a tip for everyone. Whether you are entry level, just getting started in a position at the Chamber, or whether you’re already a president and CEO, is to keep your resume updated. You know, so many people don’t start doing that until they’re looking for their next row. And it’s so much easier to keep it fresh and updated. Even if it’s not in a format where you can share at least keeping a ongoing list of all of your successes. We don’t often think of ourselves and share our successes so easily because we’re taught to put the volunteers out there. But we have successes as chamber staff so keeping an ongoing list. However you do that whether it’s in a spreadsheet or in a legal padding your desk, whatever works for you, but making sure that you keep up with all of your professional development, what conferences you attend, what courses you take, what sessions you lead, all of your your increase in your membership, your increasing your budget, all of your successes, just keeping a running list of it. That goes a long way in helping to build your resume, but also when you go to apply for your seat CEE through ACC II, the certified chamber exec or either your CAE through ASAE. That sounds like an awful lot of letters. But it helps keep that when you go to apply that you have that all at your fingertips to be able to track and look back at all of the things you’ve done. So that it makes it easier to not only apply for one of those certifications, but also to put it on your resume.

Brandon Burton 15:28
Yeah. So maybe you could touch on the and I love the all those tips about staying organized to have your your resume ready in at your fingertips. As far as the career readiness and advancement. Can you speak to a little bit about when a chamber professional maybe needs to look at making a change, maybe looking at another community to move to because I know you get so vested in one community, you almost feel like you’d be training them right? If you leave and go somewhere else. So help, you know through that mindset and that struggle, that internal battle that somebody may have?

Anissa Starnes 16:03
Well, I certainly and that’s a great question, Brandon, because I’ve certainly seen some people that think they’ve stayed too long, and then think they can’t make a move. And I don’t think that’s ever the case, I think you can make a move, and you know, when you’re ready to start looking at it. But also keeping in mind that you have to keep yourself and your family at the forefront of that, that everybody else is doing that your board’s going to expect you to do it. So keeping in mind with what your goals are, and knowing what your goals are. If you eventually want to lead a Metro Chamber, then you probably need to put some steps in place. You know, if you’re at a much smaller chamber, for instance, I mentioned Carol Gray, my first president CEO, he told me, you know, once I said I want to make this a career, he said you have to start planning to leave. And I didn’t really understand that at a young age. But he helped me see that I was going to have to leave a Metro Chamber, go to a much smaller chamber in order to move up. And, you know, looking at what that meant to me and what type of community I wanted to live in and my family. Just knowing what those goals are. And putting some steps into place is huge towards that. But yeah, I think everybody has to look out for yourself. And sometimes we’re not so good at that we look at look out for others first and making those moves, you kind of your gut will tell you, I’ve always been a good listener of my gut. But it tells you when it’s time to start putting some steps in a place to make that that next move.

Brandon Burton 17:44
And sometimes it’s hard for the servant leaders to think about themselves right to the next step for themselves. But this may even bring us to the next point of fighting burnout. Because I think sometimes that gut feeling is Gee, I’m really getting burned out here. In my current situation, let me see if it’s time to move tend to look on. Is that a factor to bring into it? Or how can they address the burnout issue as a chamber exec or even chamber staff? Because it seems like the clock never turns off? Right? You’re always seem to be on?

Anissa Starnes 18:15
Oh, gosh, we would need a whole week to talk about this. Because I’ve certainly lived it and been through it and have talked about it for the last couple of years. And and it’s it’s something our industry faces for sure. Every day. I wish I could remember who who I can attribute this to that shared this with me years ago, but they said, Never send an email. Never write on social when you’re upset and never quit your job when you’re having a bad day. Because tomorrow’s is likely to be a really good day. And so burnout, we’ve certainly just like every industry, we have lost a lot of good people over the last couple of years. Because since COVID, I would go out on a limb and say that chamber professionals have worked harder these last three years than ever in the history of chambers. They were called on to do things that nobody else before them had ever been called on to do and to take the brunt of, of or the responsibility rather of taking care of the business community at large in a big way. And so even before that, we saw burnout, but we certainly have seen it the last couple of years. And I would push back on the you’re always own. And I do push back on that a lot. I’m

Brandon Burton 19:33
glad to do. Yeah,

Anissa Starnes 19:35
I push back on that with with professionals all the time when I hear them say it’s a 24/7 job 365. You know, chamber folks are doing a critically important job. But it is not the end of the world. It’s not if they take a day off. I’ve heard somebody say you know we’re not curing cancer. I wish we were but we’re not. What we’re doing is very, very important work, but not as important as taking care of ourselves and putting our families first. And it’s still going to be there, whether we take a week off, or two weeks off, take a sabbatical, come back even stronger. I owe my entire career. And then I’m sitting here talking to you today, because I had a president and CEO that that saw was burnout and said, Hey, you’re gonna go take some time off, and I’m gonna pay you for it. But you’re gonna go take a few weeks off and come back stronger. And I thought he had lost his mind. Because I wanted to just keep plugging along. And I was too important to be missed. So I thought, and I really think I would have ended up quitting and going somewhere else. Had he not given me that time. And we’ve just got to take care of ourselves first. And it’s, you know, that, that analogy of putting on your own oxygen mask first, before you put your put it on your community and your members. It’s so true. But yeah, it’s, we can do our job. And chamber professionals can do their job just as effectively, if not more. So, when they take time to take care of themselves first,

Brandon Burton 21:25
right, I actually just got back from a week long cruise, and I chose to not buy the internet package. So I was forcing myself for a week to be totally disconnected. And to be honest, it was a gift to my wife for anniversary, she’s like I see all the distraction, I just need you for a week. So it was fantastic. So I would totally encourage a cruise with no internet to anybody listening. But also you lean on your staff lean on your volunteers lean on your board to help pick up some of those pieces, it doesn’t need to all be on your shoulders. And if you can, properly you know, work with them. And as a leader to work with them, you should be able to take some time off and have the confidence that your team is going to keep things going while you’re away.

Anissa Starnes 22:10
Well, I would I would add to that to Brandon that CEOs are sometimes really good at telling their staff to do it. And then they’re not doing it themselves. And staff, staff watch the leaders. And they emulate what they see. And so I would encourage not only the staff members to do it, but the CEOs themselves because it’s just critical. And we have we have some chambers now in the network that are doing a really good job of it. And COVID has helped fortunately, kind of break away from those old traditional ones. And I’ve seen a lot of chambers. What’s the word I’m looking for actually revised their entire operations manual to give more vacation days as the chambers now some going to unlimited vacation days as long as the metrics are met. So there’s some cool new things happening out there that people have modified their their employee manuals to make sure that that we’re taking care of our teams.

Brandon Burton 23:17
Yeah, I love that so important. Another important thing that I see is the importance of having a personal board of directors for yourself. Talk to us about that. What does that mean, from your perspective? And I have some thoughts as well.

Anissa Starnes 23:31
Well, it’s one of the things I learned it institute that wasn’t in a classroom setting. It happened just over, you know, dinner one night, somebody said, Do you have a personal board? And I said, What does that even mean? Yes, I have a board of directors. And they said no, who are your personal board? Who are the people you trust the most to tell you the truth. Whether you need to look in the mirror, do things differently, who are people who are going to not just tell you what you need to hear, but provide you input based on on what you need to hear not what you want to hear, doesn’t have to be a big group, it can be four or five people. It doesn’t even have to be people in your same industry. But people that you respect that you look up to that you want to emulate, and use them. It doesn’t do you any good to have them if you don’t actually use them whether that doesn’t have to be a monthly meeting, by any means. But people that you can just pick up the phone and call and say, Hey, this is what I’m facing. And I think I know what I need to do. But let me run it by you and be willing to listen to what they have to say. But I’m very, very fortunate that I have a great board of directors personally and I know that they won’t tell me just what I want to hear that they’re going to be honest and open with me and that has really helped guide me throughout my career both personally and professionally.

Brandon Burton 24:59
Yeah, know that is so good, I part of a small we call it a mastermind. So it’s our own little personal board that we can do that, you know, we can have honesty, we bounce ideas off each other say, here’s a problem I’m facing right now and be able to get some ideas where you’re thinking more than just your own thoughts, and be able to get a little more clarity on things. In fact, a while ago, I had Betty kept standing on the on the podcast, and she referred to her board as her kitchen cabinet. I loved it, you know, you’re you’re in your kitchen, oftentimes, and you’re on a zoom call with him or phone call. And it’s just that personal to her in the friendships that develop out of it are just amazing.

Anissa Starnes 25:38
So absolutely.

Brandon Burton 25:41
So let’s, let’s touch a little bit on mission drift, I think that can also play into the burnout side of things. But having that clear focus on mission, what can chambers do to avoid that, that drift from away from their mission?

Anissa Starnes 25:56
Well, you know, this, this might be an unpopular opinion, the way I’m gonna say it, but in some ways, I think COVID was one of the best things to ever happen to the chamber industry, certainly not COVID in the pandemic itself, and how it negatively affected the world. But what it did do is it gave the chamber industry a time to stop doing what we’ve always done, and look at things differently. And I’ve seen a lot of chambers change their program of work since COVID. And have stopped saying yes to everything. And chambers for so long have been the catch all of everything. And then community of, well, we need somebody to do this. Well, let’s give it to the chamber, they can do it. And the chamber has historically said yes to a lot of those things. And what I’ve seen now is chambers are have moved the other way to saying Does that fit our mission? And if the answer is no, then we’re saying no to doing it. We might support it, we might assist with it, but we’re not going to lead it. And so I think it’s critical that chambers really know what their mission is. And stick to that and let that be the the beacon that that leads them just to saying yes, or saying no, when asked to take something on and building the program of work around their mission. And there’s nothing wrong in the world with chambers doing events, and programs that, you know, they create, and that they want to be non dues, revenue generators. But everything chambers do should fit their mission. And I’m starting to see that that a lot more chambers are have been kind of open to that of you know, let’s stop saying yes all the time and making sure it makes sense for the organization.

Brandon Burton 27:58
Right, and look at some of those other C’s right, you can be that convener to bring those ideas and present them to another organization who might be better fitted better suited to take it. And you can still be a champion for that event or that whatever that initiative is, but just not the main driving champion of it. And and still be supportive. So and no doesn’t have to be a no completely, I guess, is what we’re getting at. All right. So now that the important thing that I know everybody’s hanging on to hear about is the funding, you know, creating strategic, strategic parts, I can’t speak, creating strategic sponsorship programs to be able to fund these activities that your chamber does, what are what are some thoughts and maybe some, I don’t know, a brainstorm of different ideas that chamber can explore.

Anissa Starnes 28:46
Well, one thing that that makes my partnership and me going to work with why GM, so much fun is it’s really been refreshing for me to see the change on that side of things. I started my career, as I mentioned in membership, and I was one of the first I think second, Charlotte was the second chamber to ever do a total resource campaign after Atlanta. And I went kicking and screaming to transition from a membership campaign over to a total resource campaign. And total resource campaigns TRCs for short, have changed so much over the years, thankfully, to YG Yum, who really has a strong business model. And I would say this if I was not working with YG and right now it’s why I’ve always been a fan of their work is it’s looking at sponsorships differently. We really don’t even use the word sponsorship. We use business opportunities and advertising opportunities. It’s a way to engage members that might only pay their dues every year, but otherwise never show up. Never engage. They you’d support the chamber by their membership that that’s it, and presenting the opportunities in a way that engages the member and puts them in a position to partner and to sponsor events and programs and initiatives that they really believe in. It just heightens their their awareness and heightens their public the public’s view of their company by partnering with a program initiative or any event that they believe in. So there’s a lot of money being left on the table we see with chambers, because a lot of chambers develop their sponsorships based on what they’ve always done. Like, for instance, I was on a chamber website yesterday, and I saw they had this fantastic event, it was a women’s event. But their sponsorships levels were 1000 for the top 750 502 50. And when I went back and looked at years before their sponsorship levels were the exact same. And we all know we’re paying more every day when we go to the store to the gas pump, whatever. chambers are paying more now for their catering, their signage, their venues. But they haven’t looked at what they’re charging their members to make sure that they’re not only covering their cost, but they’re making the non dues revenue they should be making on the sponsorships. So just taking a look and evaluating your sponsorship levels, making sure that the deliverables match the dollar that you’re charging. And looking at it with a fresh set of eyes is huge. There’s so much opportunity there for chambers to start with a clean, fresh sheet of paper and develop their sponsorship opportunities. And then sell them whether you do it through a trc or whether you’re doing it with a staff driven marketing, execution, whatever it is just evaluating what you’re offering, and making sure that the levels match the deliverables that you’re agreeing to give.

Brandon Burton 32:14
Absolutely. So a lot of people know that I got into chamber industry, you can say through chamber publishing. So I see, you know, I often joke about feeling like a bartender as I would go out and meet with Chamber members about advertising. And there would be a sense of guilt of you know, I joined I joined the chamber two years ago or three years ago, all I ever do is pay my dues because I can’t make it to the luncheons you know, I’m busy, I can’t make it to the after hours. I can’t do these things. But I like the chamber. Like the work they’re involved with. I like their mission, I want to support it. And they see that advertising as a way it’s an avenue to accomplish those things. It’s a way to be supportive of the chamber without being at all the things. So as you’re talking about sponsorship and business opportunities, I’m just a second witness, you can say that there are businesses out there that are ready and willing to give your organization money because they believe in what you’re doing. But they don’t see that clear path right now as to what that best avenue would be. Absolutely. Here’s a lot of opportunity. What is it? This has been great. We’re not done yet, though. So I’d like to ask if you might have a tip or an action item, for chambers that are listening who would like to take their chamber up to the next level? What would you suggest?

