Category: Podcast Episode

Addressing Childcare Needs with Kami Welch

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

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Our guest for this episode is Kami Welch. Cami is the president of the Arvada Chamber of Commerce at a 12 year chamber veteran. Kami has earned a reputation for developing strategic innovative opportunities for businesses and community growth. Cami is a US Chamber of Commerce talent pipeline fellow and a board member for WAC and the Association of Colorado Chambers of Commerce where she is past Chair camming also sits on the community boards for nonprofit organizations that focus on children education, homelessness, and domestic violence including family tree where she is a chair. Kami loves living in Colorado with her husband of 14 years and two young children where they enjoy hiking, skiing and exploring. Kami, we’re excited to have you with us today on chamber chat podcast. I’d love to give you a moment to say hello to all the chamber champions that are out there listening and share something interesting about yourself so you can get to know you a little better.

Kami Welch 2:02
Awesome. Thanks, Brandon. It’s an honor to be on with you. today. I’m excited to talk about a really important topic with everybody. I always struggle with this question about what’s interesting about me, I actually pulled my team to ask what is something that they thought was interesting about me. And we all agreed the the most interesting piece of my background is actually grew up ice skating, which doesn’t seem relevant to my current career, but it is because that was required early morning for a start time. After school. It was all about the conditioning, training and ballet and the cross training to be a good ice skater I actually had the same coach because I grew up in Oregon as Tonya Harding. So shared ice with her, which is interesting, but it’s hard. That was as a kiddo. I’ve appreciated the grit that that gave me that I’ve been able to carry through being a chamber leader.

Brandon Burton 2:51
Yeah, no, I liked that. I liked that you pulled your office suit, because it’s hard to come up with our own. Yeah, interesting facts about ourselves that that’s something they knew about you and it is unique. I don’t think we’ve had other ice skaters or do that have mentioned that on the podcast. So you’re one of a kind. So tell us about the Arvada Chamber of Commerce. Just to give us some perspective. Before we get into our discussion. Give us an idea of the size staff budget scope of work, that sort of thing, just to help set the table.

Kami Welch 3:21
Absolutely. So Arvada is located just west of Denver, so everybody knows where Denver is. We’re 10 minutes west of Denver, we actually share a border with Denver metro, our community size is about 120,000 people. We have about 3000 businesses in Arvada, we have about 500 Plus members of the chamber, which has been really exciting to see that our current team is six, but we’re growing to eight this year, we’ve had some awesome opportunities to increase revenue and grow our team alongside that which has been really an incredible opportunity to deliver on more work for our community. Our annual budget has doubled in the past year, which is crazy and exciting. So we historically were about a 500 to 550 $550,000 budget. This year, we’ll be coming in at about 1.2 million. And again, that’s because we’ve been able to identify ways to grow capital to do the work that’s so critical for our businesses.

Brandon Burton 4:17
Okay, so maybe we chose the wrong topic to focus on today. Let me just ask the question, what are you doing to increase revenue to double it like that?

Kami Welch 4:25
Yeah. So the reason that we did that is because our mission as an organization is to solve the most critical business challenges. And what we realized is that with a traditional business model, we didn’t have the capacity as an organization to take those challenges on. So our board looked at various options and decided to go forward with a five year strategic initiative capital campaign. So we actually worked with a company out of Atlanta called Power 10. And we did a feasibility study to really assess the need in our community, and if our businesses were willing to invest in solving their most critical challenges, so we ended up with a five year switch He took initiative that took on talents, housing, childcare, and to the business environment. And so we’re able to raise $2.5 million for the next five years to ensure that we can do the work that is required to actually have outcomes in these areas.

Brandon Burton 5:16
That is fantastic. Yeah. So that answers a question, at least on the surface level of everybody’s like, what are you doing to double your revenue? That’s awesome. So our our topic for conversation today is going to be around addressing childcare needs. As we look at the the economy in general, we see the workforce shortages and really just the economy in general has been rocked, you know, through the COVID pandemic and trying to come out of it. And one of those key questions to be able to help fix and stabilize the economy is addressing the childcare needs. So I’m excited to dive into that discussion with you and what you guys are doing there in about as soon as we get back from this quick break.

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All right, Kami, we’re back. So before the break, I had mentioned that the topic for today being around addressing childcare needs. What were some of those maybe key indicators or data that you guys saw that showed that this was a need to for you to chamber? It’s not typical chamber work? So how did how did that come to be that you guys saw? This is an area of focus?

Kami Welch 9:07
That’s a great question. And certainly one with a long history of feedback and engagement of our community and our businesses. But one of the things we do is on a quarterly basis, we run a business pulse survey and we asked similar questions. And then we sometimes throw in something or questions to make sure that we’re really understanding what’s happening with our businesses. And so every single time we’ve done that over the past seven years, talent is the number one issue always. And as we started to unpack our talent system and really understand all the moving parts and pieces, we understand that there’s not skill alignment, that there’s the lack of demand. But we had to dig deeper and ask why about 27 more times to really understand that there’s these other barriers that are happening in our community that are causing that talent shortage. What we uncovered and the reason why in our bold initiative that we mentioned earlier that we took on childcare and housing is because we recognize As as two of our biggest barriers to achieving the talent system that we really need, there is some crazy data that we’ve come across as we’ve dug into childcare. And to be honest, before we started taking this on in a meaningful way, I didn’t even realize what a huge issue this was. And I’ll rattle a little bit of data here, because I think it’s important. And I know you have listeners all over the country that are like, Oh, I wonder what that is for my state. So I’m gonna cite Colorado data. But it’s interesting to think about what other states are dealing with, and if it’s at the same degree, but one of the things that we thought was really interesting is that there was a Pew Research study, and they surveyed all sorts of people that were leaving jobs. And it was the number four reason in that study was childcare. So interesting, right? People are saying, I have to leave my job because I have nowhere for my kids to go. Colorado has the eighth highest cost of childcare in the country. So we know that that is a huge barrier for people that maybe aren’t making, you know, $100,000 a year, they can’t afford to put their kiddos in childcare. We know that in Colorado, 45,000, Colorado, parents are making career sacrifices due to child care. And 20% of our workforce needs childcare. So we’re starting to get a sense of Whoa, that’s a lot of people that are impacted by this issue in our community. What it really got alarming for us is when we started thinking about the supply of childcare facilities in that business model, which when you think through an economic development lens, that’s interesting, right? That’s like, Okay, this business model is struggling. So we know that we have what’s called the childcare desert. So in Colorado, we have one childcare spot for every three kids that need it. That’s wild. And there’s only one county in all of Colorado, where there’s enough spots for the kids that need it. And it’s not in the metro area, it’s probably very rural. Yeah, very, very rural. So really interesting data, my community alone needs well over 2000 additional spots to meet the demand. So taking a step back, and again, looking through that chamber economic development lens is saying, Okay, what’s going on here. So there’s some serious business model challenges, right, the cost of running a childcare facility is high, you think about the liability, the cost of real estate, the staffing that’s needed, there is a really difficult breakdown, these businesses are trying to achieve, they can’t pay their employees what they need to pay them. So they’re losing employees left and right, because they’re paying a minimum wage. But when you look at the business model, that’s all they can afford to pay them because they can’t have parents paying more than what they’re able to pay. So it’s a really interesting issue. And we’re recognizing more and more, that it’s going to take some really innovative solutions to overcome these challenges. But just looking at that data, it became crystal clear to us that there’s a huge issue. And there are ways we can influence making this system better.

