Category: Partnerships

How Local Chambers Can Work with State Chambers with Glenn Hamer

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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.

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

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Kris Johnson 0:41
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 1:23
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Our guest for this episode is Glenn Hamer. Glenn is the President and CEO of the Texas Association of Business which serves as the Texas State Chamber of Commerce. Glenn is a torchbearer for business for the business community and he’s a he has a proven track record for success in the public policy arena. He testified before the 87th legislator on his second day of the job and made meaningful contributions to the passage of the top legislative priorities for the business community, including broadband expansion, keep Texas trucking pandemic liability protections and preventing astronomical increases in unemployment insurance. Since the pandemic and Glenn has made it his mission to visit more local chambers than anyone else on the planet. He connects businesses small and large with lawmakers on both sides of the aisle to protect Texas’s pro business climate. Glenn is proud to be part of the Texas Camino Real district Export Council, American Society of Mexico and National Immigration forum. He also serves on the board for the US Chamber of Commerce and chairs its committee of 100. Glenn came to TAB or Texas Association of Business after 14 years as CEO of the Arizona Chamber of Commerce and Industry, where he played a central role in major tax education, legal and health court health care victories. He was at the forefront of the business community’s advocacy for the US for the United States Mexico Canada agreement. Glenn is a highly regarded international issues expert and has joined governors mayors and the US Chamber on trade missions to China, Taiwan, Mexico, Canada, Israel in the United Kingdom. Recognizing the global race for talent to keep our economy’s strong Glenn is also recognized as a champion on immigration reform. Glenn has also served as chief of staff to Arizona Congressman Matt salmon, Executive Director of Arizona Republican Party legislative assistant to Senator Jon Kyl, and executive director for Solar Energy Industries Association. Glenn is a graduate of Cornell University and Arizona State University’s College of Law. Glenn is married and has three daughters who exhibit strong entrepreneurial spirit. Glen, I’m excited to have you with us today on Chamber Chat Podcast. We have quite the bio. Vin. Well,

Glenn Hamer 4:33
Brandon, I am 125 years old. Right. Thanks for having me on. I appreciate your program.

Brandon Burton 4:40
Absolutely. I’ve been looking forward we’ve been working to get you on the podcast for some time. You’re busy man all over the big state of Texas. Fed. Glad to have you on and want to give you an opportunity to say hello to all the chamber champions that are out there listening and share something interesting then we can get to know you a little bit better.

Glenn Hamer 4:58
Well, hello Brandon. And the first thing I’ll say that our mission, these people ask, how’s our chamber different than a lot of the other chambers? Well, we’re united in the sense that we’re all part of the chamber community. And in my opinion, the the chambers are one of the most important civic institutions on the planet today. And one of and certainly one of the best respected, you do any sort of poll. And the second that you identify as a chamber, you have credibility with people of all different political persuasions, at the Texas State Chamber, our mission. And our purpose is to champion the best business climate in the world unleashing the power of free enterprise to enhance lives for generations. And, you know, Texas here, here’s for all of our listeners, all the listeners and people watching this podcast across the country. Here’s the truth, as and I say, this is a guy who came from Arizona, Texas is not a state, it’s a country. It’s a big place. And everywhere that I go, there’s great optimism about where this state is going, and the power of of of chambers to enact meaningful change.

Brandon Burton 6:19
Absolutely. And, you know, to be clear, Glenn has a job to do. You know, he promotes Business and Economic Development and so forth throughout Texas. But as a fellow Texan, I deeply appreciate it. So thank you, Glenn. But why don’t you tell us a little bit more about what the Texas Association business does as you work with local chambers? And what is the scope you shared kind of the the mission statement there, but what kind of work are you involved with?

Glenn Hamer 6:45
Well, in terms of you, you hit on a number of the things that we were able to contribute to over the last couple of years in Texas, but we’re an advocacy group and our our charge is to keep Texas, the most competitive state in the country to do business. So we’re located right across from the state capitol. So our day job is really to advocate for for the meat and potato issues that benefit businesses of all kinds from every part of this state. So for example, you mentioned unemployment insurance. Well, we felt the need to get engaged in this because if we weren’t able to get state allocation of funds to replenish our state’s on an uninsurance Trust Fund, it could have meant increases of up to 300% for our businesses across the state of Texas. So working with the governor working with the legislature working with chambers across the state of Texas, where we were able to get something done to avoid what could have been very large tax increases. That’s, that’s one example of how we work we work with our chamber partners to enact meaningful policy changes at primarily at the Texas State Capitol. We also do get involved from time to time on local matters, and increasingly, on federal matters, particularly when it comes to trade and National Immigration Policy.

Brandon Burton 8:20
Very good. That definitely helps to set the table. Right. Well that will focus our discussion today around more so how a local chamber can work with their state chamber on some of these bigger issues. And we’ll dive into that discussion as soon as we get back from this quick break.

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Richard Scully 9:48
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Donna Novitsky 10:32
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Brandon Burton 11:29
All right, Glenn, we’re back. So as I mentioned before the break, we’ll be talking about how a local chamber can work more with their their State Chamber and I loved as I went through your bio, you make it a point to visit as many local Chambers as anyone else on the planet. I’m curious if you’ve been keeping count of all your visits, you get around to like you said Texas is a country not a state.

Glenn Hamer 11:54
Yeah, it’s it’s it well, I’m usually meeting outside of Austin with a couple of chambers in Texas every week. And then also because our legislature is in session this year, that legislature in Texas meets every other year, we have many chambers that are coming to the state capitol. So and we always welcome our our local chamber partners in in terms of how chambers can get involved. And whether you’re in Texas, Arizona, Michigan, or you name the state, the best way to do that is generally speaking changed, State Chambers will have advocacy committees and State Chambers will, for example, the state art State Chamber, we have a biweekly call with Chambers from across the state of Texas, where we’re simply able to discuss advocacy, we’ll we’ll talk about the top items that are on our agenda. And we’ll also solicit items that are on the agendas of our local chamber of partners. Those are critical because State Chambers, by and large are going to be focused on advocacy. By and large, they’re going to be in the state capitol. And they are always eager to have the help and assistance and input from local chamber partners across the state. The reason why is it’s generally speaking, it’s the local chambers that have the best relationships with their elected officials from their respective areas.

Brandon Burton 13:29
Right. So an advocacy is so huge as the State Chamber and I think of all these local chambers, some of these, you know, chambers that are being run by one staff or part time staff and some situation situations. Advocacy can seem like something really tough for them to take on and handle. So how would you suggest for maybe a small chamber like that to get involved with their chamber and to get involved with advocacy where they might be a bit intimidated on the thought of it?

Glenn Hamer 13:59
Good? Great question. The first thing I would do would be to connect with the State Chamber and see what are the high level agenda items of that state chamber because our job is to make sure that the policy items that we’re championing have broad benefits. They’re they’re not the types of things that just benefit one industry, or one part of the state, the core items of a State Chamber agenda are going to be benefit beneficial across the board. And then what will generally happen and this is the case with us with the Texas Association of Business is we encourage Chambers from around the state to sign on and to support the agenda that we crafted by the way crafted with the help of a lot of chamber leaders from across the state as well as other business leaders. So the easiest way would be to contact State Chamber and to say What’s your business agenda and then to see from those items, the the top ones that would be of interest to that community. One quick example, we’re advocating on behalf of increased funding tied to increased results. For our great community college system in the state of Texas, we have 50 community colleges in Texas, there was just a very important report that was released, in terms of the need for additional funding tied to performance metrics, that practically is going to mean an ASQ of about $650 million from the legislature, it has the support of the leadership in the legislature, the governor is supportive of increased opportunities for community colleges. And the key now is getting as many chambers as possible from around the state rallying around that, that has broad benefit. And a smaller chamber, even a mom and pop shop, could simply lend their logo, to the advocacy materials that are likely being led by the State Chamber.

Brandon Burton 16:13
I love that that kind of leads into what I was going to say or bring up next, which is if you are one of these smaller chambers and trying to communicate value to your members of the work that you’re doing beyond, you know what they see on a day to day basis on Main Street or wherever you’re located, to be able to communicate that value through those efforts that you’re making with advocacy. It sounds like Texas Association of Business provides some of this material they can send out to local chambers to be able to help communicate some of that value and the work and the momentum, I’ll say that the chambers are trying to get behind and building bigger numbers together to be a larger voice at the Capitol.

Glenn Hamer 16:59
coalition’s are so important, we get asked by lawmakers all the time, you know, how do other business groups how to other chambers, particularly in their communities look at up look at it a policy. And your chances of getting that lawmaker to agree, increased dramatically. If you have the support of the local chambers. And Brandon, this probably this will just give sort of a sense. It’s I know it’s not coming off well, because of our background. But these are our core priorities for this legislative session. And, you know, be happy to share them with you. Because it’s a pretty good model of how most State Chambers operate in terms of putting together core actionable agenda items that generally speaking most chamber small, medium or large, would support.

Brandon Burton 17:50
Yeah, if you could share that with this. Since this is a primarily an audio podcast, I can share that in the show notes so our listeners can can pull that up and see some of those main points that you guys are covering this legislative session. But yeah, having those coalition’s I couldn’t agree more. It’s a it’s key for building building a bigger voice. Yeah.

Glenn Hamer 18:13
And Brennan, I also want to say is that you know, the day job for the for the smaller chambers of keeping the communities connected and keeping their businesses as healthy as possible and giving them increase opportunities to to earn and provide opportunities for the workers and the and the people the community. That’s, that’s noble work. And and, you know, that’s important, we don’t do that activity. That is that is incredibly important. Our job is on the policy side. So wherever we can help for those chambers that are doing such a great job of keeping their communities going. It’s our small part, our small contribution to their great efforts.

Brandon Burton 18:56
So I’m curious for myself on it from a state perspective, are you reaching out to the local chambers to see what issues what advocacy efforts are important to them? Are they coming to you? Or do they come to you? And then you put it out more broadly across the state? How does that communication flow?

Glenn Hamer 19:14
It’s it’s really two ways. And you know, Brian, and I think we met at the Texas Chamber of Commerce executive meeting in Rockwall, a year or so ago. And that was an opportunity where we had a number of advocacy sessions where we had a chance to talk about the items that we thought were going to be important to the next legislature. And our chamber partners also had the opportunity to talk to us about what was important, and I’ll give an example of where this two way conversation is so important. When I go around the state of Texas, I pick up different themes in terms of what different communities share in common. The number one issue number one issue Far and Away. Drumroll please workforce doesn’t matter where I go, its workforce, there’s the need for better skilled workers that meet the needs of the modern economy and more workers. So how does that practically translate to our work? Well, it translates in that we need more career and technical education in our high schools. We need the community college curriculums to be tighter, more tightly aligned with work with the workforce, which which they are being as we speak. And it also means we need more workers. You know, we have two jobs open basically, for every job opened in this country, even with, you know, higher interest rates and the economy slowing in certain areas doesn’t feel like that’s the case in Texas, by the way. But we have more jobs open and people to fill them. So we need more workers. So that’s why we fight for good federal immigration reform, better visa programs, as well as Second Chance hiring, you know, for people that have served their time in the state of Texas, we want to provide a path where they can productively reenter society, and contribute. So we came up with our agenda really based largely on many conversations with our local chamber partners.

Brandon Burton 21:20
Fantastic. Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. So just having those conversations to be able to see what what is. Those are the key issues in a community and to be able to see, okay, this has a trend throughout the state. And like you said, workforce, anywhere you go, that, obviously is something that needs to have more focused attention. And then there’s all the different layers to the workforce, right. So you can peel the layers and the layers of the onion and get real deep on that

Glenn Hamer 21:48
lot of layers. There’s the higher ed, there’s childcare layers, there’s, there’s, you know, even, you know, we’ve like most chambers, particularly where there’s a strong rural population, things like broadband infrastructure pop up, you know, it depends, you know, on a state like Texas, Brandon, we’re about 900 to 1000 people move here on net each day. That’s a staggering number. You know, that also impacts the agenda items and makes things like expanded infrastructure, more important than it might be in in some other states.

Brandon Burton 22:31
No, it’s true. And we see like you mentioned broadband, we see that like, through COVID, when schools are forced to do you know, remote learning and whatnot, you see the strain on the broadband system and networks. And if we’re really going to be able to grow and continue to have that sustained growth, we need to be able to look at some of these things on the horizon before they become a big issue.

Glenn Hamer 22:53
Well, exactly, and that’s another one where just having these conversations with our chamber partners has made a has made a huge difference. There are certain communities that I go into where broadband is an issue, but it’s not the issue, or maybe not even top three or four b Why? Because it’s penetrated the community. It’s just not an issue. But there’s other times where I go into rural Texas, where this is the issue, and you know, whether it’s education or telehealth, you know, things that a lot of us take for granted. If you don’t have a, if you don’t have that strong internet connection today, it’s difficult to fully participate in, in the modern economy.

Brandon Burton 23:41
Absolutely. And I almost wonder, I mean, it is direct directly related to workforce as well. But you see more the connectivity and then people feel like they don’t need to go into an office. It is the dominoes in the in the layers, the end. So it just it just keeps going.

Glenn Hamer 23:56
I’ll just say for the listeners out there, you should, if you can, health wise, go in. And it has a lot of benefits socially. You also think about downtown’s and you know, a lot of the businesses that have suffered because people haven’t been into into normal work areas. Zoom and other types of things like that are very good tools. But there is absolutely nothing that replaces human interaction. And commercially it’s very important and I’ll tell you employers are telling me left and right we want our workforce back back in person with more flexibility, but by and large back in person.

Brandon Burton 24:44
Yeah. No, I would totally agree with that. There’s benefits and and there’s ways to leverage it but but where I can to be there in person for sure. Well, Glenn, I like asking everyone I have on the show if for A listener who is at a local chamber, they want to take their chamber up to the next level, what tips or action items might you have for to suggest to them to be able to do that?

Glenn Hamer 25:10
Join, the first thing that I would say is that most states have at a Texas Chamber of Commerce executive platform of some point of some sort, that is vitally important. We’re very lucky here that we have such an entity it’s run by Drew Chevrolet, who is a chamber veteran. This is this is important because it goes well, the advocacy is not the main feature of this organization, it’s how to run a chamber, it’s how to put together staff, it’s how to do board meetings, it’s how to have the correct bylaws, the first thing is you have to make sure that you have a structurally sound organization. So I would say whatever state you’re in, is, please join whatever that entity is, of chamber executives, that that’s a must had, particularly if you’re a mom and pop, but chamber.

Brandon Burton 26:04
Absolutely. In fact, when I started this podcast, I came from the chamber publishing industry. And as I’d go around, I would meet small chambers that would really struggle, I’d meet other chambers that were they may be small, too, but they were doing really well. And I started the podcast as a way of sharing some good practices, best practices and ways of doing things. And then I found out that those ones that were really struggling, weren’t members of their state association. And that is such a key tip right there. And there’s other resources, but you can’t overlook the value of the state association. Well,

Glenn Hamer 26:39
and it’s the peer network, that’s very important. So you know, it’s socially brand. And we we got together and, you know, it’s it’s a social situation, you get to meet your peers, and you get to share different ideas. And in the chamber world, we all sort of joke, one version or another. There’s no pride and authorship, we steal each other’s good stuff all the time. And we try to avoid the pitfalls all the time as well. So joining that type of organization and participating, and having colleagues that can help you. We all need help. I mean, I’ll just say, you know, I’ve been doing this for a long time. I rely on a network of chamber leaders across the country, and across the state of Texas to help me and I’ve been doing this for a while. So, you know, build, join the right organizations get engaged, and it will pay massive dividends. And it will be fun.

Brandon Burton 27:37
Yeah, well, that peer network brings different perspectives than what you see yourself. And it lets you be able to see the world through different eyes and come to better solutions. So chamber leaders

Glenn Hamer 27:47
are fun people,

Brandon Burton 27:49
they are there. Yep. Exactly. So Glen, I like asking, as we look to the future of chambers of commerce, how do you see the future of chambers in their purpose going forward?

Glenn Hamer 28:03
Very bright. We know that, unfortunately, so many major institutions in this country have taken a hit in terms of the public’s credibility. chambers are one of the few institutions where if anything, it, it pulls chamber work polls higher today than it did in past years. And here’s the reason why, if you think about it, just about every person in the country has some sort of association with some sort of chamber and their community. And it’s probably a very positive one. Because chambers really exist to support their business communities, which are supporting their communities, they may be supporting the local hospital, they may be supporting little egg chambers in this country are one of the backbones that make, in my opinion, America, the greatest country in the history of the world. So I want to thank all of the chamber leaders from all around the country who are engaged in this work. It’s honorable, it’s inspirational, and you’re a critical part of what is keeping America together during a very difficult time.

Brandon Burton 29:17
Amen to that. And that’s, that’s why I’ve grasped on to the chamber industry myself is just I see that value that these chambers all across the country provide and providing better lives for their communities.

Glenn Hamer 29:29
And Brandon, what you do is vitally important because it creates a record where we could all learn from from each other.

Brandon Burton 29:38
I appreciate that. That’s the hope that’s the goal is to get it out there and everybody takes some tidbits from from each episode. Glenn, I wanted to give you a chance to share any contact information for listeners who want to reach out and connect with you and learn more about what the Texas Association of Business has to offer or anything in general that you’ve touched on today. What would be the best way for them? I have to reach out and connect

Glenn Hamer 30:02
sure to two ways my cell phone is the best way to reach me. And that’s 737-336-6590. The second best way is my email, ghamer@txbiz.org cell is far better. I sometimes joke if you don’t want me to see something emailed to me, because I get a little bit over loaded there. But I’m pretty responsive when it comes to people texting me,

Brandon Burton 30:31
man I lucked out, then we set this up over email and he happened to see it. This is great. Well, thank you, Glenn. I appreciate you setting aside some time to join us today here on chamber chat podcast and to touch on this topic of how local chambers can get more involved with their state chambers. I think it’s such important work and to really, even at the local level to take on that work of advocacy and and really communicating that value to members and community at large. So thank you so much.

Glenn Hamer 31:01
Thanks for having me on.

Brandon Burton 31:03
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Innovative Partnerships with Kris Adams

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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.

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 0:38
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 0:54
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Our guest for this episode is Kris Adams. Kris is the is with the Greater Bentonville Area Chamber of Commerce as the director of Northwest Arkansas Technology Summit, Kris comes to the chamber from a career of service with nonprofit organizations. Prior to joining the chamber team, he served as the director of development for restoration village, a local Women and Children’s Shelter. He holds a master’s degree in Strategic Communication from Arkansas State University, a Master’s of divinity degree from Union Presbyterian seminary, and an undergraduate degree in religion from Liberty University. Kris believes that technology can be a force for good to improve the lives of everyone.

Kris, I’m excited to have you with us today here on Chamber Chat Podcast, I’d love for you to take a moment to say hello to all the Chamber Champions that are listening and share something interesting about yourself so we can all get to know you a little better.

Kris Adams 1:59
Hi, everyone, it’s a pleasure to be part of the podcast and know the interesting thing about me that was alluded to and my introduction is I know that a lot of us come to chamber life from from different backgrounds. And mine took a really interesting route through really starting off with schooling and training in religious studies and theological studies, which I know sounds like an odd mix to jump into technology, and chamber work. But really, it’s all about community building, about finding ways to engage with people, break down barriers and get people to collaborate together. And so it was a really good sort of start and set up to get me ready for the work that I’m doing today here in Bentonville,

Brandon Burton 2:44
right. No, I there’s a lot of similarities, I believe with religion and churches and the structure of community is in crosses over into chamber work to build communities and strengthen each other. So absolutely. I see the parallels there. So why don’t you take a moment to share us with us a little bit about the Bentonville Area Chamber of Commerce for those who’ve been listening to the podcast for a while may remember, we had Graham cod, who was the former President CEO of Bentonville chamber on an episode 114, where he talked about the value of placemaking in your community. But Kris, tell us is kind of the scope of work for the Bentonville chamber size, budget staff, that sort of thing. Just to give us some perspective. Yeah.

Kris Adams 3:35
The greater Bentonville Area Chamber of Commerce is situated in the northwest corner of Arkansas. Our claim to fame is that we are the home of Walmart, Tyson Foods and JB Hunt. It’s a it’s a wonderful community that really most people don’t even realize exists until they come out and visit and see really what we’re known for. But beyond those big local players, one of the big draws to Northwest Arkansas is of course the university that is in Fayetteville, and we’re getting to be known as the mountain biking capital of the world. So it’s a really picturesque part of the natural state if you’ve never heard of it before. Our chamber has about 1100 members with a retention rate of about 88%. We have a budget of about 1.8 million and a seven person team guiding the ship and moving things forward here in the greater Bentonville area.

Brandon Burton 4:38
And I can attest to it. I’ve been to Bentonville several times and it is a beautiful place. And really you guys have a great corner there in Northwest Arkansas. So we had a kind of a roundabout way how we got to having Kris on the podcast. So I’ll give just a little bit of background last year at the Mako conference One of his colleagues, former colleagues, Andre, I had was part of one of his breakout sessions. And he spoke a lot about technology and how their chambers implementing a lot of these systems and whatnot into their, their office into their, their ecosystem there. And I had reached out to Andre and found out that he was no longer at the chamber. And as we got talking, he’s like, You really need to talk to Kris, like Kris is working with the, with the Northwest Arkansas Technology Summit. And he’s really, you know, a big driver for a lot of these things that we’re doing and that we’re involved with. So Kris is here with us today, we’re going to focus our conversation around technology around you know, some of these things that can be implemented at your chamber, but also, and probably more, more of a focus around partnerships that you can make with those in your region in your city and your community around innovation. So we will dive in deeper on this topic as soon as we get back from this quick break.