Anissa Starnes 33:37
This is gonna give some listeners heartburn? I’m afraid if I say it, but I’m gonna say it anyway. saying no. Saying no to being asked to serve on yet another committee saying no to taking on a new event that someone in the community thinks is a great idea. Saying no to taking on more work that doesn’t fit your mission. Say no, once you learn how is a lot easier than you think it is. And you really don’t have to give a whole lot of explanation as to why you’re saying no. But just saying no, that the timing is not right for us. Or no, we don’t think that’s in our mission. Or no, I don’t have the bandwidth to do that. Whatever that is. I get asked a lot by new execs, what is the number one thing you think I should do in my first six months as a new executive? My answer is always say no to joining every thing you’re asked to join. Because as a new CEO, or as an existing CEO, really even as as chamber staff. We get asked to participate in everything. Because we know everybody we know everything They think, and they want us on their boards, they want us in Rotary, they want us here, they’re in everywhere. And that first six months, and really even after, if your bandwidth is full, just saying, No, I can’t take that on right now, we’ll go a long way towards helping with the burnout. The first six months, first of all, should be spent getting your own house in order and learning the business of the chamber where you are, if you’re new, if you’re an existing staff member, or CEO, you know, just you want to give 110% on any board you sit on. And you really can’t do that if you’re serving eight to 10 boards, and doing a disservice, I think, to those that you do say yes to if you’re over committing. So saying no, I think is is something hard for most of us to learn. But once we do, it really can help a lot in going a long way towards helping you stay stay focused on on the task at hand.

Brandon Burton 36:08
Yeah. And I like to the simple response. He said, just No, I don’t have the bandwidth right now. Because really, you don’t owe an explanation to everybody. But you know, there’s going to be some expectation on their ends that will Why are you telling me no, and that’s a simple enough without getting into the weeds as to why it doesn’t align with your mission or whatever, just I just don’t have the bandwidth right now, that should be sufficient. So I always like asking everybody, as we look to the future of chambers of commerce, how do you see the future of chambers and their purpose going forward, you

Anissa Starnes 36:41
guys have seen so much change over the last couple of years that I think is a positive change. ACCE has been instrumental in leading this in the industry, but keeping chambers on track, again, with the mission, and we’ve talked a lot about that today. But I am seeing chambers take on some really audacious programming and initiatives that years ago, we wouldn’t have touched with a 10 foot pole, whether that’s, you know, workforce development, childcare issues, you know, social justice issues, I’m seeing chambers really take on the big stuff. And it is making chambers even more relevant than they’ve always been. And, you know, it’s, it’s easy to show the value to the business community of what a chamber of commerce membership can do for you, you know, years ago, we used to tell everybody, and anybody that’s listening, that’s been here, you know, in the chamber work more than 10 years has certainly probably used this, of, you know, the chamber is just like a gym membership, you have to go, and you have to show up and put on your shoes and get on the treadmill. So you have to be on a committee, you have to show up in an event. And that is not true anymore. We should never say that. chambers are working for the business community every single day, whether you show up or not. So if you do have someone that says I can’t be on a committee, I can’t come to business after hours, I can’t, you know, lead a task force. That’s okay, we’re working just as hard for you every single day. But we have to be able to tell that story of how we’re doing that, we have to wave the flag and say, This is the good stuff we’re working on. This is the success we’ve had. This is where we need your support. Because chambers are more relevant today than ever, I believe. And a lot of great work is being done in communities. And I just it’s an exciting time to be a part of the chamber community because chambers have seen it, they’ve they’ve started making those changes, they’ve stopped doing some of the events, they’ve always done just to make $2,000. They’re putting their resources, both monetary and human resources towards things that are really making an impact. So I just believe it to my soul that that chambers are making more of an impact today than ever,

Brandon Burton 39:14
while they’re doing the work that’s making the impact and the funding is available to drive it to so instead of just writing like the example you gave, of exerting all these resources to get $2,000 In return, you can be involved in much more important and meaningful work. And there’s businesses willing to support that financially to help drive it 100% agree. Yeah. Well, and so this has been great. I really appreciate you joining us here on Chamber Chat Podcast today I’d like to give you an opportunity to share any contact information for listeners who may not be connected with you already. What would be the best way for them to reach out and connect with you.

Anissa Starnes 39:53
Thank you for that opportunity. And if anybody’s listening that knows me you know I love social media. So absolutely Connect with me on Facebook, LinkedIn, Instagram. But certainly my email is anissa@ygmtrc.com.

Brandon Burton 40:12
Good deal, we will get that in the show notes, both links to your social media accounts and your email. So anyone listening who’s on the treadmill or out running a marathon right now while they’re listening, they can check the show notes and they get back that and this I really do appreciate you setting aside some time and, and going through all these really powerful topics. I think that all lead to chamber industry success. So thank you for doing that and spending time with us today.

Anissa Starnes 40:40
Thank you, Brandon. And thank you for all you do for the industry. You’ve had some great podcast. I’ve always enjoyed listening and thank you for all you do.

Brandon Burton 40:50
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Essential Ingredients for a Successful Chamber with Dave Kilby

Miles Burdine Chamber Chat Podcast promo image.

Below is an auto-generated transcription. Because this is auto-generated there are likely some grammatical errors but it is still a useful tool to search text within this podcast episode.

Feel free to join our Chamber Chat Champions Facebook Group to discuss this episode and to share your own experiences and tips with other Chamber Champions.

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

Our title sponsor is Holman Brothers Membership Sales Solutions. Let’s hear from Matt Morrow President and CEO of the Springfield Area Chamber in Missouri to learn how the Holman Brothers provided value to his chamber.

Matt Morrow 0:40
Holman Brothers provide a great training for our sales team in terms of just outstanding sales techniques. But maybe even more importantly than that, they were able to provide us with a system a process that was repeatable and in that we’re able to see very clearly from one month to the next how the how the pipeline is doing, what prospects are in it, what kind of progress we’re making and what we can do to coach people to success.

Brandon Burton 1:02
You can learn more about Holman Brothers Membership Sales Solutions by visiting holmanbros.com.

Doug & Bill Holman know how to diagnose and solve
member recruiting issues faster and better than anyone else, and they want to put
that knowledge to work for you and your chamber. Learn more at HolmanBros.com.

Our guest for this episode is Dave Kilby. For those of you not familiar, Dave is the President CEO of the Western Association of Chamber Executives or WACE. He’s also the Executive Vice President of Corporate Affairs for the California Chamber. He’s the author of the book Chamber Champions Wisdom for the Ages, which was released in April of 2019. And for 11 years, he served as a California chambers lobbyist on small business economic development, housing and land use issues. Prior to joining the California Chamber he had a successful career in local chamber management as CEO of the Modesto Chamber in California. He’s a former chair of the US Chamber Western Institute and member of the US chambers committee of 100. And their political advocacy committee, is a self described movie Disney and trivia net and has a poly Holic, which is new word for me. Meaning he actually likes politics. Dave and his wife Kim are on a never ending search for the perfect India Pale Ale IPA.

Dave, I’m excited to finally have you with us today on chamber tap podcast, I’d love for you to take a moment to say hello to all the chamber champions that are out there listening and go ahead and share something else interesting about yourself so you can get to know you a little better.

Dave Kilby 2:27
Okay, well, thanks for having me. I’m looking forward to our discussion or conversation. You know, you you I didn’t know you were going to do the whole bio. So you’ve already covered the the IPA angle and the Disney angle and some of those things.

Brandon Burton 2:44
But I try to get deep into the really interesting stuff. Yeah,

Dave Kilby 2:48
but you know, I’m a lifer. I basically walked off the college campus and got involved in a chamber. And it was all because of my senior project in the Journalism Department at Fresno State, which was who promotes Fresno. And that led me down to what a convention bureaus do, what do chambers do? What do cities do? And when an opening came up in Modesto to join their chamber as the number two person, my professor in the Journalism Department said, you know, more about chambers than anybody out there, go get this job. And the rest, the rest is history,

Brandon Burton 3:28
I might need to change that question. And to it says something interesting of how did you find your way into the chamber world? Because everybody’s got such an interesting path. But that’s a neat one.

Dave Kilby 3:39
Well, there isn’t anybody that’s that’s born to get into chamber. That’s their that’s their lifelong dream, but it kind of worked out for me.

Brandon Burton 3:46
That’s right, it tends to find the right people, that’s for sure. So at this point, I usually will have a chamber Tell me a little bit more details about their chamber size, staff budget and that sort of thing. But why don’t you just tell us a little bit more detail about WACE for maybe those who are east of the Mississippi or maybe not as familiar with the organization. Just tell us what it’s all about. And you kind of set the stage for our discussion.

Dave Kilby 4:11
In most states, there’s a statewide group association for Chamber of Commerce Executives. And a couple of decades or more ago, the California group was asked to become a boundary less association for chambers everywhere. And as a result, we now have chamber member members from chambers in I think it’s 21 states and a handful up in three different provinces up in Canada. And it’s it’s kind of, you know, our job we say is to help chamber executives and their staff succeed at their job. Right. So, you know, that that’s really what we’re all about. We don’t do lobbying. We don’t we’re not like you know, us State Chamber per se. We’re all in this for the the chamber execs and the staff professionals to help them succeed.

Brandon Burton 5:07
Very good. So for our focus on our discussion today, we’ve kind of settled on a topic of, you know, looking at it through Dave’s career, he’s seen some, some real chambers that are are really, you know, doing things right, you know, taking a lot of good notes about the things that these chambers are doing. And he’s been able to, you know, establish some good notes as to what are some of those essential ingredients for a successful chamber. So we will dive into this discussion and some of those findings that Dave has seen throughout his career as soon as we get back from this quick break.

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All right, Dave, we’re back. So I’m excited to dive into this exploration, we’ll say these essential ingredients that you’ve come across throughout your career, these successful chambers, what are some of the things that that have stood out to you as you’ve worked with chambers throughout your career?

Dave Kilby 8:43
Well, you know, I think there is a recipe for success in chambers. And I think five of the essential ingredients would be I’m going to I’m going to list them and then I’ll get into a little more detail about them. And that’s perfect. The first ingredient I think is do you have the right people on your board is the WHO who’s on your board and their mindset. The next ingredient is the staff. I mean do you have the best staff you can afford? And And do they have the talents to to run a successful organization? And the third ingredient is are you doing the right stuff? Does your program meet the needs of your members and I should emphasize meet the needs of your members today. Rebuilt i I’ll talk about tradition and some of the things that I’ve seen that have dominated chambers then it doesn’t matter if you have great board and a great staff and you’re doing all the right stuff if nobody knows about it. So are you communicating your value? You know and and and that appeals to everyone out there and not all of your members want the same thing. You know, Mom and Pop wants you to help them with their cash credit and make their cash register ring. And there are businesses out there that are international and their needs are cut pletely different. So are you doing the right stuff? Does anybody know about it? And then last but not least, and I think just, I mean, I, I would say, pre pandemic, but certainly during pandemic, and now is do you have a willingness to risk and change? So those would be my five ingredients. And I’d be happy to comment a little further on all of them if you’d like, Brandon.

Brandon Burton 10:24
Absolutely. So let’s talk about the two, the who I guess in the first two ingredients are the right people on the board and the right staff.

Dave Kilby 10:33
Right. Yeah. And you know, do you have the right people on the bus? And are they in the right seats? Right, so to speak? And, and I think that’s really important. Does your chamber have term limits? Does your chamber board look like the membership? Or does your chamber board look like a bunch of old baby boomers? I mean, are they representative of your membership? And Representative? I mean, that in all ways of diversity, size of business type of business location in the community, age ethnicity, going through it all? Or do they look like a cookie cutter have one type of person? And so I think that’s a big deal. The chambers that have a more representative Board, who are, who can commit resources, time and talent, are more successful than folks that have chamber board members that have to check in with the boss, before the chamber can take a position on a controversial issue before the city council. Right. I think the right people in the right seats is a real important thing for chambers.

Brandon Burton 11:44
Can you touch on on a chamber recruiting board members, and sometimes there’s a feeling of, you know, I can’t recruit are not sure how to approach that. But how do they go about finding the right people for the right seats,

Dave Kilby 11:56
we’ll see, I think one of the essential ingredients that chambers have is that everybody is, is thinking about who’s going to take my place on the board. And so constantly looking for the future board members, and actually going in and recruiting them, I’m a huge fan of that. Because that gets you if you just wait for people to volunteer, you’re never going to get the best and the brightest and the busiest in your town, you’re gonna get people that maybe don’t have anything else to do. And I think when you go recruit somebody, you know, if you and I were to walk into somebody’s office and say, Sally, we’d like to talk to you about the chamber board, you have the talents that we need. And you will have the the experience and the information about the major issues facing businesses in our community. And we need you on our board to help take the chamber to the next level to serve our membership, and the community make the community better? That’s a much difficult thing, much more difficult thing to say no to than if you just email somebody and say, Hey, are you interested to be on the board, or you put something in their newsletter or on a podcast or whatever, you know, please send it, you know, notify rested? Yeah, the busy people aren’t going to do it, you got to go recruit, you got to go get the right people to be on your board. The partnership with staff is really, really important. And knowing knowing that, you have this partnership, and everybody knows their role, they the board knows what their job is. And the staff led by the CEO knows what his or her job is, also, the board is into governance and the CEO is into you give me direction, I’m going to manage this business called the chamber. Right.

Brandon Burton 13:51
So as we talk about the staff side of things, oftentimes, you know, chambers tend to be great incubators, right. They find people may be new in a career, you build them up, you showcase these great talents they have and then you know, they go work for a member business. So talk a bit about, you know, finding the right staff, having them, you know, fit in with the organization be trained, but maybe there’s some things we can do to entice people to stay and it’s not always a bad thing to see him leave either for for good opportunities.

Dave Kilby 14:25
Well, you know, I, when I get in front of chamber boards, I emphasize the importance of running the chamber like a business, a successful business, and a successful business. They have good benefits in a successful business. The CEO may have a contract. In a successful business, there’s a bonus program. And so all of those things are really important. For chambers if the chamber makes $100,000 This year, why isn’t there a bonus program for the people on the chamber staff To reap some of the benefits of that, let’s run the chamber like a business. And, and again, fortunately, in our membership in WAC II, contracts are way up, benefits are getting better every year. And the bonuses, it’s almost 50% of the chamber. execs in WAC II got a bonus last year. Yeah, that’s awesome. And that I think is really important. That didn’t used to be the way it was. So because of that you have people stayin and making this a career more than just making it at their next job. So and that’s obviously one of our goals is to, is to make sure that that happens.