Brandon Burton 12:59
Right? What really stands out to me is 45,000 career sacrifices are going on just in Colorado, because parents will look at you know, here’s the income that I would bring in, here’s what we would pay out and child care if you can get a spot, and they just see it as a wash are really just not worth you know, the extra headache of getting up early and doing everything for maybe to net, you know, a couple $1,000 It just doesn’t make sense.

Kami Welch 13:25
Yeah, I’ve countless examples in my personal and professional life of people that are making those choices every day, because of the cost. And as you said that sacrifice is just it’s horrible.

Brandon Burton 13:35
Right? So as you cite these different stats and the research that you’ve you’ve seen and and I like Like he said, looking through it through an economic development lens as this, you know, addressing the business models of childcare. It definitely is, I would say it’s a strong argument for Chamber of Commerce to be involved with this. So how do you see your role there about a chamber? Getting into the work? How does that look? How do you you can’t just go into business and say, Here’s your new business model. So how are you approaching this, this work of addressing childcare?

Kami Welch 14:10
Yeah, it’s a really, really great question. As an organization we’ve prescribed to the three C’s, many people know that it’s come out of the Western Association of chamber executives have been a convener, catalyst and champion. And so we often think through that lens, as we’re deciding how we support an issue. I think the biggest thing that we can do as organizations is really been that convener role. We have really strong partnerships across our region. And we often will say, we will join existing tables and we will lead where needed and so doing kind of that audit landscape of what great work is happening and joining in like, we don’t always have to start from ground zero. But there’s this moment of step back and say, who’s doing this work and doing it? Well. I will give a shout out to Epic Colorado, which is where much of that data I just shared came from there and incred have a partner in this work, but they’re doing amazing things and engage in industry and businesses in the Child Care conversation. So we don’t need to reinvent the wheel. But we need to get the right people in our community in our region around the same table. Because I often note that great work is happening. But so often, I think everybody can attest to this. It happens in silos, right? That people are like I’m doing the things, I’m solving the problems. But when you don’t tell anybody that you’re doing that, it can be really difficult. So I believe the key role of chambers is to bring together people to help them understand what work is happening, and how everybody can work more with more continuity as a group. And so we’ve launched what we call caps councils. And that stands for, I hope, this is okay to say if you can edit this out, kick ass problem solvers. So we have a tendency to want to make sure we’re driving actions. So we don’t have committees and councils and things like that we have action driven naming of what we do. So when people show up, they know they’re there to work. This is about rolling up your sleeves and getting towards solutions. We also like to set targets, right? Like, we know that our goal and taking on childcare is to increase the number of spots we have in our community. So who are the people that need to come around one table to help achieve that, but having a universal target that we’ve set at the Chamber helps to make sure there’s clarity and purpose when you get those people together. So that, to me is the biggest piece of this. The second thing that I think is really critical role of chambers, is to educate. So many people don’t understand all that data I just shared. And they’re making decisions based on their own personal experiences, which is fine, we are all creatures of our own perception is reality, right? But at the end of the day, there’s a lot to this. And so we have a unique role to certainly educate our businesses in our community, but also thinking about what role we play in educating the community at large about these issues that are impacting So playing a role, and really that awareness building, education, hosting forums. So people start to get that these are issues. It’s amazing to me when we’ve done that how quickly these issues start bubbling and becoming topics that everybody’s talking about the amount of organizations now that are telling me like I’m taking on childcare? And how do you know, I’m like, great, you know, like, we had to start those conversations, which has been really interesting

Brandon Burton 17:31
that so I guess the question that comes up for me, because you cited a lot of great data, and you mentioned epic Colorado that you were able to get that data from, for people in other states, where where would you point them to to try to find some of that data to be able to start that conversation about why their chambers should be involved with solving this problem as well?

Kami Welch 17:54
Yeah, that’s a really, really great question. And I know every state is going to be structured differently. One of the great sources of data we’ve had is actually our community college system. And so looking for a place where people that are going into this childcare profession are getting trained, typically, they understand kind of the lay of the land, they have really good data that they’re trying to utilize to get people into the program and help them think about where they open that childcare facility. So that’s a really good place to start. The other place would be school districts typically have a pretty solid sense of that early childhood education, and where it’s happening. And so talking with them about the landscape where there’s gaps, because we often talk about childcare, not just through the lens of quantity, but also quality. Like it’s not just about having somebody keeping eyes on your children during the day, but they need to be kindergarten ready, because all the data shows if you’re not kindergarten ready, then you lag all the way through school. And it’s hard to catch up on that. And so those quality metrics are important to our school district. And so they track a lot of the early childhood stuff as well. And then I will look at the state level and see what government departments exist that oversee child care, and really source out from there.

Brandon Burton 19:09
That’s good. Hopefully, people are jotting down some notes so they can do their research and see what the what the problem looks like. Because I’m going to assume it’s a problem in every state, and just see how big of a problem that is. And if it’s something that rises to the attention level that the domain deserve in some states, more so than others.

Kami Welch 19:28
I will also throw out on that the US Chamber Foundation has done a lot of work in this space and have an awesome toolkit on their website around childcare, that has many opportunities for businesses to get involved and resources that exist in that space. And so that’s a really good place to kind of dig in and start building knowledge around the childcare issue and opportunities.

Brandon Burton 19:49
Yeah. So about how long have you guys been involved with the child care work and had that be, you know, a big attention getter for you guys

Kami Welch 20:00
So about a year now. So not only that, I have to show great outcomes, which I’m excited in three or four years to be able to say we’ve added X amount of spots to childcare in our community, we’re still very much in the information gathering stage of this. But what has been exciting for us is how quickly we’ve been able to get to alignment of what is the goal? And what can we do about it. And so I talked a lot about the convenient and building community support, we also really worked in the policy space. And so recognizing that there’s like this whole advocacy play that comes along with moving child care system. So we have crafted a policy agenda. And that’s a big piece of our focus for this first part of the year is our legislators are down at the Capitol to really push on things like how do we expand cost effective preschool in early childhood? How do we give incentives to businesses that are willing to open childcare? So that we have the demand we need? So we’re really looking through initially that lens that what are those barriers of obstacle? And how do we remove some of them to be able to have better outcomes for our goals?

