Category: Podcast Episode

Navigating Contracts with Angela Wilson

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Brandon Burton 34:14
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Negotiating Compensation & Benefits with Bob Thomas

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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 guest for this episode is Bob Thomas. Bob is the Chief Operating Officer and integrator for the Michigan Chamber of Commerce and Executive Director for the Michigan Chamber Foundation. Bob is a widely respected chamber and Association Executive with over 27 years of experience in the nonprofit industry. He served as the primary operations staff member since 2012 Bob is responsible for day to day operations of the chamber, including facilities, technology and information systems, human resources and finance. Bob also assists with strategic planning, revenue development, membership and meetings management. His accomplishments include assisting the chamber to achieve three designations as an accredited State Chamber with distinction as executive director for the Michigan chamber foundation. Bob oversees alignment and direction of its leadership programs, public policy, research and events related to free enterprise, competitiveness, leadership and entrepreneurship. Bob, I’m excited to have you with us today here on Chamber Chat Podcast. I’d love to give you an opportunity to say hello to all the Chamber Champions who are out there listening, and to share something interesting about yourself so we can all get to know you a little better. Hey,

Bob Thomas 2:23
Chamber Champions, glad to finally make it on the Chamber Podcast, Chamber Chat Podcast, it’s my pleasure to be here. Interesting fact about me, I set a goal about 10 years ago to see all 50 states before I turned 50, and I checked my last state off the list this last year with Alaska. Alaska.

Brandon Burton 2:45
That’s a good that’s a good capstone for or your 50th state. It’s a beautiful state.

Bob Thomas 2:51
Great trip.

Brandon Burton 2:53
Yeah, for a lot of people, I know they wanted to be much higher on their list of places to be, and it probably was for you as well. It’s just a matter of getting there.

Bob Thomas 3:00
That’s right, it’s probably the hardest one to get there, but it’s well, actually the Dakota is for the hardest one, because those weren’t necessarily a destination on my list, but I was actually pleasantly surprised everybody should actually make it to North and South Dakota as well.

Brandon Burton 3:15
Yeah, there you go. Shout out to North and South Dakota. Well, tell us a little bit about the Michigan chamber, just to give us an idea and set the stage for our discussion today, I usually like asking about the size of the chamber, staff, budget, scope of work. It’s a little bit different being a State Chamber, but give us the background and information on the Michigan chamber that could be helpful to listeners.

Bob Thomas 3:39
Sure. So we are a statewide Chamber of Commerce, one of almost 50 in the country. We are based here in the state’s capital, Lansing, Michigan. We’re just four blocks down from the State Capitol building. We have 29 staff, most of them are in our membership development and engagement teams. And then we have a $6 million budget, sometimes up to $8 million depending on whether or not and it’s an election year, because our main value proposition is certainly our advocacy components and how we connect our members to state government, legislators, other elected officials, and we pride ourselves on participating in the election process to help make sure that we’re getting pro business candidates there to represent Michigan’s over 200,000 businesses in the state. Yeah. So

Brandon Burton 4:35
as we’re recording this, this is the the first of November, 2024 so hopefully you guys are looking forward to a little bit of reprieve after next week with the with the elections, and be able to take a little bit of a sigh

Bob Thomas 4:47
of relief, hopefully, hopefully a sigh of relief. But

Brandon Burton 4:52
nonetheless, right,

Bob Thomas 4:55
every election presents new opportunities for us to represent our members and so. We’ll see what that brings us next week.

Brandon Burton 5:01
Yeah, fantastic. Well, as we get into our topic today, I think this is one of those topics that everyone listening can relate to in one way or another, as we talk about focusing our conversation around negotiating compensation and benefits. And I think you know, depending on where you are in your your career at a chamber, if you’re just starting out, if you’re just looking to get in to the chamber industry, or if you’re a long time seasoned chamber veteran, or somebody on the tail end of your career, hopefully we’ll be able to touch on on all those different aspects throughout this episode, as as Bob’s with us today to share some of his insights, and we’ll we’ll dive in much deeper on this topic. As soon as we get back from this quick break.

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All right, Bob, we’re back, and as I mentioned before the break, we’re talking today about negotiating compensation and benefits, which I know can be a very important topic for for those in the chamber world, but really for anybody. But also it can be a very uncomfortable topic for somebody to approach and to to say, here’s what I need. And just having some of those conversations that can be a little more difficult. So I’m hopeful that our in our conversation today, that we’ll be able to come, come out of this with some takeaways that could be helpful in giving that that encouragement and that support to help people have those conversations. So I’m going to hand the hand the mic over to you and share with us what what comes to mind first, when you when you think about negotiating compensation benefits, maybe from the perspective of somebody new or just coming into the chamber world,

Bob Thomas 8:28
sure. Well, I think most of the listeners can commiserate that we didn’t necessarily join the chamber for the money, that there are probably lots of other opportunities out there for us to make more money, but they don’t always necessarily line up with our life circumstance, our passion points, or even, you know, what we’re committed to doing as a career and so and that makes it sometimes more difficult when we’re talking about negotiating or asking for compensation that matches our unique abilities and the skills that we’re bringing to the table, because the budgets don’t always necessarily match what those abilities are. But I would say, you know, for folks who are looking at a chamber job, or are earlier in their career on a chamber job, there’s lots of questions that they should be asking themselves before they go into the negotiating process so that they’re best prepared to ask for what is reasonable and appropriate for their level of job. And the first one, I think, that we tend to overlook is what is the market actually paying for these jobs? And and on one hand, we could be looking at, you know, similar organizations, other nonprofits, or other chambers of commerce that have similar markets, but that data isn’t always accurate or fair to the talents that we’re bringing to the table. So I would always encourage folks to also look at. Are similar jobs paying in the private sector and to see what is a good match, you know? So if I’m a marketing and membership person, what are other marketing level jobs paying for similar size organizations? Or if I’m an accountant, you know, what are other accounting jobs paying for summer situation? So that’s the first one. I just know what is the market even available for that kind of a position? Yeah, I think

Brandon Burton 10:26
if you’re, if we’re strictly looking at other nonprofits, you’re going to immediately put yourself as at a little bit of a disadvantage, because I think chamber staff, they wear so many hats, and it’s not, it’s not necessarily like other nonprofit organizations, where you have the scope, and that’s that’s all you do, because everybody brings everything to the chamber and expect you to be magicians and figure it out. So if you can bring that skill set and say, here’s where these things fit in the private sector, this is what I’m worth. I think that’s great advice, yeah,

Bob Thomas 10:55
but with a caveat, because sometimes the first place where we shoot ourselves in the foot is we look at large mass market surveys like salary.com or Glassdoor, and those are really helpful to kind of give you a range, but that’s an average of lots of different size organizations, and so sometimes we either are over inflated, or, in the case of other nonprofits, under representing what our value potentially is to the organization. So I would say, especially if you’re already in the chamber world and you have access to your state survey or to the ACCE benchmarking data, those are great places to look.

Brandon Burton 11:29
Yeah, that’s that’s good advice. Being able to see what what other peers are getting is very helpful.

Bob Thomas 11:38
And don’t be afraid to talk about it with the network. I think chamber folks are more transparent than others to help share where they’re at and how they can help lift each other up. Yeah, they’re also probably your best supporters. For you to figure out what your value is, again, chambers tend to attract a lot of servant type workers, and so we go in with the idea of, I love this work, I’m happy to do it, but we don’t always emphasize what our value is to the organization. And so then sometimes we take less or ask for less than what we are due because we love the work so much that we’ll, we’ll do it for less. Yeah, and that doesn’t always set yourself up for sell your set yourself up for a long term success if you’re going to start on the low end.

Brandon Burton 12:31
Now, I’m from the maybe on the hiring perspective. You know, as we’ve got a lot of executives that are listening, some their boards give a lot of leeway, not a lot, maybe, but a lot might be generous, but give them some leeway as far as what salary could be for staff and others are very tightly controlled by their board. So I hope through our conversation today, we can integrate some of that too. How do we approach this at the board and show where the value lies in bringing on staff and our own self worth as well.

Bob Thomas 13:06
Yeah, well, that’s actually my next point is understand what the decision making process is. So if you’re a staff member going to the executive and asking for a raise, or you’re trying to negotiate your compensation, I think the last thing most executives want is a surprise number. I think this is a regular conversation you should be having with your boss in general about what your long term expectations are for your career and for what your compensation will look like, and how that might ebb and flow based on your personal needs. And that would give them an idea about when they can be an advocate for you with the board, or when they need to be more transparent with the budget, but just to have that open conversation and when it does come down to board clamps that are really difficult to get away from, at least understand, when do they have to take it to the board, and when would it get shot down in that particular case, or when is there a leeway so that you can take advantage of those opportunities to grow your compensation, but definitely have that transparent conversation, either with your board chair, if you’re the exec, or with your boss, so that they know kind of what you’re thinking and where Your goals are long term.

Brandon Burton 14:20
Yeah, I think that’s that’s good. I like the idea of the long term expectations. Have those conversations being had along the way. Say, Yeah, I’m new to the chamber now, but you know, down the road, this is what, how I’d like to see my career develop. I’d like to be at the Chamber long term, or this is a stopping point for a year or two, while I finish my degree, or while I do whatever it may be, and just being open and transparent, I think, helps both sides figure out what’s what’s the best and what’s most fair as far as compensation goes, Yeah,

Bob Thomas 14:51
at least give your boss a chance to come back and say that’s probably not going to work. You know, if it’s not realistic to match with your budget or these are the things that. Need to change in order for us to be able to afford that. Or, yeah, we could do that, but this is how you need to progress within your position in order to achieve that number. I think when you have that conversation, that makes it easier. It’s less of a surprise and less uncomfortable year after year, if you’re starting off a transparent foot, right?

Brandon Burton 15:21
So I’m always curious about the the more seasoned chamber professional that chambers are unique and that you you’re tied in with your community. You’re, you’re running things in the community, you know all the players. You’re, you know, convening. You’re bringing people together. But some seasoned chamber professionals feel the only way to advance in their career is to move to another community, to take another position at maybe a larger chamber. Is that true, or is that a fallacy? How can that seasoned chamber professional approach growth within their career path?

Bob Thomas 15:57
While I’ve seen that in Michigan and really with some of my colleagues from across the country, that is a real opportunity. And if you’re willing to up your route yourself and move to another community or another state, that probably is a great way to increase your compensation most quickly. But I don’t know that that’s realistic, especially for folks who have families or their kids are in school. You know you can potentially be looking at 12 to 15 years in a community where your kids are and that doesn’t really make it feasible for you to leave or perhaps your spouse or partner has a great job and they’re not willing to leave that either. So you know, there are lots of different reasons why you might have strings to a community that doesn’t make it easy for you to move to another community for a better paying job. And so when you think about that, those are the times to think about. You know, how can you grow the pot or the resources? How do you communicate with your board, what your intent is for staying with the chamber? I think most boards would find comfort in knowing that they’ve got some longevity in a leader for their organization, but not all. And so making sure that you’re going to bat for yourself with those folks who are also holding the purse strings to understand your value and to be able to negotiate that. And so one of the suggestions I have in those cases, especially if you’re in a community longer than five years, you should be creating that pat on the back file and documenting what your impact is every year so that you can show progress or achievements that you’ve been making within the chamber and remind the board what you’re doing in order to make that impact and how the chamber is progressing, and then try and link whatever your request is to organization goals. So if the board’s interest is in growing revenue, or if it’s in growing membership, tie your request for increasing compensation to those accomplishments and show how you’re going to get there or how you’ve achieved it, and why you’re due additional compensation. I know that a lot of chambers, especially if you’re small and mid sized, don’t always have the growth in revenue that would allow a year over year increase regularly. So a couple other solutions that you might ask for in lieu of a one time jump. And I know a lot of chambers, I’ve been successful with this, most recently, because of the inflationary increases, is try and phase it in over a period of time. So rather than going from a 2% increase to a 10% increase, could you do a two to five to seven or 10% increase over two or three years, that makes it more palatable for the board to absorb, and gives you more time to raise the resources to help fund that. Another one would be to think about alternatives to dollars. So if the short term need is that you need to pay for child care, or you’ve got an increased commute, could you ask for a car allowance or a child care stipend for that period of time rather than asking for a raise? So for boards, that’s a short term cash solution that helps retain you, that’s not necessarily tied to long term increases, but gets you through the things that you need in order to continue to work at the chamber. So those are just a couple of suggestions. If you’re not able to negotiate a large increase, figure out and have a transparent conversation about what do you need so that you can help bridge that gap.

Brandon Burton 19:36
Yeah, I like the idea of even being open to alternatives, too, to be able to say, here’s here’s some of the struggling or the pain points that I’m seeing and how obstacles that I need to be able to overcome in order to stay in this position. Yeah. How can you help me accomplish this? And again, it goes back to having that open and transparent conversation, which, if you’re doing the job that you need to be doing, there. Going to want to retain you and keep you there, and hopefully they’ll work with you to do that. I always think of especially with the the executive position, where you’re often in the same conversations with the city manager or the school superintendent and and you look at the salaries that these individuals are having, and you’re all working towards progress in the community in different ways, from different angles. And I think my personal opinion is the compensation should be a little closer to what they’re making, keeping in mind that everything you know, they have different responsibilities and whatnot as well. But if you’re expected to be in the same room, in the same conversations, the same table, with these other decision makers, these other influencers in the community, compensation should be more in that ballpark than having them way up here in the chamber, exec way down there. I don’t know if you have any other thoughts at that, or how to approach that, or bring that up at the board, yeah,

Bob Thomas 21:00
well, that is a great point, and making sure that in strategic planning, you’re talking with your board about what are the expectations of your leadership as the exec, and that if you are supposed to carry the same weight in that room, you know compensation is one element, access to resources, being able to commit to positions or have a conversation without always having to go back to the board. Are important elements that, you know, help create that equity, but they also have different pots of money and different resources than a lot of chambers. Sometimes it’s a much broader, bigger pot because of the tax base versus private volunteer investment in dues. But to that point, if a chamber Exec is able to garner those resources and they can start to match or create a fund that allows them to pay for that position, then absolutely the board should be looking at at that as some of those comparables in terms of position or responsibility, and so to that point, be thoughtful about who is on your compensation committee and helping to make those decisions. So are they other small business people who look at your compensation and you know, are looking at it through a lens about have and have not, or are they leaders in the community who recognize what the investment is in the chamber in order to move the agenda forward, and so also be thoughtful about are there elected leaders who are on that compensation committee who maybe aren’t making as much as the chamber director? Because in some cases, it could be a downtown development person, or it could be a city manager who isn’t clearing that that same kind of salary compensation, and so just be thoughtful about how you have staffed that compensation committee in order to give yourself the fairest shake possible. That’s

Brandon Burton 22:58
a really good point. Just being intentional about that. Who’s on there? What? What perspectives are they coming from, and how do they perceive you compared to themselves or others that they might see in a similar light as yourself? That’s That’s great advice. So you mentioned a couple different alternatives to compensation. Are there other other thoughts you have around alternatives, or maybe other ideas that it because sometimes to get to that outside the box thinking, some ideas need to be brought to the table. You can’t just say, here’s the problem. Solve it, right? As chamber leaders, chamber staff like we’re in the business of solving problems, so I think to be able to bring some ideas of alternatives to the table could be helpful.

Bob Thomas 23:46
Yeah, I mean, I think executives a lot of times don’t recognize the art that comes to their budgets, and sometimes the easiest money that they that they leave on the table are performance bonuses or bonuses tied to metrics that you’ve improved. So are there opportunities to ask for a percentage of net increase or percentage of margin at the end of the year or at the end of a quarter for exceptional performance? So maybe you had an event that you really knocked out of the park and it cleared a major revenue hurdle with sponsorship, or you had a bang up here with membership and fundraising. Are you asking for a percentage at the end of the year as part of that performance bonus? And that’s something that could waiver or change from year to year, that could be negotiated, or maybe it’s something that you build into an employment agreement, so that is something that you can count on and the board can budget for every year. I think that’s the first thing that’s easiest to budget for and also ask for. But other things, you know, chambers are amazing organizations to work with in terms of flexibility and because we work. Lots of different hours based on our event schedules or needs of the organization. You know, having that flexibility to come and go from the office or come and go from events is a tremendous one. So if you’re not actively using that as a method of your compensation or employment agreement, that could be something in lieu of compensation that you might not get at a for profit organization, professional development budgets, again, those are things that could be incorporated into your budget, especially if you’re looking to complete a degree. It’s a short term increase that could be a pre tax benefit, or maybe it could be negotiated with local university or college that would help defray the cost and only helps make you more marketable and equitable in your organization, ask for PTO vacation or personal days. Maybe you want Fridays off in the summertime that can be negotiated. Or is there something else in benefits, you know, asking for another percentage increase in a 401, K, or asking for things that don’t necessarily have direct tied to your bottom line, but they are ways that can increase your total package. So, you know, being thoughtful about what do you need or what do you want, and are there ways for the chamber to pay for it as part of your employment, rather than coming out in a paycheck, per se?

Brandon Burton 26:30
Yeah, and I think a lot of these things you wouldn’t necessarily have to feel at the bottom line of a chamber budget, some of these considerations, so I like this, especially the professional development budget, because there’s a lot of different ways to approach that and and ways to advance yourself and in your ability as a as a chamber leader.

Bob Thomas 26:52
Great. I know what’s Yeah, one last one is, if the chamber is not able to afford any additional increases, but they could flex some of your time. Are there creative arrangements that you could make with your board to allow you to do an outside employment opportunity? So are you available to consult? Are you available to do some marketing activity? You know, depending on what your skills are, would the chamber allow you to have some of those outside contracts that would help you supplement your income, that don’t necessarily compete with what the chamber does, but absolutely leverage your skills and give you access to a network that would help you build a side business that can be helpful, especially for people toward the end of their career, where the chamber just isn’t going to grow fast enough for you to see that in your compensation, But it would give you a runway or a launchpad into a post retirement career.

Brandon Burton 27:46
And say, I’ve seen a lot of people do that, that transition towards the end of the career, where they go into a consulting gig or marketing or, you know, some something in that realm, and and I assume with a lot of them, that that may have been a consideration along the way, towards the end of their careers, being able to to start something, because they didn’t necessarily just end their their job at the Chamber one day and then start their consulting gig the next day. Usually, it’s been something that’s kind of been building up, kind of in the background, but gaining some momentum as well. How have you seen that be successful for people making that transition from chamber life to more of the entrepreneur, taking it on on their own towards the end of the career? So

Bob Thomas 28:31
I’ve probably seen it be less successful more often than I’ve seen more successful in the sense that if you aren’t keeping care of the chamber as your first priority while also working on the second option. Things tend to end badly, because then people see that you have divided attention. But if you’re able to have those two things coexist, and you can use the resources of the chamber, and you know also the goodwill of your board to do both, then that works, but you do really have to be thoughtful and know that your first obligation is to the chamber, and then the second is that you can build those other things with strategic PTO, you know, or, you know, leveraging some of the relationship relationships you have with members to get additional referrals. So that’s where I would see it be most successful is when you’re able to keep your eye on both balls at the same time. Yeah,

Brandon Burton 29:31
yeah. That’s that’s a good point. One other thing I wanted to just touch back on you had mentioned, like, if you had a bang up here with with your membership or sponsorships or the certain event that’s driving in revenue to to try to get a portion of that back to as a some sort of a bonus, or, you know, performance related bonus. And in a big sense, that’s it’s sort of found money. You know, if you’re going above and beyond what the expectations were, I mean, every, ideally, every dollar coming in should have a purpose, right? That’s coming in. But if you can benchmark that, or kind of dog your that on the front end, and say, every dollar coming in has its purpose, but above this, this threshold, the purposes shift a little bit, and I get rewarded for the work that’s going in.

Bob Thomas 30:24
I think I’ve seen lots of chamber and sex do a fantastic job, and they end up with the year in the black, and then they’re building this reserve account, and they’ve got a major surplus, but they haven’t ever asked for a bonus. They’re just looking at their salary as the only compensation they bring in. And if you’ve done that great of a job that year and you’ve cleared all those hurdles, that should be the easy ask. It is money that’s waiting to be invested, and why not invest in your staff? Yeah,

Brandon Burton 30:56
absolutely. Well, are there any other considerations that we need to think of before we start to wrap up our conversation.