Brandon Burton 15:40
And that’s a that’s a big difference maker, right? They’re making it a career versus a job and something they can see themselves doing long term because there is a future there. So I appreciate that. The infographics he put out every now and then from the survey results you guys do, I think it’s very insightful. And anybody who’s not following Dave on the social media and whatnot to see those things, there’s a good key information in those infographics. So thank you for sharing that. So let’s say let’s touch on the right stuff, are you? Are you covering the right stuff and addressing the right stuff in your chamber? And I know that’s a topic a lot of chambers might need to take a closer look at when you have mission creep and maybe lose focus of, of your purpose and mission. So talk to us a little bit about that.

Dave Kilby 16:29
Well, you know, about four or five years ago, we were really, basically concerned about the future of chambers, and is our brand and in a sense, will chambers go away when the baby boomers retire? We were trying to find out the answers to that. And what we, what we came up with, with all of our focus groups and surveys and everything else is we came up with chambers today need to be what we call three C chambers, not three P chambers. Three C’s are to be a catalyst, a convener and a champion, which people can tend to remember that. And that’s a catalyst for business growth. That’s a convener of leaders and influencers to get things done. And that’s a champion for a thriving community. Now, contrasting that, with our research showed that folks don’t want their chamber to necessarily be what we call a three P chamber parties, parades and pageants. And around Fourth of July pyrotechnics, I mean, if that’s what I like to ask the question, what do you want your chamber to be known for. And if it’s known for ribbon cuttings, and mixers, and fireworks, that may not have value to a lot of people in the community. If the chamber is known as a problem solver, making it better to live, work and raise families in this community, they’re going to be a lot more successful. And frankly, people are going to be willing to write them bigger checks,

Brandon Burton 18:09
right? Have you seen maybe some key traits or characteristics from chambers that make that shift from being a three P chamber three C chamber and how they do it? Because they don’t imagine a lot of it is just, you know, cold turkey, where you just stop doing the Fourth of July parade? And, you know, there’s still things important to the community, but you’re also making a shift into more of that meaningful work?

Dave Kilby 18:32
Right? Well, I think, again, they’re kind of five buckets that that our research shows that folks want their chamber to do business people, the surveys that we do, we’ve surveyed, we have survey results from over 25,000 business people for that are involved in chambers. And we asked them the question, how important is it for your chamber to do these things? And so five things that popped out of that. And it doesn’t mean you still don’t do events, but you might have to spin them slightly different of why you do events. So the five things are, are you doing things to strengthen the local economy? Are you doing things to represent the interest of business with government? Some people would call that government affairs. Are you doing things to promote community? Now, that’s a little bit more than convention Bureau staff and tourism that’s making this a good place to live, promote our community way of life? And are you doing things to build business relationships? So see, you still do events, but you shouldn’t be doing that shouldn’t be the only thing you’re known for. And then the last bucket involves political action. It’s the it’s the most sensitive, it’s the most controversial, but the question that we ask, how important is it for the chamber to help elect business friendly candidates? It’s the office. Well, the current number is 72% of business people rate that as very important. Now, when we started doing this survey 20 years ago, it was 51%. Wow, today, today’s business person thinks there needs to be more business friendly folks elected office and how can the chamber help them? Yeah. So the fact that they want it, we don’t get into how you should do it, because it could be a spectrum, a continuum of things, from a candidates forum to endorsing candidates and writing checks from your political action committee. But all of these, so let’s, let’s just put political action aside, all of the others, the building business relationship, promoting community, representing the interest of business with government and strengthening the local economy, all of those are in that mid 80s, or 90%. of business, people say, I want my chamber to do those things, this is very important. So again, back to one of the essential ingredients of communicating value, you may be doing it. But the only thing that gets headlines are the only thing that you keep talking about is the next event. Right? This other stuff, which is a little more heavy lifting stuff tends to get put in the background, often by a lot of chambers,

Brandon Burton 21:23
right. So the communicating value, I see chambers are probably becoming more and more effective at that, with that data feedback you just gave 71% want their chambers to be involved with political action. And that that, to me, that goes back, it ties back into communicating the value because nobody is telling these business owners that hey, this is what your chamber should be doing. It’s what do you expect from your chamber and to see that growth? That means that that communication is happening there. But I also see some chambers still struggle a little bit to communicate that value. So yeah, talk a little bit about that.

Dave Kilby 22:03
Well, part of part of it is also I’m back to the board. Again, there are there are chambers out there that their board kind of has the perspective of we need to be everybody’s friend. And there are other chambers out there, the most successful chambers out there, by the way, have an attitude of we want to be respected, and maybe even feared, if we ever flexed our muscle look out. Because, you know, we can do a lot of things if we ever really went all in on something. So that communicating what you’re doing. Again, I’d like to ask people to do this, I said, take a look at your first screenshot of your E newsletter. I get about 150 180 of them every month, from different chambers. And the first screenshot to me tells the story. I’m too busy. I’m just like your members. I’m too busy. I’m not going to scroll, I’m not going to spend a ton of time. So what’s on the first screenshot, what are you communicating in the headlines? Assuming I’m not going to read? So what’s in the headlines? Are you doing a lot for what’s in it for me? The member? are you explaining the value of that I an example I use all the time is there’s a chamber there were two chambers out there. And within days of each other, I got their E newsletter. And the subject line on one was business expo November 13. The subject line on the other one was opportunity to meet 1000 potential business clients at the Chamber’s business expert. Now, that was just the subject line. But I think I know which one most businesses would click on To find out more information. I think it’s the second 1000 business contacts,

Brandon Burton 23:51
right? Yeah, so the other one you don’t need to open right? You get the information you need, right and the subject line which which made the that’s all you need is and mission accomplished. But there’s usually more information you’re trying to portray. You’re more details.

Dave Kilby 24:04
Yeah, it also doesn’t give you a rationale to be interested in it. Right? When you put what’s in it for the member, you know, then they’re more inclined to attend and click on it and go sign up, do whatever,

Brandon Burton 24:19
right. It probably wouldn’t be a bad idea for chambers to dive into some copywriting classes and courses and whatnot, just to see what these marketing companies are doing. What are they doing to grab your attention through emails, little teasers you get through social media posts. They know what they’re doing. They’re following the science, you know, of how your brain works and what gets your attention. So if nothing else, if you’re not going to sit down and actually do a course on copywriting, just be aware and pay attention to what you see on emails that come across to you and what you see on social media. Again, not

Dave Kilby 24:53
everybody has somebody on their staff with a journalism degree or a marketing degree or whatever. So you know, maybe getting a little X For a knowledge in that area would be helpful. Instead of it’s oh, gosh, we got to do the newsletter again.

Brandon Burton 25:06
Yep. In the panic do an hour before to throw something together. Right. So let’s talk about the the number five ingredient the willingness to take risks, what do you see there?

Dave Kilby 25:20
Yeah, you know, this is one of those that you know it again, to take the chamber to the next level, in this day and age, we have to be willing to change and risk, we have to be willing to do things different. You know, I, I’m a, I like to ask this question again, of chamber professionals, and I asked it to your audience, bring it in, you know, do you know who the protectors of the past are at your chamber? And, and frankly, hopefully, it’s not you, you know, hopefully, you know, if you’re the person that says, Oh, we’re gonna go back and keep doing the stuff we did in 2017. I don’t think that’s going to cut it anymore. There’s a quote out there, I’m not sure who said it. But I, I remember, I remembered it and wrote it down in my typical note taking that I do. And the quote goes like this, the pandemic caused us to do the things we should have been doing all along. Right. We should have been the key resource for businesses and dealing with government, whether it in the pandemic, whether it was PPE, or PPP or Cares Act money, or on and on and on, we became the trusted resource that they turned to, not just members, but the entire business community often saw the chamber completely different during 20 and 21. And in frankly, I think it’s it carried over into 2022. But the shelf life of that if you don’t keep doing things like that, now, we’re on to something else here in 2023. And how’s your chamber viewed?

Brandon Burton 26:56
Right. So, to me, that goes right back to that number four ingredient of communicating value, because a lot of these chambers were doing that, but their members had no idea until the stress hit till the pandemic hit, like, Who do I turn to? What do I do? And it’s like a moment of desperation, let me check with the chamber. The chamber is like, yeah, we can help you. We’ve been here all along. But that value had not been properly communicated. And or maybe they weren’t doing the right stuff. Today, going back to ingredient number three. So these are these are all supportive of each other, as I see.

Dave Kilby 27:31
Well, I see it also it gives me, it gives me an opportunity to spin it all slightly different. And emphasize the points,

Brandon Burton 27:39
right, for sure. So I hope everybody was taking notes, or maybe go back and give it another relisten as they go through those those key ingredients. And I think some of these are things that they’ve heard before and maybe in passing, but maybe hear in the way that you presented it today puts it in an order that makes a lot more sense to prioritize where they put their focus right now. Dave, as we start to wrap up here, you’ve shared some great tips. But I always like to ask for a tip or an action item for a listener who is trying to take their chamber up to the next level. What might you suggest for them?

Dave Kilby 28:15
Well, you mentioned this word, I have two things, frankly, and I’ll try to be brief on this, but

Brandon Burton 28:21
like bonuses, so Well, yeah.

Dave Kilby 28:24
I’m not gonna go there. I think one of the word focus. Yeah, I think I think a lot of chambers would be better off if they did less, and did what did those things better than trying to be all things to all people? So is it time for your chamber to focus? That would be my question there. And one of the ways to focus is I’m I’m a, I’m an absolute firm believer, I don’t care whether you’re a longtime chamber person, or brand new, of developing relationships with a handful of other chambers, and kind of a sister chamber relationship, if you will share everything, but but not necessarily pick the chambers next door to you pick chambers larger, that that you want to be more like, you think they’re doing a great job, how can I do that in our community? So I think that that, that tribe, if you want to call it that, have five go to people that you could turn to and ask them almost anything is really important. And it’s been one of those things that through social media and such, it’s, it’s probably a lot more common today than it used to be. But I think you got to choose wisely. Who’s in your tribe, right? You’re choosing people, the people in your tribe are all traditionalist. Instead of innovators and risk takers. You you’re gonna have a completely different experience. So choose wisely.

Brandon Burton 29:51
Yeah, I like that. I like that advice. And that’s a hope that I have through the podcast too, is as I have guests on and if people do splay, what they’re doing at their chamber, as a listener, if there’s a chamber that saying something that really resonates with you reach out and connect with that person, and see if if you can, you know, be a part of their tribe or bring them into yours, and learn and share information with each other and build that relationship outside of the earbuds you’re listening to the podcast through

Dave Kilby 30:20
this is this is a hugely a willingness to share industry, and to call up a chamber exec Atul, even out of the blue, and you don’t even know him and say, Hey, I saw this on on your website, or I heard about this on Brandon’s podcast or whatever. And I’d like more information, the person on the receiving end of that takes it as a huge compliment. Yes, not not a, you know, not a waste of time at all. So there it as you know, it’s a sharing industry, you know, you raise the tide and all the boats go up. So

Brandon Burton 30:57
that’s right, for sure. David, I like asking everyone I have on the show, how do you see the future of chambers and their purpose going forward?

Dave Kilby 31:10
Well, I think it’s, I think it’s full of opportunity. I, I, my numbers say that about 40% of the chambers have never been stronger ever, in the history of their organization. There’s another 40% that are kind of struggling, I mean, and many of them have been very honest with me calling me up and saying, man, we’re in trouble. We, you know, we need some help. And then there’s 20% that are kind of somewhere in the middle. So I think the opportunity for people to move up is definitely there. And if especially if they embrace the five essential ingredients that we talked about earlier in the in the podcast, nowhere to go. But up, I think it’s a great time to be in this business, and a great career for people in the years going forward.

Brandon Burton 32:01
Yeah, if nothing else, it’s easier now than ever to communicate the value to your staff of this is what we do. And then you got the mission of going and communicating that value to your membership and the business community at large. Oh, this has been a great conversation. I’m so glad to have you on the podcast and to have you go through these five essential ingredients for a successful chamber. If if someone wanted to reach out and connect with you and learn more about, you know, these observations you’ve had throughout your career, what would be the best way for someone to reach out and connect

Dave Kilby 32:38
my email address and I’m, you know, when I do hang it up, I’ll, you know, it’ll, it’ll forward you to a personal email, but my, my current email address is dave.kilby@calchamber.com. That’d be the best way.

Brandon Burton 33:01
Very good. We’ll get that in our show notes too. So people can pull that up and reach out and connect with you that way. But I will say I’ve had several listeners or several past guests, you know, reach out to me after the fact and say, you know, they were surprised to how many people reached out to them afterwards, because of the things that they shared, wanting to learn more and, and really building that tribe. So as we wrap up, I want to encourage everybody to continue building your tribe and take that tip that they’ve shared and, and do something with it. Don’t just listen, but take some action on it. But Dave, thank you so much for joining us today and sharing these key insights. And it’s been a pleasure to have you with us today on chamber chat podcast.

Dave Kilby 33:44
Thanks for having me. I appreciate it.

Brandon Burton 38:24
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5 Lessons Learned in 2022

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Below is an auto-generated transcription. Because this is auto-generated there are likely some grammatical errors but it is still a useful tool to search text within this podcast episode.

Feel free to join our Chamber Chat Champions Facebook Group to discuss this episode and to share your own experiences and tips with other Chamber Champions.

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

Our title sponsor is Holman Brothers Membership Sales Solutions. Let’s hear from Jason Mock, President and CEO of the San Marcos Area Chamber to learn how the Holman Brothers have provided value for his chamber.

Jason Mock 0:39
Two years ago, we brought in Holman Brothers to help our organization go to that next level. And in those two years, our team has transformed the way that we think about sponsorships and non dues revenue. And I would really encourage you if you’re looking to take your chamber to the next level to bring on the Holman Brothers.

Brandon Burton 0:56
You can learn more about Holman Brothers Membership Sales Solutions by visiting holmanbros.com.