Brandon Burton 21:02
Yeah, no, it’s a, it’s a sticky problem. I mean, all these different I start thinking of a solution. And then I see reasons why, you know, it may not work, but it conflicts with it. So it’s not a simple solution. I mean, it’s going to require rolling up your sleeves and doing some hard work. So the big question, I know everybody’s thinking is, how are you pulling it off? How are you funding this work? Because yeah, Kenny, this is a great idea. Every chamber should be involved at this. But how do you do it?

Kami Welch 21:35
Yeah, as I started on the front end of the podcast, obviously, we were lucky enough to pull together the resources to do that five year strategic initiative. I know not everybody is in that position to do that. But what I will take away is kind of key messages and learnings as childcare is something that people decide they want to take on, I’m always happy to talk to them about our journey. But messaging is a really big piece of that, getting clear on the data and what the issue is and the community and putting together on paper, a clear understanding of what you’re going to do to solve it. So that people understand that there’s neat to this, that this is work that needs to happen. Also talking about the economic impact, like we know, in Jefferson County alone, where I’m located, that there’s a $200 million annual economic impact because of childcare. So continuing to tie the messaging back to economic development, makes it a lot easier to go out and seek those funds. But there’s got to be strategy behind this. And so again, we did it through a five year strategic initiative, I highly recommend that I mean, I’m so glad to know that we set funding for the next five years, and I don’t constantly have to be working through that. And that’s could be a whole podcast on its own of how that campaign process, but really putting strategy behind your work for today, tomorrow and long term. So people see that I think you have to ask, you have to find those people that have the heart for community that want to make sure that their business community drives and ask them to invest, help them see that you are the organization that can do this work? Well, it has to happen in order to solve those big critical challenges. The other thing I’ll say is there’s a lot of federal and state money floating around right now. And so if you’re not plugged into grant opportunities, I would highly encourage you to look into how you access those at your state level, Colorado uses a bid that at every state is probably different in the systems that they use. But we’ve been able to apply for a variety of different grants that support this work. Some are still pending, and we’re crossing our fingers that we get. But we did get one to hire a person directly supporting talent, which as I’ve said many times talent in child care hand in hand, right? We cannot solve workforce if we don’t fix our childcare system. That’s it. So looking at grants, thinking strategically about how you ask for those dollars, is really, really critical. And I know there’s no like magic bullet situation, unfortunately. But there are ways to get dollars for sure.

Brandon Burton 24:05
Right. So how much did you say the economic impact 200

Kami Welch 24:10
million for just Jefferson County alone,

Brandon Burton 24:12
man. So I mean, when you figure the people that are making those career sacrifices, the the impact of if you had the additional childcare centers? I mean, that’s a big economic impact there. I mean, it I think there’s a number to it, you can’t even put, you know, at number two some of this, just because there’s a lot of unknowns that potentially could be much more than that 200 million. So when you talk about economic development, that is a huge factor right there. Is there anything that we’re missing from this, this conversation that we haven’t touched on yet?

Kami Welch 24:54
So I’ll add a fun thing to this kind of a lighter opportunity. So one of the things we saw over the pandemic was Women primarily we’re the ones leaving the workforce to move into a caregiver role. And so one of the things that we’ve loved doing as an organization that started a couple of years ago during the pandemic is every March during Women’s History Month, we highlight the badass women of Arvada, and celebrate women who are leading in our community and really crushing it. And it’s a really fun opportunity for us to talk about women in the workplace, and highlight how important and critical that is for our community. So we’ve worked to find certainly those very tactical and strategic things. But it’s also really fun to think about how you highlight and celebrate the people in your community. That’s the work of chambers is right to bring people together and lift and do the things that help people feel connected to their communities. So we’ve found that to be a really fun way to kind of bring our community together and educate around this issue without it feeling too starchy.

Brandon Burton 25:55
Like that, that is fun. And it draws some positive attention to these women who are who are really making a difference, right. I love that. So I like to see, you know, for chamber champions that are listening, if you might have any tips or action items that they might take, if they’re looking to take their chamber up to the next level, what would you suggest?

Kami Welch 26:18
Do you want a broad answer or to connect it to childcare?

Brandon Burton 26:22
Either way, whatever you feel is would be most relevant. Or if you want to do both, as a bonus, I’m open to whatever.

Kami Welch 26:31
Bye, far as the childcare conversation goes, I think the best thing to start and take action, if you haven’t already, is get the data, there is such a story behind that. And it will inspire you, it will inspire your leaders to take action. And so the first step related to child care, is that data piece of advice. As far as kind of industry and what that looks like, I will tell you that one of the best things I’ve done in my career is get involved, be involved at the state level, the local level, the national level, build those relationships so that you have a network of peers, of friends, sometimes we all need a little chamber therapy. I have my people that are in the speed dial that I call, I’m like, Have you ever dealt with this, this is wild, have you not network matters, it makes the career pathway of being in a chamber world so much more meaningful, and I can’t tell you how much I’ve learned from my peers through this process. So get involved, join associations, make chamber friends, it matters and your chamber, you personally will be way better for it. So do it.

Brandon Burton 27:37
I love it. So 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?

Kami Welch 27:49
I love this question. Because I think it’s been such a journey for so many of us and Canada, kind of the historic role of chambers and be known for festivals and ribbon cutting than really that celebratory stuff in communities, which is still important, and it’s fun, and it brings people together. But I believe that chambers are more critical today than they’ve ever, ever, ever been. And the issues that our businesses are facing are getting bigger and more complicated. And I often will say if not us, then who we are uniquely positioned as chambers to solve really critical challenges. We have the resources, the leadership, and we can bring together government, nonprofit education, business, all to one table and solve issues. There aren’t many others who can do that with the same level of credibility. So I believe we have an opportunity right now, to optimize on that coming out of the pandemic, where many of us stepped into a new capacity. people’s trust in our ability is high. And we need to optimize that and take action today to ensure long term success.

Brandon Burton 28:53
I love that response. Love it. Well, Cami this has been a very insightful and productive conversation. I think it’s been provided a lot of value for chambers to kind of look at themselves, look at their community, get that data, see if you know if this rises to needing that that level of importance in your community to address childcare needs. I’m gonna guess it probably is up there and probably the top five needs that you need to address in your community. But if anyone listening wanted to reach out and connect with you maybe learn a little bit more more detail about how you guys are approaching this work. What would be the best way for someone to reach out and connect?