Richard Scully 7:16
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Donna Novitsky 8:00
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 8:56
All right, Kris, we’re back. As I mentioned before the break, we will be talking about innovative partnerships. So I’d like to learn more, and maybe have you you know, tell the audience what the Northwest Arkansas Technology Summit is to kind of give us an idea of of what that’s all about. And maybe that will kind of guide us in the direction as to developing those partnerships.

Kris Adams 9:21
Absolutely. The NWA Tech Summit, as we call it for short. Started 10 years ago, this will be our 10th year going in. And it serves as the premiere Technology Conference in the heartland. And it originally began as a collaborative work of small business owners and leaders in the local community who wanted to get together to talk technology and really discuss how they could stay ahead of the curve with all the different things, excuse me all the different things that were happening in the tech world that was impacting their businesses, and over the years it’s grown exponentially from this grassroots level work to include all of our larger local corporations, Walmart, Tyson, JB Hunt, the University of Arkansas, to include a lot of the tech players who have hubs and offices in this area, and do business with those groups. Everyone from Google to Intel and IBM, Red Hat, and Microsoft. And what’s really a joy is to see how all these different tech companies collaborate and work together through our committee through our planning, and in the conference itself, to put together just some stellar content that is applicable for everyone from high school students that attend all the way up through CEOs of these organizations that join us at the event. The event itself is multi day and runs about we had over 1700 Total registered attendees last year, about 137 presenters and 27 states beyond Arkansas were represented in our attendance. Wow. So that’s the event in a nutshell.

Brandon Burton 11:07
Yeah, that’s quite the scope. So the origins for it What? What was the kickoff to say we need to formalize a summit around technology here in Northwest Arkansas?

Kris Adams 11:20
Well, 10 years ago, we would have been coming on the back end of things like the the.com, boom and of the 90s. And watching Social Media sort of just in its heyday. And I know a lot of organizations were trying to figure out, you know, beyond those things, what was what was coming down the pike, I think one of the early slogans of the tech summit was this tagline of what’s next after next. And not just this idea of being prepared for the future, but being prepared for what’s what’s after the immediate future. And coming in the next three to five to seven years. And in our area, with the organizations and companies involved supply chain has always been a tremendous issue. And really COVID helped bring that again to the forefront of a lot of discussions. And so a lot of our technology, discussions revolve around ideas of supply chain mobility, how to how to stay relevant in those areas where we’re just seeing massive changes and shifts in technology impacting companies, both large and small, in our area and beyond.

Brandon Burton 12:35
So as you as you guys have developed this Tech Summit and in develop some of these partnerships, and are you needing to reach out to some of these businesses to be involved, or imagine you’ve got several of them kind of knocking on your door at this point, saying we want to be involved, how’s that developed?

Kris Adams 12:54
Well, you know, it’s really interesting how some of these relationships develop organically. One of the interesting bits of news that happened this last year was about some of the partnerships being developed between the state of Arkansas and Oklahoma, specifically in the area of new mobility and future mobility. So things like autonomous drones, drone delivery, there’s a good working relationship happening between the two states, as you know, we’re really trying to be a part of that push into what’s coming next for delivering goods, transforming the way we think about how you get places and move things. And, you know, we have good friends connected to the to the summit over in Tulsa through Tulsa innovation labs, and some of those partnerships that and the things that they’re working on over there. They just lend themselves to really great organic connections, where we’re doing a lot of the same work less than two hours away. And we see it as a really an opportunity to be collaborative partners and help further this conversation that can better benefit both of our areas, really the region as a whole, this northwest corner of Arkansas, and the quarter of Oklahoma that includes Tulsa, and then up into Missouri as well. And we even see some attend from Kansas City. So there’s this really unique desire to see this little corner of the world that we’re in this region here in the heartland develop and become our thought leader. Some have already started saying that they want to see this area become the Silicon Valley of mobility, specifically that that’s a goal for Arkansas. And I think that’s an A wonderfully ambitious goal. And so as we’re all trying to chase some of these shared dreams and visions for what technology can do for our local areas, it just makes so much more sense to collaborate together to share our thought leaders and our innovative approaches, so that we can all learn from each other and better that from the the insights that each of us are gaining.

Brandon Burton 15:03
Right? So you mentioned about the Tulsa innovation lab. So that being a partnership and collaborative partnership, how is that? Is it a formal partnership structure? How is how are these relationships built and developed?

Kris Adams 15:20
Yeah, a lot of these organizations come on to our event as sponsors or providers of content. They help us put together dynamic presentations that really speak into, you know, what their organizations are. Experts in Tulsa innovation labs spoke both on these automated delivery systems like drones, but they’re also well known for cybersecurity and the work that they do, trying to research how to keep platforms secure. And so their unique spin on content for us was, how to secure those autonomous drones and what that looks like in the future. And so, really, it’s it’s this unique play of us figuring out who’s the experts in which area, and getting them to be able to share to a crowd of individuals who probably have some really interesting perspectives on how they, they might be able to roll out things like this for their organization, and get them to share their insight and their wealth of knowledge. So that we can all kind of learn together from the best of the best that are already doing the work. So they provide a really unique and interesting viewpoints. When they come to speak, we have another good working relationship with a lot of our public school systems. in Bentonville, there is a program for juniors and seniors called Ignite, where it is technical training everything from kids who are juniors and seniors getting their licensure and certifications to be able to work in the hospitals, to getting their FAA certifications that they can get at 16, to fly drones, to all sorts of other business marketing type innovations. And we actually had students from that group come and present at the Tech Summit to speak about the innovation that they’re learning about. And we had some of our partnering companies then present to this same group of students, how they could move up throughout their careers in the area, through getting internships, finding ways to get into their company, post college, and then the careers that they could eventually have and stay and live and work in this area for some of these larger organizations that call the greater Bentonville area home. So there are some really unique partnerships that we develop that we highlighted the Tech Summit where everyone shares their expertise, and kind of their niche for what they do in tech and how it benefits the community.

Brandon Burton 17:58
Right. So as you’re talking, I’m thinking not necessarily every chamber needs or can even justify doing a Tech Summit, right? Every chamber is different. You’ve seen one chamber, you’ve seen one chamber, right? But as you look at your community, what is that thing that you can get behind? What is that thing that is unique to your region, to your community that you can maybe build some sort of a summit like this, where you can develop those partnerships, because really, what it comes down to is, as Kris is just talking about these things, and partnering with the school district, you’re you’re working on economic development, you’re working on workforce and talent attraction, and in recruitment, and really just continuing to build your region and and attracting people to it. There in Bentonville just happens to be around technology. But it’s exciting. Everybody likes to learn what the latest and greatest what the next next. That’s right.

Kris Adams 18:57
You know, I think you hit the nail on the head. You know, it’s not that the goal is to replicate a tech summit at every chamber. I think the goal is to really listen to your your Chamber members and your constituency to find out more about them about what they do, and what they’re, what their commonalities are, what binds them together. And where were those shared threads of interest and expertise, because that’s really how the Tech Summit developed was, it was a natural fit for the organizations and members in our area. And so I think that the chambers do well to really listen to their members to get to know them, to find out what their passions and their interests are, what what are they working on that gets them excited and gets them up in the morning and then trying to see where that connects with all those organizations that are part of your membership that you know, maybe your top 10% of engaged members, you know, what is it that that is that commonality between all of them And then trying to build something big and unique based on that, because where there’s a shared love, and a shared passion and a shared interest, that’s when it’s going to be most natural, and people will get behind it so much quicker. I think you hit the nail on the head there.

Brandon Burton 20:14
And maybe continuing on this thread. There in Bentonville. You’d mentioned Walmart, JB Hunt, you know, you got some big companies that logistics and transportation that are their big issues and ways that need to be, you know, innovative going forward. So for the listeners, if you look in your community, think of who are your major employers? Who are those big manufacturing firms in your area? What other businesses support those other big manufacturers or big employers? And how can we align some of these resources to be able to help support them help support the community in general, because I see that kind of a model that you guys have taken here of saying, here’s the big industry in Bentonville. There’s a lot of other industries that support that. Now let’s build something that can support all of them to further develop and create a stronger community. So it correct me if I’m wrong, that sounds like the kind of a template that you guys follow.

Kris Adams 21:17
Oh, that’s, that’s absolutely it. And the beauty of it is to that there are just so many issues that revolve not just around around tech, but just workforce in general. It’s always about talent, attraction, retention, how to benefit not just all that the larger organizations, but the small to mid sized, that are participating in the community as well. And then really assisting those who need help getting access to to be part of this community group, you know, we provide through the Tech Summit, complimentary access to students, educators, entrepreneurs, military and veterans, really just trying to be able to bring the community together around the things that unite us, even those who may not necessarily have thought they could have access to something at this level, and making sure that they feel included and that they can be part of the conversation as well.

Brandon Burton 22:12
Yeah. And I think we’re you guys have really, you know, struck gold, we’ll say or struck oil struggled. For you guys a strike oil is where you found that niche for those those companies in your region. But you, you found that common ground that people can get excited about, you know, people want to sponsor the event, people want to show up, they want to learn they want to know what’s going on. So again, for those listening, what can you build excitement for? But maybe let’s, let’s talk more about the tech summit itself. So you had mentioned it being the largest event of the year for you guys 10 years into it? You obviously have sponsors for it. You mentioned how many people registered and attend and speakers. As far as putting on that event, so it’s multi day? are you renting out facilities? Are you selling tickets to different events within it? Are you just tell us more of the structure of the event itself?

Kris Adams 23:13
Yeah, so the events really revolves around a simple structure for programming. When we do plenary sessions, it’s everybody either all in one room, or all watching one group of people and then a live stream of that to all our other sites. That’s why we did it multisite last year, and focusing just on one thing, one program happening at that moment. And then we do that for a couple sessions, and then move into our breakout sessions where we have multiple tracks going on at the same time. And those tracks then sort of revolve around whatever’s current and trending in tech. This year, we’re looking at some new tracks that we’re going to be bringing out to address sort of the innovation that’s happening now. And it’s in the news every day, we’re focusing on automation and AI, security and privacy, retail innovation, which is the perfect fit, knowing sort of our local community and makeup track on starting up and scaling up for entrepreneurs in the area. And then I track on data science, and analytics is really what we hope to put together. So the event revolves around those big large group sessions, smaller breakout sessions where you can dig in a little deeper on a specific topic. And then one of the things that we know all of our participating organizations love our demo boots, getting to showcase their products, their their toys, the cool things that they’re doing in tech. And so this year, we’re running with the theme of the year of the machines because we want to see everybody bring all their cool tech out last year. We had drone up bring one of their their drones to show off which they They’re a lot bigger than people imagine. They’re pretty hefty. For for flying around. It’s not the Toy Drones that buy off Amazon by any means. We had Tyson Foods bring out one of their robots that actually is automated and moves some of their chicken pieces. And they demoed that and show that off. We had a robotic dog that came out last year, from our friends up near Joplin, Missouri. They came down with some of that really cool tech, people who were really concerned as to what was going on as we had two or three robotic dogs running around the square in downtown Bentonville. Tech Summit, people just haven’t seen that. And so it was, it was fascinating to see. And then, yeah, just lots of lots of cool things like that. Ganic, which if you don’t know them, they do autonomous vehicles, and delivery for Walmart. They’ve had one of their autonomous trucks that drives itself parked outside part of the Tech Summit so that people could take a look at it, and see all the cool little bells and whistles with that. Just fascinating piece of machinery. And just like that’s, I’m a tech fan. I look at something like that. And it scares the living daylights out of me, because I don’t I don’t understand how we even begin to piece something that complex together. Because it all relies even on the smallest of parts comes down to the cameras that read and interpret the road. And then all the sensors. Yeah, yeah. So it’s, it’s so it’s so much more interesting now that we’re post COVID We’re back fully in person. It’s it’s tech that you can touch, see and feel. And that’s really cutting edge and really just fascinating to, to see and hear people share their expertise about, you know, how it works, what it does, and why it’s so vital for what’s coming in the future.

Brandon Burton 26:54
Yeah, yeah, hearing about the the see touch and feel the technology, I can’t help but think of, you know, what used to be the world’s fairs, you know, people would come out to see the, you know, the first ferris wheel or the light bulb or the washing machine, you know, these these things that just blew your mind at the time. And now there’s, you know, technology, it seemed to kind of level out there for a while, and now we’re having more leaps and bounds and technology, and people are excited to see what the future holds. So I’m curious, how do you guys go about advertising the summit? How far reaching Do you try to attract people and vendors and sponsors and so forth,

Kris Adams 27:34
it’s really interesting part of it is that we’ll see a lot of natural growth that happens just as word spreads. As you know who’s coming on and who’s talking at the event. We were blessed this year to have some really high level presenters from Walmart and Tyson and Red Hat that had some great social followings that were kind enough, you know, to help share the event, promote it, we do a lot to promote it within the within the chamber itself to share it among our members. And then we we did some targeted email marketing, television spots, some partnerships with local other organizations, our chamber does not include our sort of tourism department visit Bentonville or our downtown area, which is downtown Bentonville, Inc. But we work collaboratively with them to help get the word out about the event and promote it to people who may be in the area to to those who live and work in Bentonville and make sure that it was on their radar. And so it was really a multi pronged approach as we tried to get the word out and make sure that people knew that the Tech Summit was happening. This year, we’re going to be doing a lot of the same and we really hope to capitalize on some of those people that have brand new tech looking to show it off, we’ll be reaching out to to new companies that that have that shiny, new, amazing toy that we really want to show off. And we hope that if there’s anybody listening, who’s got something like that, that maybe isn’t on our radar that they’d reach out as well. Get in touch with us and let us know what cool tech they’re playing around with. That would be a good fit to show off and demo and talk about at the Tech Summit.

Brandon Burton 29:25
I was waiting for you to come around today. You’re going on these podcasts and promoting it and advertising right. Now, as we start wrapping up here, Kris, I’d like asking everybody that have on the show if you know from the things that you’ve experienced and learned in your time with the chamber, what might be a tip or an action item that you could share with listeners who are interested in taking their chamber up to the next level?

Kris Adams 29:52
You know, I am I’m a fan of always being willing to to take other people’s opinions and insights and perspectives into putting together an event like this, I think that, you know, when we silo ourselves to a couple people to a couple of voices, we can end up with with events that are good, but really don’t reflect the broader creativity that exists when we engage in dialogue with others. And so whether it’s me being the crazy one around the office, shouting ideas into the sounding board and trying to get feedback from my wonderful team, that seriously has no end to great insights, that they’ve spoken into this event, to our committee, our chairs, some of the local players, you know, in specific tech areas, you know, just asking them, you know, hey, what do you think about this track? How can we make it better? What can we do to get really on point with our pro, excuse me our programming, because that’s not my area of expertise. I think dialogue like that is crucial, because that dialogue just makes everything so much more robust and stellar, as we get different opinions, different insights, different voices, at the conversation table to make things more diverse, more interesting, and really make it more collaborative people. People want to come to something that they’ve had a part in building. And so that’s, that would be my challenge. And tip is to engage as many as you can bring as many seats and voices to the table as possible, because you’ll be surprised at how how creative and wonderful people are in contributing to an event like this if just given the opportunity to

Brandon Burton 31:44
Yeah, yeah, embrace that. The ability to be a convener, I would say, yeah. And to be able to lean on the counsel of others to be able to develop something great. So the other question, I like asking, and I’m curious to hear what your response would be being that you’re, you’re tied in so much with the technology space. But as we look to the future, how do you see the future of chambers and their purpose going forward?

Kris Adams 32:15
No, I think the future of chambers is it really, it’s going to parallel a lot of what we see in technology, chambers are going to need to find ways to position themselves as as useful. And as current with what’s happening in the world around them. We’ve, we’ve seen technology come and go so much quicker than we ever have before. We were joking around when we were talking about the tech summit about how fun would it be? We do giveaways of like tech prizes, you know, like VR headset or something like that. We said, How funny would it be if we gave away as gag gifts, like some of the old outdated tech that either never took off? Or that only those of us of like a certain age would remember like it would be great to give out a Walkman. Because it’s no dated now. And I think that that that’s like the prime example of, you know, what, what chambers have to do, they have to find ways to stay current to stay moving forward. And really to think bold, and, you know, dare to dream some of these really high and lofty dreams for how they can continue to best serve their members in in ways that maybe they hadn’t before. I think that’s going to be the continued push for not just chambers, but for all organizations is how do we stay relevant and move forward with the times while maintaining our identity and for chambers, our identities and our it’s not just in our chamber, but it’s in our members in our local communities. And I think that’s that’s the tension that we’ve got,

Brandon Burton 33:42
for sure. Yeah, the the old piece of tech that came to my mind was remember the old Sony memory sticks like not a card but a memory stick that Sony had. But I think you guys should do that you should start collecting the Walkmans and disc men’s and the CD, all kinds of good speakers, the mini disc players, laser disc players. Yeah, just you guys can have a great pool of prizes. So yeah. They might be valuable at this point to I don’t know,

Kris Adams 34:10
it could be collector’s items. You never know. That’s right.

Brandon Burton 34:13
Well, Kris, if anyone listening wanted to reach out and connect with you learn more about the tech summit or anything you guys have gone on there and Bentonville what would be the best way for them to reach out and connect.

Kris Adams 34:23
Yeah, if you want to learn more about the event, you can visit NWA tech summit.com To learn more about our chamber you can visit greater bentonville.com to connect with me directly. You can find me on LinkedIn or you can shoot me an email at Kay Adams at greater bentonville.com I love to talk tech with you about chamber things in general and religious Get Connected always. Like I mentioned always want to hear another great voice and opinion to chime in to the conversation. Who knows what a great idea you might have to share. Love to hear it.

Brandon Burton 34:55
Awesome. Well, we will get all of your contact info in our show notes for this Episodes and people can look it up and reach out and connect with you. But, Kris, I really appreciate you setting aside some time and joining us today on Chamber Chat Podcast and sharing about the exciting things going on with the NWA Tech Summit. And things you guys have gone on there in the Bentonville chamber. I really appreciate it. Thank you, Brandon.

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Merging Organizations for a Stronger Community with Kim Casko

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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 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.

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Our guest for this episode is Kim Casko. Kim has been the president and CEO of the Iowa City Area Business Partnership and September 2016. Prior to that Kim worked for AT as an organizational effectiveness program manager. She also held positions as assistant director for Change Management at the University of Illinois, Career Advisor at the University of Maryland, and management consultant at Price Waterhouse Coopers originally from New York Kim holds a bachelor’s degree in management and psychology from Bucknell University in Pennsylvania and a master’s degree in higher education administration from Northwestern University in Illinois. Kim currently resides in Iowa City with her husband John dog, Rocky and cats. Omi and Tanis. She serves on the boards for the Iowa City Area Development Group Iowa city downtown district Mercy Hospital and ACCE she’s quite proud of that last one. Kim is passionate about leadership development at the individual team organizational and community levels. She enjoys anything food related, sitting on her front porch and making project plans. Kim, 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 that are out there listening and share something interesting about yourself so you can get to know you a little better.

Kim Casko 2:36
Sure, well hello everyone. And thanks Brandon so much for having me on. It’s so good to meet you want to be here today. Pash something interesting about myself. I guess. One of the the jobs that wasn’t highlighted in my bio is that I did a part time stint at our local animal shelter. When I first moved to town and learned a lot for that job. From that job. I got a passion for rescue animals. And you know, oftentimes in my current role, there’s just some parallels in terms of animal animal behavior like herding cats, right? Redirecting dog behavior that actually comes in handy in the current job. But out of that job, I did get a my dog rocky that you referenced in my bio, who came into the shelter with all four legs, but one was badly damaged and the shelter bed had to take it off. And then I fostered him and never gave him back. So three legged dog named Rocky and then about a year ago now I rescued a cat and her pack of kittens from our neighborhood and had them in my office for about six weeks, which was interesting. And then one of keeping the mom and one of the kittens that’s only in Tanis.

Brandon Burton 3:55
My youngest daughter would love to have a cat and one of some of our best friends. You know, it got a litter of kittens, and they keep trying to tell us my wife is severely allergic. So it’s never gonna happen or else you know, my wife would have to move out of the house. So my poor daughter, you know that she was in a tough spot. That’s right. She would love nothing more than to have a cat but yeah. Well tell us a little bit about the Iowa City area business partnership just to give us an idea of, you know, size, scope of work, staff budget, just to give us some perspective before we get into our discussion today.

Kim Casko 4:32
Sure. So we are Chamber of Commerce. we’ve rebranded and changed our name in 2022, the Irish city area business partnership right before COVID hit, which is a whole nother story, but we’ve had approximately 750 members. We’re located in Iowa City and downtown Iowa City which is the home of the University of Iowa. We are the only chamber in our county which is John In County, which is approximately 155,000 people, it’s the fourth most populous county in Iowa. Our budget is approximately 875,000. And we have a staff of five full time awesome team members. And we’ve got two folks on part time contracts. And it’s actually great because they’re folks from one’s from our CVB. So we’ve got a little bit of staff sharing going on. And she’s supporting our community leadership program. And the other is from this our Cedar Rapids Metro Economic Alliance, which is a chamber economic development group to the north. And we’ve got someone helping us with our advocacy work there. So have some good friends and partners in terms of staffing support.