Doug & Bill Holman know how to diagnose and solve
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For this episode, I decided to do a top five lessons learned in 2022. Now as I record this, it is Christmas Eve 2022. And this episode we’ll be releasing on the Tuesday between Christmas and New Years. So purposely, I want to keep this episode a little shorter, just so you can still get some good value out of it and ideas. But I want you to be able to spend time with your family and get those things done around the house that you don’t normally have time to do because you’re your normal busy schedule. So before I get into those top five lessons learned now some of the lessons that I’ll share are ones that were directly related to podcast episodes that I’ve I’ve put out over this last year. And some are just lessons from observing the world and things going on in the environment. So keep that in mind as I go through the lessons. But before I get into those lessons, I wanted to share a personal lesson, I guess you can say that I’ve learned and that is that over, I guess almost four years now doing the podcast, I have reached a point where my time is being stretched very thin, a lot of responsibilities on my plate. And I’m at the point where I need to bring on some help somebody to help to edit and produce the podcast episodes, just to free up a little bit more of my time to where I can focus more intently on getting great guests on the podcast and other projects and special interests that I have to develop that are related to the show. So with that I’ve in you’re familiar as a chamber professional is you see a need for growth within your chamber. The next question is how do you go about providing the financial backing to justify it. And we just had a great episode last week, I believe it was last week where we had Susan Williams on. And she talked about staffing. So that episode came at a really good time for me, as I’m thinking about things that I need to do to staff up the podcast, and create a better experience for all of you as well. So continue to serve, you know, bigger and better going forward in the future. So as I was trying to figure out the best way of doing this, we do have some regular show sponsors. So I would love for you to support them and, you know, buy their product support their businesses, because that keeps their sponsorships coming to Chamber Chat Podcast. But I also, over the years have received messages and emails and ran into some of you at conferences, who have expressed the great value that that you find out of the podcast that lessons learned the way you’re able to stay and be able to stay engaged and continue to learn within the chamber space. So if you are one of those people, and you would like to find a way to support the podcast, a way to continue to see the growth of it. What I decided to do was I created a page on my website so chamberchatpodcast.com/support where you can become a sponsor yourself.

So when I created the podcast, the goal was to always have it be free. And that is still my goal to have this be a free resource, especially for those chambers that don’t have the resources to go to chamber conferences and be a part of their local or state association. I wanted to create a resource for them to be able to learn best practices and tips and strategies so they can better serve their business community. Ready. So this will always be free. What I posted on this page on my website, though the support page is different options if you would like to provide some financial support. So this suggestion, and these are just suggestions, so if you wanted to give a different amount, you can reach out and and contact me and we can set up a different structure. But just to make it easy. The suggested amounts, if you are a single listener, be $5 a month. And if you are comfortable doing that, I would appreciate that it would help to you know, if we, if we get several of you doing $5 A month that would definitely help to pay somebody to produce the podcasts for me. Hopefully, you are also sharing the podcast with your staff. So if you have different staff sizes, if you have a smaller staff, maybe two to five staff members, maybe you do $10 a month for your medium size in you know, five to 15 staff members, maybe $20 a month. And if you’re a larger staff more and there’s even a Superfan option. So if you want to check those out, see what makes the most sense for you. Maybe it comes out like as a single listener, maybe the $5 a month comes out of your personal credit card. If you’re doing it for your staff, maybe that becomes an office expense to help support and train sustain your your staff. So I’ll let you decide what what works best for you and your situation there. But with that aside, we’ll we’ll move on to the top five lessons that I’ve learned in 2022. And we’ll get into that as soon as I get back from this quick break.

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All right, we are back. So the top five lessons that I have from 2022. Again, these are these are no particular order necessarily. They’re just what stood out to me as I look back on the year. So one, the first lesson that I’ll highlight is the importance for chambers to be advocates, while also remaining as a sane center in their community. So Though we had an episode 162, Marc Cohen from the Greater Rochester Chamber was on and he talked about the role of chambers and advocacy and policy. And it was a great episode, I would highly recommend people go back and listen to that one. But also Episode 175, we had Bill Connors, on from Boise talking about being the same center at your chamber. So not being too extreme one way or the other, but really listening to what those needs are of your members. And then creating programs around that supporting candidates and policies that would enable strong business in your community. So there’s a lot of good that in those two episodes right there.

The second lesson that I wanted to highlight was the great value that comes out of collaborating and creating partnerships with others. So these may be collaborations or partnerships with other chambers. They may be another organization in your region, maybe a Convention Visitors Bureau, maybe an economic development, maybe your city itself. But what really came to mind is like created the CIO, or came up with this lesson learned. It was from a reflection, as I look back on some of the chamber, the year finalist interviews that I did this year. And a couple of those chambers, partnered with local banks through the COVID pandemic to help get funding to their members. And as we know, funding was extremely important at that time. And that was a very good strategic partnership for those chambers that took advantage of that. So keep your eyes open, keep them peeled for opportunities to create collaborations or partnerships that make sense to benefit your members.

The third lesson from 2022 that I wanted to highlight was actually an episode all in itself. So it was episode 188, with Jordan Clemons from Greater Louisville Inc. And he talked all about LinkedIn, for growing your chamber membership. And he has a great strategy. If you haven’t heard that episode, I would encourage you to listen or at least have your your membership staff listen to it, as he has a whole strategy of how he uses LinkedIn specifically, to put posts out that really highlight your community and drives a lot of engagement. And then he’s able to see who engages with those posts, learn more about them through their LinkedIn profile, and then reach out to them and create a dialogue that’s already a warm conversation because they’ve already interacted with his post. And by utilizing the strategy, he’s exceeded his sales goals year after year, and really done a great job for GLI. So getting that was episode 188. If you’d like to go back and listen to that one again.

The fourth lesson that I wanted to highlight was the importance of leaning into digital to create relevant and personal communication channels, or strategies. And we had a great, great episode with Sara Ray, and Episode 166, where she talked about just this, about creating relevant personalized communications, specifically through email. So when you look at your email response rate, your email engagement, you’re probably not as satisfied as you’d like to be, if you’re like any other chamber, but by creating relevant content. So as you look at what, why did this member join your chamber? What are they expecting? What are their expectations? What are they looking for what needs do they have to support their business. And then if you can customize your communication to these members based on their needs and desires, that will put your engagement through the roof, both on the digital front with email engagements or social posts, but also for having people show up to events that are relevant to them. That way, they’re not just tone, you know, tuning out everything that comes from the chamber because so much of it’s not relevant to them. Now they’re only getting things that are relevant to them so they pay more attention and engage at a much higher level.

The fifth lesson fifth and final lesson that I will highlight from 2022 is really a personal observation as I look at business environments, economy trends, I see a future where chambers Of Commerce can really benefit by embracing cryptocurrency and NFTs. So for those of you who may not be familiar, NFT stands for non fungible token, meaning there can only be one of that token. So think of it as maybe a coin or an image or some kind of a digital asset that has kind of like a stamp on it that says this is a one of one one of a kind token. And with that NFT’s initially kind of rolled out as expensive JPEGs. So, people would put out these digital images of cats or, you know, different cartoon type characters, and they would sell them for ridiculous amounts of money. It made zero sense to me, I can’t understand why anybody got behind that. But as I learned more about it, and heard about people creating NFT projects, they really focused on the community building aspect of NFT projects. And then my ears perked up. And I had somewhat of an aha moment. Right that anytime I hear the word community, I think Chambers of Commerce need to be involved. So when you look at building an NFT project, creating a community around it, how can a chamber of commerce utilize this? So here’s an example. I recently came out with a chamber podcasting guide to teach chambers how to create a podcast. About the same time I was creating that, that course that chamber podcasting course, I was learning more about NFT’s. And I thought, I wish the technology was developed enough that I could release this course as an NFT. So in other words, if I had access, I launched this course and I have 10 tokens, let’s say that are NFT’s non fungible tokens to access this course, then I can sell them to chambers, as a chamber takes a course learns how to podcast, then they don’t need the course anymore, because they know the material that’s in there, they could then turn around and resell that NFT to another chamber, who can then learn to podcast and that first chamber can get, you know, some or all or more of their investment back of what they initially paid. And within that NFT there are smart contracts that are involved. So within the smart contract, I could write in there a commission. So every time that NFT is resold, or every time that course is resold, I could get a 10% commission, let’s say, based on whatever the sale price was. So think about how would that apply to your chamber? Do you have programs? Do you have courses? Do you have tutorials, do you have different resources, that could be packaged as an NFT, that would allow for your members to market your product and services that would allow them to regain maybe their initial investment in that in that token, and continue to promote that to other businesses in your community. So that is a thought that I had had. But as I continue to think of chambers of commerce utilizing NFT’s many of you already have a tiered dues membership platform. So maybe you look at offering membership as NFTs. So if you have a different NFT for each level of your membership, and you have a certain number of NFT’s for each level, as a chamber member maybe levels up to a higher level of membership, they can sell their initial membership to another member and become an advocate for bringing other businesses into the chamber.

If a chamber were to move out of the community, they don’t have to just lose their chamber benefits but they could resell their membership to another business, there could be a whole other resale market. And with that, you can have the smart contract involved where you’re making revenue off of that every time that membership is resold. But my thought with this is you end up having your members become advocates who are out there are ambassadors we can say that are out there really promoting the value they get from the chamber especially as they go to resell their NFTs and level up their membership. So I don’t know that the technology is ready For Chamber’s to jump right into the NFT space, but something to keep in mind is as we look to the future, look to the kids look to the youth who are playing video games. They’re playing games like Minecraft, and Roblox and fortnight, you know, games like that you and I may look at them as games. I don’t play them. I don’t know much about them. My kids play them. And what I do know is that lots of commerce is being done within these meta verses. So dropped a couple of words there. So commerce when I hear commerce, I think Chamber of Commerce, how should a chamber be involved? There’s commerce happening in these digital platforms. And it is these games are levels of Metaverse where they’re buying and selling digital goods, whether it’s a skin or clothes, or a gun, or some sort of a weapon or a horse or whatever these things are they’re buying and selling and trading. Commerce is happening in the digital landscape. How can your chamber be involved? So have that in your mind? Because we hear these promises of the metaverse coming, which would be kind of an all inclusive digital landscape. I I don’t know I have some reservations about a full full blown metaverse. But there are definitely Metaverse landscapes that are out there. So pay attention to those see if there’s any way that makes sense for your chamber to be involved, especially as these youth aged up into the working class, the the the people that are being employed in your communities, what can your chamber do to be involved in that space? So with that, it may come back to NFT’s as NFTs even in these games. There can be NFT’s that are bought and sold that are a hat or some kind of a article of clothing that is an NFT but it can be utilized within the metaverse. So there’s a ton of opportunity here. So I guess moral of the story with this lesson number five of the future of chambers, embracing crypto and NFTs is learn about it. Be ready as the shift comes to your chamber can stay relevant. That is the biggest advice that I can give you right there. But with that, that summarizes the top five lessons that I have to share with you from 2022.

And again, I’m going to plug it if you would like to take a look at being a supporter of Chamber Chat Podcast. That website is chamberchatpodcast.com/support to see the different sponsorship levels that we have available there. So if you could check it out, I’d really appreciate it. Otherwise, we will look forward to see you again next week, and I wish you all a happy and safe New Year.

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10 Lesson Learned as a Chamber Executive with Rich Cantillon

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Below is an auto-generated transcription of my conversation with Rich Cantillon. Because this is auto-generated there are likely some grammatical errors but it is still a useful tool to search text within this podcast episode.

Feel free to join our Chamber Chat Champions Facebook Group to discuss this episode and to share your own experiences and tips with other Chamber Champions.

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.

Voiceover Talent 0:14
And now your host he enjoys seeing “Let’s Go Brandon” signs because it feels like the world is cheering him on, he’s my dad Brandon Burton.

Brandon Burton 0:23
Hello, Chamber Champions. Welcome to the Chamber Chat Podcast. I’m your host, Brandon Burton, and it’s my goal to introduce you to people and ideas to better help you serve your Chamber members and your community.

Our title sponsor is Holman Brothers Membership Sales Solutions. Let’s hear from Kris Johnson, President and CEO of the Association of Washington Business in Washington State to learn how Holman Brothers has provided value for him.

Kris Johnson 0:49
Well, Doug and Bill at the Holman Brothers have been a key ally in growth for my professional career working at three different chambers, a local chamber, a regional chamber, now a statewide chamber. And they’ve been the ideal solution, whether it’s a comprehensive training program, whether it’s working on individual sales growth, quarterly check-ins with the team, the ability to grow members has meaning more assets for the organization, more assets means we can do more things to serve our members. They’ve really been the perfect solution for us, a trusted resource partner and a growth partner for us all along the way. So hats off to Doug and Bill for their great success. They’ll be a great partner for you as they are for us.

Brandon Burton 1:30
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Our guest for this episode is Rich Cantillon. Rich is a 1976 graduate of Ponca City High School and in 1981 graduate of northwestern Oklahoma State University and Albert Rich also attended the University of Oklahoma in Norman and completed his chamber Institute management certificate at the University of Arizona in Tucson. Rich owned and operated a photography studio and Blackwell for 14 years and worked for the Blackwell Chamber of Commerce for eight years. He’s been with the Ponca City Chamber since 2004. Rich has been married to his wife Pam for 40 years they have three grown children and a son in law and three granddaughters. Rich enjoys working with his church youth group at St. Mary’s Catholic Church, which has been going to for over 35 years. He also enjoys teaching and working with other chambers on how to be successful, which is which he does on behalf of the state of Oklahoma, the State Chamber of Oklahoma, which currently serves on the Oklahoma Chamber of Commerce executive board. This is a second time serving on the board and will be president in 2024. Also for the second time. He’s on the executive board for the Oklahoma tourism industry association and will be president in 2023. Rich serves on the pocket City Arts Council board and served as the secretary. He’s an active Rotarian, and has been president of both the Ponca City and Blackwell Rotary Clubs. Bridge currently serves on the US Chamber National Institute board based in Washington DC, which is Chair of the University Center Ponca City Board of Trustees appointed by the governor of Oklahoma. He also serves on other local boards and organizations to better Ponca City. Rich, I’m excited to have you with us on Chamber Chat Podcast, I’d love for you to take a moment to say hello to all the Chamber Champions that are listening and share something interesting about yourself so we can get to know you a little better.