Kami Welch 29:35
Yeah, absolutely. I would love to talk to anybody. It’s actually one of my favorite things to do is to connect with my peers so please don’t hesitate to reach out. Email is the easiest way to reach me which is kami@arvadachamber.org If you’re just looking for more information and want to r&d, rip off and duplicate our website at arvadachamber.org And feel free to take information from there. I am a huge proponent of supporting each other and so no need to tell me you’re taking it. It’s just if it’s helpful to you, and you can use some of it. Please do I believe a rising tide lifts all boats so happy to help anyone in the industry kind of figure out where they need to go next.

Brandon Burton 30:11
Awesome. Well get your email and the website in our show notes for this episode, so anyone can check that out and maybe just send you a thank you for that r&d. But thank you Kami for spending time with us today for sharing the work that you guys are doing around child care. This is a topic we have not covered on the podcast yet, so it’s an important one. And I have a feeling we’ll be talking about it even more coming into the future. So thank you for that.

Brandon Burton 38:24
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Brandon Burton 0:54
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Our guest for this episode is John Brewer. John is the president and CEO at the Billings Chamber of Commerce in Montana, which is a five star credited chamber through the US Chamber of Commerce. The Billings chamber developed and manages the Billings tourism improvement district visit southeast Montana and the billings chamber foundation. John currently serves on the WAC board of directors. His past chair of the Montana association of Chamber of Commerce executives, serves on the ACCE board served as their emerging cities chair and serves in the US chambers committee at 100 advisors. Before moving to Billings, John was president and CEO of the Spokane regional convention and visitors bureau in Washington, of course, he has a BA in Communication Arts from the University of West Florida, and he and his wife Carrie have four children and two grandkids. But John, I’m excited to have you with us today on chamber chat podcast, I’d love for you to take a moment to say hello to all the chamber champions that are out there listening and share something interesting about yourself so they can get to know you a little

John Brewer 2:10
better. Hey, Brandon, well, thank you. It’s, it’s good to see ya. It’s always the most difficult question I think is sharing something interesting about yourself, right? Because golf that I find interesting other than I do it a bore. But you know, my wife and I, I guess if I were to say one thing that we’re passionate about, and it’s been kind of unique is that for the 20, some years, 25 years, we’ve been together, we’ve been fostering dogs and my wife has a heart for people in need and animals in need. So we’ve had everything from 12 Puppies running around the house to a dog in a wheelchair to other special needs type dogs to try to help find them a home. So for us, it’s been fun as well as it’s been rewarding to to help connect the animals to their lifelong homes.

Brandon Burton 2:57
That’s awesome. So if you had to, if you had to guess over the last 25 years or so about how many dogs have been through your house, the Bowl number

John Brewer 3:08

We were much more active when the kids were at a different age and things that now we kind of go one at a time, I think more more because of our age than any grant. But it’s great. He’s working with debt dog adoption agencies around the country. And when they need a home. He’s kind of opening the doors for him. So I love being part of that.

Brandon Burton 3:30
That is awesome. As dogs need that. Yeah. Well tell us a little bit about the Billings chamber just to give us some perspective. Before we get into our conversation. Obviously every chamber is different. But give us an idea of size staff budget scope of work that sort

John Brewer 3:47
of bragging about Yeah, first. Yeah. You mentioned your that five star credited chamber several years ago, we were chamber of the year through atpe. So we’re proud of the work that we’re doing. We’ve got an incredible board of directors that kind of let us be unchained to go and figure out what needs to be solved in our chambers really focused on being one of those kick butt chambers, if you will, and problem solver and as far as tackling big community issues, as well as those core things that most chambers are involved in. For us. It’s business growth, business advocacy, community development. And then we are also as you mentioned in the intro there, the managing organization for our tourism entities both visit Billings and visit southeast Montana 13 counties and two Indian Reservation within our region here. So, you know, having that balance of connecting business to the you know, millions of visitors that come through here on their way to Yellowstone National Park or Little Bighorn battlefield sight of customers last stand or along the Lewis and Clark Trail. Were in a great spot to not only be a business hub as the largest city in Montana, and A tourism area where people start their journey by flying in and got the largest airport and great internet interstate connectivity. But our chamber has right now just over 1100 members, they employ just under 15,000 people. And we are hovering around 90% retention and we love that number. It’s solid. And we’re just we’ve been on a growth cycle, both from a revenue perspective, as well as the membership perspective. So our staff has grown by four FTE in the last 12 month and we’re brought people on who are focused in in the finance world, we need to do some things you’d mentioned that we just launched our foundation at the chamber. And we’re also bringing people on to help take care of the workforce issue that every community I think in the country is facing.

Brandon Burton 5:54
Now that you guys definitely have your work cut out for you, that’s for sure. It’s curious, have you guys seen an influx in tourism since the TV show Yellowstone came out a couple years ago?

John Brewer 6:05
It’s funny how many times we’re asked that question, right? Yeah, we, you know, Yellowstone, in where that shot is probably about a four and a half, five hour drive from us. But you know, Yellowstone Park has seen a bump, we hear lots of people on their way and talking about it, the detrimental side to that is now the state legislature feels like we’re getting all this free advertising that we should just pull that we get about $2 million annually for tourism funding. So they’re like, we don’t really need that anymore. Let’s reinvest that in affordable housing and other needs in our communities like public safety. So we’re in the middle of our legislative session that meets every two years, and kind of all hands on deck for those battles. And they are they are plentiful. We’ve got 4000 bills that have been introduced. And so yeah, it’s exciting. Yeah, it poses some challenges.

Brandon Burton 6:54
Right. Now. We were one of those families. Last summer, we were gonna go there and about I think two weeks before we went the, I think was the North Loop got closed down with the mudslides and stuff. And so we ended up kind of rerouting what our vacation was going to be because they were only letting in you know, every other day, depending on your your license plate numbers. They’re like, that’s a long hike.

John Brewer 7:19
And interestingly enough, our visitors director at the Chamber, her brother is the superintendent at Yellowstone Park. So when they were going through that kind of a lottery of license plates, you know, we were hearing about some of that, and that was an interesting process. But yeah, they were hit very hard, still not fully recovered, hit the egg industry in our region. But you know, that’s another thing that chambers are always geared up to, to try to do is, you know, be prepared to help whether it’s, you know, all the rains in California flooding hurricane. So another exciting role, though, per chamber and pillar solving those community problems that they hit.

Brandon Burton 7:54
That’s right. So getting back to, I guess the topic for our conversation today. As great as billings is, and you know, we want to get get honed in on a certain topic here. So, what we decided to cover today is, you know, every, every chamber, every community is vastly different. And as we get into the topic of diversity, equity inclusion over the last few years that looks different in each community. And as we talk with John today, we wanted to kind of focus on the why for Thayer Dei, what did they you know, hone in on and focusing on as they worked on diversity, equity inclusion, and we will dive into that much deeper as we get back from this quick break.