Brandon Burton 5:46
Very good. I like that idea that those part time contracts and being able to leverage abilities with other organizations. And I think it kind of leads well into our discussion for today, our topic will be we’ll be discussing our main topic today being merging organizations for a stronger community. And I think there’s multiple ways to go about this different types of organizations that might be worthwhile looking at a merge together. But I know you guys have recently got approval for a merge. So we will dive into more of that story and how that came to be as soon as we get back from this quick break.

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All right, Kim, we’re back. Before the break we’ve mentioned that you guys just recently got approval from your board to to move forward with a merger tell us who’s the merge with how did that develop? How did it come to be and you know, where do you see the need for this to develop this way?

Kim Casko 9:30
Sure. Well, the the best way for me to answer that is actually to tell a little story here. And actually the story starts in 1901 so bear with me will join me quick here but I’m in 1901 was when the chamber was first established. It was established as the Iowa City commercial club and then eventually evolved to become a chamber of commerce. And then eventually He developed, you know, sub committees and one of those sub committees was the Tourism Committee, which got spun off in the mid 1980s. That is now our CVB. And that’s because a hotel motel tax referendum was passed. So that their their own 501 C six entity, we also had another committee of the chamber that was the Economic Development Committee, that also spun off in the mid 1980s, as I think happened with a lot of chambers, and so that they could focus on recruiting businesses to town. So those two entities spun off. And then I think as many of us know, like, as time you know, moved along, like those, those two entities, CVB, economic development organizations focused externally bringing visitors bringing businesses to town. But over time, you know, within those industries, they realized, well, if you build it, they will come, you know, and focusing more on developing the community and making this a great place for visitors to come to and for businesses to establish themselves and grow here. And so, you know, over time, they start focusing more on that work. And, and chambers have always been involved in that that space, quality of life and placemaking. And so, hence, a lot of our community development work started to overlap. Simultaneously, we had a couple of other economic development entities that started cropping up in the 2000s. One was the Iowa city downtown district, which is a self supported municipal improvement district. And then the other is a regional partnership between our economic development organization and a combined chamber eto to the north, to create regional focus on talent attraction. And so you know, the space, the economic development space in the work, we do just started to shift and become more and more about community development. So we actually, in 2018, and it’s been explored even a couple times before 2018, as we hear from our past chairs, in terms of bringing together our organization and our economic development group, it’s a 2018 was the last time we looked at that I’ve been in this role since 2016. So it was kind of early in my tenure. And we decided not to move forward on a formal merger at the time, because there were several things going on in the environment, one of which was kind of bringing together this regional group. And, and so we decided not to do a formal infrastructure kind of remodel, but we decided, well, let’s start aligning resources in terms of sharing staff sharing space, we moved in with our economic development group, who’s called ikat by the way, if you hear me referenced up, that’s the Iowa City Area Development Group. We moved in with them in 2019, we, you know, we’d said, Okay, we’re, we’re going to start aligning our programming, we’re going to look at establishing a community vision, all of that. And we did, you know, attempt that that last one, but you know, heard from some of our stakeholders, like, oh, no, that’s not, that’s not your role to do the community vision thing. And, and so, you know, we shifted to focusing on on just education and working through that, then 2020, we all know what happened to the pandemic hit, and all of a sudden, you know, we realized our organization’s us icad Are our downtown district, or CVB, are all sending out, you know, I’ll try to compile information and sending out information to our key stakeholders, and it’s all the same, you know, like, there’s a lot of overlap. And then and there’s a lot of overlap and the information. So we all just, you combine our marketing and comms team and started to, you know, really worked together on that. And then we stood up what we call the project better together initiative, and rally the steering committee, you know, across the community, to just do emergency recovery type things. And we just did a ton of work together through that time, not just communications, but giftcards campaigns, morale boost for our health care workers, all the things that a lot of assaulted. And so and through that we just learned, like really, you know, we call the project project better together. But after 2020 20, we’re like, Well, we really are better together, and we just prove that we have you know, greater impact. And so that then led, you know, in 2021, we looked at okay, so what now what, what is greater? Should we consider more formal alignment between these entities and what does that look like? And simultaneously, we also thought, now might be the time to come back to establish a community vision, you know, a vision for our future. We decided to prioritize that and focus on the vision work first, which we did in partnership with Rebecca Ryan, and we were able to launch that vision pot this past summer, which we call the Better Together 2030 All envision plan. And so once we kind of have that under the way then at the start of this past year, we started looking at alignment knowing okay, we’ve got the vision now, what does that mean for our organs? decisions and how we support that. So that’s where we started exploring that. And then ultimately proposing to our boards this past November, that to move forward on formally merging, you know, into a single entity, the business partnership, and I can, so the chamber and the economic development group, and we got a vote of approval from both of our boards to move forward now on doing the design work. So sorry, that was a lot of scarring. But

Brandon Burton 15:25
no, you know, no, so there’s, there’s a lot to unpack there. Right? I mean, it’s, you did a good job of condensing it down from 1901 to 2022. Now, right. So you had mentioned in 2018, that the, as you evaluated it, you didn’t see the need for a formal remodel of the organizations. So what do you think the key factors were from 2018? to Now I know there’s a pandemic in the middle there, but and opportunities to align resources and other ways. But what would you say were those those key identifiers that said, you know, what, now is the time that we do you need to look at making a formal remodeling of the structure at the two entities?

Kim Casko 16:16
Yeah, I think that’s a great question, and one we’ve reflected on and that we get a lot, like, why didn’t you do it in 2018. And, you know, I think that, again, our peers that I kind of work in on this joint venture with the entity, and the county to the north, on doing kind of a regional economic development group. And so that was, I think, creating some stress and some complication. And knowing too, you know, we were getting, there’s just a lot of thing, things on both of our organizations plate, and we thought, well, doing a merger is a lot of work. And so maybe we don’t go that route, but like we we need to start kind of aligning some of our work working more collaboratively. You know, all of that, you know, which is what we did actually have a slide in our presentation that we share with our boards in October, from 2018, it was directly plucked from the PowerPoint we did in 2018. Was that said, like, you know, okay, we’re gonna, you know, we’re not going to formally merge, but we’re going to increase our partnership, we’re going to co locate, we’re going to share staff, we’re going to strengthen our partnership with our CVB in our downtown district, we’re gonna launch a vision plan for our community, we’re going to focus on this big vision and this slide I have up then it’s like, done done and done. Like, we’ve, we’ve done those things. And we did that organically by working, you know, two together. And so it’s, again, the question of So what now what, and I think what the past two years proved out, is that there’s just a lot of overlap, in, in what we do, you know, not in not just from the back office, but certainly the back office. And, you know, as we saw with our marketing communications, like, you know, this is Rob pushing out the same stuff, like let’s, you know, combine our team. So that was really the first proof point. But, you know, I think also in terms of the work we’re doing, to support, you know, businesses of color, you know, both of both AAS and ikat are engaged in that work. And so oftentimes, we’re saying us in the business partnership, or partnering to create this inclusive economic development plan, and, you know, in business partnership in the ikat are focused on Workforce Solutions. And so, you know, that was another area workforce that I had, you had led the charge, typically, you know, on that, but as we saw from the pandemic, the impact on small businesses, that was exactly the challenge there too. So So we needed to do more on workforce, and hence needing to align that with our peers. And so there’s just more and more overlap, not just in back office, but in the mission focus work. That just we thought, you know, there’s now’s time in now’s the time to to really just consolidate that so that we can have greater impact. And our teams like both of our organizations are in really even stronger places than we were in 2018. And have really great, really great set of team members that are working together. So it just, there’s also a little bit of a gut feel like, now’s the time to do it. Yeah. And it’s been talked about so many times before, it’s like, at some point, it’s never like always at that time, because it is going to be a lot of work. But you know, at some point, I think he had to pull the trigger on it. So it

Brandon Burton 19:32
made it sounds like you kind of had a four to five year kind of runway to kind of the ideas kind of out there. You’re working together in more formal settings, but not a formal restructure. And then you’re able to see where those resources align where the messaging aligns where the the synergy really lines up, to be able to say like you said with the slide done down into the you have these Yeah, missions that you set out to accomplish, and they’re done. And it’s like, okay, we can work well together in instead of having the redundancy of two separate organizations doing the same thing. Let’s make this a formal deal.

Kim Casko 20:13
Yeah. And we could certainly do that. Because we did get challenged on that, like, well, you guys are doing all this great work together as separate entities. So why not just continue that way? We’re like, yes, key stakeholder, but behind the scenes, you don’t see like, the mad scramble and the exhaustion, duplication, and, and all that stuff, like, we could work so much more, you know, if efficiently and effectively behind the scenes to be able to do more, you know, like, and I think just the, the combined entities, the larger entities that are able to consolidate some things and be able to afford, like, having someone who’s focused on data, or someone who’s focused on TDI, you know, versus having each entity have to, you know, hire that and try and afford that. So there’s just so many things, but behind the scenes that are that our stakeholders don’t see that, you know, free kind of rewire align, those those cables will just create, it’s about it’s just about creating capacity and about greater impact.

Brandon Burton 21:12
Right, so, so as you look back over the last five years or so, where do you see some of those initial discussions happening? Was it driven by the board? Was it something that, you know, ikat, or the chamber was like, hey, maybe we need to look at more of a formal partnership, or a merger, or, because it can always be a little bit awkward, you know, if, if you go to icad and say, Hey, we need to, we need to merge together a watch out, you know? You got to date for a while, you got to make sure everything’s just right. But hopefully the board ends up driving that conversation. But how did it develop on your end?

Kim Casko 21:57
Yeah, so that’s, it’s been really interesting. So we actually saw back in 2018, the way it evolved, actually was from a survey and did a member engagement survey. Because I was kind of new in my tenure wanted to find out more. And, you know, we asked our members what they would value most. And by and large, the, you know, the top three things they would value the most is just impact, you know, on community community development work, creating, you know, attracting more businesses to town. And like, a lot of those things were things that our peers at ICANN were leading. And so and I shared the results of the survey, actually, with a group of pastures that I still meet with, and they’re the ones who kind of brought it up saying, well, maybe we should really explore merging, so and then it was mainly staff driven from there. And then again, like we were the ones that made the decision, like, well, let’s kind of pause on this and, and not do it formally yet. So then we are the ones it was mainly staff driven, you know, coming out of that experience in 2020 2021. We’re the ones that put it back on the table with permission, you know, we checked in with our, you know, exec committees, like are you okay with us, you know, exploring this, and we set a deadline, like, Okay, we’re going to explore it and present something back this fall, you know, as a proposal, so we got the board’s blessing to go ahead and do that. But by and large, it was led, you know, by by staff, which is a little bit, you know, we’ve heard and talking with some other combined entities, they asked us that question like, and they were like, just make sure you get your board along, too, because oftentimes, it is, you know, board trivet driven. So now that and we’ve done, we’re doing kind of a two step process here in terms of, you know, we got a vote in November, and was essentially, our boards voted on a resolution of intent to merge. So basically, they’re now giving us the blessing to design the merged entity, and then we have to take it back for a vote, hopefully, May June timeframe for them to actually bless the merger. So we’re not merged yet. And now is the place where we’re, you know, we’re setting up a merger Advisory Council that’s made up of both of our board members to help drive this because I think it needs to be a balance of both. You need to have staff in there, but you need to have also our board members or key stakeholders groups, you know, helping to drive it and, you know, we also want to involve our members investors to, you know, via surveys, focus groups, you know, get their engagement and feedback that way. But you’re right, there is kind of that, that that balance,

Brandon Burton 24:31
right. So, you’ve mentioned a couple times that there’s a lot of work involved with making the merge happen. So I don’t want to scare away you know, people that feel like a merge needs to happen with their chamber and another organization but at the same like, you have to follow you know, what your mission is the chamber if it aligns if it works, so I don’t want to scare him away, but can you help paint a picture of what the work is? involved, you know, as far as what you’ve seen so far, and what you anticipate, you know, through this intent to emerge to fully execute it.

Kim Casko 25:09
Yeah, well, a couple of things there. Um, you know, I’ll share how we’re approaching it. I don’t know if there is one, right approach. And no, it’s, I think always going to be. But the way we are trying to approach that, because knowing, you know, we’re taking this on top of everything, like we want to maintain, if not continue to increase service levels. So we’re very much aware of that. And so, with that being the case, we’re like, okay, we’re stealing some things from kind of an entrepreneurial world, like, what’s the minimum viable product? Move forward? Like, we kind of want to do this by July one, which is an aggressive timeline, but our, but I had their fiscal year, their next fiscal year starts July one. So there’s a little bit of a sense of urgency, which I think is good. Yeah, um, but we’re trying to chunk off like, Okay, what absolutely do we have to have, you know, to get approved, knowing that this is going to evolve. And I think if you talk to any other entities that have gone through this, they say, just that, like, it may take three years for it to feel fully kind of like where you want it, but you start somewhere, and it evolves. And so, so let’s kind of make sure we understand like, well, you know, what is that, and that makes it a little bit more manageable. And the way we’re approaching is, is kind of like two streams. One is a very organic kind of ground upstream, in terms of like, let’s just get our teams together. I mean, we’re located in the same space, but we have an office space in the lower level, and our icad peers sit in the upper level. Some things we don’t see each other. So last week was merger kickoff week, and we threw everybody together, like, okay, let’s be both do Monday, stand ups, let’s do it together. Like from henceforth, we’re doing our Monday morning stand ups together, we had a merger working session where we just checked in on our team members to see how they’re doing, you know, what the change and talk about, you know, what this, what this means, and what this looks like, and what their concerns are, and all of that, and then start talking about, have everybody review their roles, like, understanding each other’s work at the individual role level, and where’s their low hanging fruit and opportunity, and let’s start kind of establishing work teams and, and so there’s that piece of it. But then there’s also the other parallel track that really comes from our boards and the merger Advisory Council in terms of what is this new entity, you know, going to look like your mission vision values, like the key functions, and we want our teams involved in designing that too, you know, and, and our key stakeholders as well. And so kind of figuring out that future state, and also the kind of the, which steals a little bit top down, and then the bottom up of like, the current state and just kind of moving along, okay, and taking the mindset of okay, what do we need to get done in the next 30 days in the next 90 days? And I think that getting in that framework in that rhythm makes it more manageable?

Brandon Burton 27:59
So in this question, it may be a little bit premature in your current situation, but as far as staff goes with the two organizations, do you just imagine or anticipate through maybe attrition or just, you know, seeing where different responsibilities and your things live with different different positions to take on different loads are kind of shifting, they’re already sharing some of those responsibilities, I guess, across the two organizations, but how do you maybe anticipate or see the staffing situation playing? Uh huh.

Kim Casko 28:37
Well, one, both of our teams are currently understaffed doing multiple jobs. So and are amazing, we’ve got really amazing team members right now. So we’ve kind of shared with them, like, we don’t want to, we don’t want to lose anyone. So there’s that. And they’re just a dream team to have right now in terms of, you know, they’ve got, they have what we need in terms of kind of shaping what this looks like, you know, and there are some areas where there is some, some duplication, like, you know, in marketing comms like an event plan, but again, like, so many people have so many, you know, you’re doing event planning, you’re managing the facility, you know, you’re doing three taps in one. And so like, can we start parsing that apart and figuring out like, some people may be tired of what they’re doing. So what do you want to do? So we asked our teams last week to share out, you know, just their current role, but like, what are your passion skills, you know, and to start kind of thinking of, okay, where are my people want to go and what might this look like? And so, you know, we feel really, really good about that. And when you look, it really seems like when you look at it, you know, the duplication like where there’s almost as you’ve got two presidents you know, so as kind of setting the example like my myself and my peers are just committed to like, we’re committed to like seeing this, this merger through and figuring out what that new And it looks like and what roles are needed and what that top CEO role is going to look like, we’ve got to design that. And then you know, we’ve recommended to our, to our boards there and it’d be ultimately up to them the merger Advisory Council, but to do a search for that role and figure out what is the right leader we need in that space. And so we’re kind of trying to design is agnostic of ourselves and our egos and personal intentions. And

Brandon Burton 30:24
I think it goes back to the our title for this episode emerging organizations for a stronger community, so not for your own ego or not for your own personal situation, but for the stronger community. It helps having a board behind that that helps them make some of those decisions as well. So but it came as we start to wrap things up here, I wanted to ask you for the chamber listening who would like to take their chamber up to the next level? Or maybe is considering Emerg? themselves? What tips or action items might you share with them to help them accomplish those those goals?

Kim Casko 31:06
Yeah, I think, you know, just leverage. This is my first experience, kind of in the chamber profession, and I’ve just been blown away by the amount of support, you know, in the profession, and, you know, between things like, you know, this great pop podcast that ACCE the association Chamber of Commerce, execs, and just lean on. I mean, for me, I got a lot of inspiration around, you know, mergers from hearing what other, you know, organizations have been doing, you know, greater Topeka partnership, the one Spartanburg in you know, just in hearing those interviews and leaning on those leaders, calling them up, like, how did you do this? What was your project plan? And like, that’s just been tremendous, you know, for us, and to be able to leverage that that also makes it when you go back to like, workload, makes it feel a little bit more manageable and doable.

Brandon Burton 32:04
Yeah, that’s perfect. And you mentioned like in Greater Topeka Partnership, I’ll link my my interview with Matt Pivarnik, as well. So it gives another perspective how they came about it. And for anybody who’s who’s serious about looking at a merger, there’s, there’s things to be learned for sure. Well, Kim, as we look to the future chambers of commerce, how do you see the future of chambers and their purpose going forward?

Kim Casko 32:36
Yeah, I think, you know, one of the things I remember learning about early on when I started in 2016. And I think it was at the ACC convention was just the study that the was the Western Association of Chamber of Commerce sects that did that study, and on branding and came out with, you know, a couple things, one that you everything you need to do needs to tie to the benefit for the overall community and not just the business community. And Sherry And Kelly and her team at ACC always speak to that to like, it’s about community impact. And I think that’s still very much in very much relevant. Because the, the, it’s all about tackling those community community problems and challenges and opportunities, and we’re the group to do it. And that goes back to the waist, and like the three C’s and our role as catalysts, you know, for business and community growth, the convener, you know, across sectors and being the champion, like, that’s how we do the work. Yeah. And like, I think that’s still like, very relevant, if not even more so today. And I think into the future, because the problems we’re trying to tackle are really hairy problems. And, and it takes like that cross sector, public private, nonprofit, collaboration, and like, we’re the only ones in the space doing it. So and I think that’s, you know, very, very much needed. And so I mean, it’s part of why we changed our name to partnership, you because it takes that work. It takes partnership, and it takes collaboration. And if you think of that word, you know, it’s got the word lab in it, just experiment experimental. It’s got the word labor, and it takes work. But that’s really, I think that’s a skill set of ours, and that’s going to be critical in the future.

Brandon Burton 34:20
Yeah, no, I, I liked the name change, too. I think we’ve talked about on past episodes, we have named changes from Chamber of Commerce to something like a business partnership. I think it just keeps the relevancy, you know, where the focus is. And I think, I don’t know, maybe 100 years ago, 150 years ago, Chamber of Commerce maybe had a different meaning a different maybe it was more in the vernacular of, you know, meaningful words. But now I think more of a business partnership makes a lot more sense for a lot of communities.

Kim Casko 34:56
It does I mean, it does, but I will tell you this Probably be a whole separate podcast. But like, I will tell you like it’s it. We’ve had a tough time getting it to stick. I mean, when we launched it when the pandemic hit, but too, it’s longer. It’s tougher to say. And so people really struggle. And so I we are quick to say, No, we’re still Chamber of Commerce, because I think there’s still a lot of value for the brand. That space, I want to make sure people know, like, No, we’re still we’re a chamber of commerce. And so I think that’s still important, but like, people have an easier time saying, so it’s

Brandon Burton 35:28
your chamber of commerce chambers.

Kim Casko 35:31
Yeah. Yeah, exactly. So people often ask us are like, what? It’s like almost the number one question we get, like, what’s the new name of the entity going to be? And one of our team members came up with this great acronym. They’re like the I was city area business and Development Association, which if you spell them look at the possible acronym, it spells out, I see a badass. Already curse on your podcast. But I think it’s brilliant. Working they were going with, they were like, you cannot have that as

Brandon Burton 36:10
I can see the logo right now.

Kim Casko 36:13
Perfect. So I’m really advocating for that.

Brandon Burton 36:21
But it came, I wanted to give you an opportunity to share any contact information for listeners who may be considering a merge or when I gain more the experience that you’ve gone through, what would be the best way for someone to reach out and connect with you?

Kim Casko 36:34
Yeah, happy to connect with anyone, you know, on this, either, whether you’re considering it or you have done you want to compare notes like, so you can? Yeah, all of it. Well, we need a support group. I’d love your support group that we went for all for that. So you can reach me at Kim@IowaCityArea.com. Or my cell phone, which is 773-633-7700. I know that sounds like a spam. It is easy to remember. And then the merger, I’m going to share my Berger website here that are currently being put together which has been really yeah, really helpful for folks. So that’s IowaCityArea.com/merger, which has FAQs out there a video and we’ll just kind of hoping to keep that site updated.

Brandon Burton 37:30
That’s perfect. And well, we’ll get all that in the show notes for this episode. So people can get on there and check out the merger page and see, you know, all the updates and everything you have going on there. But, Kim, I’m glad we’re able to have you come visit with us on Chamber Chat Podcast and share this experience and the development and how things are going down with this, this merger in your your chamber. And I think it takes a little bit of vulnerability to say, you know, here’s what we’re going through and where we came from. And so I appreciate you putting that out there for us.

Kim Casko 38:04
Yeah, yeah, it takes a lot of that, you know, across the board. We talked exactly about that with our team members last week about vulnerability, vulnerability and navigating that and navigating this transition. And so I’ll share with you some of the other resources were using to to help with that. But yeah, appreciate being able to talk about with you today.