Bob Thomas 31:06
Just one is, you know when those conversations don’t work out in your favor? When should you start to have conversations with yourself or your family that maybe it is time to go? Because I do know that while we think and hope for the best with our boards or with our bosses. Sometimes the resources just aren’t there, or the recognition that the dollars could be invested as staff isn’t there either. And so maybe that’s the time when you’ve got to think, am I aligned with this work anymore? Is it worth the stress, or, you know, the effort that I’m putting into it is there are there other benefits that I would see outside of the chamber, and those are hard conversations, I know, especially because you love your job, or you love your members, and you love what you do, but there’s always a tipping point when it doesn’t necessarily work in your favor. And so also to have that open and honest conversation with yourself and with your board when the juice isn’t worth the squeeze anymore. And unfortunately, those conversations need to happen as regularly as they do when you’re asking for compensation, just to make sure that there’s alignment there with your personal goals and and know when to say when? Yeah, I

Brandon Burton 32:23
think that’s important to think about. And I, as I’ve seen it with a lot of executives as they exit their career, sometimes it comes back to a board member that they just can’t get along with. They can’t see I die. And rather than waiting out whatever is left in the term for that board member, they just see that as the better options to leave, because they can’t, they can’t make it work together. But it’s a whole nother discussion. And, you know, recruiting your board members to make sure you’ve got people on your board that you can work with and that you can move the ball forward and not have that kind of conflict, so that that’ll lead into a longer term ability at your chamber, if you’re if you’re the executive, if you’re staff, and you can’t get along with your boss, that’s a whole nother story. So Right?

Bob Thomas 33:11
And I would say probably in the most extreme case, and I’ve ran into a couple of chambers since the pandemic, where this has been more common than not, it’s never okay to work for free. So if cash flow has become an issue, or it’s a situation where the board is asking you to defer your compensation or just get through a slow period because of cash flow, in my opinion, that’s never okay. Everybody is worth a paycheck. And to be really thoughtful about, you know, what are the underlying issues that you don’t have cash that would make payroll, and in those particular cases, if they can’t afford you, let alone afford an increase that’s also not worth your time. So make sure that you’re holding your boards and yourself to the standard that you are worth the job of running a chamber is worth a paycheck. So I’m hoping there’s a lot of listeners out there that agree with me, and that nobody out there is not working for free, because that’s, in my opinion, just unacceptable. And I know it happens more often than we know about

Brandon Burton 34:18
Yeah, I 100% endorse that everyone is worth a paycheck. Yes. Well, Bob, as we start to wrap things up here, I like to see if there’s any kind of tip or action item for listeners who are looking to take their organization up to the next level. What would you suggest for them to try to implement to accomplish that goal,

Bob Thomas 34:39
specific around compensation, and, you know, asking for what you’re due or what you’re valued at, I would just say, you know, have an annual conversation with yourself about what’s important to you, what are your priorities, and how do you value those, both personally in terms of your own growth and development. And then also monetarily. What is that worth? What is your time worth to you and your family in order for you to achieve your goals? And then second is to share that and have an open conversation with the people who are making decisions about your compensation, so that you’re aligned. And if you’re not aligned, then you at least know where the line was, because I do find that people who are willing to have those open and honest conversations are more likely to negotiate things that work for everybody than to be denied or catch people by surprise. And so I guess that would be my advice is just to know yourself first and then second. Don’t be afraid to ask for it. Just have that open conversation.

Brandon Burton 35:43
I like it well, as we look to the future of chambers of commerce, how do you see the future of chambers and their purpose going forward?

Bob Thomas 35:52
Well, this is a great time to ask that question, because I know ACCE is about to come out with our horizon 2.0 and I’m really excited about what that could look like for our chambers, in terms of a road map of things that we should be asking about. I find the chamber future to be bright, and I know that there’s a lot of movement and a lot of change right now. We’re seeing a lot of generational impact on what our chambers look like, but I also find that means the chambers that are disciplined to know what they’re all about and what value they bring to their communities, they’re going to find a business model that’s going to make them more relevant than ever. I always say, imagine what your community would look like without a chamber, and you’ve probably driven through it, definitely haven’t stopped in it. And so the chambers that have figured that out, or the communities that have figured that out, are supporting their chambers, and those chambers are vibrant, bright and offering a lot of value to the business community.

Brandon Burton 36:55
Yeah, yeah, I love that. But Bob, I like to ask everyone I have on this show. If there’s a listener who wants to reach out and connect with you, get to learn a little bit more about what we talked about today. What would be the best way, or where would you point them to reach out and connect with you?

Bob Thomas 37:10
Well, the easiest way is definitely through email, at the Michigan chamber B Thomas at MI chamber.com, or happy to connect with folks through my LinkedIn profile. LinkedIn slash Thomas Bob. Double check to make sure that was the right one. Yep,

Brandon Burton 37:31
there’s no other Bob Thomas, right.

Bob Thomas 37:35
There are a ton of Bob Thomas that would be the right Bob Thomas’s. LinkedIn slash Thomas, Bob, and would love to hear from my chamber colleagues, because I’ve worked at the Michigan Chamber for over 27 years, and these are some of my best friends and most valued relationships are in this community. So always glad to hear from them.

Brandon Burton 37:55
Very good. Well, we’ll get that in our show notes, including the LinkedIn, you know, the correct profile in LinkedIn to make it easy and have people find you, but I appreciate you setting aside some time to be with us today on chamber chat podcast and approaching this important topic, I mean it. It really does. It breaks my heart every time I see somebody exit the chamber world or and there’s a lot of different reasons, but when I see the good people leave for the private sector, I’m like, I wish we could keep them in the chamber world a little longer. So being able to have these conversations and hopefully keep some of these good ones in the chamber world as long as they want to be there, I think, is fantastic. So thank you for sharing this with us today.

Bob Thomas 38:38
Thanks for having me. It’s always good to have alumni if you’re not able to stay in the chamber. But I agree. I love working with chamber people, and it’s I’m glad when they’re able to work it out and they can stay.

Brandon Burton 38:50
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Paid Internship Programs with Rachel Beld

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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 guest for this episode is Rachel Beld. Rachel is the president and CEO of the Vista Chamber of Commerce in California, where she leads efforts to support local business growth and community development. With over 20 years of experience in economic development, strategic planning and program management, she has expanded the Chamber’s impact through workforce development programs like the velocity summer internship program and so Cal, which stands for student opportunities for awareness and learning. Rachel is a strong advocate for smart growth in housing, health, health care, access, child care, solutions and infrastructure improvements, all aimed at attracting and retaining talent and Vista. A first generation college graduate with a bachelor’s of business administration from National University, she is passionate about fostering a collaboration between businesses, local government and community partners to ensure a thriving future for the region. Rachel, I’m excited to have you with us today here on Chamber Chat Podcast. I’d love to give you the opportunity to say hello to all the Chamber Champions who are out there listening, and to share something interesting about yourself so we can all get to know you a little better.

Rachel Beld 2:21
Thank you, Brandon, hi everybody. Hi Chamber Champions. I’m Rachel Beld. And I guess something interesting about me is I love going to concerts. I go to a lot of concerts. Some people take vacations. I go to concerts. So that’s something interesting about me. I love live music, all different genres.

Brandon Burton 2:40
So about how often do you find yourself at a at a concert?

Rachel Beld 2:46
Well, they come in clusters. It seems I might go a month or two without a show, and then just over the last two months, I went to 12 concerts. So they come in clusters, which is not friendly for my wallet, but some a show will pop up and I’m just, oh, I can’t miss it. I have to see that person, or have to see that that group. So, so what’s

Brandon Burton 3:07
been one of the best ones you’ve been to? If you had, oh gosh, like the best one? Well,

Rachel Beld 3:13
I mean, there’s so many really great concerts. I mean, I took my daughter to Eris tour with Taylor Swift, that was amazing. But also, I think a bucket list for me was to see Paul McCartney and I had amazing seats. And I don’t know, singing, Hey Jude, with Paul McCartney and 25,000 of your closest friends was a pretty surreal moment.

Brandon Burton 3:36
That is cool. Those are, those are both great, great concerts. But I also

Rachel Beld 3:40
love really small shows too. I don’t just see big things. I like local folks too.

Brandon Burton 3:45
Yeah, that’s awesome. Well, tell us a little bit about the VISTA chamber, just to give us some perspective before we get into the topic of our conversation today, give let us know about the size of the chamber, staff, budget, scope of work, just to kind of set the stage.

Rachel Beld 4:01
Sure, sure. So the VISTA chamber, we’re in North County San Diego. We are 101 years old, which is great, because I don’t feel like I look a day over 95 so that’s good. And our we have about 550 members our budget. So our budget has grown pretty significantly in the last few years, partially because of some of our workforce development initiatives, but our budget is 1.2 million. We have a team of six, and that includes a workforce development employee as well a coordinator. And we are in North County San Diego, and there is a there are quite a few chambers in our area, and all of the chambers, we all offer a little bit different flavor, and we’re all friends. So each all the chambers in North County San Diego, the CEOs, we get together once a month for breakfast and to collaborate and talk about regional issues, which I. Think is unique and special. North County is really collaborative in a lot of industries, but the chamber world, especially, I

Brandon Burton 5:07
think that’s so important, especially in certain parts of the country, where you have people that may live in a certain area, but they primarily work in another and there’s a lot of value in collaborating and making a stronger larger community. All together. Now that’s, that’s fantastic. And I learned before we hit record. You guys have a podcast too at the VISTA chain. We

Rachel Beld 5:30
do, we do it’s, it’s actually called the velocity the VISTA chamber podcast, and we interview the movers, shakers and change makers impacting VISTA and beyond. So it’s fun. Check it out.

Brandon Burton 5:41
I love it. Big fan of chambers podcasting.

Rachel Beld 5:44
Like it

Brandon Burton 5:46
whenever I can.

Rachel Beld 5:46
Thank you.

Brandon Burton 5:48
So for our topic, for our conversation today, we decided on the topic of focusing on the paid internship program that you guys do there at the VISTA chamber and and I think there is, as we get into it, there’s lots of elements of it that can be replicated at other chambers. So get ready to do some R and D as we get into this episode and rip off and duplicate some of the things that Rachel and her team are doing, and we’ll dive into that as soon as we get back from this quick break.

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All right, Rachel, we’re back. So I love the idea of paid internship programs. I mean, I love the idea of internship programs, really, but if you can pay these interns, make them feel recognize the value that they bring to an organization is that much better, but also to get the buy in from schools and the business community and all that. So talk to us how you guys have gone about structuring this, getting the buy in from all the different parties and in the successes you’ve seen from it. That’s what everybody wants to know about,

Rachel Beld 8:37
right? Sure, sure, if it’s okay. I want to start with the kind of the idea for the program, because I think that really influenced how we developed the program. And so, you know, back during COVID shut down, and shortly thereafter, you know, a lot of our members were struggling to find talent, especially at the entry, entry level talent, and we were hearing, you know, for everyone, that they were having a hard time hiring. And then also, around the same time, I was working closely with our school district and our superintendent, and we’re talking a lot about students, and data around students and Vista, a pretty significant number of our high school students have paying jobs while they’re in high school. And then also, the statistic was something like 94% of Vista Unified graduates need some sort of paying job after they graduate high school, whether they go into two year school, four year school, grade school, they need some sort of working paid opportunity in order to keep going to school, or they enter the workforce completely. And so, you know, thinking about our businesses needed talent, our students need jobs. And just thinking about about connecting those dots. And at that time, the city, our local city, was going to receive a pretty. Significant amount of ARPA money, so COVID Relief dollars. And so I had this idea that maybe we could help businesses who were strapped for cash have some additional talent, help students connect with businesses in our community, and maybe we could use some of those COVID Relief dollars to fund the whole thing. And so I went to our city council and I gave a proposal. Actually proposed a lot of things, but this one stuck. And, you know, I went to our council and proposed this program and asked for a chunk of money to as a beta test to get this going. And so, and let me also just say that I grew up very low income. I grew up in a family where I worked basically full time since the time I was 15, and I had an opportunity in high school to intern as a as an unpaid intern at our local hospital. And when I told my parents about the opportunity, my dad said, Well, really need you to work over the summer to make money. You need you can’t we need your we need your help in this family. And so I had to turn down an opportunity that I think could have been important to me at that time, and so that that also really weighed into this idea of paying students for the summer. We don’t want someone to quit a paying job in order to have an opportunity to advance their their career exploration. So anyways, the city Vista gave us a grant. We were able to launch the program, and the grant funded it for about two years and for two, almost two, almost two full summers and and so then, and basically the program exists so that we hire students as chamber employees. We hire them as chamber employees. We cover the workers comp, we cover the insurance, and we match them with businesses that that match their career interest. And the students work 100 hours over the summer months, and they’re paid by the chamber, and they’re assigned to, you know, an offset, you know, a business location. And they work, they get mentorship, and they have the opportunity to work, and we picked 100 hours very strategically. The 100 hours was so that the students could keep their other summer job, but work 100 hours over about an eight or nine week period. It’s easy to do that, but also it’s enough amount of time that you can do a meaty project, you can really get a good understanding of whether you like this career or not, whether it’s something that might be interesting to you. So the program started small, you know, we had about 42 kids, and then we had 50 something kids, and then year two, I started our schools. Our school district was really excited about the program, and we were looking for additional funds to keep it going, and the school district said, you know, we have a responsibility to our students to provide career exploration opportunities, and we love what you’re doing, and so we want to fund the program. And so we’re going to contract with you, and you’ll fund, you know, run the program, we’ll pay for it and and then also we can expand our partnership so that for the four credit internships that are offered during the school year, the fall and spring semester, or for credit, maybe the businesses, there’s some connection there where they want to take four credit interns and then they do the summer, you know, paid program. That was a long answer to your question. I apologize for rambling on, but I love this program so much, and so now that the ARPA funds are gone, that we now have entered into a partnership with our school district. And year three, we had 74 students participate, and our goal is to our goal is just to keep growing the program. So I’ll pause there and see if you have a question.

Brandon Burton 13:43
No, I think that’s fantastic. That gives some some great groundwork for the idea how the funding comes that’s always important when you talk about paying interns, where, who’s going to pay for it? Where does that come from? So having the access to those ARPA funds is great. But then for long term, to be able to partner with the school district. The question comes to mind, about the students that I assume there’s an application to apply for the internship program. In the application, are they saying the type of work that they would be interested in, the career paths that they enter they have interest in? And then who is selecting the students. Is the school district involved with the selection now, with them funding it, or how does that look?

Rachel Beld 14:26
Sure, that great question. So there’s kind of a long ramp up to the summer program. So right now, our workforce development coordinator is going to all of the high schools. So we have three comprehensive high schools and two alternative high schools in the district, and then we have some charter schools and other schools that they’re allowed to participate to. So basically, the student attends a school district school, or they live in Vista, they can participate in the program, and the students have to be going into their senior year. So we’re targeting juniors right now that we’re looking that we’re reaching out to. And so right now. Our workforce development coordinator Karen is out talking to students and getting generally some some general sign up interest, general interest sign ups. And we’re asking kids what kind of industries they’re interested in. So then at the same time, while we’re ramping up for the spring for sign ups, we’re looking for businesses in those industries, so that we are kind of queuing that up, and then there’s an application process, both on the business side and on the student side. So, but it’s, it really is student driven. And so the students, they sign up, they apply online. It just, it’s a very simple application. And we, we have, we ask them, it’s a check the box, because they don’t know what industries are. They have no idea. So they say, you know, they can check the boxes of what kinds of industries they’re interested in. There’s also some fill in the fill in, you know, fill in, short answer questions. So really, just trying to to glean what, what do they want to do, what are they interested in doing? And so then we take those applications, and at the same time, we’re recruiting businesses, and we’re asking businesses for what help do you need? What type of give us a short job description for these internship positions, and then we have an orientation, a business orientation, and we have a student orientation. We have an onboarding process and a vetting process. There’s an agreement that gets signed, but the school district really doesn’t play a role in which students get to participate. And in fact, they have a real equity mindset with regard to making sure that there’s opportunities at all three comprehensive high schools, at our continuation schools, that there’s opportunities for everybody. So we have some goals around that. I will say the school district does have a say in which the school district will take interns as well as part of the program, and so they every business, every organization that participates, they actually interview the students. So once we get the list of students, we get the list of businesses the students kind of pick what their top five are. We send every business gets a list of three to five students to interview. Every student, gets a list of three to five businesses that are going to call them, and we say, do your homework on these businesses, learn about them, and then it’s basically mutually matching process. You know? Susie Jane picks company XYZ, and XYZ picks Susie Jane, boom. It’s a win. Now, where it gets a little tricky is sometimes there are students that are, they’re rock star kiddos, right? And everybody wants that kiddo, and then it’s up to that student to choose. But that’s the real world, right? If you’re interviewing and everybody wants to hire you, then you have, you have choice, but also really have a goal that every student that applies and goes through the process that they get placed. So it’s, you know, there’s, there’s a number of steps along the way. So last year, for example, we had about 130 students apply for the program, but we had 74 attend orientation, fill out their paperwork, come in and do what they needed to do, check all the boxes. And so we were able to place all 74 in some sort of internship opportunity.

Brandon Burton 17:59
That’s awesome, you know? And the thought always comes to me when you talk about internships, about these students, that they’re checking boxes on the application of what they think they might be interested in as far as a career goes. But reality is, they don’t really know what options there are for careers besides what they’ve been exposed to, right? So what opportunities are there in the process to maybe expose these students to something new that they wouldn’t have thought of before? How does that fit in with the matching, and is that part of having them interview with with multiple businesses to get that exposure? Sure?