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All right, John, we’re back. As I mentioned before the break diving into what was the why for the your diversity equity inclusion efforts there the Billings chamber and how did things kind of evolve into what it is now.

John Brewer 11:43
And I think that word evolve and evolution is so important because I think so many of us in the chamber world and maybe as just citizens of the world, you know, we hear a lot about D E I and it strikes us all differently because words do matter. And as we were developing the name of the work even it was a lengthy discussion for many diversity, equity and inclusion or triggering words or they have a stigma to them. And and I think this evolution of white white chambers are involved in Dei. Now, is it an important context to understand I mean, for us, everything that we do these days is revolving around workforce, workforce development, workforce retention, Workforce Education. And this is one of those areas that I think we just push aside or think that we’re doing okay in and ignore. And I feel that chambers are masters, developing these type of networks, to include people so that they have a voice and to include opportunities for individuals to grow. You know, we convene people as chambers to solve problems, whether it’s public safety, or wetek. We talked about a minute ago, floods and community disasters, we bring people together for their expertise. But we also as chambers convene people to help educate them to help them grow. We have small business networks, which is a diverse individual group, we have young professionals and women’s networks and veterans groups. All of those address diversity by a DDI program just brings it all together. And understanding you know, because I think when I when I first got into this, and it’s only been a couple of years from the Billings chamber, so we’re in our infancy. But diversity doesn’t mean a person’s skin color alone. And I think that’s where we often go, you know, I’ve never personally been a female, I’ve never been in a wheelchair, I’ve never been a person of color. I’m not gay. I am, who I am. And I’ve got my political leanings and my religious beliefs. And we’re all so unique that for us and for our organization, what it means for us as the why and what we need to accomplish is to have a better understanding of others to meet them where they are, to help them feel a sense of belonging so people can bring their authentic and best selves to work. And so that companies can have the tool that they need to build a strong workforce. As I mentioned, your retention and recruitment is just so important. And I think many of the chambers that will be listening, but also the tourism economy. For us, we have about $625 million in visitor spending and direct visitor spending over 625 million. And over the last several years, our call center started getting questions in regards to I’m a person of color, am I safe? I’m a person in the LGBTQ plus community do I belong? And so between the visitor economy and just working with our members to help build that, that sense of belonging in a workforce so that the companies can, you know, tout themselves legitimately as being a Quality place to work and help employees grow?

Brandon Burton 15:03
Absolutely, I think that’s so important, it just creating that that place of belonging no matter what the diversity is of the population, and like you said, you’ve never been a woman. But yeah, that sometimes that gets overlooked, you know that, you know, there are different segments of the population, whether it is gender, or I think race is where a lot of people go to and you think the bet, are you a veteran? Are you disabled? Are you you know, what are the different things and and more and more, it feels like there’s new labels being put upon people or that are people that are associated with with new labels and and groups that they need special attention, they need to be considered, especially as they enter

John Brewer 15:50
the workforce. And I want you know, everybody who works, you know, bringing it down to the micro level people that work at the Chamber, I want them to feel that regardless of their backstory, where they come from, challenges that they’ve had in their life, that they feel that we are a place where they can grow, and they are important and their voices heard. And, again, whether it’s a person of color, and in Billings, we are about 88%, white, we have a strong Native American population, we’re close to the Crow Reservation, as well as the Northern Cheyenne. And you know, their workforce right now. They’re at about 50% unemployment there. And they’ve got workforce and a college and we want to find ways to be better in billing, to help bridge that workforce gap to help grow, but they have a unique culture that, you know, some from I think that the white heritage might just see the native culture and say, you know, what, they don’t show up on time, they’re don’t work as hard. The work ethic is different. And it’s these issues where it is just different. And once you learn how to address those, boy, we’re missing out on some big opportunities. If we don’t and, you know, for us, it was to better understand what we didn’t know at the time, we surveyed our membership a lot and asked a lot of questions to help even determine whether this was something that we should be getting into. And we had about 78% of our members say, we have needs and there’s nobody leading in this space in Billings in a space, I mean, connecting business to Dei, and 78% of our members said we need to do this. Billings is friendly, you know, we’re a great community, we’re welcoming, but we’re not diverse, and simply not knowing how to address diversity. And like we just talked about the breadth of diversity. I was surprised kind of how hungry some of our members were for tools that could help them grow. Absolutely.

Brandon Burton 17:51
And, yeah, I feel like that’s one of the biggest challenges we have in our day is being able to be inclusive of all the diverse segments of the population and diversity, you know, division has that same root word of division, right? So in different segments of diversity, there comes a lot of strength, you know, as you can come together with, you know, whether it’s a women’s group or, you know, different races gather together, or its sexual orientations, there’s some strength coming together for that. But as society is as a whole, and as the workforce as a whole, it becomes very divisive, or it can be as we have all these different segments. So how do we incorporate everybody give them a place of belonging, make sure that they understand that it doesn’t matter, any of the subsets of the population you belong here, we want you to hear that. Yeah, say how have you have you guys approached that?

John Brewer 18:51
Well, we spent a lot of time again on the name when we talked about belonging, and we had all these nice acronyms and flowery words that we just decided that you know what we’re going to hit this head on, we’re going to have difficult conversations, and we’re going to be that place where people will feel comfortable coming with their tough questions, because like you say, dei and woke and all of these over politicized word, you know, it all boils down to, how are we helping our members and our employees feel like they belong. And we’ve developed a four part strategy for our dei work, and most recently launched a program called you belong and billing. With the end we launched at our annual meeting just a couple of months ago. The idea being that Montana and billing was ranked in the top three states and communities in the United States where people were moving to over the past couple of years. And we knew that brought a diversity of thought and diversity of political backgrounds, the diversity of color and so on. And we set out with this initiative to help an employer once they bring somebody in from another community, help them to onboard them to the community. So as an employer, we all have our onboarding programs, you hire somebody, you give them the one on one in the organization, they immerse in your culture at your organization. But we’ve found in our hearing, over time, so many of our large employers were losing people, because they couldn’t find their footing in our community. And for a variety of reasons. So as new people move here, we’ve got this community onboarding program, if you live at old Welcome Wagon feel you’ve just moved here? What should I see? And do where’s my theme, you know, where can I connect with things that interests me, whether it’s, you know, brew, trail walk, or arts and entertainment, the music scene. But more importantly, we felt it was a one on one human connection, so connecting them to other newbies that have just arrived in Billings, as well as community leader. So that this, you know, couple year ramp up time, I’m learning a new job and learning a lot of other stuff, buying a house, getting my cable connected all that stuff, we’re now going to deliberately help you find ways to get involved in the community getting involved in the chamber. And we think over time, we’re gonna be tracking that, and seeing what kind of retention rates employers are going to have, because there’ll be doing this onboarding, and then connecting to our leadership programs and connecting to elected official, and finding a way to get involved in our dei work if they choose. So that’s one very significant initiative that in its early phases, and we’re excited to see how it progresses.