Brandon Burton 38:24
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5 Lessons Learned in 2022

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Brandon Burton 0:00
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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.

Your audience is waiting to hear from you as a convener of leaders and influencers champion for business and catalyst for change within your community.

Chamber Collaboration with Nancy Hoffman Vanyek

Below is an auto-generated transcription of my conversation with Nancy Hoffman Vanyek. 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.

Voiceover Talent 0:14
And now, your host,

Unknown Speaker 0:16
one of his favorite pieces sports memorabilia. Is this signed Steve Young jersey. He’s my dad, Brandon Burton.

Brandon Burton 0:21
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.

Matt Morrow 0:49
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 1:11
You can learn more about Holman Brothers Membership Sales Solutions by visiting holmanbros.com.

Our guest for this episode is Nancy Hoffman van mix. Nancy is the chief executive of the Greater San Fernando Valley Chamber of Commerce in California. She started as the communications manager at the then called Van Nuys Chamber of Commerce and within six years was named the Chamber’s first female CEO. Nancy is passionate about uniting people government, business and community towards a shared vision. She serves on the city of Los Angeles’s Workforce Development Board and chairs its business services marketing and Resource Development Committee. She was named the San Fernando Valley’s Business Journal CEO of the Year in 2021. On the strength of her actions to help businesses, WACE awarded her as Executive of the Year for our her outstanding performance as an industry leader. In March Assemblywoman Suzette Validez recognized Nancy as a 2022 Woman of the Year for the 38th assembly district. Nancy spearheaded the creation of the San Fernando Valley’s Regional Foundation to advance economic community and educational development. She’s a positive vision for the San Fernando Valley and actively works to find solutions for businesses large and small.

And Nancy, I’m happy 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 that are out there listening and share something interesting about yourself so we can get to know you a little better.

Nancy Hoffman Vanyek 2:48
Well, thanks for having me here. Something interesting about myself. That’s a hard one. I don’t I don’t always find myself as interesting probably as other people do. Well, for 20 years, I was a spinning instructor. So before I would head on over to the chamber office, I would start my day at 530 in the morning with 16 other people and teach them or lead a spin class. I grew up not being athletic at all. So to in my late 30s, became an aerobics instructor was, I think one of my most interesting things.

Brandon Burton 3:21
Wow. So you were teaching the spin class while running the chamber at the same time?

Nancy Hoffman Vanyek 3:25
Oh, yeah. And then a lot of times, I got some of those people to join the chamber. Or some of my, my best volunteers like they’re, they become my friends. And when I need help, the some of those same people are the ones that come to all of our events and help us out. Yeah,

Brandon Burton 3:41
that’s great. build those relationships, for sure. Well, tell us a little bit more about the greater San Fernando Valley Chamber just to give us an idea of maybe perspective, size and staff budget, scope of work, that sort of thing.

Nancy Hoffman Vanyek 3:57
So we have been around 111 years, and it’s a very big deal for us, because if you don’t know 111 And numerology means good fortune. And we felt that we didn’t get to celebrate our 100 and 10th anniversary because the pandemic so we launched this year call, it’s a grand new year, and we’ve been celebrating all of our past accomplishments and our current account and our future, what we’re looking forward to his future accomplishments. We have a staff of five, our budget is around a million dollars, which I’m going to say probably 40% as is attributed to some very specific job training grants that we have. So most of when people go oh, I can never be like, like greater San Fernando Valley Chamber. If we didn’t have the grants, we would probably just be what most books most chambers are within a budget, you know, probably a $400,000 range. We have only 400 members. People always think we have a lot of members because we’re a Regional Chamber. But we started in 1911. As the Vanna is chamber, we merged in the 80s with another chamber. And because there’s 23 chambers of commerce in the San Fernando Valley, which I’ve just want to really quick for geography, the San Fernando Valley is a suburb in the city of Los Angeles, we have 1.9 million people. If we were our own city, we would be the sixth largest city in the nation. So just put that in perspective. And yeah, we have 400 members, because there’s 23 chambers. And we have a different focus. So our members may not be the same as all the other chambers, we have some overlap, we definitely focus on a regional approach. So we get a lot of corporate offices, and as our members as well, that really come out and support us, and they support our initiatives. You know, we’re trying to shift from that. Let’s have you support this event sponsor this event come to this event to we have a job training initiative, we have a jobs initiative, we have this initiative and see how many people will support us in those those themes as focuses, which really helps us build our relationships with the business community. Yeah,

Brandon Burton 6:05
I like that. And it is a different approach for sure. Being a Regional Chamber versus a, you know, a smaller community type chamber.

Nancy Hoffman Vanyek 6:14
We started off as a local chamber. Yeah, our area, communities kept changing their name. And our our businesses would move into these other communities was the valley still the Valley for us, but they would remain a member. And so we needed a name that reflected like, we can’t just be vandalized anymore. Man is being chopped up into three or four different communities. And so becoming regional was a big game changer for us. But it took us several years to really embrace what that was and how we were going to do it. We had a whole plan to get there.

Brandon Burton 6:46
Yeah. So that how long ago did you guys make that change from Van Nuys to the greater San Fernando Valley?

Nancy Hoffman Vanyek 6:52
Well, we first went to Mid Valley, when we merged in the 80s, or mid San Fernando Valley, they kept plasmid Valley and that meant we could have been any Valley. Right? You know, it didn’t matter. We could be a valley in Appalachian Valley, for all that matter. And and so we, in 2007, we changed our name to greater San Fernando Valley Chamber. And that’s when we actually launched I think we changed it the year before. But we it was a it was a slow process to really change our internal events, because we didn’t want to scare off our existing members. You know, some of them already freaked out. When we moved our office, we didn’t move because we were coming regional removed because our building burned down. Yes, we couldn’t find another built in we we didn’t have like time we needed an office. So we moved to where we are now. And people in that neighborhood were very upset. And we’re like, well, there’s literally like a hole in the floor. We

Brandon Burton 7:46
didn’t plan for this. Yeah, I want to look

Nancy Hoffman Vanyek 7:48
down and see into the into like the hallway or the restroom, because that’s what we were able to do. And so we moved our offices, and we already had to go through that trauma. And so when we became regional, we wanted to do it in a very thought out way, because we didn’t want we didn’t want to have any issues with other chambers, we always work well with them. And we didn’t want them to think we were coming in and we were going to overtake them, we still wanted to work well with them. Because local chambers, even if there’s a reasonable one and have a purpose, we all have a purpose, and how we serve our communities, whether it’s certain certain communities or cities or certain regions. And so we really have thought it out and how we were how each year something else was going to take us to the next level. And probably we went for like five, six years with not doing a lot. And then we brought in a new communications manager. And she saw the really big picture of it and started changing our narrative, changing how we looked at everything, really emphasizing how we need to change some of our events or bring in different events. And I think when we did that everything kind of just naturally shifted for us.

Brandon Burton 8:57
Yeah. So I think this is kind of naturally taking us to our topic for our discussion today. Being a Regional Chamber collaborating with other local chambers and just other chambers in the region becomes important. So our topic for discussion today is Ram chamber collaboration. And we’ll jump into our conversation as soon as we get back from this quick break.

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Brandon Burton 11:04

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All right, Nancy, we’re back. Tell us how are you going about collaborating with other chambers and in your region to to create a stronger San Fernando Valley?

Nancy Hoffman Vanyek 12:16
Well, I don’t think I’m just a regional collaborator. I’m definitely a national collaborator,

Brandon Burton 12:21
scaling it up.

Nancy Hoffman Vanyek 12:23
So you know, I’m a longtime chamber exec 35 years, and I’ve always had collaboration envy. I’ve always seen like, some of these chambers come up with a project or a plan and do something. And I was always that person on the sidelines, I was never the leader in that collaboration, I kind of feel when it comes to collaboration, you have like, if you take the chamber three Cs, you could have put it this way, you have the person who is the champion, and they’re like they’re sitting at the table, and they have a voice. And then you have the catalyst and they take an active role in the collaboration. And I think I’ve moved up to being that active role probably 10 years when we changed our name to more active role. But you could be the convener of their three C’s and you could be the one who brings everyone to the table and that’s a big shift especially if you’re working with other chambers or other organizations, Business Development economic development agencies because most chamber execs are pretty strong personalities and we all want to be the leader so to be able to come to the table and be a convener and have other people who are normally conveners to move the needle takes a lot of patience internally tail so so how did I come about it? I looked at those three C’s and where I was with my collaboration and B I was always just a seat at the table I look at so there you know we have 23 chambers of La like I said we collaborate on some things especially through like I think a lot of communities have like a United Artists United chambers you know some of them have a Regional Chamber group. But might be collaboration came from other chambers that were like minded with us and our Eric’s had mentioned we’re in Los Angeles was like Hollywood, Culver City, people who were were very active in advocacy, economic development and workforce development issues that weren’t just networking and just the basic of the chamber. And so I’m gonna say that I used to just ride on their coattails. I was the youngest of our group, and I was the kid that everyone took care of, and then they all retired and left me in charge. And I was like floundering for a while and I wasn’t a collaborator, I was really just trying to keep myself afloat without anyone to lean on. You know, and I have not that, again, 35 years in industry, there’s a lot of people lean on, but not within Los Angeles for me, and that’s my hub. So, you know, over the years, I just, you know, it was kind of fiddling and everything around trying to figure it all out and doing things collaboratively with a bunch of different local groups and Then I’m gonna say 2016, I had a big shift. And I was, it was a shift entirely for me in our organization, where I think I finally understood, like, you could say, your mission based, but making the mission the priority and doing the best you can for your members becomes more important than your personality, your ego, and anything else that is you want and all of a sudden great things happen. So for me, it happened with breweries. I am the craft beer advocate of Los Angeles, okay. And we, in our area, like I mentioned, were part of Los Angeles, but the San Fernando Valley had four craft breweries, and as part of Los Angeles, it was a new industry and La didn’t know how to treat it. And what I mean is a brewery was brewery, so they were paying the same fees, licenses and taxes, as Anheuser Busch

Brandon Burton 15:53
doesn’t really work. Well, that way doesn’t work

Nancy Hoffman Vanyek 15:55
well. So like, they didn’t do an inspection fee, and the city would show up. And then Anheuser Busch, you get in a golf car, and you drive across eight acres, and they look around. They were charging this brewery where you literally could stand on a stepladder, craning your neck look around the same inspection fee. And so the breweries came to me, and they said, Hey, we got a problem. We can’t afford this, you know, blah, blah, blah. And I called a bunch of land use planners who normally would help people. And it was a new industry, no one really knew where to start. And they just said, talk to this person, talk to that person. So I brought everyone to the table. And I said, I was just angry, I was angry on their behalf. There’s small family owned businesses, you know, their cousins, or husbands and wives. You know, sometimes I called one of them as a bunch of like college roommates, you know, that started it. And I just felt for them because they could not afford a land use planner. But Nancy’s not a land use planner, but Nancy’s gonna figure it out. And I got them off the table. And I was very lucky that someone completely understood the big picture. God is in front of the right person at the city’s economic development agency. And I know that sounds crazy, but it took a year but years very fast in Los Angeles, to literally get all the specs where they could now, we got four tasting rooms open within like, you know, they always were scheduled like within a very quick period of time, we got the fees reduced by over 50%, we got a qmD, which is the Air Quality Management District to waive all the fees for all their equipment, which was over $3,000. And I realized, and the big change for me on that on collaborating was unknown known to a lot of these people as a hothead. And I couldn’t be a hothead. I had to learn to just take a step back and say, here’s the problem. This is the solution I need. And once I did that all these people came to me and wanted to help. And they weren’t other chambers necessarily. They were just other people that could affect the change. And I just, it just was my game changer on how collaboration can work.

Brandon Burton 17:50
Yeah. So amazing. So what do you think it was early on in your career that made you feel like you couldn’t be that convener, the one to gather everyone together? Was it kind of an imposter syndrome or like you didn’t have that credential or how to yourself early on like that.

Nancy Hoffman Vanyek 18:10
I started off being the communications manager, and then our program manager and I had a boss, longtime chamber exec as well. So he was really that convener, but I realized that was a better convener than that I’m definitely good at bringing people together. But I think a lot of it was imposter syndrome. I never felt as felt as secure as I imagined other people, and I can name them all and tell you who they are. And I always felt like I was kind of watching them but not doing. And if I did a program, and we have many awards and accolades, I never really felt like, did I really do that? Or did I copy that. And then I the brewery thing was just a whole shift in our whole organization where we thought we can do anything to help our business community. And when that all right, Lisa chambers say these things for years, but we don’t, and we do them sometimes with other people. But not everyone just steps up and takes up the mantle on behalf of an industry or an organization because we think it’s going to be too tough, right. And sometimes you just have to be fearless. And you just have to take that risk. And people are free to take that risk with their legislators because they don’t want to ruin that relationship. But you have to they have to you have to find the right ones who are going to be your champion as well. And we got very lucky because two of them joined us and then everyone else and we’ve had all of our city council members love craft beer. So that that was my big catalyst though, for when the pandemic started. And I started a nationwide coalition with my friend Patrick Ellis at the Marietta chamber to help businesses find economic recovery during the pandemic. And it was all those lessons from that brewery episode that helped me you know, do you’re just starting to save small business Coalition, which isn’t all my class braided efforts, but it was when I realized that you could put those there were so many components when I pulled together, people not that they were my friends, people I admired that I met at conferences that I knew were doers. They were respected, and they had. They were critical thinkers. And they were also action oriented. And so we formed a leadership committee. And we got together. And then from there, we all reached out. And before you knew it, we thought we had like 39 chambers, and we had 200 chambers across the nation. And I think the biggest thing part of it was we were having chambers join us that had never done advocacy before. Their chamber might talk about advocacy, they might do something, they have relationships with elected officials, but truly do advocacy, mobilizing their members or their business community to have a voice. And we create a toolkits for them, we made it easy for a chamber had never done advocacy, we literally handed everything to them with like a timeline, everything written out instructions, they could do all of it, they could do one piece of it. And we were able to mobilize these 200 chambers we on one of our letter writing campaigns, which was using one of those systems that everyone goes into a computer system, we were able in one day to mobilize 8000 advocates and advocates means people who write a letter so from all those 200 people, that was just the first day 8000 people across the nation right to Congress.

Brandon Burton 21:19
Yeah. So from these experiences from those craft breweries to help with the economic recovery, have you kind of formulated a a template of sorts for bringing people together to collaborate? What does that look like?

Nancy Hoffman Vanyek 21:35
I’m not i For me, I think it’s really not having to have made the lead. You know, I’m like, I know that sounds crazy. We all want to be that leader and say, Oh, greater San Fernando Valley Chamber or whatever greater, I don’t know, degree chamber or whatever you want to call it. Like recently, recently, we received a grant for paid to give micro grants to small businesses. And I knew I could do it better. All the chambers have been promoting grants the whole time during the pandemic, right help businesses, and this is still recovery grant. And we received half a million dollars. But I knew I couldn’t do it alone. And every chamber has members that this grant could have helped. And so I reached out, I sent a big email to a lot of people I knew from small business coalition people I’ve just known from 35 years, all in California, and said, Hey, this is another grant, we’re not going to put our name on it, we’re just going to call it what it is. You can promote it as your branch if you want, however you want to do it. And everyone just joined in, because I think when you realize that you don’t have to be you might be the leader, but you don’t have to wear that crown the whole time that everyone can share the crown, you get a lot further, you have people who want to work with you, you want to work with them. I think I think it made me a nicer person. I know that sounds like so crazy. But I think, you know, I spent a lot of time on trying to prove to who I was versus trying to prove and what I could do for the business community.

Brandon Burton 22:59
Right. But I think it’s easier to get other in this instance, other chambers on board to help push it and promote it because they can look like a hero to to their members. And it’s not, you know, here’s a tool from the greater San Fernando Valley Chamber that we’re going to, you know, jump on top of, but it’s a, it’s positioned in a way that they’re there to help the business. And it’s not about where the credit goes. It’s just we’re here to help.

Nancy Hoffman Vanyek 23:25
And we promoted all the partners on it, you know, because we want them to get credit as well. But we want them just to we give them a gave them a sample news, release your name in here, you know, and, and then we made the website that it wasn’t one organization, but there’s a partners page. So everyone has a piece of the pie. Yeah. And now we’re actually coming to it because of them with this is a two year grant is supposed to take 24 months to give us money. Through all these chambers. We gave out all the money and under 120 days. Oh, wow. It’s crazy. So I mean, this shows you the strength of what chambers can do when they get together.

Brandon Burton 24:02
Yeah, absolutely. So that how many chambers all together joined together for the

Nancy Hoffman Vanyek 24:08
there’s now 29. And they’re all across the state of California. And you know, it’s interesting I reached out to I didn’t chase it down because I didn’t have time I needed to get it together. And I got 20 right away. If people didn’t respond to me, they didn’t need to respond. Because all I’m asking us to do promotion, we just gave them templates to an idea. So you can do it on social media, you can send news release, you can announce it at events, we didn’t care how it was done, right? Through everyone doing it. Different media picked it up, because everyone has a different source right? Before you know it. All these HR organizations picked it up and all these HR attorneys picked it up. And so it means so even though maybe we didn’t get a lot maybe our individual chambers didn’t have a lot of applicants. Our efforts had people who had a lot of influence pick it up that helped us give away all this money.

Brandon Burton 24:57
Yeah, all those different organizations have their different toolkits that they can leverage and apply it. And that’s great, really gaining momentum quickly.

Nancy Hoffman Vanyek 25:06
I think you have to bring in people you trust, if you’re going to do that chip. I mean, if you’re like, there’s, I mean, not that everyone could collaborate, but you also have to know everyone’s strengths. These people are good at this, these people are good at this. And so at the basic level, like when we did save small business, everyone had different jobs to do whether it was locally in their state, or in their community. And then with this one, it was chambers that we knew that would actually spread the word that weren’t that have someone on staff cry that was doing the newsletter, or someone who’s doing social media, because if we didn’t get the word, if they weren’t, if they were just going to put their logo on our on our thing that wasn’t going to help us

Brandon Burton 25:39
need to have buy in. Yeah, that’s good. So I’d like to ask everyone that we have on the show, for any maybe tips or action items, to help other chambers that are listening, how to take them up to the next level? What might you suggest to help some of these other chambers that are listening?

Nancy Hoffman Vanyek 26:02
Well, you know, I think there’s a few things, like I already mentioned, like be a risk taker, you know, be a little bit fearless. But I think that everyone needs to remember to be mission focused. And I’m going to just refer to a chamber I was talking to yesterday who had a committee, you know, we all have that that committee who says this grant was a that was great, let’s do 12 more times. We don’t have the bandwidth, the money or they’re not thinking about how you’re not going to get all the sponsors 12 times for the same amount of money, you’re gonna saturate yourself. And I said, are these other events the same? Or do they do they go back to your mission, because you know, how you could always manage everything as being mission based, you know, you have a mission, like our mission is to promote the economic vitality, you know, of our community. And if it doesn’t go to that, we’re not going to do it. And so it helps us one, filter out the things that that we don’t have, that we don’t have time for, and but it also keeps us on focus. And if you stay to your mission, and always act in the best interest of your members, you’re going to be a champion for your business. So I’d say that’s a big one. And then I think advocacy chambers are very afraid to get into advocacy, and they look at the big chambers to do it for them. But chambers can do it at a very small level too. And that goes to back to being not afraid. And then that small level, I’m going to use my concierge service with the breweries, maybe you don’t want to go fight a bill ello, I want to encourage everyone to to fight bills and to advocate for bills that help their business community. But if a business comes to you, and they have a problem, you don’t always have to refer them out. Right, you can act as their liaison and their concierge. And then you become the expert. And then other other businesses come to you other organizations come to you. And it’s such a wonderful feeling to actually see the success that you’ve helped those, that industry or that business, even if it’s something as simple as they need a permit, we had someone during the pandemic that they couldn’t get the city to sign off on something just because everyone was working from home. So they have been able to call someone and say, hey, the SBA is not going to give them their loan, if this isn’t signed off, like the next four days, and get that done. Get to know the right people. When I started in the business, I would have to institute and this is back when you had paper, you didn’t have a computer. That was guys to make a list. If you’re gonna do economics, all the key key offices are key players. So if someone needs a business permit, and all these different things know who they are, and I kind of operate with that, like I need to know who everyone is and what what role they play, so I know who to call. Yeah. So that’s how you could advocate at the most basic level.

Brandon Burton 28:39
And I think along those lines of advocacy, using the brewery example, as a, as you have some of these craft breweries come to you, you may see an opportunity for another business industry that could benefit from advocating for these breweries because they have some kind of tie in to whatever that that, you know, piece of advocacy is you’re going after, and then even get more on board.

Nancy Hoffman Vanyek 29:05
People come to us all the time because they saw what we did with that and I have a beer named after me because a bit so plaque you got his plaques, all these words you heard like when you introduce me, you know really, I rather the beer has ever given me an award. I don’t want to say like I’m not grateful. But the people can walk into this brewery and it has the name of the baristas, Nancy’s beer. And then there’s our story of getting the the taproom event is really special.

Brandon Burton 29:31
So I will say you need to add that to your bio. So next time we can talk about Nancy’s. That’s great. Well, as we look to the future of chambers, how do you see the future chambers of commerce and their purpose going forward?