Rachel Beld 18:38
So there’s a couple of ways that we layer in kind of that exposure, because students really only know the few careers that they’re exposed to. What does their mom do? What does their dad do? What uncle so and so and so, if they’re not exposed, they don’t necessarily know what could be possible. Now I will say our school district, the Vista Unified School District, has a pretty robust career exploration curriculum that’s woven into all the high schools, so there’s opportunities for students to learn about kind of what’s out there. And we also have another program called SoCal that feeds into that too, around the exploration piece. But when the students come for orientation, we actually have the all of the job opportunities, all the internship opportunities, listed on a piece of paper, and they can literally read them and circle, oh, that sounds good. That sounds good. Now someone may say they were really interested in HR, for example. Maybe they think they know, and then they see, oh, but there’s an opportunity to be a math tutor at this math tutoring place. That sounds kind of fun, like, I’ll check that out, right? So they can circle what they’re interested in, so they’re never locked into a specific thing. And then sometimes it gets to the end of the program where we have a few students that maybe haven’t been quite matched up or didn’t work out, and we have maybe two or three that we need to play somewhere. Then we just have a chat with them and say, You know what? We have this company over here doesn’t have an intern yet, but. Is what they’re looking for. Would you like to give it a try? You know, you’re going to learn skills, you’re going to learn this and and then they say yes. And sometimes those are our most successful because they say, I had no idea about XYZ industry, and now people want to check that out. I really liked it. And then occasionally it doesn’t happen that often students realize I do not like this, and I do not like this industry, or I thought I really would be interested in XYZ, and I just don’t like it. That’s really valuable, because as you’re going into your senior year of high school and you’re making some choices about post high school decisions, you need to know if you absolutely hate what you thought you were going to love. That’s good information to have at that time. It is. And I

Brandon Burton 20:43
The example I always think of with that is, you know, somebody who thinks they want to be an attorney, and maybe they do an internship at a law office and realize, yeah, I don’t want the stress. I don’t want the time away from family, whatever you know the things are, or they might say, this is exactly what I want, because I do debate in high school, or whatever it is, you know that that makes them gravitate towards that, but in the end, it saves them a lot of that trial and error that most people don’t get until they’ve already invested a ton of money into their education to go down a certain career path, only to find out, maybe this isn’t the best match for me, So I’d love getting these students the exposure, the thought that I had was as we I guess, as you guys are trying to play matchmaker here. How far in advance Are you soliciting from the business community to give you opportunities that you can try to match students to

Rachel Beld 21:38
so we start immediately. Upon conclusion of the program in August, we immediately reach out to the business. I mean, there’s surveys throughout. We have a mid midpoint survey and then a closing survey. But we’re reaching out to folks from the very beginning, you know, from the end of the program the prior year, to give get folks in the queue. And you know, sometimes we have businesses that apply? And they have a position they think is great and it doesn’t stick, there’s, you know, students aren’t interested in that for whatever reason, and so, you know, they can try again, or they can tweak, tweak it for the next time. But we’re already starting to think about that, and we have now that we’ve been doing the program. This will be our fourth summer coming up. We have some data around which industries and what types of jobs are the most in demand, and we also work closely with all of our schools, our school career counselors and CTE coordinators, and they have some good data around what what students are interested in. So we already are starting to reach out to businesses, and we’re cultivating those relationships. And like I said before, the school district hasn’t a for credit program that’s in the fall, in the spring, where it’s only make two or three hours a week for the students. So it’s very small with regard to the the meatiness of the projects that they can do. So we also refer, they refer those business to us, and we refer our paid summer businesses to them, so that there’s that synergy there. So we’re already starting to work on that. And just like we’re already outreaching to students to find out what industries they’re interested in, but it runs the gamut. We’ve had students do welding, you know, we’ve had students want to learn more about being an esthetician or cosmetologist. We have students doing accounting, finance, HR, real estate, social media, podcasting, set design, um, fire at the city doing shadowing in the engineering department, the fire department, fire department, admin at the school district with a nurse, construction trades. I mean, so you every industry, every type of career we’ve had somebody doing that, the ones that are the hardest to fill are actually in the medical, clinical roles because of HIPAA rules and because of the age of the students, that’s really challenging. So oftentimes students are really interested in those, you know, medical pathways, you know, nurse, doctor, those types of things. We have them working maybe in a physical therapy office, or we have them working a front desk, you know, working at a front desk in a doctor’s office that is really difficult to get them those clinical connections. And that’s a piece we’re really working with. We have a community clinic that we’re trying to navigate, carving out a specific area where we can have students do more of those clinical things,

Brandon Burton 24:20
if, if a problem can be solved like that, leave it to a chamber to figure out how to how to get around it and make it work. So I’m sure it’ll come together. So you mentioned earlier that you hire these students as chamber employees for the duration of the internship. Is there any considerations to be mindful of for other chambers that are doing their R and D right now, as far as hiring them as as employees,

Rachel Beld 24:45
yes. So the reason we do it that way is one, so everyone has a similar experience with regard to payroll, clock in, clock out, it makes it easy and we can, we can really manage and make sure that the student. Students are given breaks that they’re treated appropriately. We want to make sure, you know, of course, we’re vetting these companies, but you know, we want to make sure that everyone has a comparable experience with regard to that. But there are some considerations. So we have some things. We’ve had some serious conversations with in our insurance company. We don’t allow students home based businesses. For example, we don’t allow students to work in someone’s home. If someone has a home based business and they’d like to do this program, we have been able to establish some remote internship opportunities, or our office is actually in a co working space. And so we’ll allow students and businesses to meet, not every day, but on occasion, meet at our space to connect. So that’s a consideration. Obviously, we don’t want teenagers working in someone’s home. Also, we don’t allow students to ride in a vehicle anybody else’s vehicle. They need to have their they have to ride in their own car or their parents car. They can carpool with another student, and we’ll actually do some carpool connections. Will that’s a consideration. Transportation is a big piece of it, but we don’t allow it students to ride in vehicles we have. That’s one of the things too. Like, for example, we had some students interested in trades like H back or plumbing, things where you’re making calls to people’s homes or residences. And so unfortunately, our members in those areas which we have a number of of those types of members, we’re not able to have students right in those vehicles. So either they have to work at, you know, at the plumbing office, or if they have a plumbing supply store, they could work there. But where we’ve tried to handle those types of interests is working with our school district, our city or and or the hospital. We have large facilities. So then students can shadow someone who’s more well, all you know, like, not handyman, but you know, like a facilities manager, person who’s dealing with a plumbing issue and HVAC issue, those types of things. So there’s just some, some considerations. And really, you know, student safety is paramount, paramount to this. And you know, their safety is number one, and then their experience, as far as career exploration, is number two. And then also the businesses, you know, businesses again and again and again, our surveys are through the roof with their satisfaction with the program, because these students are amazing. They knock everyone’s socks off again and again and again. I have a member who had students put together a sales plan, sales strategy for a product, a brand new launch, and it was better than people who had been in the industry for a really long time. They couldn’t believe how great it was. Sometimes a

Brandon Burton 27:42
different perspective, right?

Rachel Beld 27:43
Yeah, exactly.

Brandon Burton 27:45
That’s awesome. So before we really start wrapping things up, I wanted to ask you know, you guys had the access to the ARPA funds to kick this off for you guys for a chamber today who’s looking to start a paid internship program through their chamber. What? What would you advise to get started today, to maybe look for other grant fund opportunities, or just go straight to the school district? Or what would be your your thoughts? Sure,

Rachel Beld 28:14
so both of those could be options. You definitely, you know, we were very fortunate that we had access to those funds to kind of show what we were trying to do and to prove a concept. But I would say, if you’re starting now, if you’re not, if you don’t have a you know, see, it’s hard to get funds if you’re not a c3 we do not have our own foundation. We do partner with the VISTA Education Foundation on occasion, but we don’t have a c3 which has made it difficult for us to find grant funding to continue this program. So if you have a c3 there’s a ton of money for workforce and internships that you can you can get going. And then secondly, you know, for us, the partnership with the school district has been really successful. And so if you’re not already meeting regularly with your school district and your superintendent, or your career technical education folks, or, you know, career services folks, start meeting with them, start having conversations. And find ways that you you know, if you offer to be a resource for someone, and you’re starting to try to help, people are going to want to know what you have in mind. And so just starting those conversations, you know, most schools, most high schools, have some sort of internship or work experience that they’re trying to cultivate. And it the thing about this is it can really be unique to what your community needs and what your community wants. And so I would, you know, you could go straight to your school district. I’m actually have offered for my other local chambers here in North County to go meet with them, with their superintendent, to just talk about the success of the program and share some data. And you know. And then the main things though, is that you want to spend some time working on some really tight agreements with regard to expectations. We have an employee, an employer handbook, or a. Site supervisor handbook, is what we call it, and then also the Student Handbook, so people know what’s expected to want to put some things like that together. But really it just starts with a conversation and an idea. And we think this is something that every student you know if, if I were in charge of the world of workforce, I would have every student who graduates high school with at least one or two actual work, real world of work experiences. I think that’s so incredibly valuable. So, and I will say, I we have, we always have an intern at the chamber, and I think we have a few future chamber CEOs coming out of the program. So, which I’m happy to say,

Brandon Burton 30:42
so that’s good. That’s right. A few years from now, I’ll be doing podcast interviews, and they’re gonna tell me I got my start as an employee at the VISTA chamber through their internship program and other chamber executives. So wait for it. We’ll see it. Yes,

Rachel Beld 30:56
I can’t wait. You know, one thing that we really didn’t expect with the program was that about 25% of the students who complete the internship program end up being offered some sort of ongoing work experience with the business, either part time or either after graduation or it’s a mentorship for now, but about 25% continue the relationship on after the program is completed for the summer.

Brandon Burton 31:20
That’s fantastic. That’s so huge. So Rachel, I like asking, usually people listen to the show to try to elevate their chamber, take their chamber to the next level. For those listening, what kind of tip or action item might you suggest in helping them to accomplish that goal of taking their chamber to the next level?

Rachel Beld 31:40
I think listening is such an incredible thing to do. And if you listen, you know, oftentimes the chamber, chamber executives, we are busy. We are jump out of bed and hit the ground running, and then we keep going until we collapse into bed at night. But if you don’t pause in the busyness of the day, to listen to other, to listen to what’s happening around you, and to look for gaps, look for opportunities. So we have a college that has a great internship program. We’re not talking we’re not trying to take college insurance, because that already exists. We have other we have folks who are doing career pathways, and they’re already working in a specific industry, and they’re pursuing that education and they can get internship. We were talking specifically about we have students. We listened and we saw the need. So we saw that there were students that need jobs. We have businesses that need workers, and we had a pot of money that we could use and about connecting those dots, and those things don’t happen until you can pause and listen and look for those gaps. And I know that sounds that’s not a super tangible piece of advice, but that’s really where this came from.

Brandon Burton 32:50
I like that listen and fill the gaps. Let’s see, see where those opportunities exist within your community. I like asking everyone I have on the show, as we look to the future of chambers of commerce, how do you see the future of chambers and their purpose going forward?

Rachel Beld 33:07
Well, that’s so interesting. You asked me that because I just wrote an article for our local newspaper about kind of how we’re not your father’s chamber anymore. And you know, I think historically, chambers have been focused on, you know, keeping taxes low. And you know, government advocacy, which that’s still super duper important. Government advocacy is still a huge pillar of our organization. However, when we ask our members what they need, and they say they need talent, then we need to lean in there. And that’s more than just an internship program. You can’t have robust talent without housing for people to live in infrastructure and roads for people to drive on child care that’s affordable, that people can put their kids in child care and go to work and you can’t you have to have good quality health care. If you don’t have a hospital where you can have a baby, then you don’t want to live in that community, and you don’t want to work in jobs in that area. So we’re really taking a holistic approach. You know, I’ve gotten some pushback from folks who say, you know, the Chamber should just be focused on business. And to my, in my opinion, we are. We are focused on business. Business need talent, and you can’t have talent if you don’t have everything else that talent needs in order to live and thrive in your community. And so that means that we have to have housing, we have to have infrastructure, we have to have public transportation, and our public safety has to be top notch. And so we’re leaning in on all of those things where I don’t know that that has always been the focus in the past. Yeah,

Brandon Burton 34:38
now that’s great for anyone listening who might want to reach out and connect with you and learn more about this program, the internship program, or anything else you guys are doing there at the VISTA chamber, what would be the best way for them to reach out and connect with you?

Rachel Beld 34:53
Sure send me an email CEO@vistachamber.org, or connect with me on LinkedIn. Amber. Rachel Whitley Beld on LinkedIn, so find me and let’s chat. Let’s chamber chat.

Brandon Burton 35:04
That’s right. Chamber Chat, we’ll get your your email and LinkedIn profile linked in our our show notes for this episode, so we’ll make it easy for people to connect with you. Thank you, Rachel, this has been fun having you on the podcast and hearing about the impact you guys are making their investor and and really changing lives of these youth and and supporting the business community and helping to make these connections, playing matchmaker. It’s so valuable, and I hope that other chambers out there listening, do you know, take this program and at least explore the opportunity of, you know, seeing if there’s a need for it in your community, but then if there is to be that driver, that catalyst that takes it and runs with it. But thank you for for sharing your experience and insights with it. It’s so valuable. Brandon,

Rachel Beld 35:52
thank you so much for having me on today. It’s been really great chatting with you about our internship program, and I’m inspired by the folks that I hear on your podcast. So thank you so much for the work you do. If

Brandon Burton 36:04
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Advocacy that Bolsters the Community with Michael Guymon

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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 guest for this episode is Michael Guymon and native tucsonan The new word for me. Michael’s 25 year professional career has primarily centered on political strategy, business development and advocacy and organizational management. As president and CEO for the Tucson Metro Chamber, Michael is responsible for developing and implementing the goals and vision for the chamber to fulfill the Chamber’s mission and champion and to champion an environment where your business thrives and our community prospers. Michael’s previous positions include vice president of regional partnerships for sun corridor Inc, the executive director of Metropolitan Pima Alliance, chief to staff to Tucson city council member Fred Ron Stan, Assistant Vice President for governmental affairs for the Tucson Metropolitan Chamber of Commerce and political consultant to the bridges, a 360 acre mixed use, mixed use infill development that includes tech parks Arizona, Geico regional headquarters, housing and 111 acre commercial development. Michael holds a bachelor’s degree in Political Science from the University of Arizona. On a personal note, his passion is baseball, and he was named the official score for the Tucson Padres triple A baseball club from 2011 to 2013 the team moved to El Paso in in 2014 But Michael, I’m excited to have you with us today here on chamber chat podcast. I’d love to give you an opportunity to say hello to all the chamber champions who are out there listening, and to share something interesting about yourself so we can all get to know you a little better.

Michael Guymon 2:48
Yeah, absolutely. Brandon, thank you so much for that, that great introduction, and I’m happy to be here to talk to all of our team chamber champions that are out there. I guess one other little fun fact is, as much as my passion is baseball, I actually play ice hockey. So a lot of people ask me, Wow, a native tucsonan That plays ice hockey. How the heck did that happen? And when I was in college, my buddies and I were just kind of bored playing too much hockey on Sega, so we decided to buy some stick, a puck, and some roller blades, taught ourselves how to play, and that ultimately morphed into playing ice hockey. So So yeah, I am also an ice hockey player, and I still play in the adult league here in Tucson and and it’s a lot of fun. It keeps me, keeps me busy and and it helps me get, you know, some of that pent up nerve that some chamber CEOs can can experience out on the ice.

Brandon Burton 3:46
That’s right, that’s a I would not have guessed that, you know, baseball and hockey. I would not have guessed, you know, but yeah, that that’s awesome. Glad it keeps you active, keeps you involved,

Michael Guymon 3:56
absolutely.

Brandon Burton 3:58
Well, tell us a little bit about the Tucson Metro Chamber, just to kind of set the stage for our discussion today, give us an idea of the size of the chamber staff, budget, scope of work and all that, just to kind of give us your perspective.

Michael Guymon 4:10
Yeah, you bet. Thank you, Brandon. So our chamber has been around since 1896 and we have been the voice of business in a variety of forms for those 100 and now 28 years. So we are a staff of 11, budget of about 1.8 million, and we have 1400 members, and those members are everything from restaurants to Raytheon. Raytheon is our largest private employer here in the Tucson region. Aerospace and Defense is our biggest, not only employer, but also just from a economic impact part of the economy, our biggest player, between Raytheon, with its 14,000 employees and 200 companies that make up our airspace and defense. Sector here in in the Tucson region. So so that’s that’s a big component, but so are a lot of our small businesses here. And of course, the chamber is the main organization that helps to advocate and be the voice for those small businesses. So So it ranges, really good range, but that that’s kind of what makes up our chamber?

Brandon Burton 5:21
Very good. And I know Raytheon is a great company to have in your backyard there. We’ve got a campus probably about 15 miles from our house here in Texas, and they’re great employer and great community player and just a great one to have have on your team there in Tucson, absolutely well, as we try to hone in on what our focus for our conversation is going to be, today, we decided to focus our the majority of our discussion around advocacy, but more specifically, advocacy that bolsters the competitiveness of your community. And we’ll dive in much deeper on this topic as soon as we get back from this quick break.

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All right, Michael, we’re back. As I mentioned before the break, we’re talking about how advocacy can bolster your community’s competitiveness as we take that approach, what does that mean to you as far as advocacy and keeping the maybe the relevance in your community and staying on the cutting edge? Just tell us what that means from you and your approach to advocacy in this with this focus. Sure.

Michael Guymon 8:19
So you know, advocacy really is it really is our main value proposition for the chamber. We, as I mentioned before, we are the voice of business, and part of being the voice of business is making sure that we are that bold advocate for a lot of things that relate to the business community and really try to push pro business policies through our city and county, and actually, when I became CEO of the chamber about three years ago, I shifted our focus to purely local, local advocacy, because we did have staff member, various staff members who would go up to Phoenix to lobby positions at the legislature. But I felt it was there. There’s plenty of work to do within the city of Tucson and Pima County that we really needed to focus our efforts locally and address the pro business policies that would help bolster our business community here locally and partner with those organizations like the greater Phoenix chamber and the Arizona chamber that has a stronger presence of the Capitol. And if there are ways that we can, that we can partner with them on state legislation that addresses pro business policy, then we’ll do that. But the chamber is really going to take the lead here locally and and we’ve been very successful at doing that. So, so when it comes to competitiveness now, it really dry there, there are, there are main components to that. Competitiveness. It it comes down to workforce and talent. It comes down to transportation and. Infrastructure comes down to public safety, comes down to housing affordability and quality of life. Those are, those are the five sort of pillars that we look at when we are talking about our competitiveness. As a former employee of our economic development organization, the big thing that I learned there is that talent and workforce and labor drives 99% of the relocation expansion decisions, and it also helps drive whether companies decide to stay within a community so as the retainer of business now at the Chamber I when I was at our economic development organization. I was it was my job to help companies expand to relocate to Tucson now at the Chamber, it’s my job to make sure that they stay here. Talent drives a lot of those decisions, and so working on workforce development and making sure that our educational institutions, our post secondary educational institutions and our K 12 system, quite frankly, are laddering up to the skills and positions that are needed within our companies. Is critically important to make sure that those connections are made. So we do a lot of that work. We have collaboratives in healthcare. We have collaboratives in mining. We have collaboratives in that are focused on construct the construction industry, and then we partner with those organizations that address the issues in and around some of our other targeted sectors and industries. But but addressing workforce development is a big component of making sure that we are competitive, not only for companies that are looking to expand, to relocate, but also those companies that are here and want to expand here in our region

Brandon Burton 11:45
that is so important, and it’s kind of the chicken or the egg, right? Like you want the big business there, you want the companies to relocate, but they need to have the workforce. And at the same time, you’re trying to build the workforce, and kind of think, if you build it, they will come kind of a sense, you know, if there’s your baseball tie in, right? Very good. But I’m curious with the approach, with this, the schools, the, you know, school system, the secondary education, what, what approach is the chamber able to do from that advocacy effort to make sure that these students are being prepared to enter the workforce, and specifically in these key we’ll say categories, these key industries you’re looking to have workforce for. What’s that approach look like?

Michael Guymon 12:34
So Brandon, really, it’s our job as a chamber to make sure that the industries and the companies are engaged. You know, I’m not. I’m not here to tell our community college system or our university who do incredible work in our community and our true are truly our economic drivers of the community. I’m not here to tell them what to do. But what I can do is bring, come more, more and more companies to the table, for them to say, here are the positions that are open. Here are the skills that I need. Here are the skills that I think are lacking in our community, to have those conversations so that our post secondary education institutions understand what the needs are, in hopes that they will help address them. So it’s my job as a chamber to encourage those companies to be a part of those conversations, and we’ve been successful in that we have a lot of companies that are at the table. Could I use more? Absolutely, it’s imperative that I have more and more industries at those tables so that they can express the types of challenges that are they are facing from a workforce standpoint. But outside of that, you know, a lot of the issues that we hear, especially at the retail level, are related to public safety, they’re related to transportation they’re related to housing affordability these days. I mean, boy, you know, this is a topic that is certainly not unique to Tucson, but it is something I am hearing more and more chambers talk about how we need to make sure that we address our housing affordability. And the recent term I’ve heard is income. I don’t think it was income based, but basically, you know, income based housing, so making sure that we’re that we’re addressing the various aspects of housing, because it is diverse, we want to make sure that our housing options are diverse, but but those are, those are issues that our communities are facing, and we as a chamber, making sure that companies are at The table to be a part of those conversations and dialogs. Yeah,

Brandon Burton 14:44
I imagine having the companies at the table specifically with workforce and talent, is trying to keep some of that talent in the community. For whatever reason, it seems like a lot of maybe high school students see that they’re the. Horizons are somewhere else, right where they need to go away, leave the community, to go to school or to find a job and to be able to show them the opportunities that are right there in Tucson, I think is key in what you guys are after with this approach, absolutely,

Michael Guymon 15:13
and it’s, I’m glad you mentioned that, because we’re having conversations right now, particularly with our university, about that, whether it’s, you know, seen as a brain drain or a brain gain, and the ways that we can address that we used to actually host an event called the career crawl, and this was getting local companies and students connected. Because a lot of the jobs fairs that occur on college campuses are companies that are from outside coming into our community and saying, Hey, we got a great job for you the Bay Area, or we got a great job for you in Chicago. And they and those students leave because of that. Well, we wanted to create a local job fair so that students could have a better understanding of what that local job opportunity looks like. And the U of A the University of Arizona actually picked that up. They now have a have an annual and actually sometimes twice a year, Job Fair called Tucson jobs now. So they took our idea and they created their own job fair that focuses on local job opportunities. And what we’re seeing now, we’ve actually seen some of those statistics shift. It used to be that that a quarter of our of our graduates stayed here in Tucson, which is a really low number, because in some communities, it could be upwards to 50 and 60% that is now inching up. We’re now seeing that number is now 35% of our graduates staying here in Tucson. And so from a statistical standpoint, we’re actually seeing a brain gain over the last three to four years as a poor as opposed to a brain drain. Could we do better? Obviously, we could, but we’re at least sitting seeing those those graduates, stay here more than they have in the past, and and we’re hopeful it’s because of things like that, where we’re opening more doors to local opportunities.