Brandon Burton 21:34
Yeah. So and I like how you surveyed your members. And you said that you’re going about this, you know, when it boils down to what’s good for buildings, what’s good for your members. But really, there’s a huge outreach component of this to saying that you belong here, and you’re talking to people that are not Chamber members, that you’re talking to people that are not yet part of the community in some instances, but being inclusive and saying you belong, we have a place for you. But really focusing with your membership to create those places where they can belong and, and make them feel part of the community. So I’d like to, the focus is on billings in the members, they’re really that outreach component. I think this is so important.

John Brewer 22:17
In the outreach piece, one of our four core goals for dei mission was not only outreach so this one is relatively new, the outreach to outside of our borders. But within our membership, that continual dedication of space in our E News and other communications to dei content, celebrating Black History Month, and Martin Luther King Day, for example, and making sure that we’re able to provide kind of an upcoming calendar of here’s where we used to be set aside and set aside some dedicated time to to celebrate different populations. We launched a dei website, billing dei.com, and it has videos and to get books to read, and a downloadable toolkit that we actually partnered with it. Since they partnered we borrowed from the Phoenix Chamber of Commerce, they developed this amazing resource. We worked with them to tweak a little bit to be billing centric, redeveloped it launched it and provided contacts and information on this website that helps businesses with their onroad or their onramp. You know, I want to start with I don’t know where to begin. What step one, I’m just in the early phases of wanting to introduce belonging into our organization, or we’ve been doing this for years, and what’s next for that company. And so some of our early adopters that really helped get the brand and part of a successful initiative, like takes funding. And some of our early adopters that stepped up, were some of the names you heard of, you know, corporate, large, major corporations such as Exxon and Keio International, based here and billing. A number of financial institution came to us with significant financial support to help us develop the structure, build a website, hire an individual to spearhead this work. And that’s meeting that goal for us. But making this sustainable, this could not be a fad. That, you know, it’s the talk of the day, let’s get behind this because it’s new, and then it disappears. It has to be sustained. So we built this into the fabric of our organization, found the funding and are really happy with with that continued growth and the continued support partnership from our members. Yeah.

Brandon Burton 24:36
So is the majority of the, I guess information and training for members? Is it digitally based on the Billings to ei.com? Or do you have any in person kind of stuff? I know you had mentioned the community, you know, the community onboarding has a personal touch that as far as getting the members position Well to be inclusive and welcoming for everybody. And what does that look like?

John Brewer 25:05
Yeah, so one of the very first things we did, this is out of my comfort zone. And we started. So we brought together a steering committee that has now evolved to an advisory board of 15 individuals that bring different perspective. And we decided early on, we needed to launch that personal touch. So for four sessions, now, we’ve had a diversity, equity inclusion, and an implementation dei class that’s consisted of four workshops. And those go over a four month period. And they’re followed by four community roundtable discussions, and then network opportunity. So after those four months, people will go through that they go through a graduation ceremony, we celebrate them. And then they become kind of part of our alumni email chain now of keeping them communicated with on a high level. But that step was big. And then once a company has graduated, so many people through that program, they’re then designated as a Workplace of Choice, and they get some language, we’re working on another piece to that that would be more of an identity for them. But they’re able to utilize those resources and promoting their organization as a quality place to work. So that has meant over the last two years for us 150 graduate full classes almost every time, those 140 50 graduates represent just over 30 businesses that employ 16,000 people. And that was our goal was to reach the major employees to begin with employers to begin with, knowing that they would cast their net out to their employees. And our goal, starting last April, and moving forward now is to engage many more small businesses. And part of the funding that’s come in, through our sponsors has been dedicated to scholarships for those that can’t afford it.

Brandon Burton 27:03
And it’s great. That was one of the questions that we’re going to have is there’s some kind of certification they get afterwards as a company, and you got into the depth of that with those workshops and the ability to kind of workshop together and around table and stay as part of that alumni group, and build that strength throughout the community. And then thinking with these major employers, 16,000 people being affected, they’re not all going to stay at the same player forever. So they’re going to move around that training is going to go with them as well. So casting that net, you know, wide within these major employers, I think is so key. And it’s such a smart move. I wanted to see as we start wrapping up here for I know a lot of chambers have some sort of a D and AI initiative, but it’s gonna see if you have any tips or action items for chambers listening, who want to take their organization up to the next level, what what would you suggest for them?

John Brewer 28:04
Yeah, that’s a great question. And you know, whether it’s dei specific or otherwise, one of the things that after our one of our first dei workshops, the presenter, who we’ve engaged as our contracts service provider to lead these workshops, gave me a bottle of wine, and encouraged me to enjoy it with somebody who I don’t know who doesn’t look like me, think like me is different. And I just that stuck with me. And I’ve got that here on my desk as a constant reminder of, you know, we’re engaged with a lot of people as chambers, we have strong networks, but there’s so many groups and individuals out there that we don’t know. So I’ve carried that on. And we do gift cards for staff and gift cards for others in the past, and have handed them out and said, You know what, here’s here’s a card for your favorite brewery or a card for a coffee shop. only caveat is you got to go find somebody to enjoy it with who you don’t know. And that really helped us as we were, again, evolving our advisory board and bringing those unique places around the table. Because we just have such a propensity to go back to that comfort zone and say, Hey, I’m gonna go grab this person and that person because I know they get stuff done. And I have a comfort there. That really helps, I think, just think differently and put you in that uncomfortable zone of of growth.

Brandon Burton 29:28
Yeah, yeah, I love that tip. That’s a hopefully everybody’s making a quick note of that. To get out of your comfort zone. Go enjoy time and conversation and a beverage or some food, you know, with somebody who’s different than you. And there’s a lot to be learned by doing that. John, I’d 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?

John Brewer 29:59
Yeah, I think there’s, you know, wide open plate for us to be successful and incredibly impactful in our community. But it boils down to leadership. It involves, you know, the makeup of our boards of directors and the professional staff that we have membership leadership and engagement. But there are there are some incredible roadmaps out there and somewhat crystal ball that we all need to be paying attention to and, and watching as they are updated. And, and, you know, I look often towards work that was done several years ago to ACCE and the horizons initiative gave us great perspective on emerging demographics and political polarization. WAC II is an incredible resource for their three C’s evolution of chambers becoming catalysts, and champions and conveners. And, you know, if we look to those roadmap, but he said at the very beginning, all chambers are different. But there’s a certain kind of structure a solid foundation that makes us unique, and I think will continue to provide value and make us relevant and not only relevant but essential as we go forward in such a digital age that we still have that ability to bring people together, that can really impact our communities in substantive ways.