Nancy Hoffman Vanyek 29:46
You know, I think we really learned a lot in the pandemic about what we can do, like, you know, we were closed and we were closed down in some ways, right? You didn’t do your events, all those things that we rely on, I know our CPAs to say, Oh, well we shouldn’t do this because that could go away tomorrow. Well, by the way All our events went away. And the one thing that was holding us up was this thing he told us, I shouldn’t be doing training, because Job Training still existed, you know, for certain, like manufacturing and different industries that we were doing. So got what I really think chambers need to dive more into workforce development, or economic development, or Business Retention and Expansion, which those two things kind of fall under, well, first of all meant economic development. And I really have a lot of envy for those organizations, too. I mean, I’m pretty competitive. And so like, when I have a friend that’s doing something in a different community, I’m in a different state, I want to know how they’re doing it and chambers are great, we all will share will pretty much give it to you in writing, look at your entire package of whatever it is we’re doing if you just fill in the blanks. And so how I got all these other things I’ve been doing is because there was one person I was kind of following, you know, like, follow the leader, and how do I do that in my area, because they were doing it further down in Southern California. And I think all chambers, once you do that, and you understand how it relates to your mission and how it relates to your members, it totally changes your chamber, you still do your network breakfast, but when you’re when you’re talking to them, and they hear you’re doing the job training, or you’re doing this advocacy on their behalf or, or doing concierge red tape busting. It really helps your business community move further ahead,

Brandon Burton 31:24
right. And that’s the whole purpose of this podcast is to share some of those best practices and, you know, shine some light on some of those things, and then reach out and connect with these people that are on the podcast and learn more about how they’re doing these things. So, Nancy, along those lines, what would be the best way for someone to reach out and connect with you if they want to learn more about how you’re doing things there in your area?

Nancy Hoffman Vanyek 31:47
Well, my email is very long. So let’s start with my phone number. How’s that? Okay, you can reach me at 818-902-9455. That’s my direct line, my office, my email,

Brandon Burton 32:00
and I’ll get these both in our show notes. So you don’t necessarily need to spell the whole email out. You can say what it is and then we’ll we’ll have it in the show notes.

Nancy Hoffman Vanyek 32:08
It’s nancy@sanfernandovalleychamber.com. Yeah,

Brandon Burton 32:15
you got a good URL, but it’s nice in like

Nancy Hoffman Vanyek 32:19
a shorter URL. It’s just not linked to our email. Yeah,

Brandon Burton 32:23
yeah. No, that’s great. So I’ll get those in our show notes. Anyone listening, you know, while they’re out walking the dog or driving in the car can can go on and look it up there. But, Nancy, this has been great having you on the show. Thank you for carving out some time to spend with us. Talk about the things you’re doing way easier. You’re building those collaboration efforts. I think this is terrific. So thanks a lot.

Looking 25 Years into the Future with Bryan Derreberry

Below is an auto-generated transcription of my conversation with Bryan Derreberry. 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.

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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 enjoys smoked meat from his Traeger, he’s my dad Brandon Burton.

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.

Jason Mock 0:45
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 1:02
You can learn more about Holman Brothers Membership Sales Solutions by visiting holmanbros.com.

Our guest for this episode is Bryan Derreberry. As President and CEO of the Charleston Metro Chamber of Commerce for 11 years, Bryan leads one of South Carolina’s largest chambers in its regional advancement work. Bryan has an established executive management track record, featuring more than 30 years in chamber leadership and advocacy roles. Prior to joining the Charleston Metro Chamber. Bryan was president and CEO of the Wichita Metro Chamber of Commerce in Wichita, Kansas, where he directed the state’s largest Metro Chamber for seven and a half years. He also served as president and CEO of the Catawba County, North Carolina and Middleton Ohio Chambers of Commerce respectively. Bryan began his chamber career as a state lobbyist for the Greater Cincinnati Chamber of Commerce, of course in Ohio. He holds holds a Bachelors of Arts degree in political science from Wittenberg University and is and has completed graduate coursework towards a combined MA and PhD in American politics, and international relations from the American University. Bryan, I’m excited to have you with us today here on chamber chat podcast. And I’d love for you to 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

Bryan Derreberry 2:31
little bit better. Well, Brandon, thank you for the opportunity. You know, it’s I love when you say chamber champions, because I I think about all my colleagues across the country and the amazingly important work they do and strengthening their business communities and advancing their regions. And I think one of the interesting parts of my background is my intention, when I started my career, was to go into lobbying full time, and had that chance with the Greater Cincinnati chamber. And at that time, that was the fourth largest chamber in America and represented that business community in Columbus, Ohio, four days a week and really treasured the opportunity. And somebody said to me, do you miss your lobbying days? And I think one of the things that people can learn about chamber executives, is that I said, I lobby as much now as I did when I did it full time, right? This looks different. I said it different audiences, different opportunities. A lot of times, it could be anything from a neighborhood association, embracing a new piece of infrastructure, or a group that’s not familiar with our chamber, we launched a major DNI effort three years ago. So we’re, we’re speaking out in numerous communities in our metro area, and sharing with them about the chamber for the first time. So it’s powerful to think about how every chamber exec in the country and many of their teammates day in and day out need great lobbying skills. So those degrees and that initial experience have really served me well.

Brandon Burton 4:15
Absolutely, yes. And I firmly believe that anyone listening to this it’s involved with the chamber, they are champions for their community and and when I tried thinking of a name for the audience, you know, that that seemed to fit well, so kind of rolls off your tongue but it has great meaning to so thanks for for recognizing that and you take a moment and tell us a little bit more about the the Charleston Metro Chamber to kind of the type of chamber Scope of Work size, staff budget, that sort of thing. Just to give us some perspective before we dive into our conversation.

Bryan Derreberry 4:52
You bet. We have 1600 members. A budget that said six and a half have million 30 full time staff members. And we have four primary platforms that we deliver our work through. Number one, like every chamber, a significant membership platform. Number two, a important government relations platform. We have three full time lobbyists on our team, one up in the state house in Colombia, and then two that work locally with our three counties and 30 municipalities. I think that’s a distinctive flavor for our organization, with regard to how important it is to get alignment, in all those communities, and I’ll talk a little bit later about, we use a partner ethos to lobby versus the bloody nose ethos that seems to be typical for the rest of our United States today. And that serves us very well. We have a large community advancement platform. And within that platform, we do diversity, equity and inclusion work. We do significant professional development programming work for our members. And also we do workforce and talent development. And then our marketing and communications platform is the fourth platform with regard to making sure not only that membership, can actively get engaged in what we do, but also the 830,000 people. And 165,000 employees represented by our membership, have an appreciation for what goes on within the chamber. So a very gifted group of folks, board of directors of 68, Executive Committee of 26. So very actively involving all the sectors in our metro area, and the volunteer leadership of our chamber. And I know one thing that chamber champions understand out there is that a lot of times we have to explain to people that we are a volunteer, directed organization. And they’ll come to us and say, Oh, you need to take a position on this issue. Well, we’ll go through our committee structure, and determine whether we take a position on the issue or not, it’s not my decision, or our government relations team, or our workforce development team to make a policy decision. It’s the responsibility of our volunteers. And I think after a number of years here, people now appreciate that, and they value that. So I think that’s another dynamic of our chamber is we very much want to put our members and key leadership roles in directing the chamber, we see ourselves as a regional advancement organization. So we look at that three county metro area and we look at big Rakesh used to work on already mentioned diversity, equity, inclusion, housing, attainability, mobility solutions, overall quality of business environment. So significant work that will advance our region over the next 25 to 50 years.

Brandon Burton 8:09
Right. I love that the fact that you pointed out you know, if the issue gets presented to the chamber, you take it to your committees, your board. A while back, I had Matt Morrow from the Springfield, Missouri chamber on the podcast, and he talked a lot about the wisdom of crowds. And when especially when you have a board of that size, 68 and different committees and whatnot, as you bring a different different topics in there. They all come in from their different backgrounds and experience and be able to know what the vision is the direction the Chamber’s trying to go. And then from there, combined experience and wisdom, they’re gonna land on the best possible outcome and direction to take up on different issues and policies even so glad you pointed that out.

Bryan Derreberry 8:57
You know, Brandon, I would strongly agree with your assessment. I am. This is my 36th year in the profession and I, overall, those board meetings, executive committee meetings, government relations committee meetings, I’ve seen the wisdom of our leaders proven out time and again. And I think another thing that every chamber champion listening recognizes is that they may come up with a position that’s contrary to what I personally believe, on a policy issue, maybe even what our team believes. And at the end of the day, we step forward and implement that decision, because it is their organization. So I think if you’re young and you’re chamber champion development, it’s important to realize that and of course, we want passionate people in our profession. And we want people that are highly skilled and able to craft how an issue needs to be examined. But then you have to be responsible to the degree See that it may end up somewhere that you didn’t imagine it would go. In over all those years, I’ve never seen it a selection of an outcome or a policy position that wasn’t best for the business community. So my encouragement would be to trust, that leadership, trust working with them to find the right pathway forward for your community. And there’s an old saying, you and I both heard of Brandon, you know, if they write it, they’ll underwrite it. And they, if they develop it and fill, it’s their own, they will get up and give public testimony, they’ll provide funding for lobbying efforts. So that’s part of the beauty of this profession is that, you know, we do lead heterogeneous organizations. This is not the American Dental Association or the American Medical Association. So we’ll have everything from a sole proprietor to somebody leading Joint Base Charleston here with 26,000 employees, and all across that spectrum, people will bring input an interest, and that’ll craft a composite position, or a composite direction. That’s really powerful. Right? Takes a lot of patients.

Brandon Burton 11:16
That’s right, it does. It takes a lot of patients. So our topic for discussion today, I’m a big fan of helping people and even chambers to understand the potential the power within them to become something greater. And for our discussion today, we’re focusing on looking 25 years into the future, which I think is very important in that aspect as far as realizing what the potential is of your organization, to be able to see what direction you can go and what needs to happen. You know, those those baby steps so to speak between here and there, and we’ll dive into this discussion as soon as we get back from this quick break.

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All right, Bryan, we’re back. And as I mentioned before the break, we’re talking about looking 25 years into the future as a chamber organization looking into the future. What at the end of this conversation, I’ll ask you how you see the future of chambers going forward. But in the meantime, before we get to that future and How do you see from here moving forward over the next 25 years,

Bryan Derreberry 15:04
Brandon and we do something that we feel is particularly powerful. About mid year we’ll begin a process called annual partnership calls. So we will go to somewhere between 180 to 250 of our members. And we sit down. And we ask a couple of questions that influence what that runway looks like over the next 25 years. The first question is, talk about the next three to five years of your company, and identify where you think there are excellent opportunities for your competitive growth, and then identify things that are impediments, speed bumps, and then we just, were quiet. And I think anytime you ask somebody about their company, and how they’re doing, where they’re going, what’s working, what’s challenging, you get really good, really good input. And the other the other question that really registers with them is that if there were one to two things in our metro area that you could change for the better, what would they be? So I’d love to tell you, we come back with a lot of disparate information and no agreement, we come back with a real clear picture as to what are the most significant opportunities, and what are the most pressing challenges. And when we look at those in combination, a lot of what we described on how we’re designed as an organization is influenced by the annual partnership calls in our area housing attainability is the number one regional issue. It will be a 25 year fix. To get the proper stock, the proper pricing, we’re in a real challenge with regard to our supply versus our demand. We’re growing by 33 net people a day, and we’re just having a hard time providing workforce housing that’s affordable. So we have a huge coalition working on that all three counties, public sector partners, private sector leaders, citizens, different associations. And we know right now we’re at 6000 houses behind for attainable housing in our metro market. That’s a couple of decades. So another one is mobility solutions, we’re getting ready in 2026 to undertake high speed bus lanes. So major mass transit project 21 Miles 2020 stops along the way. And for our metro, you know, if you’re in a, we were just in Boston for Metro leadership visit, they’ve been hopping on the tee for a while now. For us, that’s an important first step, there will be other lines to follow. But removing, even if we can remove eight to 10% of the traffic from our highways, that extends their longevity, it cuts down on congestion. So those are the kinds of issues that emerge. And it’s not us sitting in some room at the Chamber, figuring out where we go the next 25 years. It’s the people that want to be the employers, the citizens, the electeds, that continue to help our region thrive, identify where we’re going. And in that mix, there are many of our elected bodies, there are stakeholder partners. So we’re getting a really great level of input that’s formulating where we go. The other thing we just completed, we did an 18 month study. It’s called one region roadmap and used SP Friedman out of Chicago, Illinois to undertake our effort. And what it does, as a lot of communities don’t know what those big rock issues are, doesn’t take very long to figure those out. But this is going to be a 10 year plan, where every year we’ll identify five to seven priorities for the region to work on collectively. And there will be we’re using a local governing network,

which my political science professors from long ago would have really liked hearing. But what that is it means there’ll be a lead agent, we’re going to be the lead agent for housing attainability will involve other stakeholders throughout the community. And then we’ll begin to work on gaining annual metric identified success and creating more attainable housing. So equitable did Dual accesses another one, entrepreneurial development is another one. But this gives us a roadmap as a region for a decade. And at the heart of the one reaching roadmap is equitable access for all of our citizens to living, learning and earning opportunities. So I think you have to have a foundational piece that engages everyone. And that’s the piece, we want everybody to be able to have those attributes as we move through the decades ahead. So listen, well build a strategic plan that has lead agents that will be responsible for the work that’s being undertaken. And they get after it year in and year out, we have a large steering committee that will evaluate each of the lead agents on an annual basis to make sure they’re performing. So you know, it’s the classic thing brand. And if you if you fail to plan, you plan to fail, and we’re just really dedicated to that kind of work. And I would encourage chamber champions across the country that are listening, there’s a couple of key learnings in there. Number one, you want to bring as many people along as possible. So get out and talk to your members, talk to your elected officials, talk to the people that you’re going to need to do this with. We never say the chamber is going to do this work. We say along with our partners, we’re gonna tackle these annual priorities. The other thing is to make them concrete. That’s hard for a lot of communities. I’ve been in other communities that love to study and talk. But when you say annually, we’re going to achieve x, y, we’re gonna accomplish why. And then you report on it, then you have credibility, then it’s not a study that goes and sits on the shelf and collect stuff. So listen, well, engage others be concrete, and produce results. So we’re, we’re excited about one region roadmap, we kick it off in October. So when you and I talk this time next year, yeah, I’ll be able to, I’ll be able to tell you more about getting divorced in one region roadmap.

Brandon Burton 22:18
Yeah. So I know leading up to this discussion, you had shared with me, some of these topics that you guys are looking on. Maybe areas of focus, as you look to the future of Charleston, and and you talked about some of these, like the attainable housing and the you know, the infrastructure and mobility and things like that, as you have these different. We’ll call them topics areas of focus. How do you go about focusing on each one? I assume there’s some sort of a committee for each area of focus? Is that right? Have you said it’s one thing to create division, and we need to expand and put some focus and, and work over in these areas? But then how do you go from that, that vision to actually rolling it out to? Let’s take some action on these different steps? What does that look like there in Charleston?

Bryan Derreberry 23:12
You know, it’s interesting, and I think inherent in your in your question is a couple of things for chamber champions number one, regardless of the size of your chamber, and I have a deep passion for chambers that have staff under the number of 10. I think they work harder than any other chamber in the country, you’re going to need to hire some experts. We’ve been very intentional over the past 11 years, that we add people to our team that have significant expertise. So while they won’t do it on their own, they have a career track record in the areas whether it’s workforce development, government relations, diversity, equity and inclusion, attainable housing. They’re an expert. Because I think that you’ll be pleased as a chamber when you make that investment. And when you’re smaller, and maybe one or two major issues. So we’ve been very intentional about in that group of 30. Hiring people that have that level of expertise. The other thing that we’ve done is built a very strong committee structure. So however, those issues are moving through our organization, there are one or two or more committees that will be touching them. And we’ll be following through on what we commit to do organizationally to achieve results. The final thing is a talk a little bit about that local governing network and if anybody would like information on that we’re happy to share. You have to engage the whole region. So you look at something like the high speed bus lanes. Our Berkeley Charleston Dorchester Council of Governments is working with all the governments along that set of high speed bus lane routes. We’re working through our regional policy committee, which handles all of our local regional work. But there also is going to be a lead agent in that area that will pull together, how many ever stakeholders are required to implement. So a lot of it’s leveraging what I call critical mass. So you got some key folks at the top that have expertise, and then they’re bringing partners together to, in this instance, transportation, overlays for development on those 20 bus stops. So you know, there’s some sophistication that’s required when you do that kind of work. So, you know, my encouragement would get experts on your team, make sure the region understands the top issues, bring stakeholders together, that can move the issue. And then, again, metrics that make sure over 510 1520 years, you’re making progress, because in that timeframe, Brandon, you and I both know, you’re gonna have different mayors, you’re going to have different city councils, you’re going to have different county councils, you’re going to have a different state legislative delegation. So you have to be you chamber, and top stakeholders that are in it for the long run, you have to keep the plumb line very clear, and keep coming back to the issues. Because a lot of times public and private sector partners can get easily distracted. So that’s the other thing is that we look at all of our work as forever work. Okay, you’re forever doing housing affordability, you’re forever improving infrastructure. You’re forever maintaining your business climate. For us as a coastal community, you’re forever looking at resiliency. So part of that is developing a drumbeat internally to be in it for the long game. Yeah, every year, as you said, you want to have annual achievements. But you have to have those long game goals, talented team, great partners, focus and metrics to be able to move to we call them big rock issues. Because they don’t go away. You know, somebody said, you know, we have funding, we have something called Accelerate greater Charleston that funds. A lot of the professional staff that the technical professional staff is somebody said, Well, when are we going to stop doing accelerate greater Charleston? And we just smile, and we say never,

Brandon Burton 27:50
whenever you give up, you know, like,

Bryan Derreberry 27:53
you want to quit? Yeah, you know, and last one out, cut off the lights. And what I think what helps private sector companies, especially if they’re developing products, have said, you have an r&d arm, don’t you? And they Oh, yeah, we have research and development. Well, for chambers, your research and development is positioning the region for the future and putting the building blocks in place. I said, if your r&d went away, you’d be selling the same product over and over, you’re always looking to improve. And that begins to help people wrap their brains around. Okay, this is forever work. This is a long game. And the other beauty I just shared earlier, we went to Boston with 100 leaders, is get your leaders out to other metro markets that have like opportunities and challenges. So they can see the kind of work they’ve done. And then we come home and people say, hey, we saw how they did that in Boston, we can do that. Or they come home and say, wow, they had a big miss, we can really learn from that. So when we tackle a like issue, we don’t make the same mistakes. The other beauty of that trip is that you think all the leaders in your community know each other and kind of have a comparable set of aspirations. They don’t know. So when you get 100 people together that are having lunch and dinner and some staying up till college late hours, getting to know each other better. They come home aligned. You know, a lot of this is about not only what you’re tackling, but its alignment, and persistence. So that annual trip kind of says, Okay, we’ve gotten to x with high speed bus lanes. So we’re gonna go look at somebody that’s either built them all the way out, or maybe they have light rail. So again, it’s I call it staying 20% dissatisfied. Yeah, never, never 100% satisfied. that you have to continually prod the region to achieve at a higher level. Part of the challenge to Brandon is that, you know, I’ve been in places that are BB plus communities, it’s hard to get a BB plus to an A, it’s really easier to take a C or a D and pop it up to an A, because people feel the threat. They feel the need for collaboration and alignment. You know, when you’re a B plus, you’re kind of fat and happy. Right? Do we really need to be in a

Brandon Burton 30:33
you’re too comfortable? Any adjustments? Yeah.

Bryan Derreberry 30:37
And that’s when we say there are 396 other mshs in this nation, that one our employers and they want our talent. So yes, we need to be in a

Brandon Burton 30:45
Yeah, that’s I love that point. And that being the 20% just satisfied it. Yes. Always, always looking for that room to improve. I love that. salutely. So and I’m sure this answer will vary. But as there are different committees and whatnot on these different topics. You had mentioned doing these leadership visits to other cities, which I think is awesome. It’s a great way to look at a certain topic and how a city that you may aspire to be like and in certain aspects that I see great value in that. As far as the nitty gritty, the day to day. How often do some of these committees meet as a monthly? Is it weekly? Is it quarterly? Are they all different? Depending on what it is? How do you? How do you say that in your community?

Bryan Derreberry 31:32
There, at least monthly, if not twice a month. And we’re big believers, our board this year will have had 10 board meetings and 10 executive committee meetings. You know, I hear people say, Oh, we you know, chamber champions. I apologize if I’m stepping on toes. Oh, we do a quarterly. Okay, these kinds of issues. If you do a quarterly and somebody misses a quarterly meeting, they miss half a year. Yeah. Okay. We call that creating a drumbeat. Whether it’s committees that are working on policy, or programs or initiatives, or executive committee and board. If you lose the drumbeat within your organization on key issues, you’re not going to be able to move fast enough to make a difference. Well, they’re all busy people. And I’m gonna give you a great example. Brandon, we tried to go to every other month when I was in Wichita, and the board rebelled. That’s a cool message. Yeah, one I’m meet monthly. So I think sometimes, yeah, it’s a lot of work. We have an amazing executive ops team. And it’s a lot of work to do 20 meetings a year with, you know, large lead volunteer bodies. And it’s the work we signed up for.

Brandon Burton 32:58
Absolutely. And it’s that forever work as it’s that forever work.