Rich Cantillon 4:11
Well, Brandon, first off, thank you very much for having me. I’ve been really looking forward to this. I’m excited to get to share some things that we do. And some things that I’ve done in my career that I think have helped me be successful. One of the things that I want to share is my wife and I love to travel. My wife was a travel agent before we had children. And we just talked about we’ve been to 45 of our United States. We have parts in New England that we want to go to and we’re going to Alaska next year, so that’ll take care of one of the five. Yeah, and we just got back from Italy, which was a dream of ours. We’ve been to Mexico and Canada but we’ve not ever gone to Italy and we’re both born and raised raised Catholic. And so that was always a big dream is a very emotional trip when we were at the Vatican, and we were standing in St. Peter’s Basilica. So that was really exciting. And that’s what I enjoyed doing. And then of course, we have three beautiful granddaughters that our daughter and son in law have given us. And they kind of rule our life. And we love every bit of that.

Brandon Burton 5:24
And that is awesome. It is nice having your wife as a travel agent, because you need to test the product, right? Make sure it’s good before she sells it to other people. So it’s a good good byproduct. A

Rich Cantillon 5:34
lot of fun. Yeah, have

Brandon Burton 5:35
it. Well, tell us a little bit about the pocket City Chamber just to give us an idea of the scope of work that you guys do size staff budget, just to kind of give us some perspective.

Rich Cantillon 5:47
You bet. Thank you. So pulka City, Oklahoma is located in northern Oklahoma. And we’re right off i 35. We’re 20 miles from the Kansas border. So we’re right up here in north central Oklahoma. We are home to six Native American tribes. And so we get to do a lot of tribal work, which we really enjoy. There’s a lot of issues in Oklahoma, we have 39 sovereign tribal countries. And so that’s been a real interesting part of my career. We have about 650 Members, we’re a town the size of 26,000. At one time, we were kind of a one horse community, we were home to Conoco and which now is Phillips 66, when we realized that we needed to diversify, we started really an effort to diversify who we were as a community. So we weren’t dependent on just one industry. And that’s something I’m really proud of. I’ve been here 20 years. And in that time period, we are now the number five city in the state of Oklahoma with manufacturing jobs. And our manufacturing base is wide range, and covers a lot of different products and that are shipped throughout the world. So we’ve done a great job in securing the future POC the city, we also were oil has had a massive impact on Oklahoma. And there’s been a lot of oil investment into mansions into architecture into attractions. And so one of the things that we have here is the Marlin mansion, which is one of America’s top five castles. It’s a 55 room mansion, built by ew Marland, you created Marlon oil, which became Conoco now, Phillips 66. And that attracts people from all over the world to pump the city. So we’re also a tourist destination, we have a lot of other things that I won’t go into, you can go to visit pop the city.com. And there’s a lot of things to see and do that are very unique. And a couple of things you can only see here. So that’s a big part of what our chamber does. We’re all about building our economy and making lb punk the city, a great place to work and live. But we also are a tourist destination for the great state of Oklahoma. And we put a lot of effort into that. And that really can affect our economy.

Brandon Burton 8:25
Yeah, I love that. So for our discussion today. So I the whole purpose of the podcast when I started this almost four years ago now I think the idea was to be able to present ideas and best practices to ideally smaller chambers, who may not have the resources to attend conferences or may not have the staff to get away and to learn and, and it’s kind of evolved from there. But our topic for today we’re going to be focusing on 10 lessons that Rich’s learned as a chamber exec throughout his career and I think this is valuable to some of those smaller chambers, even even somebody at a bigger chamber maybe they haven’t been in the industry for 20 or 30 years, but maybe they’re you know, five years in but some of these lessons can help shortcut some of that learning curve and and really get you up to speed a little bit quicker. So I’m excited to get into this discussion and these lessons that Rich has learned as soon as they get back from this quick break.

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All right, Rich, we’re back. So as I mentioned before the break, we’re talking about 10 lessons that you’ve learned as a chamber Exec. So I’d like to go through what these 10 lessons are, I’m sure I’ll have some follow up questions for you, and maybe some back and forth. And hopefully those listening are going to be able to take some good notes and be able to apply some of these lessons or see how these lessons may be applicable in their own community. So let’s, I guess start with number one, we’ll start at the top.

Rich Cantillon 12:10
Okay, so this will probably the most important thing to me, I’ll never forget, I had my photography business. And I was approached, I’d been a volunteer in the Blackboard chamber, I’d actually served as chair of the board, and I was approached about, hey, you would be so good at actually managing and operating our chamber. And I thought, wow, how exciting. And I said, I did that. Well, one of my really good friends said who was the bank president and Blackwell said, now you know, it’s very political. And you’re going to have to really watch everything you do. Because a lot of people get in trouble in the chamber world because of politics or not doing something correct. And I said, it’s not political, it is political. So you have to be careful about everything you say, you have to be inclusive of everybody. You have to look at where you shop, who you support, all of this stuff. And now, with social media, and people with cameras, and Facebook and Twitter and seeing everything you do how you live your life, it is critical that you put the best foot forward that you can, and that you truly represent your chamber and your community.

Brandon Burton 13:40
So it sounds like you’re given fair warning, when you came into the chamber that it is political. Did you were you able to just learn from that warning? Or did you have to learn through experience?

Rich Cantillon 13:50
Well, it was it’s really funny. We would we love to go to Oklahoma City and walk the mall. And that was one thing during the holidays, especially go down with lights. And that was one thing I learned quickly. I do not go out of town during the holiday season. Because I don’t want someone even though they may be there. I don’t want somebody to see me there. I need to set an example to we talk about shot punk at first, and so I need to be that person. So though that’s one of the things right off when I was young, I was like, I can’t be I ran into some people in Oklahoma City and I instantly felt guilty. And so that’s something I’m really mindful of making sure that I do what I say.

Brandon Burton 14:42
Yeah, that’s a good example. It’s something to be mindful of for sure. I mean, in still travel and do your tourism and stuff, but I think that example holiday time, when people are expecting you to be shopping and you go to a mall, which is inherent for shopping so

Rich Cantillon 14:58
it could exist in there. said difference when you, you know, you want to take vacation you want to travel, people do not have a problem with that a matter of fact, I’ve been inundated with friends and people in pop them loving our pictures we posted from Italy. So glad we got to go. And so there’s nothing wrong with that at all. But when you’re going to neighboring communities, if you’re shopping, promoting what they’re doing and not locally, that can get you in trouble.

Brandon Burton 15:32
Yeah, for sure. And like you said, in the world of social media, I could just see if you went to went to the mall in a neighboring community, and you’re taking pictures and how beautiful the lights are and everything. You’re setting yourself up for some trouble.

Rich Cantillon 15:48
Yes, I have to be very discreet. That’s right.

Brandon Burton 15:51
So let’s, let’s move on to the next lesson that you’ve learned one of the things

Rich Cantillon 15:56
a lot of people that come into the chamber industry, they really think, well, I’ve run a business or I’ve done this, I know how to operate a chamber know our chambers are 501 C six, we’re regulated by the IRS, we have certain things we can and cannot do. We have bylaws that we must follow. And so that’s one of the things that we’ve seen in Oklahoma that people take over a chamber, maybe they would like me, Blackwell, what volunteer and someone said, Oh, you’d be so good run in our chamber, and they think they know everything. No, you do not. And so one of the things that I really stress is that if you’re new to the chamber world that you reach out to your state organization, or it’s someone that’s been a longtime chamber person, and get educated on what the do’s and don’ts are of operating a chamber, and here in Oklahoma, our State Chamber and our organization, OCC E, they offer trainings on what it is to be in chamber management at all levels, CEO and staff. And then the US Chamber which I’m heavily involved in, has Institute, which is a certification of our industry. I’ll never forget the very first year that I went to institute, it was eye opening to how much more I could be doing for my community through my chamber. And I’ve sent my staff and they come back, they’re all fired up. They’ve learned so much. So education, on what it is to run a chamber is critical to being successful and long term.

Brandon Burton 17:41
Absolutely. And I would say if you are one of those small chambers, one staff or part time staff, maybe to staff, and your board is not giving you the funding to be able to go to conferences, or be member of these organizations play back this little clip that rich just shared about how valuable this is to be involved to be able to get those mentors to be able to understand how to run a chamber properly because it is different than running a business for sure.

Rich Cantillon 18:10
Well, I’m one other thing, Brandon that you mentioned, if you do work for a chamber and their board is like they’ve never done that. And they’re like, well, we’ve never seen anyone that conference or will then find someone to sponsor. I mean, there’s always a bank or a doctor or a business that believes in that and they’ll sponsor you to go. And then when you come back, you’ll have this information. I firmly every time I go to any kind of conference or any educational thing. I always come back and give a report to my board on what I’ve learned and how to be beneficial to our chamber. So that that can make a big difference.

Brandon Burton 18:50
I love that giving a report when you come back and they can understand how you’re working for them and what you’re getting out of these conferences. And the one

Rich Cantillon 18:57
thing I would not do like Mako is the Missouri Arkansas Kansas Oklahoma conference. It’s in Branson. I love brands and we go there all the time. I when I go to make out I’m not taking pictures of me out eating on the landing. I’m not taking pictures of me at big cedar at Table Rock Lake, which I do all that but what when I if I do anything Facebook, it’s in a session. It’s what I’ve learned. And our board does not mind us having fun. But that’s not what we put when we when we’re talking about our conference, not the fun. The educational

Brandon Burton 19:37
that that goes back to the first lesson that you talked about being political and being careful and gosh just put out there. Right. So let’s let’s roll along to lesson number three.

Rich Cantillon 19:50
So put your volunteers first. We are the hired help. It is amazing to me I’m I’m I get Get a lot of emails from a lot of my peers, you know, their emails that they send out to their members. It’s amazing to me when I see CEOs in the middle of a ribbon cutting, when I see CEOs in every picture, and they’re kind of front and center, it is not about us, it’s about the people we’re trying to build up. So when we do a ribbon cutting, we like we just had one this morning, when we do a ribbon cutting, it’s all about that business, their employees, not our staff, we’re promoting men. So make sure that you always put your volunteers first, make sure when you have an event, you don’t just hang out with your staff, or hanging out with your chamber chair, that your executive board or your little buddies, make sure when you have a chamber event, you are literally talking to all the people there, you’re working in the room, even at a ribbon cutting, you’re speaking to everyone, making them feel important. When you put people first, they’ll be very loyal, and they’ll do whatever you need. It’s when they’re ignored or don’t feel appreciated. You’re gonna have trouble.

Brandon Burton 21:14
Yeah. And I think a lot of chambers are good about that. Because I you know, connected with a lot of chamber professionals across the country. And as I see pictures of ribbon cuttings, like in that example, I’m often looking for the the executive that I know, and the pitcher. And it’s usually hard to find them if they’re in it. Yeah, usually they’re in the back. And they’re supporting the business, which is that’s where they belong in that photo. Or taking it or Yeah, exactly. So I think they’re, I think a lot of chambers are good on that. But there’s there’s probably some that that needed to hear that as well. So thank you. So your next lesson number

Rich Cantillon 21:53
four, we’ve already kind of talked about this, but you are the chamber I am the face of Papa city. And so everything I say and do, people are looking at. And so I have to be very positive. We had a right after I took my job here, we had a major merger and we lost some estimate three to 5000 jobs when that merger happened. But we’re pocket city, we have great leadership. And we knew that we would survive that and be even stronger after a while, which we are we’re stronger today than we were ever before the merger. And you have to so many people were so negative, so upset, you know, how could this happen to us. And I felt those feelings, but I never relayed them. Because I was the face of the chamber along with the mayor along with economic development, we had to put a good face forward and say positive things. And so you have to remember no matter what people are looking at you and they’re looking at what you say what you put in email, what you put in the paper. So always make Remember, you’re the face of the community, and you can guide whatever happens and the direction, right? Nothing was exciting. I love that.

Brandon Burton 23:20
Yeah, nothing will destroy a good community feeling quicker than a chamber President getting out there and saying, Oh, this really stinks for our community. You know, you got to keep that positive, optimistic point of view. And I think in today’s world, a lot of people are they talk about being authentic. And there’s a way of being authentic without laying all the cards on the table and saying, This is how I feel, and I’m distraught inside versus being authentic, but still optimistic that your community will rebound. And there’s bright things on the horizon. So

Rich Cantillon 23:54
when you lose a company, of course, you’re going to report that, you know, we’ve lost 200 jobs, but you can’t just, you know, how could they do this to us. And so it’s really important. Another thing kind of Brandon along those lines, we have to be the leaders in creating unity. We cannot have division in our community within our leadership. And this is something I see that is an issue across Oklahoma where there’s the chamber doesn’t like Main Street or the chamber cannot stand the city manager or vice versa. I mean, and we have to remember that we have to create a vision and a unity and a focus for our communities. And we have to get past personalities and be determined to make it work. And I just did this week earlier, I had a chamber per one of my friends call. They’re very upset with their city manager, and he’s really not doing a good job. I said you know what do not talk about that, they’ll see that, and he won’t be there long. So you take the high road always be positive. And I guarantee it, it’s not going to last for long. And so our city manager here in Ponca, city, our mayor, our main street, we’re all our economic development, we’re all together, and we enter in, something happens. And I’m not recognized. And maybe I was a big part of that. I don’t get all upset, that doesn’t matter, because I know what I did. So we have to really always take the high road and be that peacemaker, or your communities are not going to be successful.

Brandon Burton 25:41
Right? Yeah, that’s a that’s a bonus lesson right there. Number 11. Right there. So so number five, lesson learned,

Rich Cantillon 25:52
okay, you have to get out of your office, it doesn’t matter if you’re one person, Cooper, it doesn’t matter. You have to schedule every week, time to go see your manager, your members. So many people, you know, you I made it a passion of mine, that I don’t want someone to ever say, rich did not cross the door, my business. And I got marked out time every week, and I go out and I check them off that I and and if you shop local, if everything you do is love a lot of it and already gonna be doing that. But there may be a dentist, that’s a member that’s not your dentist, that I go by and say, Hey, let Doctor know that I came in. I really appreciate all you do. It is not time consuming. And I’ve had so many people say well, I’m just so you just don’t know, I’m just so busy. Know, if you mark it off and planned and then you it’s like a meeting committee meeting. So I really encourage that you get out a we have a 92% retention rate. And I firmly believe it’s because we’re touching our members. And they like that. So make the time to do that kind of stuff, and that you’ll be very successful.