Brandon Burton 17:14
It’s trending the right way, for sure,

Michael Guymon 17:18
absolutely.

Brandon Burton 17:19
I love the approach of local advocacy and in these areas that you talked about with transportation and quality of life and public safety and housing, and can you talk to us a little bit more about some of the different approaches? Maybe in these other categories, we spent some good time on the workforce and talent development, but talk to us a little bit about the transportation or quality of life and things of that nature? Yeah,

Michael Guymon 17:43
absolutely. So I’ll start with public safety. So couple, two and a half years ago, I created our coalition against retail theft. It was small businesses, even, oddly enough, one of our one of our mortuaries, as well as you know, places like CVS and Walgreens were a part of this coalition because they were experiencing retail theft today, more than they have, like, extremely, more more than they have in the past. And so we created this coalition to address a lot of those challenges that those companies were facing, and we brought in local law enforcement, we brought in our city and county attorneys. We brought in a lot of the individuals to be a part of those conversations, direct conversations, so that we could come up with with solutions. One of the solutions that we did come up with, we were the recipients of a local grant that awarded small businesses micro loans, or actually, sorry, micro grants. It wasn’t a loan a micro grant to put in new lighting, to put in new vegetation, to put do things with on their own property, to discourage retail theft and and vandalism and things that would happen, you know, private property vandalism. So so we were successful in that, and we want to do more of that. And so now our conversations have grown outside of retail theft and are really focused on public safety and things that we could do to to make sure that we are addressing public safety, and a lot of that comes down to making sure that we’re hiring more police officers and other things to to address public safety in our community. As it comes to trans transportation, we have a reauthorization that’s going to be on the ballot next year of our Regional Transportation Authority. This is a 20 year half cent sales tax that was approved back in 2006 it will sunset in 2026 so next year we’re placing on the ballot an extension of a 20 year extension to that half cent sales tax. And that, again, is just Pivotal, especially in a state where we’re seeing. Fewer and fewer state shared revenues coming toward transportation. If we don’t reauthorize that we locally are going to be in a world of hurt, and we know how important transportation is to our economy, to deliver the goods and services that companies and small businesses depend on, it is absolutely critical that we maintain a robust transportation network. And so that’s that’s some that’s a huge, going to be a huge focus of ours going into next year. And

Brandon Burton 20:31
I’ve seen chambers, you know, in other areas, have a lot of success with taking on initiatives like that transportation to get it on the ballot. And this is a renewal. So hopefully it’s a little easier to tell that story. But for the person that says, Well, I don’t take you know public transportation well, but a lot of the people that are you know, serving you your dinner at the restaurant, they do, and if you are not participating in this, you’re going to pay a lot higher or not have a wait staff, or whatever it is. I mean, there’s all different industries that have employees that rely on public transportation, and you see that across the board, for quality of life within a community, if you don’t have a strong, you know, transportation, says public transit system, then you suffer. So hopefully that’ll, you know, get that momentum you need, get it across the finish line and renew that and keep your community thriving. Are there other areas you touched a little bit about housing? What are some of the the approaches that you guys are taking on with housing?

Michael Guymon 21:35
So when it comes to housing, we are working with mainly our our county. So Pima County is the county that serves our region, and our Pima County, believe it or not, is the same size as the state of Connecticut. So counties in Arizona are quite large. We only have 15 we’re the sixth largest state, but we only have 15 counties. So our counties here are pretty big, but so Pima County does a lot of work. In fact, it does a lot of work that counties typically a lot of urban work that counties typically don’t do to counties typically provide rural services, but our county does a lot of urban services. So they’re pretty big player in terms of making sure that we continue to to establish a pro business environment here in the region. But when it comes to housing, they have established a Housing Commission, and we are looking at various proposals and initiatives that would that would help address that some of it, quite frankly, Brandon is going to come down to to public support, but we can also look at ways in which we lessen some of the regulation. So regulation is a big, big issue when it comes to being able to provide the housing supply. And as we all know in the chamber world, supply and demand, economics is a real thing, and understanding that is pivotal for communities as they’re trying to address some of these issues. And so the better we can lessen regulation, or at least address regulation in the right way that provides the ability for developers to build housing stock is going to help address the supply and demand issue, and if they’re able to build more supply that meets the demand, then those housing prices are going to come down. It is just basic economics. So So our focus has been and will continue to be on the regular regulation side of things. And there are some great examples out there. We’ve learned some examples in the Minneapolis area. There are some examples that are going on in California that really address that, that supply issue, and so we want to enact some of those things outside of sort of public support for for housing.

Brandon Burton 23:54
Yeah, no, that’s that’s great, and it really gives some ideas about how housing can be approached. Again, the local approach to advocacy, I think, is so important. And like you said at the beginning, it’s normal for chambers to have staff that are tasked with going to the state capitol or going to Washington, and there’s a place for that, absolutely, but be able to turn the advocacy internally within the community, to build that that place making really within your community, to have it be a place where businesses want to be, where people want to live, where you have that quality of life, is so key. Yeah. So I wanted to ask on behalf of listeners who are wanting to take their chamber up to the next level, kind of tip or action item might you share with them as they try to get after that goal?

Michael Guymon 24:46
Yeah, I would say just make sure that you are providing the right kind of value proposition, whether it’s serving your members on a regular basis or, you know, one of the one of the actions that we took was. So knowing that our advocacy was a primary driver for companies, small, medium and large to join the chamber, we actually embedded our Public Policy Council into our bylaws. So you know the normal committees that you would find in bylaws of it, like the Finance Committee and the Governance Committee, but we actually put our public policy council committee in our bylaws because we knew how important that was to our members, and by putting in the bylaws, that means that a board member of ours has to chair the public policy committee. So it’s that direct link between Board activity and our what we consider our number one value proposition for our members, and to demonstrate how important that is, our community, our connections important. Of course, they’re important. We’re going to continue to provide events. We’re going to continue to provide mixers and breakfasts and ways in which our businesses can connect and connect, whether that means connecting with leaders so that they can share their thoughts or connecting with each other so they can do business with each other. We want to make sure that we’re continuing to do that, but we are also putting together our next three year strategic plan, and as it stands right now, it has yet to be approved by the board, but we’re we are having conversations with all of our committees, our board, our high level investors, and at the end of the three years, we’re looking to have 80% of our funding go toward our advocacy efforts. That that’s a big percentage, that’s that’s certainly more than most chambers would be comfortable with accepting, but again, that is something that our members are telling us is important to them, and they’re willing to shift and maybe even grow dollars on the advocacy side of the of the of the staffing coin, so that we can be that stronger advocate for for the region and and part of that is because of what we are up against in Tucson, maybe different from and unique from other communities. We have a a government that doesn’t see the value in in business, thoughts and opinions, and so we have to push harder than some other chambers have to when it comes to our local governments, to say, This is why the business voice is important. This is why you need to include the business community in a lot of your conversations as you develop your ordinances or your initiatives. And so because of that push, because of that added push, we’re going to have to add resources on that side of the ledger, and our board seems to be comfortable in moving that direction.

Brandon Burton 27:51
That’s great. Just between the board and your members recognizing the impact and seeing you guys move the needle with your advocacy efforts to want to lean into it even more. I think is huge. So yep, Well, Michael, I like asking everyone I have on the show, as we look to the future of chambers of commerce, how do you see the future of chambers and their purpose going forward?

Michael Guymon 28:14
Well, it’s interesting. You say that because we are in a due diligence process right now to potentially merge with our economic development organization, the very same one that I used to work for, and I was there for seven and a half years. I’ve been to the chamber now here for for six years. And so I’ve seen both sides, and what I truly feel is and I and in my conversations with chambers across the country who have got who have actually successfully merged with their economic development organization to have the expansion slash attraction and retention arms under one roof, I think, is powerful. So I see, and again, based on a lot of the conversations and a lot of the trends that we are seeing in the chamber environment across the country, I see more of that happening. And so I think the trend to answer your question is moving in that direction, to to establish a merged relationship with economic development organizations, I think, is going to be the future of chambers. To be, not only that advocate for a pro business environment, but also, like we’ve talked about, be that advocate for their community’s competitiveness, because it is a much more competitive world out there. Companies are moving and relocating more today than they have in the past. And so for chambers and economic development organizations to be aligned in their messaging, be aligned in their content, I think is going to be not only the trend for chambers moving forward, but also to establish a more powerful organization. That can bring all of those services to bear and be that advocate for pro business policy and for competitiveness in their respective communities. So

Brandon Burton 30:13
out of curiosity, and I know it’ll look a little different in each community, but how does a conversation like that begin when you talk about a possible merger with the chamber and Economic Development Authority, yeah,

Michael Guymon 30:26
based on a lot of the conversations that I’ve had, some of them are like, like us. It’s come down to there are too many business organizations in your region, and sometimes it’s hard for that collective, unified voice to exist, and the more dispersed voices that you have in a region, sometimes can dilute that voice as you’re trying to advocate and lobby for a pro business environment. So sometimes it starts there, other times it starts with and I’ve had these conversations with other communities as well. It started with an exiting of of a senior official, like a CEO of either a chamber or an economic development organization, where, when that person exits the community, kind of takes a step back and says, Okay, well, that person’s exiting maybe now, maybe the timing is right now for us to take a look at whether or not these two organizations should should be under one roof.

Brandon Burton 31:27
Yeah, I think that’s helpful, just to be able to keep minds open and perspectives open, to see when that opportunity, when it makes sense. I would argue in a lot of cases, it does make sense, but to see when that timing matches up and how to start those conversations. Yeah, well, Michael, I wanted to give you a chance to share any contact information you’d like to put out there for listeners who may want to reach out and connect and learn more about how you guys are doing things there in Tucson. What would be the best way for them to reach out and connect with you? Yeah, happy

Michael Guymon 31:58
to do that. So our website is TucsonChamber.org and my email address, should anyone want to email me, is mguymon@tucsonchamber.org happy to love answering emails. I’m definitely one of those individuals that gets back to folks within 24 hours. So love to communicate, love to learn, love to share ideas. Love to share best practices. And just love to communicate, like I said earlier, with other chamber executives. Because my way is not always the right way, but I can share what works for us, but I can also learn what works for others. So happy to do that absolutely

Brandon Burton 32:48
well. We’ll get that in our show notes to make it easy to find you and for listeners to connect with you, but I do appreciate you spending time with us today on chamber chat podcasts and sharing what is working for you guys there in Tucson, and thank you for being with us and sharing your perspective with us today.

Michael Guymon 33:06
Thank you so much. Brandon. I appreciate it.

Brandon Burton 33:08
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Your Chamber Does That with John Tayer

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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 guest for this episode is John Tayer as President and CEO of the Boulder Chamber in Colorado, John is honored to lead the organization that serves as boulders unified voice for business interests advances the community’s economic vitality and provides valuable business support services. Prior to joining the boulder chamber in 2012 John was Public Affairs and Communications Director for the pharmaceutical manufacturing company Roche, Colorado Corporation, and policy development director at the Boulder City Manager’s office. John also spent six years as the boulder area’s elected representative to the Regional Transportation District. As a native of Brookline, Massachusetts. John earned his undergraduate degree from the University of Michigan. Spent a couple of years working on Capitol Hill in Washington, DC, and moved to Boulder 34 years ago to earn a law degree from the University of Colorado. He now resides in South Boulder with his wife Molly, and enjoys playing outdoors, accessing local cultural attractions, and generally loves his community. But John, I’m excited to have you with us today here on Chamber Chat Podcast. I’d love to give you an opportunity to say hello to all the Chamber Champions that are out there listening and share something interesting about yourself so we can all get to know you a little bit better,

John Tayer 2:27
Sure. Brandon, and thank you so much for reaching out and offering to include me in your podcast series. You know. I’ll just say this that you know i a Just so appreciate my chamber colleagues and I learned so much from conversations with them. One of my favorite things is getting together with them at professional conferences. And so this kind of a podcast is a great opportunity to for me to just share my thinking, but I look forward to just listening to others as well as I have previously. I will say that just if you think about me, just as a individual, quirky as I am, I’d say just I love the chamber universe and the work that we do. And I’m sure we’ll get into the details of that, but it is somewhat overwhelming. I mean, we are engaged in so many aspects of our communities, our schedules are, you know, seven or gosh, I get up so early, like four in the morning to get my emails done till late at night, and then just get up and do it again. So in order to balance that kind of a work lifestyle, I would say something different about me that might be relatable to other chamber directors, and that is, I have to be very compulsive about how I schedule in time to exercise and to engage in activities outside of my chamber experience. And what that looked like for quite some time was for three years, three months and three days. I ran five k5, kilometers or more every day, not skipping a day, and whether it was ice storms, the snow, rain, wind, crazy wind days. So you know, for me, that was a just a great way to a keep a consistent pattern of Exercise and Health, but just for also just finding a way to get space where I could just release my mind and think about some of the key issues that I was addressing at work or in life, just amazingly important. So I think maybe the compulsive nature, there’s other elements of that in my life, things I’ve done, but that might be something a little bit unusual to just to give you a sense of my character, yeah, that’s

Brandon Burton 4:56
a that is quite the feat. I. I’ll say, I I’m run. I’ve run as well. I Fitness is important to me. But most mornings, I’m getting my my oldest daughter up at 5am get her going and and I’ll take that time, I’ll get her up, and then I’ll put on the shoes and go out for a run. And in Texas, it’s either like, you gotta beat the sun up, or else, you know, it’ll beat you up, you know, on your run, yeah. So, so I do that, but this week I got her up, and we had a cold front come through, and it was, like, in the 30s, and it’s like, wow, I’m not up for yet. I’m gonna wait for the sun to come up today. Wow. So the fact we’re out nice and,

John Tayer 5:39
yeah, we haven’t had anything like that up here in Colorado. So interesting,

Brandon Burton 5:44
yeah, but I enjoy your your sentiment about, you know, going to chamber conferences and interacting with colleagues and learning from them, spending time with them, and I don’t think we have them enough. So that’s where this podcast kind of fills that void and gives us that, hit that we need in between. So love it, yeah. Well, tell us a little bit about the boulder chamber. Give us an idea of the size, number of staff, scope of work. You guys are involved with budget to kind of set the stage for our conversation today?

John Tayer 6:14
Sure. So the boulder chamber is about 1200 and mid 1200 membership, shooting for 1300 we are a we have about 21 staff members. And just to describe the character of it, we’re one of those chambers that has the opportunity to have economic vitality under our umbrella. So we serve as the economic development agency for Boulder and the broader region from a chamber perspective. And for me, I just we might get into this later, but I wouldn’t have it any other way, in terms of just that marriage of economic vitality underneath the typical chamber functions. So that’s, I think, key, about a $2.6 million budget and just a wide array of just activities that probably aren’t typical of a chamber. So we’ll get into some of that in our conversation. I’m

Brandon Burton 7:16
sure. Yes, absolutely, and and I agree. I think being able to have that marriage of chamber and economic development, makes a lot of sense. As far as that cohesiveness and really building community, you need to be able to be on the same page. So even if they’re separate organizations, being able to come together and be on the same page,

John Tayer 7:35
absolutely. I mean, I hate seeing when you have an Economic Development Authority, separate from the chamber, and they’re competing for funding events for, you know, the elbow throwing around what activities are within their purview. It’s, it’s, to me, that’s undermines Community and Economic Vitality.

Brandon Burton 7:56
Yes, I would agree with that. So we settled on a topic for our conversation today around your chamber does that and that can either that can be a statement or that can be a question. So we’ll get into that much deeper as soon as we get back from this quick break.

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All right, John, we’re back, and before the break I’d mentioned so your chamber. Does that can be a statement or a question, as as we approach the topic today, what, what direction do you want to go with it? First is a statement or a question?

John Tayer 10:09
You know, I’d say that it’s a it’s a statement and, and we do that, it’s, you know, got a period, but it might as well have an exclamation point at the at the back of the the end of it. And the point of that statement is, when you think about chamber organizations, many folks, they’ll say, Well, what does a chamber do? I mean, you’d like to think that the job that you’re doing daily and working your tail off, and folks would completely understand it and have awareness of what Chamber organizations do. But when you, when you talk to average business leaders, citizens on the street, many of them have no idea what a chamber is. And they, they’re, you know, once I tell them what I do, I’m the head of the boulder chamber, they they’ll next question is, and then what do you do for work? And I have to this is actually a full time, more than full time job, really. And so you know the chamber, your chamber does, that is a statement about you should know what your chamber does. And if you you know, if you’re have an issue as a business, if you’re thinking about a community issue that’s impacting the economy, you should talk to us. And so, you know, it’s an expression for us about the just wide range of activities and programs that our chamber is involved with. And you know, I’ll just touch on it. But I mentioned, I mean, we have the traditional three areas of chamber activity, member support and marketing, services and networking. We have our advocacy, which is the being the voice for business interests. And I would say that, you know, that was for us, a very important element of our own sustainability and our strength as it as an organization drawing in members. And then third is that economic vitality element. So we, we are the economic development group looking to retain and attract businesses, to carry the data resources for our community on the health and vitality of our economy and generally helping businesses build toward their future vision. But in addition to that, we’ve taken on significant other ancillary activities that are important to business success. So for example, when we think about one of the challenges for business activity in our region, it’s workforce retention and attraction. And so we’ve we’ve had to approach things like workforce development, helping to develop the talent that we have in our community, to serve the best, serve and align with the businesses needs for different expertise and skills. In addition, we become very active in housing policy, because it’s become very expensive to live in central boulder. So how do we help to develop a ray of housing, not just in Boulder, but around the region? And then third, just as another example, and there’s so many more, we are very active in transportation, where the transportation management organization for our community, and that is facilitating workforce mobility that is in around Boulder, but also, more importantly for workforce retention and attraction, it is what helps us facilitate longer regional commutes for Our workforce, making it really convenient for them to travel to Boulder for work and back maybe to housing outside of our community.