Bryan Derreberry 33:03
And, you know, the the thing we talk about is, and I just met with our exec ops team yesterday, and they’re incredible. And we said, our goal is to create an experience for every volunteer that has never been met or matched in our metro area, from knowing about their family, their names, their interest, and taking care of them. So when it comes time for one of them to be an officer, or to lead a committee or to get more of their people engaged Hekia I’m going to deal with the Charleston Metro Chamber. And so that that kind of intentional focus. And that’s why we sold out that trip to Boston in record time. And we don’t want to take 200 people, you know, we’re kind of like 100 Yeah, you know, if you get over 100, you start to have a three ring circus, and they don’t bond the same way. Yeah. But that that internal clock for us? It’s kind of like a metronome. How are we honoring them and engaging them. So they think I’ve never had a volunteer experience like this. Because let’s face it, we are battling for their time, talent and treasure, there are 4600 non enough for profits, and just the greater Charleston area. You know, as your communities get bigger, that’s probably 15,000 20,000 25,000. So it’s pretty rarefied air to get top leaders. The other thing we do a little bit different because we are really committed to the ENI is that we don’t have to have the the gal or the guy in the corner office. A lot of organizations just say, Oh, I only want the CEO or the president. Right. Well, we’ll say is give me number three, or number four, that will be that CEO and president in 10 to 15 years Yeah, so we can have the level of gender ethnic, racial diversity on our board that reflects our community. It also makes us a lot more healthy from an organizational standpoint,

Brandon Burton 35:13
and possibly more time to give to the purpose and the cause that you’re working on to always go for the number one, they’re going to be some of the busiest people. Not that the number three or four is not busy, but they’re able to work it in a little bit more and build that future along with you. So you’ve hit on some really awesome points in our discussion here. If you were to try to condense down to maybe a tip or an action item for chamber champions listening that want to take their chamber up to the next level, what would you put out there and suggest for them to consider

Bryan Derreberry 35:53
my greatest tip would be pick one to three things in become an expert. And that that’s going to weave right back into what we’ve been talking about Brandon, you’ve got to be committed to do it long term. So let’s say you pick developing a pipeline from your high schools and middle schools for your top two or three business sectors just know front side that that’s going to be 15 to 25 years. Think what we learned during the pandemic, because it was probably a sharing experience for every chamber and business member Association in our nation is that it was the meaningful work that maintained our most significant investors. It wasn’t the business after hours, it wasn’t the networking events. It was they could look at the chamber. And the chamber in our metro area got together with the council of governments and other stakeholders. And we created a whole reopening strategy for our metro marketplace. We met every day at four o’clock, Monday through Thursday for almost six months to get the region opened again. I felt like I had a whole new family. And sometimes it got irritating. But I wouldn’t have traded that we build bonds between organizations and governments that we never had before. So that would be my tip be be substantive, be relevant. And we use a term I think it’s the you know, if you were to ask me the the Chamber’s magic power, our secret sauce, we use a term called seine center, sa N E. Your chamber, chamber champions can be the same center on these issues, you can bring parties together. And whether it’s workforce development, whether it’s diversity, equity, inclusion, whether it’s housing attainability, whether it’s infrastructure solutions, whether it’s recruitment and retention of either businesses or employees, you can be the organization that brings all the parties together, that need to be aligned to do the work. That to me is what a chamber really is. Our mission statement is initiate advocate and empower the region to produce a prosperous business environment. And it’s a little different than a lot of chambers. Because they flip business environment in a region, we know that our region has to have the ingredients that are aligned to make employers, employees and citizens successful. So look at the region as your laboratory, look at your county as your laboratory. If you’re a City Chamber, look at your city as a laboratory, and find those one to three things that really need to be worked on. That would be my greatest encouragement. And and when you do it, you’re gonna get real popular real fast. So you’re gonna have to learn how to say no, yeah. That’s right, because let’s say this camera does such a good job on developing those middle and high school talent pipelines for industry. We wanted to do this now. We wanted to do that. So I think the other thing is to when you do those annual partnership calls, as I mentioned to you, we didn’t come back with 50 Things came back with probably five to seven things that every employer is focused on. So you know, stick to those critical realities, and and go deep and do a great job. And then when it comes renewal time and recruitment time, somebody will say, Oh, yeah, that chamber. They really have the best interest of the business. Unity in our region in mind, they’re worth investing in. So that would be my do stuff that matters and do it. Well.

Brandon Burton 40:09
I love that. So the question that I mentioned at the very beginning that that we would circle back to towards the end is how do you see the future of chambers and their purpose going forward?

Bryan Derreberry 40:21
I’m bullish, I think about what’s occurred over the window is what we’re in pandemic endemic, the past two, three quarters of a year, and I know for our chamber just to bring it home to right here, we look totally different than when we entered. We have a set of members, a set of stakeholders, a set of raving fans in the community, because of how we opened up our organization, for allowing us to assist anybody that needed help. And that that runs a little counter to the the typical Oh, we only help members. Well, when when your community is facing what we’ve all faced. During the pandemic, you help everybody you can help. And you make again, choices. So we look very different today, we look more open to diverse partners, diverse audiences. And we’re working on stuff a lot of chambers, you know, 20 years ago, maybe if you were in a major metro community, you were doing DNI, but I think chambers are going to be leaders for their regions, excuse me. And the years ahead, unlike any other time, I think that the credibility of the chamber when they tackle those issues, even if they’re not successful, and they’re going to be successful in the vast majority of instances. I think there’s a caring tone and tenor and a level of respect by leaders saying, Yeah, we need a rallying point. And I think I think it’s changed. And if your your chambers worth its salt, it’ll step into that opportunity and, and really make a big difference. SOT I’m very excited for the future. However, I do believe one of the things we continually learn is that it can’t, it can’t be all about the fun stuff. Right. And I mean, there are, somebody said to me, how many organizations in your community do networking events, somewhat goods? Probably all 46 months? not for profits? Yeah. So yes, do we have strong programming? We do. We do. But we’re probably one of the communities leaders for providing professional development programming. We have the six different leadership types of offerings. So we know right now, as you well know, in your market, Brandon, attracting and retaining talent is the number one business issue. So again, always making sure your chamber is plugged into what’s relevant, and then providing it with the highest level of expertise you can undertake. And if you’re small, don’t let that slow you down. You’ve got people in your membership. You’ve got volunteers and members that can come alongside of you, and build out the type of programming that you need. That’s one of the powers of small communities is that they can really rally that type of asset set and make it work. So I’m excited. I’m, you know, I think that chambers have always been amazingly relevant. We celebrate a little birthday next year. Yeah. Yeah. We’re gonna be 250 years old. Wow. That we’re the we’re the oldest continuing operating chamber in America. So founded three years before our nation became a country. I’d say we’re in it for the long game.

Brandon Burton 44:13
Yeah, doing that forever work. I love it. So I’d love for you to be able to share some, any contact information for listeners who might want to reach out and connect with you and learn sure but as you’re doing there in Charleston,

Bryan Derreberry 44:27
it’s it’s a really easy, bderreberry@charlestonchamber.org.

Brandon Burton 44:43
That is perfect. And I’ll get that in our show notes for this episode, too. So if somebody always,

Bryan Derreberry 44:48
always happy to talk this profession, and you know, I think your question Brandon on the future is that many chambers are at an inflection point. Mm. But there were ways that they used to do things and things that used to matter. And the inflection point is some of those still have value. The greater value though is marshaling the the leaders and assets of your community and aligning them and doing significant work. So we’re at that neat juncture, so many chambers have already crossed over. And if anybody wants to talk about the both the rewards and the pitfalls, because it’s hard when you enter into a new area of work. And also there are ways to enter in that you can have some immediate victories and set yourself up for long term success.

Brandon Burton 45:47
Yeah, I think that’s important to be able to have that encouragement going along that, that you are going in the right direction. So I love that. Bryan, I appreciate you spending time with us today on chamber chat podcast, providing, you know, great vision and insight for chamber champions listening. I’m sure everyone got a lot of value out of this. But thank you for being a part of the program today. I appreciate it.

Bryan Derreberry 46:13
Well, I love you championing our industry. I believe so greatly in the work that I see peer organizations and colleagues do across the country and America is great because of great chambers. So thank you for being an advocate.

Brandon Burton 44:58
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Presenting Employment Opportunities to the Classroom with Bret Schanzenbach

Below is an auto-generated transcription of my conversation with Bret Schanzenbach. 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.

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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 worked for staples. Well in high school, he’s my dad Brandon Burton.

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.

Kris Johnson

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 2:03

You can learn more about Holman Brothers Membership Sales Solutions by visiting holmanbros.com.

Guest Introduction

You’re joining us today for episode 191 of Chamber Chat Podcast. We are getting up there in the episode numbers. But for this episode, we have Brett Johnson back with us and Brett is he’s served as the president and CEO of the Carlsbad Chamber of Commerce in California since January 2019. Brett is a native Californian and resident of San Diego’s North County since 1971. He came to the Carlsbad position from the VISTA Chamber of Commerce where he served as CEO for nine years is corporate background before the chamber was in residential real estate and the software industry. In 1992. He helped start the technical difference Inc, a human resource software company. before venturing into the corporate world. Brett spent seven years as a youth minister, Brett graduated from the Franciscan University of Steubenville in Steubenville, Ohio, earning a BA in psychology and a BA in theology. He earned his master’s in theological studies from the University of Dallas in 2001. He and his wife Jolene reside in Vista, California, and they’ve been blessed with six children and two grandchildren so far. Brett, I’m looking forward to having you with me on the podcast today. And and I want to give you an opportunity to say hello to all the Chamber Champions that are out there listening and share something interesting about yourself so you can get to know you a little better.

Bret Schanzenbach 3:07
Morning, Brandon, thank you so much for having me as a guest today. I’m excited to be here and have conversation. Something interesting. I mean, you read my bio, so that stole most of the stuff that’s actually interesting about me, I guess I would say one thing that’s interesting is, you know, like a lot of people like backed into the chamber career, I don’t know if anybody truly like goes to college and thinks, oh, I want to be a chamber executive when I grow up, you know, so, and the way I backed into my chamber career was through the real estate industry, I did real estate for eight years and found out that I hated it. And, you know, as you mentioned, my wife and I have six kids and you know, real estate, you have to obviously work on your client’s terms. And so they usually are available on nights, weekends, holidays, you know, things like that. And after a while, I just really did not enjoy that industry. And, but that’s the industry that got me super engaged with my local chamber. When I was a realtor, I had joined my chamber, joined a committee got invited to the board of directors and because of all that, you know, it’s how I got really familiar with the impact chambers could have in a in a community. And when the guy who was the executive of my local board there that I was part of, he decided to move back to the Midwest with his wife. You know, I’m like, Oh, this is great opportunity to get out of this because I’m so done with real estate and I didn’t really know exactly what I was getting into but you know, I so but I backed in. I had I remember having a conversation with him one day when we were talking about him leaving and me possibly applying for the job. And I said Um, I don’t actually know what you do on a day to day basis. What do you

Brandon Burton 5:07
board member? Yeah, what you do?

Bret Schanzenbach 5:10
So, but I threw my hat in the ring. And now I’ve been in the industry for 14 and a half years, I think it is or, or I’m in my 14th year, however that works and love it.

Brandon Burton 5:24
As I say, hopefully it’s going better for you than real estate. So yeah, I really do love it. And maybe that needs to be the question I ask people is how did you find your way into the chamber world? Because everybody has a unique story about how they are? Yeah,

Bret Schanzenbach 5:38
that is so true. You know, one of my neighboring chamber execs. He is one of those guys that came right out of college and got a job at his local chamber and moved his way up and all that jazz. But that is so rare. It’s mostly people who have come from all kinds of different. You do find a lot of people who served at a chamber before they became an exec. But the stories are so different.

Brandon Burton 6:02
Right? Yeah, I always find it fascinating. So thank you for sharing your journey. Absolutely. So tell us a little bit about the Carlsbad chamber just to give us an idea of size staff budget, kind of scope of work to give us an idea of what you guys do there.

Bret Schanzenbach 6:20
Sure. So we are located as you mentioned, in North San Diego County. We’re about 3530 35 miles from the city of San Diego itself. And we our community itself, is about 115,000 people in in our suburb here. But for our part of San Diego County, we’re kind of the economic hub. We have a robust tourism industry, but we also have robust industry in general, which is a nice combination, and at least in San Diego County is pretty rare besides the city of San Diego. We are we’re the number two generator and tourism dollars in our county behind the city of San Diego itself. And and I think we have the third largest industrial park in San Diego County. So both we have this great mix of both, you know, like biotech and high tech and that kind of stuff. And then the tourism side. So that’s great. Our chamber itself, we have right around 1000 members, little over 1000 members. San Diego County has 43 chambers of commerce, and we’re the second largest with the city of San Diego, the Regional Chamber in San Diego being the largest. So we’re the second largest chamber in the county, we have about a $1.3 million budget staff of nine. We do not our community has we have separate visitor Bureau, we have a separate Downtown Association. Our city has its own economic development department. So we don’t have any of those other add ons that some chambers do. But we obviously we work very closely with all of those entities matter of fact, we meet regularly have a great rapport with them. But but we don’t fulfill those, you know, those specific roles, like getting funding to be say a visitor center or a manage the downtown or any of those things. So So yeah, that’s a little bit about us. I have a very large board of directors. That was kind of the biggest, one of the biggest changes coming from my previous chamber where we we had what I thought was a big board at the time, like of 17. And, you know, I have 35 voting members and, you know, for other like, advisory members and then other emeritus members, we have a large board here.

Brandon Burton 8:56
Yeah, they work for a lot of people. That definitely helps paint the picture for sure kind of where you guys sit and the type of work I’m involved with.

Bret Schanzenbach 9:06
I do work for a lot of people. It’s very true.

Brandon Burton 9:11
Well, I’m excited to get into our topic for our discussion. Today we’re we’re going to be focusing our discussion around presenting employment opportunities to youth in the classroom. And we’ll dive more into this discussion as soon as we get back from this quick break.

Visit ChamberNation.com to learn more.

All right, Bret, we’re back. As I mentioned before the break, we’re talking about presenting employment opportunities to the classroom today. I know our our scheduling of recording this is being worked around both you and I both volunteering at at church youth camps and so forth. So I know for me, and I may be speaking for you as well, that the rising generation is important to me. And and I think for chambers in general to look at that future employment pipeline and creating a vibrant economy in your community. So I’m excited to have you tell us what the Carlsbad chamber has been doing to introduce these these students, these youth to what a future can look like in your community through the various employment opportunities.

Topic-Presenting Employment Opportunities to the Classroom

Bret Schanzenbach 13:05
Yeah, thank you for that lead in it is a very important topic for all chambers. And I feel like as we go to our conferences, and you know, you attend webinars, and you see this topic comes up more and more and more, because it’s a it’s not just a local issue. It’s a nationwide issue. And if I could, before I explain what we’re currently at, I want to paint a little bit of a picture of what we used to do. That led up to our current initiative and our chamber, like probably many others who are listening in, we’re very engaged at one point or another in trying to bring together the world of work and the classroom, you know, to bring those together as you as you alluded to, and what we had been doing before, we had this program called talent, cities, and we brought eighth graders out on field trips to actual businesses, like different manufacturing type businesses, et cetera, et cetera. And instead of just doing like a tour of the business, we specifically crafted a tour where they would stop strategically at different places at the company that they were visiting, and they would get a little interview with somebody. So a couple of those stops would be like, on a shop floor, for instance. And then a couple of stops would be more like in research and development and marketing and sales, things like that. So there’s always this mix, kind of a, the blue collar, the white collar type things, but we at each stop, they would hear from a staff member and employee who would talk about who they were, what they did, what they liked about it, what was challenging about it, and how they got to this point in their career. And our goal with that bringing those kids out on site was to just broaden their perspective. Have a little bit because what mostly we found is that most students know what their mom and their dad do if they have both parents. And sometimes they don’t even know what their parents do. Because sometimes what their parents do, they just, they just have no way of actually knowing what they do. But beyond that, they just know the big hero jobs like teacher, firefighter, policeman, military, you know, stuff like that. So our goal was to try to broaden their perspectives just a little on what kinds of jobs and career opportunities could be available to them. And when we started that program that we called Talent cities, it was we felt that was successful, like we would actually pull the kids before they would go through with this kind of a tour, field trip, etc. And then we would survey them again, after and we got some great comments, like one that really stuck out in my mind, one of the kids said, you know, I never thought I could use my love of art in, you know, a work setting or a job or a career or whatever. So things like that. That was exactly what we were hoping to do is help them to see a little bit bigger than they had had a chance to up to that point in their life. But we ran into challenges. So that program, when I was at the VISTA chamber, we ran 1,000/8 graders through in like an 18 month period of time. And at least out here in Southern California field trips are challenging for school districts, and all those logistics that they have to go through to make a field trip happen are not simple. And then secondly, I found that I was constantly going back to the same four or five different companies saying, Hey, I got another group of 38th graders or 20, you know, whatever, for you guys to host. And so, you know, it becomes challenging for businesses to interrupt their flow to do that on a regular basis. So all that being said, That was that was the precursor, when COVID hit, obviously, the whole world pivoted towards virtual learning, virtual interaction, et cetera, et cetera. And at the same time, our local hospital out here was working on some initiatives to help their career readiness workforce pipeline get developed. And so they were interested in, in creating some videos to help broaden people’s awareness of career opportunities within healthcare. Most people when they think of healthcare, all they think of as a nurse and a doctor. And obviously, when you have a big hospital, there’s usually something like, I think our hospital has, like 2200 employees. So there’s all kinds of careers, that all the way from marketing, you know, down to techs and an

Brandon Burton 18:00
average janitors, you know, everything Yeah,

Bret Schanzenbach 18:03
you got it, you got it. So there’s, there’s so much diversity within just a company like that. So they approached us and and so what we ended up putting together and one of the things I love about this is, this was a collaboration with three different chambers of commerce here in my area. So we the Carlsbad chamber, our two neighbors directly nearest the Oceanside chamber and the VISTA chamber, the hospital that I just mentioned, and then our regional EDC edge, our Regional Economic Development Council for our area, the five of us together collaborated on this project. And we went out to our local county representative and said, Hey, we have this idea. And so luckily, he bought into the idea that I’m going to share and funded it because this stuff doesn’t happen without some money behind it. But we created a web portal. And it’s called SoCal. And that’s an acronym that I always forget, but it stands for student opportunities for career awareness and learning. SoCal, and the website is called SoCal workforce.org, SoCal workforce.org. And so we created this web portal. And what we did as we were starting to conceive it, and one of the pieces that was really important to us as we wanted to do this in conjunction with our schools, we didn’t, we didn’t want to do this in some silo by ourselves and just do what we thought made sense. So we worked with the three school districts in the three communities that I just mentioned, Carlsbad, Oceanside and VISTA. And we said, hey, here’s this idea we have, we want to make this evergreen portal of jobs and careers, a video library, if you will, that you can use in the cloud. last room to expose students to the real world of work. And they love the idea, we met with them like two or three times during the process of developing it. And, and when we unveiled it in January of this year 2022, they were ecstatic. And so what the web portal has, when you go there, and it’s open to anybody, so it could be like a teacher who’s navigating this or an individual student, or like, anybody who’s in a, looking to change directions in life, right? Anybody can use this, this website, but you can look up job or career opportunities, three different ways, by industry, by company name, or by a job itself. So like industry, you could look and say, oh, what kinds of things exist in my area in healthcare and tech, in, you know, in public safety, or whatever the case might be? Or, Hey, I’ve heard of, in our area that, you know, there’s some big name companies like ViaSat, or Nordson, or, you know, whatever the company is, I’ve heard of that company, what jobs might be, what careers do they even have, I don’t even know what they do. Or you could just go the path of, you know, like, I want to know more about being an engineer or want to know more about being a this or that. So whatever way you navigate, you eventually get down to these three minute videos. And what we did is we shot all the videos on location. At the site where the worker works, we wanted it really, in their workspace in their flow, like all the B roll, we didn’t use any third party just B roll that you can just purchase, you know, anywhere, everything is shot at the actual site where these people work. And we interview these these various workers. And it’s the same kind of interview that I mentioned earlier, who they are, what they do, what do they like about it? What’s challenging about it?

How do they get to this point in their career, if they were adding a staff member to their team, what would they be looking for. And so in these three minute videos, you get a really good snapshot of a real life, you know, place of work, job, career, etc. And, on our portal, another piece that I really like, because we were trying to think of it from the student perspective is, when you get down to the actual job, before you watch the video, there’s a description there, hey, here’s a little bit about the job. Here’s what the average person in San Diego County makes, who, who performs this job, here’s the job outlook for the next five to 10 years for that profession, in our area. And then if, you know, educational resources are like if you need a degree or a certificate or something to do that job, here’s a couple of links of local institutions who offer those certificates or degrees, etc. And so then with all that background, and they can watch the three minute you know, video and and get to know, that particular job, career, etc. And school districts, when we rolled it out in January, we’re over the moon, they love it. Now, it’s not that a school district can’t like if they wanted to bring, oh, let’s let’s look at a day in the life of the engineer. They can they have resources, they can find that that’s out there. But what our school districts really loved about this project was that it’s so localized. So these are companies that they’re, the students may have heard of, these are places that they’ve driven by, I mean, these are right here in their backyard. And it just the teachers were so excited about making it tangible to their students.

Brandon Burton 24:02
So I’m gonna circle back towards some of the beginning of your comments, and you mentioned that students often will only know what their parents have done it Yeah, just funny. When I was in third grade, I drew some attention from the school when I told them that my dad sold drugs because a pharmaceutical sales rep but I would hear him come home talking about the new drug that he’s marketing. So you know, naturally when we talk about what is your dad do for a living my dad sold drugs so that prompted a parent teacher conference and Oh, no that so that was interesting. But so with these, this web portal and video library I love this idea that I love being able to have the different angles being able to filter by industry company and job type. Are you primarily focusing on the bigger companies because they have so many different levels, different types of positions? Or do you have some of the smaller entrepreneurs even that are highlighting what a day in the life of their work is? Like?