Brandon Burton 27:17
Absolutely. And you’re right, the time management part, if you block it out. I mean, if you don’t block it out, yes, your schedule will fill up and you don’t have time, but you make it a priority to block it out and find a way to enjoy it. You know, it should be something you look forward to getting out. And that’s what the work is about. It’s about supporting these businesses and hearing them listening to them taking it back to the table, you know, different committees and helping to further and advance your own community. So Right, correct. So rolling along to the next lesson.

Rich Cantillon 27:48
Okay, so we already kind of talked about this to treating everyone equal. This is really critical. If you put emphasis on just your big donor members, and you’re at things and that you that you don’t really care about that little mom and pop business, they’re going to see that. And you have to make sure that you’re treating everyone equal, when you’re looking at your board makeup, that it represents your membership, that you have a mom and pop business, you have the head of this industry, you have a not for profit, you have all the aspects of your membership on your board. So I have always put a lot of emphasis and a lot of that was because Blackwell Black was a small town. It’s only 8000 people we had about 280 Members, I think we got up to 300 before I left. And so it was easy, you know, to touch all your members, when you’re a lot more members, you have to make sure you’re doing that at events. So that’s a good way and you got to make sure everyone knows that they’re welcome at the table, that it’s really important to treat everyone the same. When I first came to pop the city, I don’t want to criticize anyone before me, but our chamber had a reputation of being very cliquey that that cannot happen. So many people don’t like to go back to their class reunion, because they felt like they were cliques. And we you cannot have that in our adult world. Because that’s a terrible stigma. So we are not a clicky chamber. Everyone’s welcome. I enjoy everybody. And so really keep that in mind.

Brandon Burton 29:40
Yeah, well, and to your point, it’s easy to follow the money, you know, the bigger donors bigger, you know, higher level members and support them because you can’t lose them. But really, it’s those smaller businesses that are maybe scrapping together whatever they can to join the chamber or maybe it was a hard decision to make, whether or not to join that Amer and they need you more than some of these bigger companies or people that have been around a long time. So yes, treating everyone equal, but realizing that the need for some of these smaller businesses may be stronger than some of the bigger businesses.

Rich Cantillon 30:14
That’s exactly right.

Brandon Burton 30:17
So lesson number seven.

Rich Cantillon 30:19
So it is really important that we’re enthusiastic, that we like people at random, it’s crazy to me, there’s a lot of people in customer service, and they really don’t like people. Well, in Park City, we have manufacturing jobs where you can work on a line, and you don’t have to deal with people. But if you’re in the people business, you have to be enthusiastic, especially a chamber and you have to be passionate. So what that means is, every day, you have to come to work happy, fired up, my brand, my wife crazy, because on Monday mornings all go, here we go. It’s another week. And I mean, it, I’m excited, it’s going to be another week to do great things for Baca city. So you have to be the same every day. And it’s not just us, the CEO, your staff has to be that way. Because I could be the most outgoing, happy, passionate person. But if someone comes in my front door, and my front line person, not nice, grumpy, that that’s going to be our chamber. So it’s not only me, but making sure that the my team has that same attitude. And so that that’s something we have to work on every day. Now in my career, I’ve lost my parents, I’ve lost two siblings. And so I’ve had some real sad stuff. While I’ve been operating a chamber, people are really aware of when you have things in your life that are sad. But what what you can’t do, it can’t affect when you come to work. If it does, you just need to take a leave of absence, or take some sick days or whatever, you need to get over that emotional, whatever. But when you come to work, you have to put that smile on, you have to be passionate, enthusiastic, every day, eight hours a day, or however long you work. That’s critical.

Brandon Burton 32:31
Right. And that enthusiasm I would say is contagious. So your staff is going to follow your lead Yeah, as the leader of your organization, they’re going to look to you. And if you’re coming in with a bad attitude at the front desk person probably is not going to be the most welcoming that people come through the door. But if you can be, you know, brighten and optimistic and you know, happy and cheerful and that all it’s contagious. So it’ll it’ll flow through. So So lesson number eight.

Rich Cantillon 33:01
So we’ve kind of talked about this too, but I want to really re emphasize this. So you can never be in the mud. You can’t be like the pig wallowing in the mud. Talking about people talking when someone’s being rude to you, you know, we had a member the not too long ago come in, and they said yeah, we don’t see any value in what you do. And they were kind of yelling and and come to find out you know, they’re they declared bankruptcy. So the you know, sometimes people you know, they have a lot of pain and hurt and they don’t want to except, you know that he didn’t want to say I’m taking out bankrupt bankruptcy. So he just lashed out at me, you know? And and I took it, I mean, you, you have to always take the high road, you cannot talk I could not tell anyone about that incident. Because that just talking bad about him. I didn’t. Every now and then I’ll tell my chair, if there’s an incident because I feel like they need to be in. If someone’s upset with us. They need to know that. But I’m really careful that I never say anything negative about an issue, or anyone. So I’m going to give you this example. When I was taken in pocket came after me Blackwell that came they wanted me to come and run. I grew up here as well known they knew our success and Blackwell. They wanted they’d been having trouble. They fired like three or four chamber CEOs. They wanted me well at first I said no, I’m not coming while they hired a person he didn’t do well. Well, a year later they came back they said you can raise your kids and Blackwell when they graduate from high school then you can do what you want. We don’t care. So I took the job. I was really excited to come home to my Come down, which I love. Well, there was an individual that someone on the executive board had said, We’re gonna give it to you. Well, they gave it to me. Well, he was very distraught. So he was talking horrible about me, said that I might have been embezzled, and Blackwell, I ran that chamber in the ground, how could they hire me? I mean, some horrific step where you know, people love to tell you, so Oh, did you know he said, blah, blah, blah? Well, so they have this reception for us about a month and a half, after I started with a receiving line back in the day. And anyways, we were standing there, and here’s my wife. And here he comes with his wife. And I said, Oh, honey, this is Mr. Blah, blah, and his wife, and he put his hand down, and my wife wouldn’t shake his hands. She’s looked at him, and is very awkward. And he knew that we knew he’d been talking about him. I did not like that. And I realized Brandon, at that time, I would come home and tell my wife, all this stuff for my wife loves me. And how do I know my wife’s not telling her girlfriend? You can’t believe? And then here you go. So what I do now, and I really encourage this, if I want to get something off my chest, I call Matt provider, Nick, who rents the Topeka Kansas chamber, my best friend in our industry. And I tell Matt, Matt, could get done, no, anyone who talked about me could care less. But I can vent to Matt and I know, no one’s going to know. So I just would encourage you, if you got to get something off your chest, or you feel insulted, or someone’s been mean to you, and you want to share it. Pick someone in Alabama, you know, Montana, that, you know, in our industry, and vent to them don’t do it local.

Brandon Burton 37:06
Yeah, in big trouble. That is a great piece of advice. And you know, taking it home to your spouse, like one, they don’t need that burden, you know, that you share with them and to carry it and carry a secret sometimes, right? So just, yeah. Export that, uh, that unloading to somebody outside the area. I love that lesson. So you got two more here, lesson number nine.

Rich Cantillon 37:36
So this is really critical to you being successful. And it’s so weird, because I have a buddy in our chamber world that said, Hey, your Italy trip was great. We’re about to go on a trip. And I said, that’s fantastic. He said, Yeah, but I’ll still get inundated with emails and all I’ll be getting taxed. And I go seriously, I, I said no, I don’t do any of that. I when I am on vacation, I’m on vacation. When it’s five o’clock, I’ll be back the next day before eight. And I don’t do anything. The biggest issue in our chamber world is people feel like they’re on the clock 24/7 You’ll be burned out, you will get resentful. You’ll get sick of it. And there is no need for it. No one else works that way. So why should we work professional people in a professional industry, and we’re on the clock eight to five. And then when it’s five o’clock, I’m watching my grandkids. I’m watching my kids. I’m doing whatever, I’m enjoying life. And I don’t get back until I come to work. And people know that. And when it’s the weekend, it’s my weekend. I don’t ever look at email I don’t look at I won’t respond to texts. And after a while, like I don’t get those things because it’s that’s how we often Yeah, he feels odd. They know I’ll respond when I’m at work. And within a day, I mean, you text me and I’m at work, you’re gonna get a response. So work the eight to five, but disconnect and don’t make it 24/7 I promise you if you live that way, you’ll never be in the industry like me, almost 30 years you won’t, you’ll wet because you’re you’re just going to be worn out. So I was told that early on by another chamber person dich Rasch, who ran our State Chamber, he said, make sure you don’t work 24/7 That’s just unacceptable, and you’ll be successful. And I found that to be very true.

Brandon Burton 39:53
Right? And I’ve even seen some chamber execs have a an automated, you know, auto responder on their email. So after five o’clock, they’ll say Tony Felker in Frisco is a good example of this, if you email him at 515, you’re gonna get an automatic reply that says, It’s after five o’clock. And by experience, I’ve learned that if I go, if I pay attention to this, I’m going to miss some details or whatever. So I’ll respond to you tomorrow morning when I’m back in the office. And it’s a classy way of I think of addressing it and just saying, I got it. And I’ll get back to you, you know, when the time is appropriate. And email, I think people are totally fine with that for sure. So the final lesson number 10, that you have to share with us. But what do you have, don’t be

Rich Cantillon 40:39
overwhelmed. Don’t let the chamber consume, you don’t get stressed out. My predecessor here at the pump, the Chamber died of a massive heart attack. Because he was overwhelmed. We had another person that ran our chamber, when I was in high school, my dad was on the board. And he literally had a nervous breakdown, he was so overwhelmed. And that is really sad to me. So when whenever you have an event, or you have all of all of this stuff, don’t let it consume you. One of the things that I’ve learned that can help alleviate that is write down at the end of every day, I write down everything I need to accomplish the next day. And then as I go through the day, I literally mark it off as I’ve accomplished it. So here’s today. Yeah, and I’ve already marked off stuff that I’ve already done. I literally am that all my work, it has saved me all these years. And I’m not overwhelmed. Another thing, if you have events, if you do a lot of events, with each event, create a folder and literally write down everything you need to do. I have to before the event three months out, I do this, this this, and then a month out, I do this two weeks out. And so you’re not having to redo it every year. Oh, what do we do for the auction? Oh, my gosh, it’s all in a booklet. And it’s your to do list. So if you take anything away, that I’ve said today, to me, the most important is the last thing I’m sharing is don’t be overwhelmed, write down what you need to do. And as you do it, mark it off. At the end of the day, when I see everything marked off. I know it was a success. Now having said that every now and then there’s something I didn’t I literally did not get to, okay, I’ll add it to tomorrow’s list. And I’ll it’ll be the top priority. So don’t be overwhelmed. We have a fun job. I love being a chamber CEO, and I’m going to really miss it when I retire. I love making a difference. I love seeing something think, wow, we could add that to that park or Wow, we could do this start downtown. And I can do it. I can start that ball. I love that. So or helping recruit a doctor or an industry or whatever we need a pastor and showing them our community and, and be and getting them here. That’s so rewarding. So enjoy what we do and have fun with it.

Brandon Burton 43:47
I love that usually asked for a tip or action item at the end. And I think that is perfect. Just enjoy it.

Rich Cantillon 43:55
Enjoy. Yeah.

Brandon Burton 43:56
So Rich, as we look to the future of chambers of commerce, how do you see the future of chambers and their purpose going forward?

Rich Cantillon 44:04
We have to be relevant. So we have to be willing to change we have to be willing, you know, my focus here at our chamber in my 20 years here has really changed multiple times when the merger happened and we were focused on keeping our people growing our people. Now we’re focused on housing, which is a real need and pakka city. So it’s really it’s being relevant and always willing to readapt. So every year, we have a retreat and with our new board, our incoming board and with our existing board and we talked about what is going to be our focus in the next year. And we do that in November and that dictates what our business plan is going to be what your return on your investment to the chamber is going to be because you have to Joe, your members their return on their investment. And so that’s always exciting. And it’s always driven by what’s happening. So for example, 2022, we came out with the COVID. And we doing COVID, we were all about making sure our businesses survived, and really promoting what they were doing to to survive. And we were recognized by our State Chamber as a leader in that area in what we did some innovative ideas. But now, when we came out at COVID, for 2022, our world has become very angry, and mean, and people don’t mind yelling or cussing someone out in a store business, or it’s just crazy. So we’re doing a kindness campaign. And it’s been incredible. So we have 12 Marxists here. And we took a month, and like this month, it’s on our senior citizens. So how do you show kindness to senior citizens, and then we come up with action items. And that’s been really awesome. And I’ve really enjoyed doing that. So being relevant, looking at what your community is faced with? And how are you going to take care of it.

Brandon Burton 46:18
I like that, I like that a lot and be be relevant and be willing to change that.

Rich Cantillon 46:24
You asked about the future chambers. That’s how we’re going to succeed. If we’re not a player, if we’re not a leader, if we’re not relevant. If we’re not showing the return on our investment, we on their investment, we’re not going to be relevant, we’re not going to be able to sustain Chambers of Commerce. So keep that in mind.

Brandon Burton 46:45
You’re absolutely right. So Rich, as we wrap up here, I wanted to give you an opportunity to put out any contact information for listeners who might want to reach out and learn more about some of these lessons that you shared with us or in general, just how you guys are doing things there in pocket city, what would be the best way or ways for people to reach out and connect with you?

Rich Cantillon 47:05
So the best way would be through email and it’s rich@poncacitychamber.com. I love to text. So if you want to text me it’s 580-363-6665. And I’d love to hear from anyone and send our business plans and anything that we do that would help you we would love to do our we have we do tourism for the city of pumped city have a great relationship. So if they’re interested in partnering with their city, like could share how we do that anything they need. I’d love to share. So thank you so much.

Brandon Burton 47:54
Thank you This has been great. And I like I said at the beginning I hope some of these lessons will help a newer chamber exec be able to shortcut some of their learning curve and, and maybe take away some of those growing pains that happen when you’re new in the industry. But Rich, I appreciate you joining us today and sharing these lessons with us. I think this is terrific.

Rich Cantillon 48:16
Thank you, Brandon for all you do.

Brandon Burton 48:18
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Wisdom from the Wild with Julie Henry

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Below is an auto-generated transcription of my conversation with Julie Henry. Because this is auto-generated there are likely some grammatical errors but it is still a useful tool to search text within this podcast episode.

Feel free to join our Chamber Chat Champions Facebook Group to discuss this episode and to share your own experiences and tips with other Chamber Champions.