Brandon Burton 14:09
So that gives a great scope of some of those things that you guys are involved with. I love that even in your email signature, you say your chamber does that, you know, so you’re, resonating, that you’re putting that out there and that messaging to your community. So for those listening, yeah, I’m thinking of the chamber executive who’s already overwhelmed, who’s like, we can’t take on one more thing right now. And then somebody in the community will come to the chamber and say, Hey, I think you should do this. So talk to us about that. How do you approach when the new ideas, either if it self generated within the chamber, or ideas are presented to you from the outside, how do you figure out how that aligns with your mission, if it’s something that you’re going to take on and to really run with? Tagline of your chamber. Does that? How does that fit in with this? What

John Tayer 15:03
a brilliant question, a brilliant question. Because I will tell you that that was one of the conversation elements when we did our rebranding to think about, you know, the message that that sends is that, do we become the sponge for just about anything that a chamber can do, because that is one of the greatest challenges in this role, is figuring out what are the things we don’t do, what are the the the opportunities to have an impact on our community, on the economic vitality of our area and support our businesses. And you know, every day, somebody’s calling and saying, Hey, we’re having this parade, and we’d love the chamber to lead it, and you know all this. So how do we approach the decision making around what is appropriate for our organization? And I won’t claim to be expert on this. In fact, if you talk to our staff team, they say we need to do a better job at this. And I think we all with that. But it first starts with the strategic plan. We the way we plan strategically is every year we do, we update our strategic plan. So it’s not a three year plan or five year plan that we we we point toward we know that the conditions in our community and our economy are changing all the time. So every year, we do a soup to nuts review, and that’s everything from just making sure that our mission, our vision, are still in in alignment with what we want them to be, making sure our core values are are still what we feel are critical for our organization to represent. But then you start getting into the meat of the work, of the strategic plan, and we have key pillars they relate to the kinds of things I mentioned earlier, things like being the voice, being the the strong economic vitality pillar member support those kinds of things, a little bit broader scope to to them and nuance. And then, you know, those things don’t change that much. But then underneath are the activities that support success in those key pillar areas, and that is reviewed every year, and they change regularly. I mean, sometimes, you know, we’ll have programs that go on, and we know that they will for a number of years, but other times, we have a mission or goal project that we’re pursuing. We know it, and hope that it’ll be a one year, one and then we’ll be able to move on to something else. But under that umbrella, every year, we’re doing a check to make sure that we are keeping a focus on achieving our key pillar, pillar goals, strategic priorities and the programs, all our programs need to lead toward that we look to weed out things that maybe are no longer serving us in those areas, and then that sets the pace for the year, and we try to be strict about not deviating too far from What we set at the beginning of the year. But you know, opportunities come forward, and so when that happens, we do have a tool for analyzing. Are these things that you know are aligned with our mission? Are they going to serve our goals? Is it something that we have the capacity to take on, whether it’s financially or whether it’s with our staff team. And sometimes there are creative ways that we can either support others in achieving a goal and still be tied in a way that is comfortable and strategic for us. And then at other times, we just have to say sorry. We just can’t be involved with that at this time and and try to offer support and guidance, but you have to make that difficult decision, and you know that at times can be disappointing for folks, but I think the greater clarity you can provide to them up front without hemming and hawing, is serves, serves you long term. And last thing I’ll say about that is we just actually made a decision to take on, for example, the film commission under our umbrella, and something that I really excited about, wanted to pursue, and had to listen to our, my staff team, when they said, you know, no, not now. And this was, this was quite over a couple of years, really. And there, then came a point where we said, Okay, now we see that this fits with us. We see how we can adopt it. And. A way that doesn’t over Burton, our staff, team and resources. So it’s not always a permanent, no, it can be a hey, not now, but maybe in the future.

Brandon Burton 20:12
Yeah, I like how you say you have a tool for analyzing, you know, whether or not something is a fit or something you can take on, is there like a canned response when you get a phone call or an email to one of your 2021, staff members? How does that filter in from the the original source to that feedback of, yes, let’s explore this. Or, you know, how can we support you in another way with your parade or whatever it is, how is the staff trained to handle you know, as more things come your way, you

John Tayer 20:53
know, I think each of them have a different approach. I’ll say just my style. I mean, I just tend to be an exuberant person in general. So my initial response is, wow, that is an exciting idea, if I think it’s a great idea. And boy, I’d love to think about how we could be engaged with that. And then I will absorb as much information as I can. Usually entail some sort of a meeting and discussion. I’ll bring in the appropriate staff folks to have that conversation, and then the statement is, hey, I need to bring it back to the team. It’s kind of and I think folks respect that’s fair when I, when I, when I offer that. I’m really excited about it, but I need to take it back to the team. You know, it’s, it’s an honest statement. I mean, if I don’t think that this is a fit, then I’ll usually let them know. But I really do rely on the team. We have so such great, great staff team members and partners that I want to make sure that they buy in our I meet with our leadership team every week, we walk through just the list of issues that are coming to us, whether they’re existing projects or new ideas. And I’m always testing with them, and there’s some very hard conversations that they have, and you know, listen to periodically, I’ll get reprimanded because I got somebody a little bit too excited about the potential of working with us, and they’re like, wait a minute, you know? And I, you know, they’re they’re right to do that. And so I respect them and look for them to give me honest push back when it’s taking on something that is just not within our capacity, or maybe even not a good fit for us? Yeah.

Brandon Burton 22:40
So I like that approach. I think it’s good to show if there’s some genuine interest to express that, but take it back to the team, and it all has to go through that filter. I think that makes a lot of sense. So I had mentioned before you’ve got the tagline in your your email signature of your chamber. Does that? How do you guys go about telling the story? I mean, you guys are involved in so many things. How do you let your community know exactly what it is you’re involved with? I mean, it’s, it’s in your email signature. You’re on the podcast today talking about it. What are, what are other ways that you’re getting the messaging out there? This is what the Chamber’s doing to advance our community.

John Tayer 23:20
Yeah. So listen, I will defer to our expertise in the marketing era staff team. But you know what we will often do is tell the story through our programs and activities and so we, we, we are very aggressive in our media outreach, our editorial commentary, in our video content, all sorts of ways of communicating that we have this broad scope. And you know for me, some of the most effective tools are the opinion pieces that we write, which allow us to speak up on issues that are important to our businesses, important to our community, and indicate that our organization is at the table, playing a critical role, Speaking on behalf of business interests. I say, always say business interests in harmony with the values of our community, which we shared, environmental sustainability, social equity, but at the same time making it clear, hey, this is the impact this issue will have, or the position. This is why we’re taking this position on a particular issue area. And so to me, these kinds of proactive free media opportunities are really important, having a relationship with our local newspaper reporters so that they know and think to call us on the kinds of activities that we’re working on. And so we. Balanced that kind of approach with just our own marketing messaging, which covers an array of topic areas. We have newsletters in the economic vitality area, in our public policy programs area and in general membership, and try to meet them out in a way that doesn’t overwhelm our membership and our business community, but is demonstrating that we’re active in all of these different areas. I

Brandon Burton 25:31
like that, especially those opinion pieces and your idea of, you know, showing the business interests in conjunction with the community interests. I think it’s so important to show that that alignment there. When you take take something to the team to evaluate whether or not we’re going to take this on as something new that the Chamber does talk to us a little bit about what you look at, as far as the financial aspect, because all of it’s going to take some kind of staff time. I would assume most of these things are going to take staff time. There’s a cost to that. Are these programs? Are they going to be revenue generators? Are you going to have to go after grants? Are you going to so talk to us about the financial aspect as you, as you bring on new programs or new initiatives? Yeah.

John Tayer 26:16
So for me, that it starts with the foundation of the the characterization I have for our organization and any 501 c6 or 501 c3 and that is we are a non profit business, and that means that we have a mission and purpose to our work. We there are specific goals that we have for the work that we do, and we want to be incredibly impactful in those areas, but we know that we cannot achieve those goals or have as much of an impact if we don’t operate as a normal business that has a mindset of bringing in revenue that helps us to employ the staff, team members, pay them in a way that is appropriate for their expertise and skill levels, and also invest in the tools and and and support services that allow us to drive toward those, those those goals. So for everything that we do, we’re always assessing, how can we pay for that? What are the the sponsors? What are the the grant programs? And also thinking about some of the programs that maybe not drawing in direct revenue, but are a driver for membership at standard or even higher levels, because we’re doing that work. So there is that revenue assessment for just about everything we do. You know, there are some things that you would, you would say, Okay, we are doing this because that is a chamber activity. Were so many fewer of those than when I first came on board. I mean, there was just, I’d say, just an array of activities that we said, Well, we do that because it’s, you know what a chamber does? Well, let’s find out how we can turn that into a revenue, revenue generating mechanism for organization that allows us to do that and also supports our other operations and activities. Yeah,

Brandon Burton 28:35
I appreciate that perspective. I think hopefully that’ll help others that are, you know, facing those challenges to bring this on. How do we do this? Figuring out a way to pay for it, to make it all work, is super important. It’s, I

John Tayer 28:48
will say, Brandon. It’s a philosophy that just it. You know, even myself, you know, when I came in, you know, I will tell you that I wasn’t somebody who understood. I wasn’t, didn’t come up through the chamber ranks. I came into the organization and wasn’t clear on all the, you know, the Chamber financing tools and but was focused and compelled by the mission. And I think that’s probably most of the staff team members that that join. They want to serve and support our businesses. They want to achieve things that are important for our community and our economy. That said making sure that everybody has a mindset of generating revenue to then support and keeping some expenses at the lowest possible rate that allows us to perform our mission to do the programs and initiatives that we find so compelling and that lead us toward achieving our mission.

Brandon Burton 29:48
Yeah, that’s perfect. Well, as we shift gears here a little bit, I wanted to to ask for the chamber listening, who’s interested in taking their organization up to the. Next Level. What kind of tip or action item might you share with them? And as they try to accomplish this goal,

John Tayer 30:07
you know, I I listen. I first of all just, I say this with all humility, because there’s so many chamber leaders out there that I follow, and think I need to take that on so but what has been successful for I think our organization are a couple of really key elements. So one is that I do believe that there is a very critical need to represent business interests and represent them in a way that is constructive, that drives goal toward goal policy, goals that support our businesses, and I think, to the extent that that becomes a significant area of investment for chambers, to me, I’ve seen that propel colleagues around our region to much greater success and impact in their communities, and also a greater financial base. It’s it’s the larger businesses, the ones that have the capacity to invest in your work. They want to see you speak up on their behalf to help make sure that their businesses can operate most efficiently and effectively in their community, and at the same time they they want to be represented responsibly in a way that isn’t, you know, you know, hell with business interests. I mean, we have, I always joke that we have these beautiful flat irons that are the back backdrop to our community and really the the symbol of our our communities, just beauty. And, you know, I joke that, you know, we’re never going to be the chamber that says, let’s, let’s tear down the the flat irons and sell off that sandstone, because it’s really good for business. No, we are about long term business vitality and economic strength and the vitality of our community for the long term. So for me, that’s the character of advocacy that I think is so important for our business. In addition, I then move toward the economic vitality side of the equation. And to me, it’s not just the classic business retention and attraction and for us strong strengths and data collection and understanding the vitality of our community, but it’s the programs that have a broader, long term impact on our community, things that aren’t going to be addressed in you know, either a single, you know, you know, one month action or activity, but also aren’t things that are just part of your daily work. So for example, we have homelessness has become an issue in our community, housing costs are significant challenge for for our workforce. So we took on what we call the greatest challenges to our economy and to our community under the umbrella of what’s called the boulder Together program, and that initiative is allowing us to describe and define those issues that are of most concern to our businesses, and then attract resources that help us to tackle them for specific goals, to to for for Our community and for our economy. And so we’ve, you know, now in our seventh year, I think seventh year, yes, seventh year of Boulder together, and we’ve been able to see really important progress in transportation programs, in housing generation and in we developed an entirely new workforce development program through the boulder together umbrella, and I’d say that’s the message to our to fellow colleagues, and I know a number of them are doing this, but it’s instrumental to our success, and that is identifying the greatest challenges that our businesses have for their success and their their vision for the future, and then outreaching to them for support to tackle those issues with specific programs and initiatives that, to me, has helped to define Our organization as a leader in much broader scope of activities that I don’t think are typical for a chamber organization. I

Brandon Burton 34:49
love that answer that identifying those biggest challenges and go attack it. Yeah, go, go after it. Go get it. And I, I wrote down the the comment you made about the. Character of advocacy. I love the way you said that, and I think that resonates very well, John, as we look to the future of chambers of commerce, how do you see the future of chambers and their purpose going forward?

John Tayer 35:13
Yeah, well, you know, listen, I’m a chamber believer. And you know, when I think about the state of our society, and that the challenge we have in communities, but nationally, internationally, just communicating and and getting folks together to address these very difficult issues. I see Chambers as becoming the place where we come together diverse perspectives, but with understanding that we have common goals. We want our businesses to be successful, we want our economy to thrive, and we want our communities to be wholly sustainable. And so a chamber organization has become that unusual place in society now where you can bring folks together in a in a in a in a in a problem solving nature brass tacks not not no fluff, but really pointing toward solutions that are actionable and drive toward positive results together. And I find that that’s just the the opportunity for chambers, especially in this day and age, it’s, it’s, it’s a community center, and it’s a place for achieving results that in many ways are are even our government entities are not capable of given the the consternation at the political sphere. So I see chambers evolving and developing to become bigger players in a whole array of community issues that impact our economy and business success. So I’m bullish on where we position ourselves for the future, and I’m just excited about just, of course, our own chamber. But just chambers writ large,

Brandon Burton 37:14
it’s a great vision. I love it. John, I wanted to give you a chance to share any contact information for listeners who may want to reach out and learn more about how you guys are approaching things there in Boulder. What would be the best way for someone to reach out and connect with you?

John Tayer 37:29
Well, I’m glad to reach or be connected with on LinkedIn. You can find me John, John Taylor, T, A, y, E, R, you can also email me directly at john.tayer@boulderchamber.com, and if you feel compelled, give me a call. 303-442-1058, and you know, I’ll just say this that I’m glad to respond to any questions. Just share what we know I was just emailing just yesterday, somebody on our team, and I said, Let’s do it. Let’s do that. R and D rip off and duplicate the work of other chambers. It’s just, you know, this is not a competitive business. This is a business of collaboration toward a broader vision of healthy economies, strong businesses and strong communities, and so anything that we can learn from each other and successes that we can share a newer to our common collective benefit. So I’m looking forward to getting any calls or questions folks have about the work we do, and I’m sure I’ll be reaching out to them after they call me and say, Well, how did you approach it? Right, right? Thank you for that opportunity. Brandon,

Brandon Burton 38:47
yeah, it definitely is a collaborative effort. So we’ll, we’ll make sure to get your contact information in our show notes for this episode make it easy for listeners to find you. But John, I wanted to thank you for spending time with us today and just, you know, shedding a little bit of light about how you guys are approaching things at the Boulder Chamber, the impact you’re making and those things that you guys do in Boulder so thank you for being with us today.

John Tayer 39:12
Your chamber does that. Just, you know that I’m sure your chamber, whoever’s chamber, does that too. Great.

Brandon Burton 39:20
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First Reaction of the Chamber Industry with Dale Kooyenga

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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 guest for this episode is Dale Kooyenga. Dale grew up in as the oldest of four children in a blue collar family. He played college basketball at Moraine Valley Community College, followed by Lakeland University. Following graduation from Lakeland University, Dale moved to Milwaukee and immediately fell in love with the Milwaukee community, inspired by the events of September 11, Dale joined the US Army alongside two of his brothers. He attended a fit Officer Candidate School, followed by the Army’s military intelligence officer training program, Dale was assigned to the United States Army, civil affairs, psychology, Operations Command in 2008 he was deployed to Iraq with the 400 and 32nd civil affairs battalion as part of the surge strategy led by General David Petraeus. Dale was awarded the Bronze Star for service in Iraq. In addition to his service in Iraq, Dale has served in military intelligence units attached to the Defense Intelligence Agency, two company commands, including command of Wisconsin’s First Army Reserve Counter Intelligence Unit, and overseas assignments with NATO allies in Europe and in South Korea. Dale currently holds the rank of lieutenant colonel and as the battalion commander for the 407th Army Reserve civil affairs battalion. In his civilian career, Dale is the President at the Metropolitan Milwaukee Association of Commerce. The MMCA represents over 2000 businesses serving as the region’s boardroom in pursuit of a globally competitive economy that fosters high value jobs, sustains a vibrant quality of life for all, Dale is a certified public public accountant, and obtained his MBA from Marquette University prior to joining MMAC, Dale served eight years as Wisconsin state representative and then four years in the Wisconsin State Senate, where he developed a reputation as a hard working, pragmatic Problem Solver who worked across party lines. Dale and his wife Jennifer have four children, their son grant and three daughters, Taylor, Quinn and Ada. Dale, I’m excited to have you with us today here on Chamber Chat Podcast. First of all, thank you for your your dedicated service, but welcome to the show. Give you a chance to say hello to all the Chamber Champions who are out there listening, and I’d love to give you a chance to share something interesting about yourself, maybe that we didn’t cover, so we can all get to know you a little bit better.

Dale Kooyenga 3:37
Yeah. Well, thanks for having me on the show, and hello to my fellow colleagues in the chamber world. This is a whole world I’d never thought of three four years ago. I do a lot of speaking with high schoolers, and we do a lot of programming as far as you can’t be what you can’t see. And I you know new associations existed, knew they had presidents and CEOs and all that stuff, but never thought of myself in that role up until about two and a half years ago in the interview process. So great. I love it. It’s It’s amazing where life brings you love, where I’m at in regards to interesting things that people don’t know about me, that’s only to be revealed on your podcast no one else knows, besides the koinga kids and some of their select friends, is I do a very mean, authentic Donald Duck impersonation.

Brandon Burton 4:28
All right,

Dale Kooyenga 4:32
there’s some interesting those

Brandon Burton 4:34
are one of those things that between father and the children, like grandchildren, something like, that’s that’s something, a special bond that you’ll have. I can’t. It’s a weird thing. I

Dale Kooyenga 4:45
can never be able to snap. I try to try to be like, Oh, it’s so easy. Why didn’t they try to teach you I cannot snap. But somehow, God gave me this ability to make Donald Duck noises.

Brandon Burton 4:53
There you go. Hey, that’s got to be worth something. It’ll never be on the resume, but there it is. That’s right, you. Well, give us some background about your chamber. Give us an idea of size, staff, scope of work, budget, just all of that to kind of set the stage for the perspective that you’re coming from as we enter into our discussion today.

Dale Kooyenga 5:12
Well, I appreciate that, because as we talk about how healthy and impactful the Metropolitan Milwaukee Association of Commerce is, I have to acknowledge, is that I’m fully aware that I’m on third base. I did not get a triple. It was primarily my predecessor before me, Tim Sheehy, who has been the president for 30 years, 31 years, and there for 40 years at the MMAC. So very, very appreciative for his leadership. The impacts he’s had, really has led a great chamber, and also the community in general. So we’ve been around since 1861 so we have, you know, just like a lot of associations, there’s a bunch of at the time, gentlemen who were upset with things going on in the community or just thought that there needed to be a change in some institutional guidance, in addition to a government and formed our association in downtown Milwaukee. We’re now, you know, we’re metro Milwaukee, but really more of a Regional Chamber in Southeast Wisconsin, and we do have aspects of our business, including health insurance program and a food and beverage group, among other initiatives that are statewide in Wisconsin. So it’s a very robust chamber. We do a lot of lobbying, primarily at the state level, to a lesser extent, at the federal and local level. We, like any association, do events. We have a health insurance plan. We actually have a sub Sarah doing Milwaukee development, corporate sales, real estate, and that’s just a scratch of service. So we’re in a lot of different things and really making a big impact here in Milwaukee.

Brandon Burton 6:45
Yeah, that’s fantastic. I’m excited about our topic for discussion today, especially after going through your bio, the background that you have, the military service, estate service, you know, civil service, to be able to get your perspective as you entered the chamber world, and what some of those first impressions were, how you adapted, and just the story around that. And we’ll dive into that much deeper as soon as we get back from this quick break.

Visit ChamberNation.com to learn more.