Brandon Burton 31:23
I love that answer. And you know, how spot on was the horizons report? Right? Yeah. Oh, my goodness. Yeah. So I’m glad you brought that up. And in going from relevant to essential, I gotta upload Casey Steinbacher book, you know, that same title, great book, and any, any chamber pros out there, I haven’t read it. It’s a Kindle version. So you got to download it, but it’s a great read. John, I wanted to give you an opportunity to share any contact information. So anyone listening who’d like to learn more about how you guys are doing things there and billings, specifically about you know, creating a place of belonging with the your business growth there. What would be the best ways to reach out and connect with you

John Brewer 32:10
always best to reach me via email and that’s john@billingschamber.com. Again, just perusing our website with our BillingsDEI.com. There’s some great resources and a wider breadth of contact information and then then our website at Billingschamber.com as well.

Brandon Burton 32:30
Right? Well, we’ll get all of that in our show notes for this episode. So if anybody is driving and couldn’t get in, jot those down, just check out the show notes and scroll all the way to the bottom, you’ll have all of John’s contact information there. But John, thank you for spending time with us today and sharing how you guys are creating that that place of belonging through business growth there and Billings and the example you guys are sending. I really appreciate it. Thank

John Brewer 32:55
you, Brandon means a lot. I appreciate that.

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Increasing Your Membership through Advocacy with Kate Bates

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

Our title sponsor is Holman Brothers Membership Sales Solutions. Let’s hear from Tony Felker, President and CEO of the Frisco Chamber to learn how the Holman Brothers have provided value for him.

Tony Felker 0:37
One of the key benefits that we’ve realized from Holman Brothers it’s actually happened many years after we started using them. We just completed our new strategic plan and understanding those subtle differences between transactional benefits and transformational benefits. The companies that knew what they expect has been a key part in our strategic plan. And we really want to thank Holman Brothers for that.

Brandon Burton 0:59
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Our guest for this episode is Kate Bates. Kate serves as president and CEO of The Arlington Chamber of Commerce in Virginia. Kate was appointed to this role in June of 2014. After an extensive national search, Kate began her tenure with the Chamber in 2007, serving in areas of increasing responsibility. Under her leadership, the Chamber increased their business advocacy efforts with notable state and local successes, as well as growing significantly in membership. Prior to joining the chamber, she worked for women in government and national nonpartisan association of women state legislators. Kate serves as chair of the Virginia Chamber of Commerce executives. She also serves on the Arlington Economic Development Commission, the Arlington Alexandria Workforce Investment Council, the Leadership Center for Excellence board of directors, and participates actively in a number of additional regional organizations. Kate was a 2014 recipient of the Outstanding Young Virginia Anna award from the Virginia Jaycees and was an inaugural honoree for the Leadership Center for Excellence 40 under 40. In 2017, she was named a Washington Business Journal 40 under 40 honoree in 2019. She was recognized by ACCE as a 40 under 40 honoree for significant contributions for community as well as the chamber industry. Kate is a graduate from the George Washington University with a BA in Political Science and International Affairs, as well as the US Chamber of Commerce Foundation’s IOM program. She is also a graduate of leadership Arlington and leadership Greater Washington, originally from small town, Illinois, Kate and her husband, Ronnie have made Arlington in their home. Kate, I’m excited to have you with us today on chamber chat podcast, I’d love for you to take a moment to say hello to all the chamber champions that are out there listening and then share something interesting about yourself so they can get to know you a little better.

Kate Bates 3:06
Thanks, Brandon. And it’s great to be here with you. Again, I love connecting with the Chamber industry and other chamber professionals. I think that’s one of the things that’s so great about our industry that you often see the surprise from people coming from other industries when they enter the chamber world is that we are one of the most supportive industries that everyone wants to share best practices and lift each other up. It’s really not a competitive industry. You know, if somebody’s coming from another chamber area, they have a great experience that’s only going to increase everything for our industry. So really happy to be here with you this morning. The fun fact questions always a tough one. But taking something that wasn’t in my bio that you read. I am a diehard Washington Capitals fan despite being from Illinois, I both my husband and I have fully adopted the caps as our team to the point where I several years before the caps won their Stanley Cup. Our wedding cake was actually made to look like the arena and had a tiny little Stanley Cup as our cake topper.

Brandon Burton 4:02
Wow. That is you guys are all in? Yeah, that is awesome. Yeah, no, I the the comments you made about the industry and being very supportive of each other. I was kind of surprised when I started the podcast about four years ago that there wasn’t a podcast out there already to share best practices and tips amongst other chamber professionals because it is, you know, so reciprocal, you know, amongst other colleagues. So thank you for pointing that out and sharing that, that fun fact about you. I’d love for you to take a moment to share with us a little bit about the Arlington chamber just give us an idea of perspective, you know, size, staff budget, scope of work, things like that, just to kind of set the table for our discussion. Absolutely. So

Kate Bates 4:46
the Arlington Chamber of Commerce is about 750 members, and our members really ranged in size from small startups, all the way up to large corporations like Amazon, Boeing and Nestle. And really every thing in between. So it’s really reflective of the business community here in Arlington. For anyone who doesn’t know Arlington, Virginia is located right outside Washington DC to the point where if you land at DCA airport, actually everything surrounding you is Arlington, I think they give the airport a DC address. But literally, as soon as you step one foot in any direction, off the airport, you are right in Arlington, so you know best known for the cemetery, probably. But there’s so much else going on in Arlington, it’s really a great place that has sort of a lot of those amenities that you get from being in an urban area, but has a lot of the benefits of you know, that placemaking that comes with other communities that are a little bit more on the small town space. Our chamber budget for 2023 is about 1.3 million. We have a full time staff of seven including myself and three part time members of our staff as well.

Brandon Burton 5:53
So yeah, this is kind of a unique, your chambers and a unique situation where a lot of the listeners have probably been to Arlington as they come visit the nation’s capitol where a lot of the chamber people that I interview are from all over the country and you know, maybe a small town Idaho or something maybe you haven’t been to but a lot of people have been been through Arlington so. So that definitely helps to set the perspective for our conversation today. And I kind of alluded to it as I went through your bio, but you’ve had an impact with advocacy there at the Arlington chamber and directly seeing an increase in membership tied back to the advocacy efforts that you guys are making. So we’ll be focusing our conversation today around increasing membership through advocacy. And we’ll dive into that a little bit deeper as soon as we get back from this quick break.

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All right, Kate, we’re back. Tell us kind of the origin I guess as you started there at Arlington chamber and kind of really boosted up the advocacy efforts. What did that look like? And at what point was the membership growth intentionally tied to it? Or how did you see that correlation and lean heavier into that?