Introduction

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.

And now, your host, he’s always intrigued when he sees a snake in the wild. He’s my dad, Brandon Burton.

Hello Chamber Champions. Welcome to Chamber Chat Podcast. It’s my goal here on the podcast to introduce you to people and ideas to better help you serve your Chamber members and your community.

Our title sponsor is Holman Brothers Membership Sales Solutions. Let’s hear from Matt Morrow President and CEO of the Springfield Area Chamber in Missouri to learn how the Holman Brothers provided value to his chamber.

Matt Morrow  0:45 

Holman Brothers provide a great training for our sales team in terms of just outstanding sales techniques. But maybe even more importantly than that, they were able to provide us with a system a process that was repeatable and in that we’re able to see very clearly from one month to the next how the how the pipeline is doing, what prospects are in it, what kind of progress we’re making and what we can do to coach people to success.

Brandon Burton  1:06 

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Guest Introduction

Our guest for this episode is Julie Henry. Julie is president of finish line leadership and author of wisdom from the wild the nine unbreakable Laws of Leadership from the animal kingdom. Former Zoo and Aquarium senior leader, Julie has worked with over 55 organizations across corporate nonprofit government association and community sectors. She holds a Bachelors of Science degrees in both zoology and education and Masters of Arts and Communication and an executive program certificate in sustainable business leadership. She is dedicated to helping people deal with change lead teams and build resilience using insights from wildlife and wild places. Julie has presented over a million people across 32 states and six countries in settings ranging from auditoriums and ballrooms to boats, beaches, forests, theaters, boardrooms, and even underwater while feeding sharks and moray eels. She lives in Sarasota, Florida with her two children whom she lovingly describes as her zoo animal and her wild animal due to each one’s natural inclination towards life. Julie, I’m happy to have you with me today on Chamber Chat Podcast, if you would take a moment to say hello to all the Chamber Champions and share something interesting about yourself so you can get to know you a little bit better.

About Julie Henry

Julie Henry 3:06
Oh, it’s so great to be here. Thank you so much for the invitation. I love talking all things, wildlife and wild places, and especially if you can help somebody think about something a little bit different. I’m happy to do that. And something interesting about me is if you ask me what my favorite animal is, it’s not actually in the book. It is a giant squid. And I think giant squid are fascinating because, um, you know, they get in battles with sperm whales. And we didn’t even know that we didn’t see one alive for a long time out until like, the past 10 years alive in his natural habitat. So it was a it was a conundrum, you know, an animal of legend that we kept searching for. And I love that.

Brandon Burton 3:41
Right. Wow, that is a good insight. There might be another chapter in you somewhere about.

Well, I’d like for you to take a moment to share a little bit about your background about your organization Finish Line leadership and and your relationship with chambers of commerce throughout your work just to kind of show the relevance to why we’re having you on Chamber Chat Podcast today.

Julie Henry 4:10
Yeah, thanks. I appreciate that. You know, when I spent the first 10 years working for organizations working for other people in nonprofit and corporate settings, and then when I launched my business in 2008, my sister in law actually said to me, you need to join the Chamber of Commerce. And I said, Well, why I don’t understand I just never had really been involved in chambers of commerce. And she said, Well, you need to it’s, you know, community, it’s its growth, it’s networking. It’s everything, and especially if you’re going to run your own business, and I said, Well, okay, and, and so I checked it out and immediately, I was really interested to get involved in many as many ways as possible. So that was putting my hand up and saying, Yeah, I want to join this committee, and then it was sure I’ll serve on the board and then it was, yeah, run this committee for green business. leadership because to me, Chambers of Commerce are such a necessary part of our community to provide a gathering space, a convenient space for people to talk about things that are hard and challenging and business as well as to support each other. And then over time, they became my clients hired to help them with facilitation to find new executive directors, I’ve been helping recently with the leadership programs that many of them have in the local area. So I’ve, I’ve been on both sides or every side of the coin, and I continue to think that they provide a very valuable and necessary role in our communities.

Brandon Burton 5:38
Absolutely. I appreciate you sharing that background. And it is very fitting to you to have that such close contact with chambers of commerce and several communities. And to be able to integrate that with the lessons that you share in your book today, which is going to be the topic that we’ll cover is diving into a little bit more of your book of Wisdom from the Wild, which is the nine unbreakable Laws of Leadership from the animal kingdom. And we’ll dive into this discussion as soon as they get back from this quick break.

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Topic-Wisdom from the Wild

All right, Julie, we are back. You know, I’d like to say that it would be an understatement to say you hit a homerun with this book, you know, a lot of people, they, they talk about writing a book, and then when it comes down to it, they balk, you know, then they never actually do it. And sometimes, you know, if they’ve already put out information about it, they kind of find themselves in a pickle, you know, because they they’re not going forward with what they said they would do. And I’m saying all these things on purpose to dry out these these metaphors, these analogies there throughout life. All right, as we talk about hitting that home run or boxing or being in a pickle, a lot of these analogies are sports related. A lot of them are baseball related, I would say that wisdom from the wild, it covers a lot of the blocking and tackling of leadership. So there’s a football analogy there. But we don’t see a ton of analogies from nature in our everyday lexicon and conversations. However, I will say my oldest, my oldest child, he’s about a year and a half he’ll be leaving the nest and spreading his wings. So he’ll he’ll be getting out there in the world. But we could uh, we could either stick our head in the sand and pretend like these. These laws of nature don’t exist in leadership and have those parallels. Or we could talk to Julie and we could read her book and see some of these parallels. So Julie, I’d like to hand it over to you and share maybe what was your driving force behind writing this book writing wisdom to the Wild and drying out these lessons that you’ve noticed in the wild in creating those parallels to leadership?

Julie Henry 10:08
Yeah, you know, and I’ll the first thing I’ll say is that I find nature the great equalizer, because it doesn’t matter if you live in downtown Tokyo or rural Oklahoma, or if you have a Harvard MBA or if you’re 16 years old, and you haven’t graduated high school yet, you can walk outside and think about, hmm, I wonder why that’s happening. Or let me learn more about that. And you don’t have to pose in nature, you can just be yourself. In fact, nature demands that your yourself doesn’t let you

Brandon Burton 10:38
be natural. Yeah.

Julie Henry 10:41
Like it’s gonna call you out. If you try to hike a mountain in high heels, you’re not going to go very far. And so I think nature is a way for people to have leadership conversations that strips away the need to know the answers already, because nature is about being curious and asking questions. And that’s really what life is about, let alone leadership. And I also will say that when I was in college, you know, my dad was a leadership development guy, he ran his own business, my mom was a teacher, and I was a science kid. So somehow, it’s going to stitch them all together. And my college professor gave me a project and said, teach people about coral reefs. That was my project. And I thought, well, not everybody’s going to be interested in coral reefs, what if I use the analogy of a business and talk about how coral reefs operate together, just like a business does with different departments, etc. And that was in 1996. So it’s only grown since then. So when I worked in zoos, and aquariums, I would always invite companies in, like, come to a retreat here, this is an interesting place. And let me help you think about your communication challenges through the eyes of you know, a pelican rather than, like the top 10, you know, communication laws. And then when I flipped it, and I was working as a consultant, I would be, you know, literally 1500 feet underground in a limestone mine, working with people that work in shift work, and it’s 11 o’clock at night, and they’ve been there for 42 years, if I can tell them stories about, you know, a sea turtle, then suddenly I’ve got their attention. And that’s important. So it was for all of those reasons. And we learn everything else from nature, architecture, our medicine, music, everything, why not leadership?

Brandon Burton 12:18
Yeah, I love that. And I’m hoping after you, after people hearing this discussion, and and chamber leaders reading your book, hopefully, they can come out of it and say, I really need some coral reef time, or, you know, through this pandemic, you know, I was, I was quite the sea cucumber, you know. So, these things will make more sense as we get on with our conversation here. But you have your book broken up into three main sections. So you talk about change, teamwork, and resilience. So I think for the chamber for chamber professionals listening, change, teamwork and real resilience are three areas that they need to be hyper aware of all the time, because starting with change, you know, those changes always happening. But I’d like to focus on maybe one of these topics of change, where we you talked about not being distracted by fear? What lessons did you learn from nature that correlate to leadership revolving around fear?

Julie Henry 13:20
I’m glad you picked that one. Because I think change, of course, is ubiquitous, right? In every part of our life, let alone as a leader, but also, it’s your great calling. And as a leader, if you’re not leading change, then I don’t know what you’re doing. You can’t just No, no leader that I’ve ever talked to, I said, I just kind of want to manage the status quo, like, do you? Or do you want to innovate and serve your community better? I think it’s the latter. But in order to do that, you are going to be confronted by either your fear of the unknown, or people around you who have, you know, I don’t know, maybe brainstormed many, many times on giant post, it notes, all their ideas, and then they never get taken. So they’re afraid to do it again. Or they’re new at the organization, and they don’t want to commit their ideas. Or maybe you’re trying to change the membership structure of your chamber. Oh, my gosh, that’s so hard. I’ve been in those conversations, like, how do we restructure to better serve our members? And how do we price it and how do we market it? I mean, your listeners know exactly what I’m talking about. I know they do. And there’s innate fear, both on oh my gosh, are people going to like not join again? Because we’ve changed the membership structure. And who do we make more angry? Right, right. So think about the animals that scare us. Universally, right? Snakes, and spiders. Those are the animals that come to mind. And the thing about spiders is, I love spiders, love spiders. I find them totally fascinating, but even me, I can still be startled if I turn on the light and there’s a giant spider the size of my hand next to the light switch as has happened before. That still startles me So even if you’re totally comfortable with leading change, and you’ve been down that road, you can still be startled by fear. And it’s important to understand and recognize that fear is just a part of being a human. And you’ve got to validate that and call that out, and you cannot ignore it or sleep, sweep it under the table, if you want your change to actually stick when you’re on the other side of it.

Brandon Burton 15:21
I love that. And I think, you know, nature for us fear is something It’s a survival mechanism. You know, we have that fear for a reason, and it’s to survive. So when you see that, that spider or snake for me, I like snakes, I’ve had pet snakes, I’m fascinated by snakes. But if I’m out for a run, and there’s a stick in the road that kind of looks like a snake that catches me off guard, I’m going to stop, because I don’t know what kind of snake it is. But then I get curious, sometimes it’s a stick, sometimes it’s a snake, and I’ll stop and watch it for a bit. But it goes back to being curious. So don’t let the fear stop you from being curious. kind of lean into it and see what you can learn from it is what I understood.

Julie Henry 16:04
I love that. Yep, I call it fear is nature’s yellow light. Just slow down.

Brandon Burton 16:09
Yes, absolutely. So you talked a lot about teamwork. And there’s a I want to move on to the teamwork section. Because there’s a couple topics on this that I wanted to have you highlight and talk more about, but one of them is the the chapter is titled, there’s no one size fits all approach to teamwork. And in the chamber world, everyone has heard the saying that if you’ve seen one chamber, you’ve seen one chamber, meaning that no two chambers are alike. Talk to us a little bit about this and how that relates to leadership and specifically with chambers.

Julie Henry 16:46
Yes, I think that chambers are one of the most unique organizations that I’ve been involved with and worked with. And sometimes that’s a great thing. And sometimes that’s a challenging thing, especially when it comes to communicating, you know, your relevance, or why should people should get involved sometimes, like I did, I had, I didn’t understand it, you know, long time ago when I was first getting involved. And there are some animals that from the outside look a little unusual. In fact, one of my favorite animals about this is naked mole rats, and naked mole rats, when we first discovered them, literally, the people thought they were mutations because they’re super funky looking. And they have big teeth, and they look basically naked. They’re hairless, almost mammals, they live underground, they live together. And we just ignored them for a while until we rediscovered them in the 50s. And then came to understand that oh my gosh, they actually live in colonies like bees. And they’re super effective at how they’ve divided all of the labor, if you will, between these animals. And they’re basically blind, but they communicate by your trails of urine and stack up together, keep their body temperature regulated, even though they’re mammals, I mean, so, you know, I love naked mole rats, and I champion them. And I tell people, when your team seems a little unusual from the outside, or your organization does, I want you to lean into that and champion your naked mole rat team, you don’t own explanation, anybody and you’re probably super highly functional, even though you may look kind of strange from the outside, but embrace that and own it. And don’t ever shy away from it. That’s why I love that you call your listeners chamber champions, because I want them to champion the fact that they are also naked mole rats,

Brandon Burton 18:28
yes. Love that. can bring it full circle, I love it. And I think that’s so true that as we look at, you know, especially working with maybe people on a committee, you know, they might bring an idea or an approach. It’s like, man, that’s really weird, you know, and you can kind of put it aside and say, That’s weird, and stay away from it. Or you can, again, be curious and lean into it and say, Well, what, what is there that we can learn from this? And are there things that we can implement and become stronger for it and maybe attract other people to come along our mission with us? So I’d love the lessons from the naked mole rats. So the other chapter that I wanted to touch on under Teamwork was, especially I think, important during these times were in chambers all over focusing on diversity, equity and inclusion. And you have a chapter titled, surround yourself with people who are not like you. And you talk specifically about a termite meeting giraffe and giraffe meet the termite. And I’d love for you to share more about that story and maybe, you know, make those correlations to what we see in the real life today.

Julie Henry 19:43
Yeah, you know, if you thought about a termite giraffe, they may not even seem like they even live in the same habitat, let alone need each other but they do because you know, the Africans van it’s pretty hard place to survive. There’s not a lot of water out there and you’ve got to work together and so they while they’re not actively Working together, they’re participating in helping each other survive. So the termite is breaking down vegetation as they’re, you know, chewing it up, basically. And, and that is attracting the giraffes to come over and basically eat that vegetation. And then they’re laying their own feces and urine. If you Well, there’s a lot of conversation about this on this podcast, I apologize, hopefully.