All right, Dale, we’re back. As I mentioned before the break today, we’re going to be focusing our discussion primarily on what some of your first impressions were as you entered into the chamber world. Like you mentioned, you didn’t even know this world existed to the level it does until you’re in it. But just tell us from from your background and the the introductions you had in the chamber world. What were some of those first impressions and reactions that kind of introduced you into this space? Well, my

Dale Kooyenga 9:28
first interactions with the association was when I was in political office, and they would come and lobby me. So it’s funny, when I was looking for jobs, I was interviewing, I actually had a couple positions already in mind where I knew the direction I wanted to go, and it was not a political direction. I didn’t want to go. Politics was always something I did. It was never something I was and so I didn’t want to do something where I was in the political realm. So I remember our current chair, Austin Ramirez, was CEO. Of a husco, which is a manufacturing company in the automotive space in here in Milwaukee area. He called me up and said, Hey, you Tim, she’s not going to be around forever. We’re looking for someone to be positioned at MMAC and then transition into possibly his role someday. Would you be interested? My reaction, immediately, without even thinking about was, No, I’m not, and the reason was because I thought of NBC as a lobbying organization, and I didn’t want to be a lobbyist. I didn’t want to have that be part of my post political life. And I remember I hung up the phone that night. I’m a solid sleeper, but I woke with the middle of night, and just thought about that very brief conversation, and I looked at MHC on the internet, and it just struck me, man, there’s a lot more to this organization than what I saw on the receiving end of the lobbying, economic development, the events, the the business line activities that we provide to our members. And it really struck me as like, this is actually a perfect fit for my background. Was a business background and a political background and the military leadership I learned. And so I remember thinking, Is there a time too early to call a CEO a multi million dollar company and say, Hey, can I get a take back? And I did just that. I called him at 7am and said, Austin, can I get take back? I actually am interested. That’s that’s perceived with what this process looks like. And so proceed with that process. There’s a national search and an interview process, and it obviously went well. Here I am. So that was my initial thought. And I just, you know, really, actually enjoy the public policy work we do. I would say it’s about 30% of my job, if I had to quantify it, but it’s been really impactful. And I just have a really deep respect for associations, because I really deep respect for America, and I mean some cheesy about that, but if you look at TED Talk, Phil as far as what makes America America, he talks about those institutions and the institutions that are outside of government to help shape the Democratic Republic governance process and how impactful that is. You know, just one more thought on that. I apologize be long winded. You know, just last week, there was a Nobel Prize, a peace prize, awarded to two authors of a book called Why nations fail and the book goes around the world and talks about places where there’s the same people, it’s genetic makeup, the same climate, but somehow radically different economic results, or community health. And you look at East Berlin, West Berlin, Nogales, US side Nogales, Mexico, side North Korea, South Korea. And there’s a couple key takeaways in the book about what works and what doesn’t work. But one of the things is that institutional strength leads to a healthier community and economy, and the Chamber world is part of that institutional strength, clearly. And so I’m a romantic. I believe in our country. I believe in meaningful work, meaningful relationships. And so when I find myself in this job, I mean, this is the perfect job for what I believe and live and what I want to do, and looking at what I think makes an impact to community. I think associations really do matter, and I think I’m at an association that has is and will matter in the future.

Brandon Burton 13:29
Well, I’m glad that Austin reached out to you. I’m glad that he took your your immediate call back the next morning, because we need people like you in the chamber world and having the unique background you do. I was going to ask about the percentage of lobbying time that you give in your current position, and I think you covered that with about a third of the time is kind of focused in that, that direction and the advocacy part. But I guess my question is, how? How can the chamber community in general, how can we do a better job of relaying what it is that the chambers do for communities, to strengthen and build communities. So when you know the next Dale coin goes out there trying to be recruited for the next chamber executive seat doesn’t shoot it down because, you know, the it the work is being seen. It’s being recognized. And it’s not just that surface layer initial reaction, I guess, do you have any thoughts of what, what the chamber community at large could do better to to attract people with with great backgrounds to the industry,

Dale Kooyenga 14:43
I think primarily telling the story I just told, as far as the importance of institutions. I mean another great book by Robert Putnam that I think is now, gosh, 20 years old, but it’s still very relevant, maybe older than that is bullying alone and the propensity of individuals. Go alone and be alone, as opposed to plugging into associations and institutions and groups like the rotaries and the legions and things like that. So I think it’s that person that wants to press and push for a community. I also think it needs to be a doer. I see a lot of associations and chambers that tell people what they do. I don’t think they are as effective as showing people what they do. And what I mean by that is you can’t have your meetings. You can’t have your board members being given a show and talking about a topic. They want action. They want to see things shaped. They want to see state statutes eliminated, modified or created. They want to see buildings going up. They want to see crime going down. They want to see relationships form that create tangible, substantive fruits for the community. So I see a lot of event, heavy conversation, heavy associations and chambers, and my recommendation would be, that’s good, that’s deliberative, that’s healthy, but you gotta translate that into effective action that actually changed the landscape. Otherwise, you’re just a bunch of talking heads about radio show.

Brandon Burton 16:25
Yeah, I think that’s a key point to be be a doer show that action, and I’d say, from your perspective, before you came into the chamber world, your your point of view of the doer, the action that the chamber is doing was as a lobbyist. So it makes sense, that’s what you would see, right? Yeah, it

Dale Kooyenga 16:45
was in my office. So that was the engagement. I was my value to the association, was my ability to write and vote on laws. And so that was the face I saw. I was in the business community, but at my level of CFO in midser companies, I was not engaged. Maybe I should have been, but I was not engaged from a business level with the Association, like, like I should have been. So that was my perch. That’s what I saw. And you see what you see from your perch. And so it’s really good to see now all the different other aspects to what we do and why we do it.

Brandon Burton 17:19
Yeah, absolutely. I think it’s just a it’s a fascinating idea, just to think about the perspectives that one comes into the chamber world. I love getting people’s stories of how they found the chamber industry, how they were invited in. Some people, you know, it’s out of high school, some it’s after a very productive career. Some it’s just by total accident, right? But being able to see how people are introduced, how they can take their skill set and be able to apply it to make a an organization of action, to be able to really drive things forward within their community, is what I think. That’s what makes the chamber work so special. That’s what makes it the industry, such a special thing. I’d like to always ask for chambers that are out there looking to take their chamber next to the next to the next level. You’ve given some great, you know, action points already, but what kind of tip or action item might you share with listeners who are interested in taking their organization to the next level? Um,

Dale Kooyenga 18:23
I mean, have an engaged board that you could actually call upon to help with things. I mean, they’re there for a reason. And so, you know, don’t be afraid to engage your board and have them be what we call the military force multipliers. So, so that’d be the big thing I would. I mean you gotta serve your members and what the members want. I think in this space, there’s probably few memberships that are politically uniform in one direction, and so therefore, I would encourage a chamber of association to be mindful that if you look like you are a part of a political party, or just relationship wise, on one side of the political party, you’re probably going to minimize your ability to get things done. And now I say that because the nation’s different, and I can’t pretend or dive down into what’s your politics look like, where your chamber association is. I can tell you from Milwaukee, we are a purple state in Wisconsin. Milwaukee is blue, like most large metros, our outer part of our region is more red, and so therefore we have and we will and to be most effective, we have very healthy relationships with both sides of the aisle. And I would say that our membership, especially our board, is bipartisan and probably increasingly no partisan that claim no party. And so we need to be in the relationship business. We can’t be in the political ideology business, and we. Need to know what’s right for our community, and sometimes that falls in different parts of political spectrum. But I mean, I’ll just give an example, like last year, we had a really, really big win. The city and the county of Milwaukee were in a very tough financial position for reasons that was no fault of anybody that was in office or in power. These were decisions made decades ago related to pension issues, and the big compromise we need with both parties was Republicans wanted more police on the street. Wanted more public safety. Democrats wanted additional revenue in the form of a sales tax and sure and more shared revenue from state. Both parties wanted more fiscal solvency, which meant freezing some pensions. It meant so that goes to the whole deal, but there was a compromise made on both sides that we put together, and now this fiscal State of the County the city are much, much better. They’re not closing libraries. They are adding police to the street. They no longer have this infant, these infamous pension plans. So that’s what I’m talking about. I mean, for us, I think you really don’t be a be politically astute and make sure you’re in the relationship business, not the political ideology business.

Brandon Burton 21:18
I think that’s great advice. And your comments, you know, resonate with being the same center, you know, when it comes to political issues. But I, I’ve heard it said that if, if you can resonate with what makes for a good, you know, pro business environment. If that’s your members, that’s what’s, you know, supporting organizations and business members when it comes to politics, if you’re doing things that are that support business, that grow business, you have that to stand on, and it’s not doesn’t have to be a political party at all. And oftentimes you’ll find things on both sides of the aisle that support business. And if that’s your mission, to drive business, drive your local economy, you can’t go wrong if that’s your focus, but builds relationships along the way. So that’s absolutely key.

Dale Kooyenga 22:09
See, like, for example, is, you know, I can really be angry right now with you and like, be hostile because you’re clearly a 49 ish fan.

Unknown Speaker 22:17
Yeah,

Dale Kooyenga 22:18
I’m a Packers fan, but I’m still going to be pleasant and polite and find common ground here. So yeah, and I’ll forgive you a perfect example.

Brandon Burton 22:29
That’s right, and you’ve got the American flag behind us. That makes it all better. So we’re there you go. We’re on the same team. Yeah, that’s good. Well, as we look to the future of chambers of commerce. How do you see the future of chambers and their purpose going forward?

Dale Kooyenga 22:45
Well, you need to fight for it. I don’t think you can assume that there’s some sort of inertia with membership, either growing your membership or retaining your membership, if you’re just going to keep the same model that you had yesterday. I there has to be value propositions within your I mean, I know they say it’s not transactional, and you know, you should do this for the good of community. I think there’ll be a good percentage of companies that believe that, but it’s going to erode when a recession happens. I think you gotta find your value proposition, whether directly or indirectly. And you know, you gotta have your why, like, why do I need you part of the you know why. And for us, it’s Milwaukee without the Metropolitan walk. Association of Commerce is in Milwaukee without the Milwaukee Brewers. It’s in Milwaukee without the Milwaukee Bucks. It’s a Milwaukee without a river that’s being cleaned up, that’s going to return native species of fish and cleaning up chemicals from 100 years ago that are at the bottom of the river. It’s a Milwaukee that has huge financial issues, as opposed to solvency day. So we, we, our value proposition is, imagine a Milwaukee without a Mac and you think, oh gosh, and walk without, without. That is not a city I want to live in. It’s not a city I can recruit talent to. So you got to get there. And I think non dues revenue is has to be part of your plan. For us, our non dues revenue continues to grow and grow and grow, and we are hungry after growing that our health insurance plan and combination United Healthcare has been very, very good for us, and that continues to grow. And not only is it good for our revenue, but it’s clearly a solution to our members, and we actually offer it to non members as well, which is why they’re purchasing it. I mean, they wouldn’t purchase it, but wasn’t a value for them. So they’re they’re saving money. We’re making money. It looks like we’re going to go to market with some other innovative things revolving around maybe 401, Ks to help reduce costs and give access to some of the HR tools that larger companies would have. So it’s a twofer, but I think you really need to focus on you. A stream for that non dues revenue to diversify your revenue streams, because I’m just leery that the philanthropy and the community involvement will be as strong as it has been in years past in America.

Brandon Burton 25:18
Well, I think in that explanation you just gave the what the new tagline, or slogan for the Milwaukee, you know, MMAC should be, you know, think of Milwaukee without the bucks, without the brewers. Yeah, that’s what we do, right?

Dale Kooyenga 25:32
Yeah. And this is very specific to Milwaukee, and I know, and I’ll just give it put me it means a lot to us, a whole lot to us. But the biggest one is, imagine a Milwaukee without, and I can name it doesn’t mean, I think to you, but without a st Marcus, without a Milwaukee Academy of Sciences, without an odd prep. And what those schools represent, I just said, is, they represent very high performing schools that are in parts of Milwaukee with high poverty. And one of the things I think my predecessor, if he had, if I had to choose one accomplishment to put on his on his marker someday, say, This is what Tim Sheehy accomplished. Is Tim Sheehy alongside a former superintendent of walk public schools here in 1991 so this is not working when you try something radically different. And that’s where the concept of school choice came from, and now you see the concept of school of choice growing nationally. And they came out of Milwaukee. It came out of MMAC, and our relationship with a gentleman named Howard Fuller, and now that has grown not only in Wisconsin, but it’s grown to a national concept that parents should be able to decide where to send their kids based on your academic standards and based on your principles, whether that be rooted in religion or ethics, whatever that is. And so that’s, that’s the big, bold change. And I think, you know, chambers and associations do need to take some risk. I mean, you can’t just always put your weight on a topic that you have 100% agreement on because if you have 100% agreement on it, you’re probably not getting after a social injustice. You’re probably not getting after an issue in your community, because there are people and sometimes institutions that are rooted in social injustices, and you need to get out to that. So I would also argue, as I talk about, you know, being smart and being pragmatic, that doesn’t mean that you’re always safe. And in the long run, I think you’ll be rewarded for taking some risk and taking some big issues head on.

Brandon Burton 27:36
I agree. I think that’s that was very well said. Well, Dale, as we wrap things up, I wanted to give you a chance to share any contact information for listeners who may want to reach out and connect with you and learn more about how you guys are doing things and taking care of business there in Milwaukee. What would be the best way for someone to reach out and connect LinkedIn?

Dale Kooyenga 27:56
Send me a LinkedIn message, D, A, L, E, and his last name’s K, o, o, y, E, N, G, A, and I am the only Dale coin go in the world. So you will not be confused with a another deal coin go.

Brandon Burton 28:08
That’s good. Well, we’ll get a link to your LinkedIn account in our show notes for this episode too, to make it nice and easy and they don’t need to worry about spelling if they’re in the car driving or wherever they’re doing. Sounds good. Dale, it’s been great having you on the show. I appreciate you taking some time to be with us and share some of the impact and and your perspective as you entered the chamber world and and how chambers can make a bigger impact in their communities. I really appreciate you sharing your insights with us today.

Dale Kooyenga 28:37
Thanks, Brandon, thanks for having me. If

Brandon Burton 28:39
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Creating a Chamber of Impact with Matt Lofy

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

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

Our guest for this episode is Matt low fee. Matt is the President, CEO of the Worthington area Chamber. And since joining the Worthington area Chamber in August 2021 he’s been driven by his vision, which is he wants their chamber to serve as a igniter of positive change, rather than merely serving as a resource to cope with change. Matt’s strategic focus on business advocacy, bridge building with key stakeholders and relentless pursuit of relevance has significantly strengthened the Chamber’s influence and engagement with local businesses, amplifying the voice of business, his initiatives led to a 20% increase in local business engagement within the his first year. This impact resulted in him being named as one of the chamber industry’s top emerging leaders, as a 40 under 40 honor honoree by ACCE and a 2023 chamber professional of the Year by the Chamber of Commerce executives of Ohio. Prior to this position at the Chamber, Matt served in numerous roles within the Westerville area Chamber, including executive director of leadership at Westerville he also taught morning spin classes for over a decade, and is a veteran of the United States Coast Guard. In addition to his professional success, Matt finds joy in his roles as a husband and father to his beautiful wife, Heather and their two young children, Tuckerman and Caroline. He’s also the founder and co host of the award winning Dadass Podcast, Matt, I’m excited to have you with us today here on Chamber Chat Podcast, I’d love to give you a moment to say hello to all the Chamber Champions and share something interesting about yourself so we can all get to know you a little better.

Matt Lofy 2:51
Absolutely. Thank you so much Brandon for this opportunity, and thank you to all the chamber champions who are listening. You know a fun fact I like to share you had mentioned about my my podcast and from one podcast post to another, one of my fun facts is we actually used our podcast platform, not so much to grow beyond just a local podcast, but to actually advocate. So we’ve worked with our Columbus City Council the last two years to advocate to get we’ve now had over 300 changing tables put into men’s and gender neutral restrooms throughout businesses and nonprofits in the city of Columbus, and so as a way to marry my passion project And my chamber career, to really bridge build with a public private partnership. So we’ve been able to do that and advocate for easier access to changing tables. That’s

Brandon Burton 3:48
awesome. I’m convinced that chamber work is like a drug. You just get addicted to it, and then whatever you do in life, it’s going to tie back to the chamber somehow. So that’s proof and point right there.

Matt Lofy 3:58
So absolutely can’t get away from it. I drank the Kool Aid. That’s right,

Brandon Burton 4:02
that’s right. I need to find out where to go to get awards for podcast. I’ve yet to win an award. So congratulations to dadas podcast. That’s pretty cool.

Matt Lofy 4:11
There was a local one here. So really, I think we joke, but we’re pretty serious. It was our mom, my colleague, and my mom and all their older friends who are retired, just voting daily. That’s all it was. So don’t

Brandon Burton 4:24
awesome,

Matt Lofy 4:25
but now we can say winning.

Brandon Burton 4:26
We can edit that out. Nobody has to know. No,

Unknown Speaker 4:29
it’s our secret.

Brandon Burton 4:30
That’s right. But tell us a little bit about the Worthington area Chamber. Give us an idea of your chamber size, staff, budget, scope of work. You guys are involved with just to kind of set the stage for our discussion today.

Matt Lofy 4:42
Yeah, for anyone who’s not familiar with Columbus, imagine a big circle around a major city. We are at the north, north central part of Central Ohio, and Columbus, which we actually get confused. Worthington, Minnesota. When I when I first started, I was told that half of the phone calls in Minnesota, in Worthington, Minnesota, are phone calls for Worthington, Ohio, but we’re a small chamber of commerce of roughly 550 member businesses, a modest budget in the mid 300,000 range, and a staff of two currently putting out roughly 65 to 70 events and organized meetings a year. So we were doing quite a bit for two people in terms of the scope. We went from a chamber that really wasn’t was kind of in a decline prior to COVID to not not being relevant or impacting our community or supporting our businesses during COVID. So really, we’ve done a lot as a two person team to bring back all networks. So from our Soho groups, small office, home office, which we call Small Business Roundtable, to our Women’s Business Network, yp, those all have been started from scratch within the last two to three years. So just to really show where we’ve been and how far we’ve come just in three years, and then we’re in a city that’s four and a half to five miles square, miles in size. Our school districts four times that, because we pulled from the city of Columbus, and so that’s really the taste of our community and our chamber in, you know, 90 seconds or less.

Brandon Burton 6:32
Yeah, no, that’s perfect. So you came into the chamber world at a very interesting time. So I think that’s going to play in well, your story with our topic today about creating a chamber of impact, because I’m sure you’re able to see all of the opportunity around you at that timing of when you came into the chamber here. But we’ll dive in much deeper in that as soon as we get back from this quick break.

Visit ChamberNation.com to learn more.

All right, Matt, we’re back. As I mentioned before the break, we’re talking today about creating a chamber of impact. So how did coming into the Worthington area Chamber in August of 21 How did that timing affect your thinking going into creating a chamber of impact and the opportunity that you saw at that time frame?

Matt Lofy 9:07
That’s that’s a great question. We had our challenges, just as a lot of chambers did, because of the impact of COVID. What I had kind of up against me coming into this role is one I left another chamber in a neighboring community, but not in the president role that did everything, I think, right during COVID, coming to a chamber that hadn’t done much to impact the community or the businesses. So I had a different lens to look through, but at the same time, because of where we’re situated in in central Ohio, we pull from Columbus public health. So after my first week, we actually got put into a six month mask mandate. So there were just some extra layers that were added. But how I looked at it, it was because we hadn’t impacted our community and our businesses. I had a four. Whole deck of cards to play with, because no one was going to question and say, well, we didn’t do things this way. No one really remembered that. And so I jokingly say I came in like, I pulled a Miley Cyrus and came in like a record. Oh, yeah, I have to right. All I had to say is, I came in like Miley Cyrus, and you knew it, that’s right. But at that point, it was okay. We have a mask mandate, but we have to be seen. And so I started to really look at ways to how do we amplify the voice of business and our chamber without having events here in the first few days and not having the relationships? And so we use it as a way to completely flip our ineffective emails and getting squared away with three separate monthly email newsletters that went out and specifically targeting different areas of interest for our businesses. Instead of just showing and sending out future events and and things like that. We had to get better and more strategic with the way we reached out. One of the first things I did on social social media was I wanted to be seen and build a relationship when I couldn’t be in person and build relationships. And so with without knowing, at the time of your podcast, I kind of stole your name and created a chamber chat with Matt. Video, okay, bi weekly, where it was just me. I had my own theme music and introduction, and it was me sitting in my office, or even in my my basement office, giving key updates of what the business is doing. We might not be able to meet together right now, but this is what your investment in our chamber, in us is helping us do to impact you, your business and our community. So it really allowed us to take non existent social media and email and flip them upside down and more impactful, as well as start to strategize, you know, unfortunately, six months out what our impact would be when it comes to reigniting our network. So that was really what we did, you know, from day one to the first six months outside of cleaning out the organization and getting the house in order.