Bret Schanzenbach 25:11
Yeah, good question. Um, it is it is intended to be a mix of both. But initially, it was, when we were at the conception phase and trying to get it off the ground, it was a little bit easier to go to some of the bigger companies who have a diversity of roles already, and say, hey, you know, we want to shoot three different, you know, jobs through different roles at your company. But, but we have both some, so we have some large companies, but we also have some, I would say, medium sized companies. And, and when we launched in January, our goal was to get, I think our goal was to have 60 videos on the portal at launch. And we ended up we met that goal. And currently there’s, there’s 80, I’m trying to think through the numbers. Yeah, currently, there’s 80. And our goal by the end of this calendar year is to get to 100. And then obviously, continue to grow it but but yeah, the so we’re trying to diverse, like to your point, we’re trying to diversify as we grow, and get a more industries be more diversity of size of companies and things. The county supervisor who really bought into this initially, he wanted us to have a healthy mix of things that did not require going to get a four year degree. Sure. And as you probably know, there’s, you know, obviously, there’s the big push in the schools for STEM, and, you know, that kind of stuff. So we wanted to have, obviously, that kind of stuff, too. So we worked really hard. So there’s like some, there’s some construction jobs, you know, what I mean, there’s welders and you know, that kind of stuff in the midst of off. So there’s engineers and you know, etc. So we’re worked hard to try to have that kind of diversity in there.

Brandon Burton 27:07
Yeah. And I can see this library just growing over time with expanding the different companies. But there’s always going to be the need for an accountant and a lawyer and a doctor in some of those staples. But then you see new careers popping up to you know, from I’m thinking when the smartphones came out, and you had app developers, and that wasn’t like you had software designers, but now specifically apps and now. So we see technology shifting with, you know, the metaverse and things like that. And, you know, what is the career going to look like 10 years from now, it might look very different. But exposing these students to those opportunities might help them avoid, you know, eight years in the real estate industry if they don’t like that, right.

Bret Schanzenbach 27:53
Yeah, no, you’re but you’re you’re spot on it. I mean, there’s people who have careers right now that five years ago, those things didn’t even exist. So you know, so theoretically, somebody entering college today, you know, might end up in a career a few years from now, that doesn’t even exist as they start college at least. And Title and name like you, like an app developer. At one point, there was no such thing, right? Or what exactly is an influencer again, but making a lot of money at it. I don’t know what that means. You know, so that is a challenge to, but the other thing that we’re doing is one of the challenges we had when, you know, when I was sharing that example, at my previous chamber, where we were working hard to bring the, the classroom world into the real world of work. We were doing it within our given community, you know, I was the VISTA chamber, and these were Vista businesses, and this was the Vista school district and, but at least in our area, and I know, every region could be, you know, have some differences here. But in our area where we are a suburban, you know, area, it doesn’t make sense to do it. siloed but community by community, which is why this regional approach we felt made a lot more sense. Like, I live in community a I work in community b I go to school and community see my churches in community D. I mean, that’s, that’s actually true for me what I just said, you know, so it was really important for us to take a broader perspective, here in Carlsbad. There. 80,000 people come to work every day, but only 20,000 of those actually live in Carlsbad. So that’s a lot of people coming to work from neighboring communities. And so we had that mindset. So now what where we’re at is, since we launched in January, we’ve now added three more communities to our portfolio, San Marcos Escondido Encinitas have all joined us and their school districts as well. So we’re growing it growing the footprint of it geographically. And then as you already were talking about the companies, the jobs, the those kind of operates, the industries are growing as well. And so we eventually see it hopefully being county wide, but that’s going to take a little while, but county wide, and, you know, just continuing to expand the diversity of opportunities to,

Brandon Burton 30:27
I think it goes to show, maybe the definition of community is changing to some degree, you know, between online communities got your physical communities, you’ve got cities that were established before transportation was as robust as it is now, and, and the world just keeps getting smaller and smaller. So as we silo and say, We are the Carlsbad community, you’re really discounting a lot of opportunity from the neighboring areas that, you know, your residents or employers employees are interacting in those cities anyway. So maybe just kind of a reset on what community actually means.

Bret Schanzenbach 31:02
Yeah, I think that’s a good point. You know, we’re, we’re very fluid in this area, and I believe, probably in a lot of areas, and as you pointed out, transportation being, you know, robust, but this, this portal has been, you know, a great collaboration, and I think, in our industry, you know, that’s really important, you know, in the chamber industry to collaborate together, look for me, you know, how can we create win wins, you know, and it, it’s a, it’s been a really great thing for us to collectively work together on and create value for all of our memberships in this in this region. And our, you know, our bigger members who have a tendency to be members of multiple chambers, they love seeing this to, you know, they love seeing our chambers all work together on on big, more enterprise level projects. So, so that’s been a positive, I think our biggest challenge, you know, as we, we initially got that grant, which was super helpful, but, you know, to grow it, there has to be funding so, videography, high quality videography, and editing doesn’t come free. And, and we have done it at a very high level. So we’re at the point where, okay, we’re looking for some more grants and streams of funding. But we’re also going straight to the companies and say, Hey, if you want your company, you know, featured here, we have a path for that. So we’ve created corporate pricing for those that want to be added. It was interesting when we launched some industries that we hadn’t really thought of jumped up and said, Oh, we want to be featured. And so you know, a municipality, their, their water division, they’re like, We need to promote career opportunities in this field. You know, people don’t think about this. And so they jumped on board and sponsored, you know, right away and got some video shot at, at their, whatever water division at their municipality. So there’s, you know, there’s different pockets that we hadn’t really anticipated. And right now I’m working. You know, I mentioned at the outset that we have a strong tourism in Carlsbad. But at the moment, there is no tourism or hospitality listed on our portal at all. So I’m currently in dialogue with them, they they’re really hurting for workforce right now, after the pandemic, it’s been a challenge getting getting staffed back up to the levels, both at restaurants and hotels, and but we just hosted a panel discussion on tourism about two weeks ago, and they were all talking about how they need to, you know, promote careers within tourism. So, so we had a discussion this week about how they could get into our portal. So we’re putting a proposal together for them to to get some video shot at their place. So, you know, I love that, that we have this tool to be able to help serve those who have that need right now.

Brandon Burton 34:05
Yeah, I love that. And thank you for touching on the funding part of it too, because I was going to ask that next about day, how do you make all this happen? And yeah, variety of sources and, and being creative as you go along to and looking for those new opportunities.

Bret Schanzenbach 34:19
Very true. I mean, obviously, there we all in our communities know of some, some go to little, you know, channels where we go after funding for this or that, but eventually, you know, we need business to step up. You know, we were looking regionally at funding sources. You know, our local congressman really liked the idea what so one of the things that’s been that’s come up though, is multiple people have said, hey, it would be great. If your portal could be like a one stop shop for internships, companies who want to host interns, you know, people who want to have an internship and it could be a one stop shop and You know, we’re dealing with all these different jurisdictions now different school districts, and you know, all this stuff. And they all have their own

Brandon Burton 35:08
parameters. And yeah,

Bret Schanzenbach 35:10
exactly. So it’s like, oh, boy, how do we do this? So that’s probably like version three of the portal. Not even version two. But so those are things we’re aspiring to, though and are on our radar to continue to evolve, how this portal can continue to serve the needs of our community now that it’s launched, and it’s getting on people’s radar.

Brandon Burton 35:33
Yeah, I really liked that. But as we start to wrap things up here, I wanted to ask you, for anybody listening? What tip or action item might you share with them to any chamber that’s looking to take their organization up to the next level?

Action Item/Tip for Chamber Champions

Bret Schanzenbach 35:51
Yeah, that’s, um, you know, it’s a great question we talked about here. And, and other people have heard in the industry, that we can’t, we can’t be our grandfather’s chamber. You know, the chamber, the days when you think of kind of like, there was a time where businesses join the chamber, and you can pick a variety of reasons, the chamber was the go to place for networking, that was probably the easiest chamber was the go to place for advocacy, you know, you know, things like that. And we don’t have the market cornered on any of those things anymore. I mean, there’s a million ways to network from meet up and you know, online tools to lead clubs and all that kind of stuff. There’s so many ways to network, besides even just social networking. And then advocacy, every industry has its own, you know, vehicle, you know, their own Association, that advocates just for their specific niche needs, and really watches their back. And I still think chambers are excellent at broad scale advocacy, and networking, and all that kind of stuff. But we don’t have the market cornered on any of those things that used to be kind of synonymous with why you need to join a chamber. So we’re constantly asking, asking ourselves, you know, what is our you know, value proposition? What are we bringing to the table that nobody else is bringing to the table, which is part and parcel with this, this discussion we just had today, this is one piece of it for us, you know. So we’re, we’re involved in workforce development in about five or six different fingers or different ways. This SoCal project was just one of them. But that’s, for us, it was like, nobody, when I left broad scape, broad scale, nobody’s involved in this, nobody can bring to the table what we can and workforce development, the relationship with the companies and the relationship with a schools which already we have, you know, we can we can be this bridge that nobody else can serve. So we’ve, that’s one of the stakes we put in the ground, this is going to be a value proposition that we have for our membership. But looking at those things, what do you bring to the table that not nobody else is, you know, Rotary can’t bring to the table or, you know, some nonprofit in your community can’t bring to the table or some Meetup group can’t bring to the table, you know, what, what is it that’s unique. And so we look for those things we and we have, you know, we’re constantly developing new initiatives, which is a little daunting, to be honest, we have to be careful, we don’t get out of a mission and, and go off on some tangent, but, but, and I think, and one other thing I want to, I want to point out 25 years ago, when people thought of economic development, they primarily thought of, let’s try to get Company X or company wide to come to our city. And they’ll bring good jobs, and that’ll be good for the community. And we even saw it like five or six years ago, like the whole country was tripping over themselves to try and get the next you know, Amazon headquarters, you know, and it was almost comical, but and there’s I’m not saying that’s not valid, but even before COVID We knew and now since COVID We really know that people can be from work from anywhere. Yeah, you know, they don’t you it doesn’t matter where their job is. It’s where do they want to be and so we have to create a community that attracts people that want to be there not because their company’s there. So what does that mean? Well, what attracts people you got to have, you know, low crime rate, great schools, affordable housing, amenities and parks and stuff that people want, you know, a good entrepreneurial environment, you know, business friendly, me all these factors together. There are what make places desirable for people to locate. And, and, and be. So we have to be about all of it. You know, we can’t just be siloed in, we’re a business organization, we are going to work with business. That’s long gone. And so we’re constantly looking at how can we make a positive impact in all those areas, so that we can make our community a great place to, you know, live workplace shop, dying vacation visit, you know, all of that. And so it’s it’s exciting, but it’s daunting. It’s a, the the ways you can engage that are never ending, which wakes me up and gets me excited. And also overwhelms me sometimes at two o’clock in the morning. But that’s what I love about the industry.

Brandon Burton 40:51
Now, and I think something you touched on is, it’s the shift of placemaking. Like it used to be, you’re attracting business, and now it’s attracting those employees, attracting those people that want to live in your community. And I think your response, it may answer my next question, but I like asking everybody I have on the show, as we look to the future chambers of commerce, how do you see their purpose going forward?

Future of Chambers

Bret Schanzenbach 41:16
Yeah, I think that the role that we serve as a hub within the community is so vital and important, and valuable, so valuable, you know, we can pull together stakeholders from so many different things from from public safety, and government, to education and nonprofits and business and we can put them in the same room. And, and sometimes you don’t maybe only need two or three of those fingers for what your initiative is, but, but you can, we can pull together things that nobody else can and, and so we have to, we have to embrace that role. And you know, find the issues within our communities that are meaningful, and, and go after them and be the solution. We don’t have to have all the answers, but be the one that convenes everybody to help create the positive movement for the community. And I think if we wholeheartedly embrace that role will continue to be relevant, and will continue to have a reason to exist. But you know, if we just kind of bury our head, and like, we’re the business community, I think that’s too narrow. And I feel like most chambers have evolved beyond that. But, but I see going forward, just we have to take that up, you know, wholeheartedly and run with that mentality to be community leaders, not just business leaders.

Brandon Burton 42:42
Right. And being that that embracing being a convener is is so important, and you guys are setting a great example with the SoCal program. Because that’s exactly what you’re doing is you’re bringing those those right people to the table to help provide opportunities for the the youth coming up that are going to be the future workforce. Yeah. So Brad, I wanted to give you an opportunity to share any contact information for listeners who might want to reach out and connect with you and learn more about the SoCal program or how you go through all the things in Carlsbad, what’s the best way for someone to reach out and connect?

Connect with Bret Schanzenbach

Bret Schanzenbach 43:18
Sure. I have the easiest email in the world. So one of my emails is ceo@carlsbad.org. And you can email me the if somebody wanted to check out that website I mentioned socalworkforce.org. And you can see more. I’m on LinkedIn, I’m on all those different. I don’t know social media thing is, you know, I respond I actually check messages on LinkedIn. If anybody messages me on the other ones, I don’t check those but but you can connect with people all the time on LinkedIn, especially chamber pros. I love connecting with other chamber professionals. Because I value them and you know, there’s none of us has all the answers in this world of of what we do in the chamber. So I love learning and meeting other people and hearing what’s working in their communities and seeing if there’s any tidbits I can bring back to my community. So yeah, hit me up on LinkedIn. Email me ceo@carlsbad.org. And yeah, love to connect.

Brandon Burton 44:28
Very good. I’ll make sure if we get all that in our show notes for this episode, which will be found at chamber chat. podcast.com/episode 191. But Brad, this has been great having you on the podcast. I appreciate you taking the time to be with us and sharing this great example of what you guys and you know, in collaboration with your neighboring Chambers as well are doing and it’s a great template that others can look to and build upon themselves.

Bret Schanzenbach 44:55
Well, thank you so much for the invitation, Brandon, I really enjoyed it.

Your audience is waiting to hear from you as a convener of leaders and influencers champion for business and catalyst for change within your community.

Regional Coalitions with Glenn Morris

Below is an auto-generated transcription of my conversation with Glenn Morris. 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.

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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 likes to explore new automation tools. Here’s my dad Brandon Burton.

Hello, Chamber Champions. Welcome to the Chamber Chat Podcast. I’m your host, Brandon Burton, and it’s my goal here 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 Diane Rogers, President and CEO of the Rancho Cordova Area Chamber to learn how the Holman Brothers have provided value for her.

Diann Rogers 0:45
As a medium sized chamber, we recognize that it’s absolutely critical to have a well qualified and well trained membership development person. Holman Brothers trained that person, recruited that person then they even trained me on how to manage that person. We’re grateful for the support we got.

Brandon Burton 0:59
You can learn more about Holman Brothers Membership Sales Solutions by visiting holmanbros.com.

Guest Introduction

Our guest for this episode is Glenn Morris. Glenn leads the Santa Maria Valley Chamber of Commerce in California and developed in delivering on its mission to be a catalyst for business growth convenient for leaders and influencers and champion for a stronger Santa Maria Valley. The chamber is the leading business support Economic Development and Tourism Promotion Agency in Northern Santa Barbara County. Prior to joining the Santa Maria Valley Chamber, Glenn served as president and CEO for the Visalia Chamber of Commerce, which is also in California leading the chamber through a complete update of its programs, while establishing the organization as an influential voice and local policy decision making. In addition to his work with chambers, Glenn has professional experience in economic development, tourism and business advocacy. He brings nearly three decades of experience and leadership to bear on his passions of community organizational excellence, and the power of collaboration to achieve goals. His experience includes leading nonprofit organizations in Utah, California and Nevada. As a community leader, Glenn has been involved in a number of local and national organizations working on issues ranging from access to the arts, improvement of local schools and youth leadership development. Glenn has also been part of a number of community based political campaigns. Professionally, Glenn has served on a wide range of local, regional and national boards focused on business advocacy, economic development, workforce issues and youth career preparation. Glenn has served in numerous leadership and training positions for His church, community and professional organizations. He finds great joy in being a husband to Shana and as a father and a grandfather. Glenn, I’m excited to have you with me on Chamber Chat Podcast today, I’d love for you to just 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 better.

Glenn Morris 3:06
Well, Brandon, good morning, and thank you for this invitation. And the chance to chat about chambers, I think. I think chambers are just critical organizations and communities. And I was fortunate that kind of midpoint in my career to find myself in the chamber business and found my real home professionally. So I love that, that that you have this opportunity to bring chamber people together and help us all learn and, and grow together. So that’s wonderful. You know, something else about myself, I you know, I do a lot of work. But But I love all of it. But you know, I think the thing that makes it all worthwhile. At the end of the day, you mentioned the grandkids and that and that’s just you know, that’s the payoff in life, right? When you when you get those opportunities to see your family growing and thriving, and we’re really blessed in that way.

Brandon Burton 4:05
That’s right. I always like to say that’s how, you know you got your priorities right. You know, you can get at work and and all your responsibilities to be able to reflect on that. That’s where that that’s what matters. Yeah, indeed.

Glenn Morris 4:19
Very good.

Brandon Burton 4:20
Well, tell us a little bit about the Santa Maria Valley Chamber just to give us some perspective, midsize budget staff, that sort of thing is we get your discussion

Glenn Morris 4:29
today. Yeah, so Santa Maria Valley Chamber. We are the chamber for the city of Santa Maria and the surrounding. There’s a fairly large unincorporated community in our neighborhood. There’s a smaller city just down the street. So we kind of covered that regional area. We’re in Northern Santa Barbara County, so that three and a half hours north of LA for something south of San Francisco, right on the Central Coast. We, we think of it as God’s country. And you know, the we I joke with folks that I live in the land of the eternal 70s is that it’s really just a beautiful place to live and work. We have a wine country here that that’s a big draw for our tourism side. But there’s a significant amount of manufacturing in this area, as well. And so it’s a very diversified economy communities about 100. And, oh, if you take the all of the neighboring areas that we serve, it’s probably 150 to 160,000 people, kind of one of the last, growing communities along the central coast with with still some opportunity for new new development and new growth. Our chamber is a we think of ourselves as the one stop shop for all business needs. In addition to the traditional chamber functions, we are the tourism marketing organization for the community. And we are the economic development organization for the community. So we work with our city and the county in our area to lead in all of those areas. So we really are kind of a one stop shop I have a team of depending on the day 10 to 12 folks that lead those three functions. We have about 850 members of the chamber and our budget all in is gonna probably be in that two and a quarter million this next year. All right.

Brandon Burton 6:43
Well, that does help to give some of that perspective especially as we get into what our topic for our discussions today around regional coalition’s. We’ll get into this discussion as soon as we get back from this quick break.

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Topic-Regional Coalitions

All right, Glenn, we’re back. So as I mentioned before the break we’ll focus our conversation around regional coalition’s and your responsibility or your chamber there, like you mentioned, as you kind of gave that background about the chamber is your typical chamber work you’ve got the tourism arm as well as economic development responsibilities, so you guys stay busy. But also that gives you the need really to reach out and, and work with others in your community and the region. So I’m always curious to hear how different chambers go about reaching out and working with other organizations because it can be, you know, competitive on some levels, but also, you know, rising tide raises all ships as they say. So, I’d love to kind of hear your philosophy and strategy as to how you approach that.

Glenn Morris 11:06
So this is a this is an issue that I’m really passionate has been kind of my, my new to the topic I’ve been evangelizing on in our community for since I got here. So good, let me give you a quick story, because it’ll set some context for how we came to this this approach, I joined the Santa Maria Valley Chamber, just over just right at eight years ago, came from another community in California, and moved over here, Santa Maria is the largest community in our region. But it’s not the county seat, right. So it’s not the political center of the county, that would be Santa Barbara. And San Luis Obispo, which is about 40 minutes to the north of us is the home to the regional university. And so you know, as you can imagine, I’m sure that this will ring true for many communities, when you’re the kind of the second community that you know, there can be a chip on the shoulder, right, we don’t get our fair share, some disapprove. Yeah, and so when I moved to the community that that perception was really clear that, that this community had felt for a long time, like it was a little isolated from resources and decision making power, and all of those kinds of things. I joke with people that when I moved to town that, you know, community leaders would discuss, you know, would say, Well, you know, the community is bounded by, you know, the Rio Grande and the Grand Canyon, there’s a riverbed on the north end of town, and there’s a kind of a choke point Canyon, you have to go through to get from us to Santa Barbara. And it was their way of kind of describing this sense of a little bit of isolation, right? Not being from the community and carrying some of that emotional baggage, I decided to my role was going to be you know, I would tell my board, you know, if there’s a moat around the community, my job is to build bridges across and, and to go out and create relationships that would benefit our community. But also knowing that we could bring value to the greater region where the where the workforce home, so many people in our community can move out to neighboring communities for work during the day, where the retail center, so people that live in those outer communities on either side of us come here to shop, and, you know, so that we add value to bring, but we also needed, you know, the health of the region. And then as we really got into that we really, you know, came to the what’s probably an obvious right realization, but but, you know, took us a while as a community to acknowledge that, that we’re, you know, business doesn’t care about political lines, right? The economy doesn’t stop at a city boundary or a county line, or probably even a state guide, right? That, that people’s lives flow across that right, you may live in one community, but work in another right and your business may be in one. But your customers are coming from, you know, three or four others, you certainly are going to have suppliers that are in other communities, you’re going to have, you know, all of that economic activity flows back and forth in really natural ways that have nothing to do with the way we organize for governments. Right. And so we’ve worked we’ve been working for that eight years to really create those relationships with those economic institutions. So initially, it was probably the universities that are one university 40 minutes to the north and another 170 miles to the south. But as we got into that, what we really found worked best was when we reached out to the other chamber Vers, in those communities that said, let’s stop competing and start working together, particularly on the things that matter, like, head of household jobs, and, you know, infrastructure, and you know, all of the housing, job bows, all of those kinds of things, right, we can fight over where the next, you know, cool retail store goes, but but when we come to, you know, where are the head of household jobs, we can work together to land those.