Brandon Burton 20:24
We’re not advocating for chambers here. Just to be clear, right? Now, we’re not

Julie Henry 20:30
gonna remember this, because we’re talking about it. You know, so, you know, for me, I remember the first board I was ever involved in, I remember, in this giant, long, giant board, it was 40 people long meeting, it was eight hours long. And I remember thinking, Oh, my gosh, this is super stressful. And I don’t know, really how I’m participating, etcetera. And the formative thing for me was the fact that I think towards the end of this meeting, one person basically said one sentence and summarize the entire eight hours, we call the meeting to order, we took a vote and we finished it. And that is not how I operate. As you can tell, I have a lot to say, and I communicate with my words all the time. And immediately, I thought, oh, my gosh, he’s different than me. And I need to be with him on all of these projects, because we’re going to be better together, and the outcome is going to be even stronger. And that’s an uncomfortable thing, too, though, right? Because I’m like, What are you thinking? You’re not talking? I’m talking all the time? And what are you thinking, but I had to lean into that. So that’s, that’s, that’s one way of looking at it. And then the diversity, equity inclusion is, of course, the other part of that, because, you know, people who are not like us are, sometimes they scare us, because it makes us try to think differently, or just acknowledge that we don’t know all the answers. But remember nature’s about curiosity. And if the termites and drafts need each other, then you need also a termite to your giraffe.

Brandon Burton 21:55
Absolutely. And one thing that came to mind is you were giving your response there is, so there’s the diversity, equity inclusion, part of it of, you know, trying to figure out those people in your community that you may have not even noticed before, you might not have noticed that they were part of your community, you might not have noticed that they had a business in your community, because of whatever the type of business it is, or the person that’s running it, their background, or whatever it may be. There, I can guarantee their segments in any community where you have not noticed certain people or certain types of businesses. And if you can kind of open your eyes as a giraffe, like what purposes is giraffe have to look way down on the ground, there’s a little termites that are going around feces and stuff down there. Whereas, you know, in the chamber world to be able to look a little deeper within your community. And on the Diversity Equity inclusion topic, we always talk about who’s missing. And rather than just who’s missing, I would say, Who Have you not noticed, and try to notice a little bit more. And then I think there’s another part of it when it comes to networking, I mean, chambers, editorials for having networking events, and you’re making introductions, and if we can help certain businesses, see other businesses that they may not realize they’re connected, but to be able to help build, you know, build that bridge between their two businesses and say, here’s why you need each other, here’s how you can be stronger together, and help form those solid relationships. I think really reemphasizes that a whole story of the termite giraffe. So So as we move on to the resilience section, there’s a couple in this as well, that I wanted to touch on. So especially coming through this COVID pandemic, resilience has been a key topic of how do you, you know, first of all stay relevant, how do you adapt to that change? But then how do you thrive through it? And I think that boils down to resiliency. And your chapter titled you’re wired not just to survive, but to thrive. And you talk about sea cucumbers. Help us make that connection there.

Julie Henry 24:14
So before I answer that question, I just want to say that the reason why I’m so passionate about everything in this book, and everything we’re talking about is because I didn’t just think of these examples, and suggest to your listeners that maybe they should consider this. Everything we’re talking about is absolutely true. That’s why I call them unbreakable laws, like termites and drafts, they need each other spiders are needed and sea cucumbers are wired to when they are threatened. Ie they’re living on the bottom of the ocean floor. Here comes this predator are about to get eaten. Their mechanism to survive is literally to eat visceral, which means to throw up their own guts, right? That’s Crazy, this animal that is trying to eat the sea cucumber will either swim away or potentially eat the guts of the sea cucumber. Now, if that happens, this sea cucumber, which basically looks like a sausage on the ocean floor, it doesn’t actually look like it’s capable of much. However, it is related to sea stars. So probably most people listening know that a sea star can regrow its arm if it gets cut off, or eaten or whatever. Same thing with a sea cucumber, it can regrow its own guts, that is a biological fact and absolute certainty. That’s how it’s wired to survive, but also to thrive. So if a relatively innocuous animal on the ocean floor can survive a huge threat literally within inches of its life. Those times when you are afraid of change, or leading your team down a road, that you’re just really not sure if it’s even the right road to go. But someone’s got to make a decision. And that’s you. And you literally feel sick to your stomach. The awareness and the recognition that you’re wired to get through. This brings not only great comfort, but also should build your confidence and let you lean in a little more and totally erase it pastures is syndrome, anything else that we talk about, like, it’s your biological fact that you’re gonna get through this and you’re gonna thrive on the other side, it’s going to be uncomfortable, I can’t imagine what it feels like to regrow your guts, but you’re going to do it

Brandon Burton 26:31
just that image of regrowing your guts. So, I see the parallel to again, through the pandemic is you know, initially when everything shut down there was that kind of wait and see phase where chambers and businesses just kind of like okay, let’s let’s take the temperature, let’s see what’s going on here. And once we realize this is gonna go on longer than what we expected. It’s not just two weeks, this is gonna go on much longer. He saw businesses he said chambers that had to do layoffs. He said chambers that had to tap into their reserves that they’ve you know, saved up for decades, possibly those reserve funds. You said chamber offices that had to shut down their physical location and everybody was working remotely from home. And I don’t know that looks a lot like you know, getting rid of your your insides and in still figuring out how to pull it back together, how to regenerate how to get back into the office, how to rehire how to get your funding backup, all while at the same time remaining relevant and serving their their membership base that that needed them so badly at that time. So I think that is a an excellent parallel to the sea cucumbers. It probably one of my favorite chapters was was the last chapter the book, as you talked about resilience, and it’s titled even cheetahs slow down. I know. Well, I’m gonna, I’m gonna let you talk about that before I share any of my thoughts, because I think we may touch on some of the same things.

Julie Henry 28:16
This is the last chapter of the book. But the pivotal moment when I realized after 25 years of having the idea in college was time to write the book. Because I had talked to so many people at that point and felt that way myself, that it is again, a biological fact and unbreakable law that even cheetahs slow down. But if I were to ask your listeners to think in their head, when I say the word cheetah, what do you think of? Now? Chances are, you’re thinking about the fact that it’s the fastest land animal. And if you were to Google cheetah, you’re pulling up all of these images about how fast they run. And that’s what they’re talking about. Okay, well naive. How many of you have ever been to a zoo or even been to Africa and seeing the cheetah running? Probably not many people actually seeing the cheetah running unless the zoo has, you know, structured it for an event or for you know, interaction? Most of the time, they are hanging out and resting and relaxing. And they are not, I think overthinking when they’re resting and relaxing, right? So we glorify the idea of being busy with effective leader in our culture. And that’s why we are so fascinated by how fast this cheetah goes. But that cheetah goes for what less than a minute, and then they rest. And they don’t think about oh my gosh, I wish I would have jogged left instead of jogged right. And I don’t know if I can do it next time. And I’m not sure I have the courage and maybe I should ask somebody else what they think no, they just rest. Okay, what do we do? Well, I will rest on the weekend or everybody else leave at five. I’m going to stay and do the event tonight. Okay, well, first of all people are watching you. You can’t Don’t just burn yourself out and expect everyone else not to do the same thing. But the thing is, nature’s going to slow you down one way or the other, you have a choice, you’re going to be proactive and say, Nope, here’s what I need. Here’s how I manage my energy. resilience to me is about managing my energy. It’s not false positivity. It’s not Yeah, I’m good. I can totally do those three events on Friday night, and I’ll just bop around, can you No, you cannot, okay. And it’s also going to happen to one way or the other. So reactivity, proactivity, completely your choice. But you need to slow down, if you want to lead and have the impact you’re designed to have. And if you want to have other people around, you also do the same thing.

Brandon Burton 30:43
I love that. And I think for chamber leaders all over, I see them running constantly, whether it’s just in the office or at an event, but even after hours, you know, if they go out to eat with their family, they’re seeing people in the community and they’re constantly thinking work, they’re thinking the connections are, you know, trying to further the mission of the chamber, which it’s all you know, they good and honorable desires. But to avoid that burnout, and to really perform at your highest capacity, we need that that downtime, that respite time. And that’s, you know, for leaders, specifically, as you’re talking about in this book, but I’m thinking even your your membership salespeople, you know, they, they need that, because if they have any kind of commission structure, to their to memberships there, I mean, I’m a salesperson, you I understand sales, like you run, you run, you run. And I had this discussion this week, because of this book with with a sales rep that I said, you know, what, you’re running constantly, and you need to, you need to rest. And sometimes I think resting it, maybe you talked about not thinking about second guessing and everything. But I think some of that resting can come in the form of planning to some degree, not, not the big strategic plans, but maybe planning out your next day, or what you’re doing next week. Kind of on, let’s say lower level, brain power, but it’s not the high stress kind of brain power that you need to rest and to be able to perform it that the best of your ability. So I love that chapter. And, and especially, I think that was fitting to be the last chapter in the book, because you read through it, and you get all these great ideas about being a leader and like what you need to do to be like a sea cucumber, or a pelican or coral reef, or all these different things, I am gonna hit the ground running, and cycling hit, but I also need to rest. So it’s a good reminder.

Julie Henry 32:44
I’m still getting, you know, think of it like a bell curve. We spent all this time preparing and thinking and strategizing. And then we’re doing doing doing doing and then we just fall off a cliff. But it’s really a bell curve, like how do we ramp down? Like, are you checking your email, right, exactly. Soon after we get off this podcast like? Or can you take five minutes and like write down what you learned and reflect on it? Like you need to have a bell curve of your energy management, and then you’ll go back up. But it’s not a cliff. It’s a bell.

Brandon Burton 33:10
I love that those emails will wait for five minutes, they will I promise, they’ll still be there in five minutes. So take that time and jot down some notes. I love it. So Julie, as we start wrapping things up here, I wanted to ask you, if you might have maybe one tip or action item that you could share with chamber champions to help take their organization up to the next level.

Action Item/Tip for Chamber Champions

Julie Henry 33:34
You know, the one thing I would say to chamber champions is to pick one part, whether from well, you know, from this whole conversation or when they’re looking out, we tend to have all of these ideas and visions. And as you’re saying they are unique, because most of the time if not all of the time they’re living in the community that they are supporting. So they’re always on right. But what’s one action item that you can stop doing one action item that you can do a little more of and one action item, you can start completely in the next quarter. I like quarters because I think that’s a doable timeframe. Because you can see and measure progress. And the key to this is not only do you write down your goals, but just like I talked about with a mangrove method of change, you need to write where you are right now. So for example, if you want to stop checking emails immediately after every meeting that you get out of and you want to spend five minutes just thinking and decompressing before you check emails, then you need to write down. Alright, now I’m checking emails after I know it sounds silly, but I’m not kidding. Like if you want to run a marathon faster, the first thing you do is time how fast your mile is right now. If you want to lose 10 pounds, the first thing you do is get on a scale and see how much you actually weigh. So when we try to measure change in our personal leadership style, we go at it like that. I want to become a better leader. I want to become a better chamber professional. Oh my goodness, what does that actually mean? We have got to get specific and measurable. And it’s deeply personal. It’s deeply personal. And so pick achievable goals for you that makes sense to you. And maybe you won’t even end up on your annual review. And that is okay, is your personal journey.

Brandon Burton 35:19
That’s right. I love that. So one thing to stop one thing to do a little more of, and one thing to start brand new. I love that, too. So I know, chambers are always looking to the future says, as you look to the future of chambers of commerce, how do you see their future and purpose going forward?

Future of Chambers

Julie Henry 35:37
I would love chambers to continue to champion to use your word here. Their integral role of being a neutral place for people to convene, and have conversations that need to happen. So my analogy for this is when I used to run the Green Business Leadership Council, which was a committee of our local chamber was really important for me to create a space in which businesses felt safe, not necessarily comfortable. That’s always my marching order, right? But safe to come to the chamber and say, Gosh, I’m really struggling with how to do sustainability, my business right now, or I’m not sure if I should make this investment in, you know, the change in my restaurant or operations. But I know it’s better for my customers. But it’s not better for the bottom line right now. What are you doing? So how can people work together to affect change in the community, collectively? And I think chambers are unique in that position, because where else can businesses go and not feel like they’re either baring their soul or they’re going to get, you know, called on the carpet by somebody else? And maybe they don’t want to tell their customers yet or their stakeholders or even their employees, yet, they just need to have some thinking time first. And chambers are a convenient space. From my experience, in my opinion, it’s such a needed one. And so look to the future, what are the big things happening in your community, that you can step up and say, yeah, come talk at our place, like literally, here’s the space, or here’s a, here’s a neutral facilitator, or here’s a neutral listening person like that is so needed in order to continue advancing the communities, especially from diversity, equity, access inclusion, you all have these big hard topics that are happening. chambers have a unique role. And I know you can do it even better than you’re doing it now.

Brandon Burton 37:23
Absolutely. I love that, that look of the future. So Julie, I want to do to give you an opportunity to share any contact information with chamber champions, anyone who might want to reach out and connect with you or find your book. What’s the best way for them to reach out and connect?

Connect with Julie Henry

Julie Henry 37:41
Yeah, my website is JulieCHenry.com They can get on there shoot me an email. My email is also Julie@JulieCHenry.com It’s not all that creative, maybe. Yeah, you know, they can get my book anywhere their favorite local bookstore can order it if they don’t already have it. Or an Amazon has been in some airport bookstores with their you know, traveling again, and having some fun that might see it there as well. I’m on Instagram and LinkedIn both that Julie C Henry, and I would just love to you know, hear about what you’re doing and hear your plans for the future. Because it’s all exciting to me.

Brandon Burton 38:17
I love it. And we’ll get your contact information in our show notes for this episode as well. But I will say as you mentioned, finding the book in some airports and things like that it so it’s a leadership book, but it doesn’t feel like a leadership book, you know, says you read it the stories that you’re reading, they’re they’re real stories, they’re real parallels to life. And and that’s what I love about these analogies that I talked about at the beginning is the more familiar you are with them. You don’t need an in depth explanation to understand that an ostrich ostrich sticks its head in the sand to understand that metaphor, right? So the more familiar you are with these stories and the examples that Julie shares in this book, I think the better the leader you will be and being able to make those parallels in your life. So thank you, Julie. It’s been great having you on chamber chat podcast today that you provided a lot of value for the listeners and I hope everyone picks up your book and, and learns more about being a great leader from these laws of nature. Thank you.

Julie Henry 39:21
Thank you. It’s an honor to be on. And I hope everybody takes five minutes and goes outside today and asks a new question that you’ve never asked about nature and how that can help you be a better leader.

Brandon Burton 39:31
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