Brandon Burton 12:13
Yeah, now I can appreciate coming in and people don’t remember what the programs were before, but to be able to have kind of that almost a blank slate. I mean, you could do essentially what, what you wanted to, but to be able to be strategic about the emails going out. Can you talk to us a little bit more about that? You said, going from those ineffective emails, which I think everybody listening knows exactly what you’re talking about, and what are the what’s the strategy behind your three purposeful emails each month,

Matt Lofy 12:41
yeah, and let me, let me first go on the record, because I always want to say things first. I don’t have the magic formula. So I don’t want anyone to be like, oh, you know, or think that. I think that I have it all figured out. But I think from my previous role doing communications at another chamber to just emails I’ve gotten from other organizations. We get too fixated of we got to throw all this stuff into one email, and then we tend to sometimes get so bogged down about events that all we’re sending our event correspondence. Don’t look at my social media right now, because that’s all I’m doing. But I looked at, let’s get the events out of all of our emails, and let’s look at respecting people’s inboxes. And here’s how we’ve done it. And again, this is just one man one Chamber’s way to do it, but either the final days of a month or the first days of a month, depending on when, when that falls in the week, I send an events bulletin out that just has picture header, brief description and a CLICK HERE button, and we list out five events for the month with a corresponding social media post. We’ve we went from emails that we’re getting in the teens to the low 20s of open rates to mid 40s to low 60s. Open rates, click rates, I won’t talk about because I want to stay with the numbers that make me sound that’s right, that’s right, but open rate wise, and then what we’re seeing on registrations, in terms of revenue, we’re certainly seeing a huge amount of investment of revenue coming in per email specifically for our events bulletin, but then the second week of each month, that’s what I refer to as our member highlight cycle in our business connections email, where we’re putting out things in our Member Notes section, accolades about businesses, businesses who are hosting maybe an upcoming Lunch and Learn, or businesses we’re partnering with, as well as announcing our new businesses. And then somewhere in there a link to our events calendar, because again, I don’t want to bog down everything with give us more money come to more events. And then the third week, I try and put more advocacy efforts in there upcoming major events, but talking about what the takeaways would be at those events. You. So much about the event, and then any other major things that we’re doing impacting, you know, our city or regionally, and that’s been a really good winning formula for us. And hopefully anyone that you know wants to possibly use that, maybe it works for them. Yeah,

Brandon Burton 15:17
and I’d like how you said you still have your events in there, but you’re not drawing all the attention right to the events, but it’s in there. It’s like, oh yeah, I saw an email a week or two ago. It talked about an event. Oh, here it is, right here, and you can click on it, but you’re not focused on, give us money, give us money, right?

Matt Lofy 15:35
And that’s kind of the lens. And you’ve been in the industry for for a long time. I mean, sometimes we get a little too focused on events or revenue, you know, without respecting what we’re putting into people’s inboxes. And I think, you know, I’m a relationship builder. I’m a relational leader. And I think chamber leaders need to start thinking more relational than transactional. And that’s how I also try and view the emails, yeah,

Brandon Burton 16:00
and I think most chamber staff are probably guilty, at least at times where the next event’s coming up, and that’s all you can focus on, is the next event, and just getting bogged down with with that and nothing else, and forgetting that that one event is not the reason why 90 plus percent of your members joined right? Like it’s important for you in that time, because that’s what you’re focused on. But they all are members for so many other reasons, that as you reach out and communicate with them, you gotta be touching on those points as well,

Matt Lofy 16:31
well and and just in a what is the chamber done for me? Aspect, if, if we’re not putting that in the in the in the emails or in the newsletters to the membership they you know, I count that as retention, so, you know, we’re sharing out information, but also saying, Here’s what we’ve done since this last advocacy update, or here’s what we’re doing shortly. You know, there’s, there’s a lot of different things strategically, if we put it in the newsletter, that can go into recruiting new businesses, retaining businesses, beyond just getting butts in seats for another event, right?

Brandon Burton 17:08
Exactly. So the emails, that’s a great example of of making that shift to creating a chamber of impact. What are some other areas that you were able to attack as you came into the chamber there,

Matt Lofy 17:22
one of the things that we needed to do is our our community being as small as it is, like the city, not the school district, again, four and a half, five square miles, we’re so disconnected in a small community that we have a pro and not so pro business nonprofit that has started through the last decade in our community, not called the chamber, Okay, which one I thought was an issue, because we’re not relevant. We weren’t having an impact. That those groups had to start. We should have been convening both sides. But at the same time, if there’s those two groups, no one’s hitting that that 80% in the middle, the same center. So one of the things that I wanted to make sure that we did was get heard, and two of the things I did quickly was try and identify and make those relationships with key stakeholders. And I’m sure that’s not anything new that any chamber person that’s been in the industry for a while has heard, but I probably met with key stakeholders more than I did businesses, just to make sure that we built those bridges, and also we’re being heard of what’s to come from this new chamber and our pursuit of relevance and the impact we wanted, so no one was caught off guard or challenged. And that was the biggest piece, because a lot of what I was saying at that time was deemed political and well, the Chamber’s never done that before. That’s not going to go well. And I go, I assure you, I have surveys and countless of data points that our businesses want this, and chambers are doing this across the industry. This is only new here, and so I kept those voices, those stakeholders, close in that to ensure that they they knew what was coming from our chamber, and now they’ve been on board, even if they are challenging. And I think that really massaging those relationships and building those collaborations, especially with those that aren’t on board with what the chamber is doing, is key. And the other aspect is at the same time, we started a podcast called amplify Worthington that allowed me to use that as a platform to say it even louder to businesses, but also to the community, and then we did it in in a collaboration with our economic development director. So it’s a little bit, possibly a little bit different of approach for a chamber podcast, compared to some who highlight just primarily what the chamber is doing and what businesses are doing, and those. Us to were probably the best investment of time outside of of re kind of retooling our chamber.

Brandon Burton 20:06
I’m a huge fan of chambers having a podcast. I even have a little course. If anybody wants to explore having a podcast for your chamber, it’ll be in our show notes, but going back to your meetings with the key stakeholders you didn’t necessarily say these words, but this is how I heard it. So correct me, if I’m wrong or if there’s a different take, you weren’t going and asking for permission necessarily to say, these are the changes I want, but it was more just so they’re not surprised when they see the changes coming, that they can be on the right side of things and not be like, Whoa, who’s Matt. Think he is coming in here, changing everything, but just saying, Hey, here’s some things that can be impactful for our community. Wanted to bring you in the loop and let you know some things that are coming down the pipeline. Is that, is that kind of accurate, or did I get that off? Yeah, I

Matt Lofy 20:58
You probably even said it better than than what I said. That’s exactly it. I think, as chamber leaders, we also serve as community architects, and the best way to do things smoother is to ensure everyone knows what’s to come, but also to say change in our community at some point, some level, is coming. Let’s control that change and do what’s best for our community. And the only way we can do that is if you join the conversation. And so yeah, 100% I think that that is one of the things we should do, and not ask for that permission, like you said, but just include the voices so that they they feel heard through this transition,

Brandon Burton 21:40
right? I think the worst case is you can come in with a big change and surprise them, and then you’re going to meet, get met with the resistance all the way along, where, if they have a heads up of it, and they feel like they’re in the know, it’s going to go a lot smoother to push along something new. Yeah. So you mentioned, as you came in to the chamber, was kind of on a decline through COVID and everything. You guys have implemented some of these changes. How are you seeing the needle move at this point, now that you’re three years into it?

Matt Lofy 22:10
Yeah, I feel like we have an aircraft carrier moving full steam ahead in the ocean while also going forward on the course, it is altering the course at the same time. So I’m like, I’m just starting my fourth year, and it’s like I’m still having to clean this up. But I think what what we’ve seen greatly is we’ve had a steady flow of new members, and then having to really work extra hard on getting better contacts of those that we want to return retain, just because there’s so much turnover. So we’re still seeing those battles, which I’m sure there’s a lot of people nodding right now listening like, oh, in there. Brother, yeah. But one of the things that we’re seeing is we’re getting a lot more initiatives up and running, and a lot more businesses who have not been engaged are starting to get more engaged and start poking their head out at events or in my inbox. And that’s the most flattering, especially seeing people you know, with all due respect to those leaders before me that said, I haven’t been a part of the chamber in X amount of years, and I’d like to come back. And that’s that’s been a lot of what we’re hearing now. That’s

Brandon Burton 23:23
very rewarding to know that the work you’re doing is being noticed and really making an impact. To be able to not just retain but bring back some of those members that have dropped at some point along the way. So that’s, that’s awesome. I can imagine that those members that hung through COVID and everything too are like, wow, the chamber is like, revitalized, like, they’re really making an impact right now. So I would imagine that first year retention for those, aside from just financial strain through the pandemic, if they could see that impact, that they would hang on.

Matt Lofy 24:00
We’re getting there. I don’t have we didn’t have good enough numbers to know what that retainment level was at the beginning. But yeah, we are starting to hear that. You know what? One of the things to maybe, hopefully not getting too far off your point, one of the things we did with those that dropped and didn’t want to reinvest in our chamber. I still wanted to show value on investment in the chamber and respect and support our Chamber members first. But I worked a little extra hard, and maybe this is political and there’ll be a lot of hate emails or anything that comes through to you or me, I still busted my hump almost as much for non member businesses to see, to show them the value of a vibrant and strong chamber, and I got a lot of return on that. And I don’t mean that ignorantly. I think sometimes, as leaders, we. Too caught up of oh, you’re a non member, or you’re not in, you’re not involved with the Chamber anymore, and we forget them. I’ve tried to work really hard to say, You know what? If maybe it’s a no for them about being a part of the chamber. Let’s talk about how, because at the end of the day, if they come to one event and they find value in the chamber, they found value in me as their chamber President value in our mission, and at the end of the day, we’re chamber leaders, but we also have to think like civic entrepreneurs. We also got that revenue, and so we saw a lot in these first three years, and I’m still seeing now a lot of the networks, like our Women’s Business Network, half of the women coming to these luncheons are non members, but I can almost have enough data points to show this has been one of the best networks to bring in new members and new investors in our chamber by dropping the real significance of how we treat a member versus a non member. Again, wanting to show the value on investment for members, but that’s really been something through this transition to whether they were dropped or they just didn’t see the chamber as relevant, back, you know, a month ago or a couple years ago, that I think, has been one of the biggest things that have led to a success for us, not saying no to supporting them or being involved in the chamber, but asking ourselves as a two person team, How do we get them a part of the chamber or involved with the chamber? And that’s been a huge game changer for us, and we’ve actually gotten positive feedback. Hey, thanks for not being pushy and really wanting to help me first, and now it helped me see what the chamber really means.

Brandon Burton 26:36
Yeah, I think that’s an excellent point. And I think we forget as chambers, we think, you know membership, membership. You know everybody’s got to be a member. And we forget that each business has its own different walk of life, so to speak, where some businesses and maybe against their corporate policy to join a local chamber because they had a bad experience in another community, another state, whatever. So as a policy, they can’t join a chamber, but if you have an event that resonates with their mission, then they’ll sign up and they’ll be a sponsor. They’ll they’ll be there for it. So being able to be there for all the businesses in the community and to show value to the community at large, rather than just being hyper focused on membership, I think is a very smart approach,

Matt Lofy 27:25
yeah. And I know, you know, I can hear the comments and the emails coming in that disagree with that approach. And if not those emails coming to me, they’re coming to you, right? But I think in a day and age to you know, let’s, let’s see the reality. All membership organizations are seeing declines, right from veterans groups to other membership organizations are seeing declines in membership we as chambers, if we want to have a great impact, we need to also switch our mindset. But at the same time, I can think right off the top of my head, five different businesses who’ve come to our events paid a non member price. But if I tallied up how many times I’ve seen them at paid events this year, they’ve done more than their share of an investment in an annual membership and a one time or two time lunch that most of those who are members coming to one or two events have invested so, you know, getting away from mission and thinking about, you know, being a civic entrepreneur, in a sense, having that hat on. I still got that money, yeah, and they got to see the value in the chamber. So I think we got to shift that mindset too. Sorry if I got too far off.

Brandon Burton 28:34
No, it’s all about being community architects, as you said before. So, yeah, I love it. Love the thought process there. Matt, I wanted to ask for chambers listening that are wanting to take their chamber up to the next level. I’d argue that you’ve done that there at the Worthington area Chamber. What kind of tip or action item, what piece of advice might you share with with that chamber who’s looking to take their organization up to the next level.

Matt Lofy 29:07
You know, I think it’s kind of a, I have one answer, kind of a two part response to that. I think, in order to really continue to grow your chamber, and we’re still doing this ourselves, so I don’t want to sound like I have it all figured out, but we have to take chances in doing something that we’ve never done. And if you’re a chamber that is doing things differently than how they’ve been done, what’s that next thing for us to be doing and and to that end, for me right now is we’ve kind of gotten things back our way. I think for us, being here in central Ohio, which is a growing community, is I’m also having a mindset now that’s a little new for me. I want to think regionally to better impact locally. So I really challenge. A two part answer there. Think about what’s that next thing that your chamber needs to do? And just like I said earlier, Channel your inner Miley Cyrus and do it as a wreck, be a wrecking ball. And then secondly, let’s start thinking a little bit more regionally and bring that home locally for that change to really spark that positive change. Yeah, I

Brandon Burton 30:21
like that a lot. I like asking everyone I have on the show about the future of chambers, and how do you see the future of chambers and their purpose going forward?

Matt Lofy 30:34
You know, that is the million dollar question. If I had it figured out, I would be probably living on an island right now, and not in a two person office, but I think for chambers, we have to adapt to what’s to come. That’s why I’m excited about the horizon initiative being updated. I think chambers need to stop thinking so small in some ways, or at least for the smaller chambers, and start thinking a little bit more broadly in what our impact is. Where are we serving and where are we not serving? What chances and opportunities do we need to take? But on on top of that, I think the future of chambers lie in being that that connector for all voices to cut through the noise and be that trusted source that we need to be, and hopefully we’re all serving right now, so that we can hit that same center, that 80% that’s not in the know, or that is voiceless or just isn’t aware right now. And that’s that’s where I think the future lies, right there in the that, that same center. And we have to address that, and we need to address it yesterday, absolutely.

Brandon Burton 31:47
And if you knew all the answers, you could write the horizon 2.0 all by yourself. But this is right, yeah,

Matt Lofy 31:57
absolutely. And again, we don’t have it all figured out. I just want to say that one more time, but some of the risks we’ve taken and some of the initiatives we’ve done have definitely helped us do more than what I thought we could do possible in three years. Yeah,

Brandon Burton 32:12
absolutely. Well, Matt, before I let you go, I wanted to give you an opportunity to share any contact information for listeners who may want to reach out and connect with you and learn more about how you guys are doing things there at the Worthington area Chamber. What would be the best way for someone to reach out and connect? Thank

Matt Lofy 32:29
you for that opportunity. I’d love to connect, especially on LinkedIn. I’m huge on LinkedIn. You can just find me at Matt. Matt low fee, l, o, F, y, on LinkedIn, or you can email me at mlofy@worthingtonchamber.org and you can just find more about us at WorthingtonChamber.org I’d love to connect in any way that’s perfect.

Brandon Burton 32:53
And we’ll get all that in our show notes for this episode as well, to make it easy to find you and connect with you. But Matt, this is this has been fun to to have you on Chamber Chat Podcast to share your story and the the impact that your chamber making now in the community, and kudos to you and in in your your two person team for being able to to do this. I know there’s others involved, there’s there’s volunteers, and there’s board and all that, but you guys are doing things right to be able to right the ship and turn in the right direction. So thanks for sharing that with us today.

Matt Lofy 33:29
Thank you, and thank you for this opportunity. I certainly appreciate it’s been an honor.

Brandon Burton 33:33
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Success Through Involvement with Derek Rusher

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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 guest for this episode is Derek, rusher from the Kearney Area Chamber in Nebraska as president and CEO of Nebraska’s third largest chamber, Derek carries a fun and creative energy with him as he walks through the doors of the office each day. He believes in bringing about positive change and by fostering a can do attitude in those around him, and is proud to serve and promote the quality of life in their community. Derek maintains a strong commitment to leadership and public visibility, recognizing that both are essential to grow and sustain the mission of the chamber. He actively works to expand the Chamber’s reach with his hands on leadership style and innovative troubleshooting. This can be seen through how he relates to various organizations, through his interactions with the chamber, with Chamber members, individuals from the Kearney community chambers around the state to oversee their own day to day operations. Derek also serves as a chair for the State Chambers small business policy council, and an ex officio board member for the Nebraska Chamber of Commerce and Industry. Outside of the chamber, Derek is the founder and president of a nonprofit business impact art. Impact art is known for a variety of large murals in the Kearney community. He is subdivision threes representative on the board of directors for the Nebraska public power district. He possesses more than 15 years of experience as a teacher and many more former collegiate athlete and coach. Altogether, Derek is passionate about supporting the growth and education of others. His favorite motto is, do right. His attendant he picked up from his father. He lives with a beautiful wife, Maggie, and Derek continues to pass his teaching on to his five daughters. But Derek, I’m excited to have you with us today here on chamber chat podcast. I’d love to give you an opportunity to say hello to all the chamber champions that are out there listening, and to share something interesting about yourself so we can all get to know you a little better.

Derek Rusher 3:08
Yeah, absolutely. Well, well, thank you, Brandon, it’s definitely blessed to be on your podcast. Excited to talk with you today and talk with the listeners, and I love the chamber world, I think, you know, going back to my bio, when you’re reading, you know, I was a, I was an art teacher for 15 years, and I was a former collegiate athlete, and there was not a lot of athletes that were art majors. And so that was pretty unique in itself. But I remember when I was was probably first hired back in January of 2018 and I’m sure a lot of our Chamber members and past leaders and current leaders were reading my bio. They’re like, what are we doing? We’re hiring a, you know, art teacher to lead our chamber. And so, you know, I was, yes, an art teacher, but obviously, you know, athletics had taught me a lot of leadership skills. I went through our local leadership class here in Kearney. And, you know, I started building my business at QM, actually through impact art, which was part of that, I was actually working part time for a company called Team concepts, where we where we will, do we, we did a lot of employee engagement, leadership development, some school programs, just team building in general. And so my background was actually pretty diverse, and I was always one to, you know, make sure I was, you know, stayed involved in continuing my own education. I was getting my master’s in administration, so I was building, you know, kind of my more professional development there and personal development. So yeah, in the day, if you just maybe saw art teacher, you would have been like, oh, man, what are we doing? But yeah, I got the, I think one of the things. That is a strength of mine, is my diversity that I that I brought to the chamber and also art. It’s that creative mindset, and I think that’s one thing that I brought to the chamber too, is kind of my creativity as a leader.

Brandon Burton 5:12
Yeah, I think there’s definite parallels without the creativeness that comes from art into the chamber world. And I don’t know why that needs to be a it seems to be a sticking point for people, and they’re like art like they don’t see it as a real major or anything or real career, but it is. People do, people do art, people teach art, people make a living with art, and it definitely brings that creative mindset.

Derek Rusher 5:34
No doubt I could, I could probably have a whole podcast on why the arts are great for kids and students and, you know, proven, there’s, there’s actually a lot of stats out there that prove that your test scores are better when you’re involved in the arts. So not just, you know, painting or drawing. I mean, it could be music, any kind of performance art as well. So, yeah, yeah.

Brandon Burton 5:54
So I’m curious, what type of athlete were you? What sports did you play?

Derek Rusher 5:58
I played them all growing up, anything that I could, you know, swing a bat, throw a football, shoot, shoot a basketball. I did get into golf later on in life, but, yeah, so I went to college to play football, and I was a quarterback, and then transitioned into wide receiver. I did. I dabbled in a little bit of high jump, actually, on the track team, but I went through a core workout for track, and I was like, holy cow, I’m here to play football. This isn’t too much setups and crunches and everything else. And so I went back to throwing the football during spring. Yeah, but no, it’s a great experience, and great teammates, and just the long life relationships that I have from my college teammates. You know, that’s, it’s pretty awesome. That’s

Brandon Burton 6:44
awesome, fantastic. Well, tell us a little bit about, I think I pronounced it wrong earlier, Carney area, chamber, yep. All right. All right, yeah. Tell us about the the chamber, size, staff, budget, scope of work to kind of set the table for our discussion. Yeah,

Derek Rusher 6:58
absolutely. So Carney is pretty much smack dab in the middle of the United States. So Kearney, Nebraska is right on Interstate 80. We’re positioned really well being on the interstate. I think that’s one of the advantages we actually have over our peers. But so Kearney is about 33,000 people, and our county is about 55,000 we have members from all over, but mainly, obviously in the Kearney area and then Buffalo County. Our chamber size is about 870 members. We usually hover right around that number. We’re we’re about a million dollar budget pushing that. I think one of the things that’s exciting is how we’ve grown as a staff and a team. And I think when I first started, we were about five staff. Now we’re going into six. I like big teams. If my budget could afford it, I’d have even more teammates. But for Nebraska, you’ve got the Greater Omaha chamber, the Lincoln Chamber of Commerce, and then the Carney chambers, is the third largest chamber in the state of Nebraska. And so, yeah, we’re two hours west of Lincoln. If you’ve ever driven down I 80 and driven under an archway, we’ve got an archway monument that crosses over the interstate there, and so that’s that’s Carney right there. Alright,

Brandon Burton 8:28
fantastic. Well, I will be focusing our the majority of our conversation today around the topic of finding success through involvement and what that’s meant for you throughout your career, and we’ll dive deeper into that as soon as we get back from this quick break.