Brandon Burton 15:31
Yeah. Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. And I, the thought that comes to my mind as he explained that because I mean, to me, it makes it like I said, it makes a lot of sense to work together to build a stronger region, because, like you said, the politics don’t stop, you know, certain lines, economies don’t stop at, you know, city boundaries. And even having a university, you know, in the community next door, doesn’t meet. Yeah, so there’s a lot of this crossover. But the question that comes to my mind is, how does one defined community these days when the world seems to be shrinking, and we have so much crossover into in these different areas and elements, that it makes sense to work together with other communities? But what defines a community anymore?

Glenn Morris 16:25
You know, that’s a good question. And I think it’s changing, right. And I hope that that, in my belief is that it’s expanding. Right. So, you know, I think you can define community by the neighborhood that you live in, I think you can define it by the city that you’re engaged in civically. And I think you can define it in that region that you live you that you really live your life and right, and where you do, you’re recreating, and you’re working, and all of those other kinds of pieces. And I think when you really think of it as kind of that Patchwork, right, with different pieces, it really adds a richness, and you know, a lot of value, right? You know, the you may not have every kind of thing you’re looking for in one in one of those boxes. But if you can pull that lens back just a little bit, you probably find, you know, what you’re looking for, right? And, you know, we would, we would have conversations about, you know, well, we don’t have this type of housing in our community, but you know, what, the guy five miles down the road does. And so, you know, if I’m selling, you know, if that’s what the, if that’s what somebody’s looking for, we can point them to it. Right. So, yeah, that, you know, the set the idea of community, I think, is really evolving, and, and hopefully growing. Right,

Brandon Burton 17:51
yeah. I like how you brought up the richness and the value that comes as we expand community and be more inclusive of others in those, you know, traditionally, bordering communities. And, you know, when, like the example you gave of certain housing, you know, you got to play with how the fields striped at the moment. But that doesn’t mean that you can’t help to redefine where the stripes go right over time.

Glenn Morris 18:17
Yeah, and, you know, we really, so Well, you know, a big part of our role in the community is economic development. Right. So we’re all we’re engaged in business attraction. And, you know, often we would get ourselves into these conversations with prospective businesses about, you know, well, we need we need more of this particular type. We need engineers, and, you know, in your city data, we don’t see enough engineers. Right. But But again, I pulled that lens out 40 miles, and I one of the top engineering schools in the country, right, just just across the river. Right. And, you know, so it’s like, the real, we got him, right. You may not see him as you walk down Main Street, but we got him. Right. And, and, you know, that held true for, you know, housing, it might hold true for available land, right, maybe they want to put a factory in, and, you know, my neighboring communities having that conversation, and they don’t have the 10 acres the guy needs, but I do right, but in so you do that. And I think this kind of an approach is critical on business retention. I’ll give you one quick story right before I moved to the community, we had a business that that moved 20 miles away. And people in the community when I moved into town, they were just really still upset about this, right. It had probably been about two years. And they were really still ticked off about it. Right because we lost the business. And as I thought about it, I thought, you know, okay, they you know, they’re fizzle. cool facility is 20 miles down the road. But all of the people that live in our community that work for that business are still in our community, they have a little longer commute. Right. But they’re still here, their kids are still playing on our kids soccer teams, they’re still volunteering on our local nonprofits. Right. And they’re still, you know, in, in our, you know, in our churches. So, did we lose? You know, I don’t know. You know, if, if people are your greatest asset, I’m not sure we lost, right. And, you know, maybe the city lost a little property tax, I don’t know, you know, but, but in the grand scheme of it, I think, because we were able to stay in the region. You know, I don’t think I don’t know that I would chalk it up as a loss.

Brandon Burton 20:50
And say, especially with that example, keeping them in the region, just 20 miles down the road, there is a facility that’s available now, for somebody that move into so yeah, the perceived loss is also a gain on another side, as well, bringing new people new resources, new, you know, everything else.

Glenn Morris 21:10
And, you know, the reason that they had moved was they needed to grow, and Mike tanned at that moment didn’t have a building they could grow into. Right, and, and I think without a regional kind of an approach, when the next one of those comes to me and says, you know, I need another 10,000 square feet, and we just don’t have it in the market. You know, I think without a regional approach, the risk is that they start looking at other states, right? Or completely different markets, where my neighbors who work for them are either going to have to make a choice to relocate, or find new employment. Right. And so, you know, do I want them to stand my town? Yes, I do. Right. But if I can’t make that work, and I can put them in the town next door, that’s a better outcome than, you know, letting them, you know, load a truck up and go someplace far away.

Brandon Burton 22:05
Exactly. So and those are tough decisions to make, too. And they need to do that. But maybe let’s talk a little bit more tactical. So as you started reaching out to some of these neighboring chambers, and saying, Let’s collaborate together, let’s work together, let’s not compete anymore, let’s, you know, level or let’s let’s raise the bar, I would say, How was that received? How did you approach it? And is there anything formal that’s come out of it as far as like a regional round table or something like?

Glenn Morris 22:37
So? So I think it starts with relationships, right? It starts with chamber CEOs, you know, having lunch with other chamber CEOs in the area, and building that relationship that you can get some trust, right, that, that if I need that business, I need to find that business that 10 1000s extra square feet, I can call you, and and we’re going to work that out together. But you’re not going to use that as an excuse to come poach to others or Mike. Right. Right. There’s that trust that you have to build there. And that’s really one on one. And then we found that, that one of the areas that we could, that was easy to collaborate on early in that process was around legislative advocacy, right? Because now we’re all fighting the State Capitol. And that’s, you know, a common, you know, foe maybe or, you know, and so it wasn’t about, you know, balancing between us, it was us all together, yeah, against an external thing. And so that got us started working together, taking common positions, collaborating around advocacy, kinds of discussions. And then from there, we’ve been able to move to more of the Economic Development kinds of things. But it’s also, you know, spun off into we do some joint staff development things and you know, all of those kinds of things, once you start working together, you can find lots of opportunities. But we do now have probably three formal Regional Chamber, you know, elaborate so we have one that’s around this advocacy piece, that actually is about 30 chambers in a three county region that come together for that. We have a another chamber group that is more more on MRI on local kinds of issues. That is what eight chambers in in one particular end of that region. And then we’re, we have a two County Economic Development, collaboration that started as the chambers and as actually now, we’ve actually stood up a new organization to really lead regional economic big development initiatives. So, you know, that was probably the one that became the most formal as it really just kind of became a new entity. Right?

Brandon Burton 25:12
Now, I love those examples and being able to put some numbers to that about what that looks like at the regional advocacy, you know, 30 chambers come in together, I mean, the power that comes with those kinds of numbers, and you go to the state capitol and say, Look, you know, 30 chambers representing I don’t know how many 1000s of business owners we believe strongly in this, you know,

Glenn Morris 25:34
it gets, you know, in my town, I have one member of the assembly, right, and I have one, Senator. But if I bring that Tri County group together, it’s like eight members of the assembly and three or four state senators, right. So all of a sudden, we have more people we can talk to. And so you know, that that gives us a different kind of a voice.

Brandon Burton 26:00
Right? So as far as the approach with with your membership, I know, there’s always going to be somebody that will find a problem with whatever the Chamber’s doing, you’re going to hear those voices. But hopefully, there’s more that are seeing the bigger picture of how you’re working with neighboring communities. What type of feedback are you getting of a note and a lot of times, so maybe preface that a lot of times members don’t see the work that’s happening behind the scenes. But with that in mind, what what type of feedback do you get from your members with taking a more regional and collaborative? Yeah,

Glenn Morris 26:40
so yes, you’re right, most of them probably don’t know what we’re doing. Right? Because because they’re focused on on much more transactional business and their day to day and that’s great, right. That’s what they should be doing. And we try to support them in doing that. But, you know, the most of our community leader level folks, you know, appreciate the, what we’re trying to do. And they see the bigger picture. You know, occasionally when, you know, we’re, we’re celebrating what they to them looks like a neighbor’s win. Right. You know, they can kind of go explain this to me one more time. Right. And so we have to be really good about telling the bigger story. Right. And so, you know, particularly with local elected, right, city council members who, by definition, should be passionate about their, their little spot in the world, right? Yeah. And, you know, so it’s important for us, if, if we’re celebrating a business location in a neighboring community, that we’re highlighting the jobs that are going to be, you know, filled by residents of our community, or, you know, the supplier relationships that our small businesses will not be able to have. And, you know, so you do need to localize the the impact and the benefits, you know, for folks so that they see themselves in, you know, what, on the surface can feel like someone else’s when, right, yeah,

Brandon Burton 28:12
help help them see where the insane fall, I usually fall out to negative connotation. But yeah, a positive fallout. The windfalls that come from a neighboring win? Yeah, yeah.

Glenn Morris 28:25
There’s a we have a nuclear power plant 30 miles north of us that is slated for closure. And, you know, when that was announced a couple of years ago, you know, people started ringing alarm bells, right, because it’s a significant economic driver, 1200 highly paid jobs, you know, all of that kind of stuff. And we jumped in and said, you know, this is a problem, and we need to help figure out what we do next. Right, what, how do we respond to that issue? And we got folks that were like, that’s, that’s their problem, right? We don’t, you know, city, folks, were saying, we don’t get any taxes off for that, right, that the taxes all go to the other county. And we them, yeah, but we have, you know, three or 400 people in our community that work there. We have, you know, a dozen businesses that are in the, you know, local supply chain that provide services and products to that facility. You know, so you just started have to figure out and, and just constantly be repeating that local impact of monies being

Brandon Burton 29:34
spent in your community from those jobs and mine, like how much of your communities receiving their power from that right plan? Yeah,

Glenn Morris 29:43
you know, so there’s those macro issues, but, but there are going to be local issues in regional impacts,

Brandon Burton 29:50
right. That’s a great example. So I wanted to to ask if you might have any tips or strategies that you could offer for a chamber champion, listening they can do to help take their chamber up to the next level?

Action Item/Tip for Chamber Champions

Glenn Morris 30:04
Well, you know, and I recognize that, that I’m in a little bit of a unique position, I, you know, we started this with kind of the, the DNA of our Channel by chamber, right. And I shared that I have a team of 10 to 12, you know, full time employees who helped me do the day to day work. That’s a blessing for me, because it frees up some of my time to go and do these other kinds of things like building relationships with regional partners, and some of that, and I, I’m fully aware, that’s not every chambers, reality. Right, right. But I do think that there are ways that, you know, we have chambers in our regional coalition’s that have, you know, a CEO and one staffer, and, you know, maybe a part time, you know, kind of helper, right, so we have some very small chambers that are part of this as well. And they they add value, they add, they add really important context to our discussions. And so, you know, I would say, Don’t worry about your size, if you can have a conversation with people, you can begin to become part of a regional coalition. The, the pandemic is awful, never want to do it again, there were definitely some benefits that came out of it. And one of them for us, was it really took what was it these fledgling kind of regional issues, you know, partnerships, and made them essential, right. So from the very beginning, we all started to go, you know, you can remember two years ago, we were immediately the kings and queens of webinars, right? We have information and our members need it, and we get it to him, and there’s no way to put them in a room. So we all learn how to do webinars on Zoom really fast. And we really quickly went, you know, they’re eight chambers right here in a 30 minute radius, we don’t all need to do the same webinar. Right, I can do the one on Tuesday, and you can do the one on Wednesday, we can both promote them to all of our members. And so we were able to share workload, right and, and provide consistent information. The reality is our businesses are members of multiple chambers. And if they’re getting different messages, that’s confusing, right? And in a crisis, confusing is not helpful. And if you’re not helpful, they don’t need you. Right, they’re going somewhere. And so I think we helped all of our chambers be more essential by doing it together, right. And so, you know, and it didn’t cost us anything fact, if anything, it probably saved us all, you know, some resources because we could share. So, you know, if you’re, if somebody’s really looking to start this kind of a journey, you know, I start with

Brandon Burton 33:15
all right, not sure what happened there.

Glenn Morris 33:18
The beauty of zoom, all of a sudden, you just stop moving,

Brandon Burton 33:22
as you’re talking it up about how great it is for these webinars and everything and just boom, it’s gone. Yeah, no,

Glenn Morris 33:29
you know, the point I would make is, you know, during the pandemic, it became you sent, it became really important that we all were doing consistent messaging, sharing resources quickly. And it became, you know, to try and do that all by ourselves, it was overwhelming. But if we could share the load, chamber, one takes Monday, we take Wednesday, somebody else does Friday, all of a sudden, we all looked better, and we’re more valuable to our members. Absolutely. And so, you know, if somebody’s really thinking, you know, I really should work more closely with the chambers and or other economic development, tourism or whatever, in your region, you know, I’d say, pick one issue, right, pick something that you have in common. And, you know, figure out how you can do it together, and then you know, it’ll grow from there.

Brandon Burton 34:30
Yeah, I think that’s a good tip. And you know, you started that answer by talking about not everybody has the luxury of you know, going and meeting but as you brought in the zoom, you know, there is the ashes you get to know these people, you don’t need to have the commute time just hop on a zoom call with the neighboring, you know, three or four chambers around you and talk about the latest stuff.

Glenn Morris 34:52
You know, when I when we started that the legislative advocacy group, we met in person, right and So the days of those meetings, you know, depending on where that was a, you know, hour and a half meeting became a half day commitment. Right. Now it’s back down to the hour and a half. Because we can do it on Zoom. Right. And that just creates a lot more opportunities.

Brandon Burton 35:17
Absolutely. So Glenn, I like to ask everyone, as we look to the future of chambers of commerce, how do you see the future of chambers and their purpose going forward?

Future of Chambers

Glenn Morris 35:27
Well, I think chambers are currently essential, and I think they’re going to be more so in the future. But I do think that there are some, there’s some risks out there, I think, if chambers aren’t becoming really focused on what matters in their community. And, you know, I think for me, that really is all about economic vitality. It’s about jobs. It’s about wealth creation, it’s about quality of life. If we’re not doing those kinds of things, businesses can find a lot of the other things that we used to be, you know, their provider for right, networking will always be part of our DNA. But there’s other ways to get networking, you know, general information about business, there’s a lot of resources out there. What chambers can do uniquely is be a convener to bring your leaders together, set economic and community priorities and then rally, you know, as a catalyst really bring the resources together and focus on that economic growth. Right. So I think, I think the future for chambers is really strong. If we’re really focused on what is, you know, essential to our businesses and the, you know, the people they employ.

Brandon Burton 36:49
I love that response. It’s a very well concise and good summary about the importance of being the convener of leaders, and then becoming that catalyst for those actions throughout the community. Glenn, I wanted to give you an opportunity to share any contact information, if anybody listening wanted to reach out and connect with you and learn more about how you’re doing things at the Santa Maria Valley Chamber, what would be the best way for them to reach out and connect?

Connect with Glenn Morris

Glenn Morris 37:16
Yeah, absolutely. So our website is just SantaMaria.com. One of my predecessors early in their life, grabbed the best URL possible in our town for the chamber. So just simply Santamaria.com get a good price for that these

Brandon Burton 37:34
days, I’m sure. Yeah, exactly.

Glenn Morris 37:35
I think my city manager probably was like, how do we. And in the spirit of keeping it simple, our email, my email is glenn@santamaria.com. Right.

Brandon Burton 37:50
That’s perfect. And I will get that in our show notes for this episode. But Glenn, I appreciate you joining me today on Chamber Chat Podcast, this has been a great discussion. And hopefully some of these things just, you know, remind some of these Chamber Champions listening of, yes, I need to reach out and connect with, you know, one of those neighboring communities, or we need to form some kind of a more regional coalition together. So hopefully, this is a catalyst for them to move forward and do some of those things. I

Glenn Morris 38:19
I think what you’ll find if you as you do that, and you start to tell your businesses, particularly your, your primary, you know, Head of Household job businesses that you’re doing it, they’re gonna go it’s about time.

Brandon Burton 38:33
For sure. Yeah, I totally agree. I appreciate it, Glenn. This has been a great discussion. And again, appreciate your time with us today on the podcast.

Glenn Morris 38:43
It’s been my pleasure, I’ve enjoyed it.

Brandon Burton 38:45
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8 Content Methods to Strengthen Your Storytelling

Does Your Chamber Tell Stories?

How does your chamber show up as a storyteller in your community? What types of stories do you tell? Our current social media environment shows us that people love to consume stories. Infact, some social media platforms are shifting from “social media posts” to “stories”. We often hear how Chambers of Commerce need to be storytellers. This is because we live in a world where facts and benefits about your organization are important but largely overlooked if you don’t have good stories to back up what you offer.

I have seen many chamber websites and membership brochures that list the key benefits of and reasons why a business should become a member of their chamber. While these “lists” have their place, showing the impact and value of your chamber is done much more effectively when done through stories.

Story Platforms

Your storytelling can take place face to face. Stories can be shared in newsletters, emails, or on social media in snippets. Some chambers may have a talented staff member who can shoot and edit video to tell their stories. As you might guess, my preferred method of storytelling is through podcasts.

When thinking of the stories you have to tell, think about who is the ideal audience you want to share the story with. Where are they? Where do they hang out digitally? Do they prefer printed text, pictures, video, or audio? Are your stories better formatted towards a specific media?

Many chambers like to go straight to social media to tell their stories. So do a Facebook Live video. My observation and opinion is that people open their social media apps when they are bored, tired, or stressed. Social media becomes a mindless activity to pass time without truly engaging on any kind of meaningful level. For this reason, I would strongly recommend NOT having social media be your primary medium for telling stories. By all means, use social media to magnify and perpetuate your stories but choose another medium to host and share your stories from. You may choose to repurpose some of your stories on social media as a teaser or an advertisement for the story in its entirety.

For most chambers, this would leave two primary content mediums, video and audio. Of course YouTube is the place to host any video content as viewers can subscribe to your channel to receive any updated content. For audio, podcasts are the place to be. I have a whole podcast course to teach you how to get started with a podcast. Every iPhone comes with a podcast app already preinstalled. This makes it super easy for your audience to listen.

Storytelling Content

Once you know what platform(s) you want to focus on to share your stories, you can then dive into the content for story creation. I have identified eight types of stories you can tell through your podcast or YouTube channel. You can choose as many as you feel are relevant to your community or that would add value to your members or attract new members.

Member success stories or member spotlight. You can interview your own members and have them share how your chamber has helped their business find success. You can also go a little more generic and have your members tell you about their business or entrepreneurial journey. People love to hear a good original story and it ends up being a great commercial for your member business as well.
Impact of nonprofits. Identify and interview other local nonprofit organizations in your area to tell the story of the impact they are making. You can make the connection of how your chamber helps to support these nonprofits or ways you have partnered with them.
Community Partnerships. Community partnerships often need a bit more of an explanation for the general public to understand why the partnership exists and what the combined mission is about. There are often success stories that can go along with partnerships and the impact that is being made in the community.
Advocacy Efforts. In a very generalized sense, many of your members are still transactional members. They want to know what the chamber can do for them and if they don’t see it on their bottom line, then they don’t see any value. By sharing the stories of your advocacy efforts and the direct impact to each member of your chamber, you may sway some of your transactional members to become transformational members. Promoting your advocacy work also will show your community that the chamber is about business and what is good for business. The chamber is the sane center where both sides of the isle can come together for the good of your community.
Impact of Events/Initiatives. If you have people in your community who complain about why the city and/or chamber of commerce shuts down traffic each year for a festival that runs the whole weekend, then it might help to share why. Telling of the economic impact, increased sales tax revenue, and hotel occupancy in addition to the other positive outcomes of your events might help your community better understand what the chamber is about.
Staff Spotlight. Do your members and your community know your staff? Do they understand what the role is of each member of your staff? If they have a need, wouldn’t it be nice if they felt like they knew the person they were reaching out to? Doing regular staff spotlights will lead to building stronger relationships with your members which should help with your retention numbers.
Why Members Join. You are well aware that there are always businesses in your community who don’t know what a chamber of commerce is or why they should be involved. Collecting and sharing stories of why businesses join your chamber can help to tell a better story or what your chamber has to offer without producing a long list of member benefits. Remember, people have short attention spans and taking time to highlight just one or two reasons businesses join your chamber at each time will have the most impact.
Testimonials. A while back, I had Shari Pash on the podcast to talk about testimonial strategies. This is actually a very simple way of telling very short stories. Testimonials can be used in many ways. From reading a testimonial on a podcast episode to including a member testimonial in your email signature, you should be gathering and sharing testimonials all the time! Testimonials create credibility, social proof, and help with recruiting and retaining members. Feel free to leave a testimonial or review for Chamber Chat Podcast in Apple Podcasts and see how I might integrate your testimonial into my storytelling strategy. 🙂

You are now equipped with eight strategies for your chamber to be a storyteller. Now, you just need to lean into your medium of choice (audio or video) and then amplify your stories on your social media channels. You may find it beneficial to tell some stories over video while others are better on a podcast. If you utilize this strategy, you can also cross promote your platforms to each other and continue to grow your audiences.

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