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All right, Derek, we’re back, and as I mentioned before the break, we’ll we’re going to focus our conversation around finding success through involvement. So you’re coming with this art background, you found ways to get involved, to transition that into a chamber career, but talk to us a little bit about that, that story, that transition, but how involvement has really helped to catapult your career in the chamber world.

Derek Rusher 10:52
Yeah, I think what I found is, you know, I’m a people person, and I always wanted to be around other people and then let lend a hand, whether it was through, you know, an artistic skill or whatnot. But at the end of the day, I just felt that, you know, I was always driven towards to be on a committee or be on a board or help out, however I could, whether it’s through our church and serving, or what it might be. So when I was actually teaching at the facility that I was teaching at my my last stop in my education career was actually at a juvenile detention center, and we had an accredited high school there, but I got involved in about everything that I could at that facility, Teaching these juveniles of Nebraska, and we built a confidence course, basically an obstacle course. We did landscaping with my students there, and then I would get involved in our gang team. And so we had a lot of kids that got caught up in gangs and so. And then I eventually led our gang team. I was on employed development groups. I was part of our teachers association out there, and so I just continued to get involved. And people saw, you know me as a as a leader there, like, like I said in my intro, I started our facility administrator asked me if I wanted to go through our leadership Carney, our local leadership group. And I was like, yeah, absolutely. So I did that, and continue to just find ways to get involved. And then I started kind of learning more about the extra the Chamber of Commerce, not knowing the job was even open, and at that time it wasn’t. But I had a friend that was on the board of directors, and so it would attend some ribbon cuttings, and just started continuing to build my network. And again, it was just making sure I was, you know, being involved in different things. A funny story, my my art classroom had a a lot of murals. We were actually in a shop, and a somebody from leadership Carney had toured my classroom because they knew I was alumni, and so they’re like, Hey, can we come tour the facility and come tour your classroom? I said, Yeah, absolutely. So as that person from the city of Kearney was walking through my classroom, they’re like, Hey, we were looking for a muralist, and I was pretty naive at the time, and they’re like, Hey, would you like to paint a mural? And I said, Absolutely. So I had a good friend that I said, Hey, do you want to? Do you want to help me do this? And his sister was actually an art major at the time, and so we tackled a mural, and that was our first mural, and we were not impact art at that time. And then after that mural, the VFW asked, Hey, we want to paint a flag on the front of our building? Who did that mural? So they put us in contact. And then Coca Cola was delivering beverages to the VFW, and they need a mural restored. And so we started that. So at that point, I’m like, Okay, this is a business. I need to get a business plan. So I wrote a business plan, and went through that whole process. And again, I started building my business at you, that board member that I talked about being on the chamber, him, and I hit it off. We had some different things that we shared, and one of them was the Clifton Strengths Finder, and he was a Gallup certified coach, and I just love leadership development. And so we started working together, and he hired me to work part time as a teacher to do different, you know, workshops with him, team building, employee development, employee engagement, leadership, and I still take a lot of those things today, and definitely helped me. And so all those things kind of catapulted me into this position. And the board member said, hey, when that, when this job opened up for the chamber. He said, Hey, I think you should apply. But he’s my friend, right, right? So I was like, okay, you know, thank you. But I actually had two emails that got in my inbox, and they were from just my network. I did not know the two people that well, but basically the gist of their emails were the same, yeah. Hey, this job’s open. I think you’d be really good in this position. You should apply. And that’s what really put me over the edge. And when I do things Brandon, I go all in. And so, you know, I did what I did, and now I’m here, so six and a half years later, I love it. And when I first joined the chamber, we had accreditation due for the US Chamber. That was a big thing for our chamber. It was the first year. I remember my board members said, Well, we’ve been four star. Probably can’t get to five star because of our size and different things. And I said, challenge accepted, right? And we were fortunate enough to get to a five star accreditation. So that was the first time in our Chamber’s history to be a five star chamber. That was a great learning experience for me. You know, I did not come from the chamber world and kind of that non profit sector, and so it was a great learning experience. But, you know, that’s just what I wanted to show, kind of our our chamber and our business community, to say, hey, here’s here’s how we’re going to operate, and we’re going to operate with excellence and and like I said, it kind of the rest is a little bit history. And what I love about my involvement and how I found success through that, that’s obviously one of our Chamber’s pillars, right? Is involvement and making connections and and networking. And then how can we help as a chamber, do that with others, and so I found success that way. Now I’m able to help our Chamber members find success as well through involvement. Yeah,

Brandon Burton 16:30
and you’ve been involved with with boards as well, that the it’s the State Chamber and the public power district. And how are some of these things that impacted your career and be able to help you, whether it’s connections or leadership skills or whatever that you’ve taken out of these experiences that have helped you be successful and really a relatively short time in the chamber world.

Derek Rusher 16:56
Yeah, it’s a great question. I would say that right before I was with the chamber, I got asked to be on our Junior Achievement board. And they do financial literacy with kids. And when I went through leadership, Carney, I had a one of the speakers. I’ll never forget, he told us, don’t be on a board just because someone asks you if you need to be passionate about that board was basically his, his talk to us, and so you’re going to get asked as leaders to be on boards, right? Everybody. A lot of nonprofits need boards and things like that. A lot of organizations need board members, but they said, make sure you’re passionate about it. And so that with that tie to education and working with kids, I was like, Yep, I think that’s a good board. Well, since I got on the chamber, as you can imagine, chamber presidents get asked to be on a lot of boards, and so right away I was like, oh man. And so I actually had to kind of sift through some of them and tell some of them no. And I served on one for one year, and then I told the director. I said, Hey, I said, I actually have a I actually have a chamber employee that’s way more passionate about this, and they would be a better fit. And so we did that transition. And I think it’s just knowing that you don’t have to do everything as a chamber president, right, as a chamber executive and and make sure you’re passionate about it, make sure it’s, you know, something, that you can add value as a board member too. Now going through boards, you know, you learn a lot of things, and I think probably the biggest step I made in my career was the decision to be an elected official, and that’s through our public power. So Nebraska has public power, so I was asked to be a representative on the board of directors for Nebraska public power district. I had a campaign talk about learning a lot about campaigning and politics there and all the things that go along with it. Obviously, there was a lot of parts that I liked about campaigning. There was a lot of stuff that I did not like, and it’s just some of it’s ugly, but in the day, going through that process was a big learning experience, and something that I definitely do not regret, and I’ve been on that board since it’s about about 20 months now. And what a fascinating business, because it’s, you know, power, the the energy industry is probably the most capital intensive industry there is, and so the sticker shock was a little crazy, right at first, because we’re dealing with millions and billions, and I’m not used to that as a chamber of commerce, right? And a little impact art business as a nonprofit

Brandon Burton 19:33
guy over here, yeah, yeah, I remember

Derek Rusher 19:38
one of my first meetings, they were saying, we’re going to refurbish this piece of equipment, and it was like 900 some $1,000 and I’m like, wow. I’m like, Well, what’s a new one cost? And they’re like, 5 million. I’m like, okay, refurbish. It is. And, you know, as as as I want to be the best BOARD MEMBER I can be, you know, and that preparation, I’ve found a way to. Uh, you know, get through all of the board packets and all information and just educate myself. And it’s been wonderful. And then the board meetings itself and how they prepare, and just their organization. It’s such a robust organization. I’ve taken some things that they’ve done and tried to right fit them for our little chamber of commerce. And so it’s definitely added value there. And again, I think having a business representative on that board, having a, you know, somebody that’s tied in and has a pulse in the business community, I think it’s really added value that way, as well, on that board of directors. And so it’s been a great experience. It’s a six year term, so I would love to stay on that board for probably two terms. I think that’s probably the right amount, but it takes a long time. I mean, talk about drinking from the fire hose when I started the chamber, yeah, mppd was nothing like that. I mean, it was just, it was like three fire hoses. It’s crazy to learn all the ins and outs of that, but I would say my advice for I think the chamber executives that are listening would be be on a board, not just because you got asked, make sure you’re passionate about it, make sure that you’re able to add value and then take something away as well. We should always continue to learn. I’m a lifelong learner. I believe in that. That’s my education background. That’s why I got my administration, education Education Administration degree. I got my master’s when I was still here at the Chamber of Commerce. Because there was a multiple reasons. I started it, I wanted to finish it. There was a lot of things that overlapped. I mean, every single Master’s class I had talked about communication. And so there’s a lot of great things that I learned through my master’s classes. And I also want to show my kids, you know, I got five daughters. I want to show my kids. My kids that, hey, education is important, and it still is. Yeah, I

Brandon Burton 21:47
especially like your your thoughts about board service and to only serve on boards you’re passionate about. And for any chamber executives listening they they know the headaches of working with a board member who’s not passionate about the chamber, or, you know what they’re supposed to be there, showing up for and executing on, you know, plans of action and things like that. And if you’re not able to show up and give your best self, it’s okay to say no, it’s okay to delegate to somebody else. It’s okay to pass up an opportunity if it doesn’t align with, you know, the mission that you’re, you know, being driven by, in this case, with the chamber, or personal values even, but it’s okay, and I think that organization would appreciate no thank you versus a Okay, I’ll do it on top of my already busy plate, and I’m not really going to give it all the time and effort and Energy it deserves, right,

Derek Rusher 22:41
right? Well, I think that’s part of my reason to be on the small business policy council, because I know it adds value to our Carney businesses. And so at the state level, we have a representative, and I’m actually pregnant is only serve one more year there. I’ve talked to the State Chamber, and I’m going to serve one more year because of just timing of things. And I’m ready to, you know, hand over the reins of someone else. You know, there’s someone else that definitely has earned that spot to be the chair of that business council, but I think that’s that at the end of the day, yeah, just be passionate about the boards that you’re serving on and making sure you can add value for sure.

Brandon Burton 23:15
So in this involvement with these different organizations, different boards, nonprofits, these different ways you’ve you’ve been involved, you’ve been intentional about being involved. Can talk to us a little bit about how your network has been affected, and kind of rubbing shoulders with people in these groups, and just how that’s impacted you. Well,

Derek Rusher 23:35
my kids don’t like to go in public places with me. You know, I didn’t do it really, to, like, selfishly, honestly. I mean, I did it because I truly, I think I love serving, I love what I do, and that’s why I ran for the Nebraska public power district board. Yeah, I didn’t understand everything in the industry, but I just felt like pulled to serve, and so that’s really has been my intent. Now, what it’s done, obviously, is my connections and network has grown tremendously, and I don’t know everything. And so now I have a phone with friend, but I’ve got a lot of friends that I can call on or email and contact and say, Hey, have you guys ever dealt with this, right? And, yeah, there’s forums out there, you know, there’s Facebook groups out there that you can, you know, put a put something out there and get some responses. But when you have a closer relationship, right? And you’ve maybe served together or been on a committee together, you know, that’s a lot easier to get a response from. And so when I can pick up the phone or shoot an email over to somebody or text them, that’s what it’s really done. Because, again, I don’t know everything, and I don’t claim to know everything, and I’m I’m always one that’s always saying, Hey, you. What I like this idea, but let’s see what this chamber is doing, or let’s see what this business is doing, and how can we operationally be better? Because that’s me. I’m I’m in, I’m competitive, and I want to be the best, and so maybe that’s a little bit of my servant leadership, I suppose, and why I want to be on different boards and committees and be involved. But I’ve also, I like leading. I like, you know, being at the front and leading. And I’m a very visionary guy. I’ve got big ideas. I like to move fast. And I know my cons of my leadership too. I know what I’m, you know, moving fast is not good for all my teammates, so I have to slow down. And I don’t I remember, when I first started the chamber, I would present a bunch of ideas, and I’ve learned to present one. Hey, here’s something I think we can focus on, because I’ve got leaders that are very supportive leaders, right? And they’re, they’re the ones that are great at getting all the details and all those things. Well, if I present all these ideas, my other leaders and my on my team are going to be like all the work. They don’t see that. And I’m just, I’ve got all this, you know, this big picture stuff. And so I think it’s, I think it’s wise of me to understand the pros of my leadership and my strengths, but then the cons, right? And maybe what I’m not good at, right? We’re all Swiss cheese, right? We all holes. And I’ve got a great team right now that fills the holes of my leadership and my strengths and what I need to improve, or my weaknesses for lack of better words. And that’s where we are, and we really focus on that. We focus on our strengths as a team, and I’ll continue to do that with any committee I’m on and and knowing people that way. And it’s definitely I found success that way.

Brandon Burton 26:45
I can really appreciate you kind of bridling your your creativity, your ideas, and being able to instead of taking the list of 10 or 15 ideas to say, here’s one for your team, and really as a leader, that’s going to drive your team to be creative and to be leaders as well. Because introducing one idea at a time, they might catch the vision and say, what if we add this too? And it may be something you had on your list of ideas, but letting them drive that helps to build them up as well, which I think is super important,

Derek Rusher 27:18
and that’s the chamber world we’re in right now, right? I think we need to be creative and innovative.

Brandon Burton 27:24
Absolutely. Derek, as we start to wrap things up, I wanted to ask for chambers listening who are wanting to take their chamber up to the next level. What kind of tip or action item might you share with them and trying to accomplish that goal?

Derek Rusher 27:39
This is a great question. Um, obviously very subjective, but I would hope that all Chamber members just love their current members. One thing I learned right off the bat, I had this lofty goal, right? I’m competitive. I wanted to grow our membership, and so I had a membership growth goal, and then I had a retention goal as well. And then I would say, shortly, and probably less than a month, I squashed the growth goal, and I said, You know what? If, if they don’t want to be Chamber members, whatever, I’m going to spend way less time on recruiting, basically, and I’m going to spend time on retention, and I’m going to love the members that are investing in our chamber now, and we will grow organically, because I believe everyone wants to be part of something great. And so if we can be great and we can show that we are adding value, then we’ll grow, and we have slightly right? There’s the ebbs and flows, as you know, the members come and go, and we feel that in Kearney as well. But, you know, just loving your members. And then I would say the other part of that is, I kind of reference it is being innovative. I mean, AI is you need to embrace it as a Chamber of Commerce. My marketing director, Riley Mills, is phenomenal in social media and AI and all those things, right? And I just love the things he’s doing. We’ve got some really neat, innovative things with making like tiktoks and reels, and he would explain it way better than I but he’s making custom songs for businesses using AI, and it’s awesome, so cool. It’s so cool. And so, you know, there’s a lot to it. I know you can, you know, you got your your recording meetings and all those things. And obviously, I think everybody’s using, you know, chat, GPT and things like that. But you need to embrace, I think, AI. But then also, what else is out there, right? It’s not just AI. We can’t drive our chamber with AI. And how can you continue to be authentic but innovative? And what is next? How can we kind of stay above that business community and see what they’re doing, what trends they have? And I think that’s going to be important for us. And one of the ways that we’re doing it, besides just looking at trends and trying to. Stay up to date on technology is we’ve actually decided to look at our facility, and we sold our building about a year ago, and we’re building a new building, and it’s a major investment, and we ran a capital campaign, and it’s taken a lot of work, but our new building is going to be a collaborative environment for our team. It’s going to allow our Chamber members to come in and work, maybe not quite have a straight incubator space, but there’s space for them to come and work. So we have small businesses, obviously, freelance and that work from home. We didn’t embrace that sector. How do we help the business that’s selling shoes on YouTube and making more money than all of us? Right? How do we help that chamber member now? Right? And then we’ll have a media room where you can do a podcast, you can do video, you can do photo. There’s flexible spaces where you can hold meetings or interviews and things like that. And so that’s kind of our strategic plan is looking at, how can we continue to add more value to our Chamber members through even a facility? And I think we’re super excited. We’re about 30 days away from moving in.

Brandon Burton 31:01
That’s awesome. I can feel the excitement. Well, I like asking everyone I have on the show, as we look to the future of chambers of commerce, how do you see the future of chambers and their purpose going forward?

Derek Rusher 31:14
I think it’s I think it’s relational. I think it’s really having close relationships with your Chamber members, the the adage that I’ve seen in our industry of businesses joining chambers because it’s the right thing to do, yeah, that’s starting to go away, right? And I still think though that, because still

Brandon Burton 31:36
the right thing to do, but Yeah, correct. Yeah, 100%

Derek Rusher 31:40
but now it’s like, well, what do I get, right? I’m going to invest in in the chamber. Well, what do I get? And how can we continue to add value? So we always look at, what other benefits can we give? And obviously, every industry is a little different, right? Banks need something different than insurance agents and so on and so forth. And so I would say that I see chambers going just more like on a relational and so building relationships and finding opportunities to, you know, have those opportunities where you can just continue to get to know your Chamber members, not on just a Hey, thanks for paying. And here’s your invoice and just a transactional relationship I’d call you need, I think then intimate relationship is going to be a healthy way to run a chamber. And then how can I knowing that chamber member better, you’re going to be able to help them better, because our answer is always yes. That’s our motto, right? That’s a chamber. How could can you do this? Yep, and then we figure it out. And so whether it’s marketing or education or advocacy or involvement. We’re going to tackle those things for those Chamber members. But you need to know them, right? And you need to get to know I mean, just be like your family, right? And that’s, that’s what we call it. We call it our chamber family. And if you know your family members well enough, then you can help them when things are good, when things are bad, whatever it is, and that’s what we need to do for our chamber. And so that’s that’s a tough task that is not easy, but I think that’s really where chambers can hopefully thrive in the future, is continue to build those relationships that you have. Yeah,

Brandon Burton 33:16
I think that’s key. Well, Derek, this has been great to have you on chamber chat podcast and share your your story, your experience, how being involved has helped lead to the success you’ve seen in the chamber. Or listeners who may want to reach out and connect with you or learn more about how you guys are doing things there in Carney. What would be the best way for someone to reach out and connect with you?

Derek Rusher 33:38
Yeah, I would say our website, obviously, is a stand, you know, a standard there, so kearneycoc.org, but then our Facebook, I think, is probably still our go to on social media. Yeah, we’re on, we’re on all the channels, but seems like our social media for Facebook is probably the go to there, but feel free to reach out. Even via email. You can find my email pretty easy on our website when you go to our team page. But we’ve got a lot of things going on. And you know what I love about the chamber world is you’ve got the old saying of R&D, rip off and duplicate. And so, you know, we’re looking at other chambers around the around the United States and seeing what they’re doing well, and we’re going to see if we can duplicate that and right fit it in Kearney, and that’s what we do. So yeah, I definitely welcome that for others.

Brandon Burton 34:29
That’s awesome, and we’ll get all that in our show notes for this episode as well, to make it easy to find you and easy to connect. But Derek, this has been great. I appreciate you and appreciate the experience you shared with us today. Thanks a lot. Well,

Derek Rusher 34:43
thank you. Brandon, appreciate you.

Brandon Burton 34:46
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AI Applications After 300 Episodes with Brandon Burton

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

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

Visit ChamberNation.com to learn more.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Unknown Speaker 17:45
It really is.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Unknown Speaker 18:16
keep this incredible conversation going.

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

Unknown Speaker 18:19
Cheers to that.

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

If you are a chamber professional, please subscribe to Chamber Chat Podcast in Apple podcast, Google podcasts or Spotify. When you subscribe to Chamber Chat Podcast new episodes will show up in your podcast app each week as they are released. If you’re finding value in this podcast, please leave us a rating and a review in iTunes. But most importantly, please share Chamber Chat Podcast with your colleagues that are in the industry.