Kate Bates 9:56
Great, so I’ll pick things up actually when I became CEO in 2004. tin again, I’d been at the Chamber for about seven years prior to that. But moving into the CEO role obviously presented some opportunities for me to be the one with the vision for the organization. So actually, in the interview process, I presented a new staff org chart. And it had two new full time roles. And the idea was to get there within five years, and we did very proud of that. But the first was a membership engagement role. So we had one membership person, and no matter how great that person was, as the chamber pros on the call, no, you know, it can be very hard. If you’re in charge of everything, recruitment and retention, you end up focusing on recruiting new members, and then also calling members when their dues are late. So that doesn’t leave a lot of time for taking care of your existing members unless they’re reaching out to you. So I knew that that was the role. I wanted to add first, chronologically, but equally important on this org chart I presented was a government affairs manager position, that, you know, I had some of that background from, you know, my education and my previous role prior to joining the chamber staff, but really saw that as the area, you know, where our chamber could grow and really be more relevant moving forward, we were in a great position, when I came in as CEO in 2014, you know, very strong organization, the good culture, a good foundation financials, in order are respected in the community. But I saw that opportunity for us to really lean into our mission more, and really have that impact for our Chamber members and our greater community as well. So I knew that it was important, I did, you know, however, kind of deliberately start with the engagement to get some more of the revenue to ultimately be able to add this role, which we were able to add in the fall of 2018. But really, you know, both in between that time, before we had the full government affairs professional, and even after, you know, it took a little bit for it to get going. But now we’re at the point where, you know, our government affairs person will not a salesperson at all, is absolutely instrumental to membership retention, and can be a really big asset for our membership team in terms of membership recruitment, as well.

Brandon Burton 12:05
So how does that work strategically, when you say they’re so impactful with membership, although they’re not salesperson? So do you have it time somehow, as they reach out to certain businesses as membership comes up? Or just because of the touch points along the way throughout the year? What does that interaction looking like to show the value that comes to the advocacy to those members to retain and to bring on new members? Sure, a minute. So

Kate Bates 12:31
I’m gonna bring that up a level first and talk a little bit more big picture. And then we can sort of sure dive into tactics a little bit more. So in terms of the advocacy broadly, you know, what we do falls into two bucket areas, you know, we do policy positions, and then we do member support. So policy positions are positions that the Chamber takes, you know, on behalf of the business community, there’s of course, a process that we go through to adopt those, you know, we did have a government affairs committee already in 2014, we grew that committee, and we added actually more meetings and now meets twice a month. So that group was working on that. And then policy positions are ultimately adopted by the Board of Directors, again, as chamber staff, you know, we we help them through this process, but they are the ones who are actually formally adopting the positions. So the value of those from a membership standpoint is, you know, it’s an opportunity for businesses to have a seat at the table on issues that they care about. So some chambers have their policy committees, application only are restricted, we do it a little bit differently, where ours are open to any member who wants to attend. So even if you know, if you have a company, if three people from your team care about an issue, they can come that day. And that is done. So you know, if we’re talking about child care regulations within the county, perhaps HR professionals will come to that meeting. If we’re talking about, you know, zoning in light industrial areas, we might get a different group of members. But we want whoever shows up to be the people who are impacted by those issues as well to make really good policy positions. But that also serves the benefit of having our policy work be beneficial to an even wider range of members. So we’re doing that broad work. But then we also do what we call member support. And that’s where we do the individual work and advocacy on behalf of businesses who are having issues typically at the local level. Virginia has what’s known as a Dillon rule state so that means that any authority not given to missa palette is stays with the Commonwealth. So we probably do about 20% ish of our work at the General Assembly level. But really, the bulk of it is at the local level and Arlington’s a county, not a city with no cities within it. So you might hear me refer to the county board for other folks that might be their city council or, you know, similar bodies there. But that member support can look like anything from you know, a business is having issues getting a signage process, getting their sign put up on their building, and they’re getting buried in County red tape, and we’re able to reach out and make those connections for them, and help them get their problem solved, or very least get it expedited and get to the right people. And what we often talk about is if you can solve one of those individual issues like that, you’ll often have a member for life.

Brandon Burton 15:13
Absolutely. So yeah, I think that really helps to break it down into what those two buckets look like. So let’s circle back with the on the policy side with the the committee meetings that you have there. So as you said, that’s open to any members who want to come, are you just broadcasting that through email? Or you’ve got your your regular set dates twice a month? And just an open invitation? And how do you moderate, that goes?

Kate Bates 15:45
Absolutely. So we they are open to all members, we do members can opt to sign up for the distribution list. So then you get the full information on a week out of who the speaker is going to be. It is a set date and time so you can mark your calendars with them. We do also for the bigger and more popular topics, we will also include an article about it in our regular E newsletter. So if you’re a member who isn’t already on that distribution list, and you’re interested in attending, there’s a way to do that. So early on, when we really beefed up our advocacy program, we separated them out. And we would usually have one that was more speaker focused, and one that was more working session focused. We’ve shifted and really most of them meetings at this point other than where we’re drafting our annual positions. Do you all have a speaker so often, you know, we set the agenda with our government affairs leadership, or our two committee chairs. And then we have a representative on our executive committee, who’s our vice chair for business advocacy. And our staff will work with them. And we set the agenda for the year, we always leave blanks because there’s always things that come up, and we want to have those spaces. But for example, we always start in January, we already had our first meeting with the county board chair. So the county board chair comes and gives, you know, probably about a 15 to 20 minute, talk about you know what’s going on for the year, especially what pertains to business. And then we open it up and do a moderated q&a. So this committee actually used to be in person pre COVID, when virtual during the pandemic was actually our first meeting to go virtual, we pulled that off quite quickly. And then we’ve actually kept other than, you know, a few special meetings, often our work sessions are better in person. But we’ve kept the bulk of those meetings virtually, because we’ve found that really that moderation is even easier to do on the Zoom than it is in person. We also have some members who you know, the commutes in these areas can be a little tough, there can be some bad traffic around and we’ve got not all of our members live or even work in Arlington. So having the Zoom really makes it more accessible for people as well.

Brandon Burton 17:42
I love that you pointed out that it has been done over zoom, because that was going to be a question as as it’s open to any chamber member, how do you have a room big enough to accommodate anybody that wanted to come, especially some of those hot topics come up? So glad to see that you’re still utilizing zoom and being effective with it and not just having the Zoom burnout?

Kate Bates 18:03
Yeah, the networking again, we we listened to our members, and it was very, very clear that the networking events, you know, we made it work virtually when we had to when things were really shut down. But no people want to physically be together for the networking. But for some more of the the meetings tend to work well virtually for us.

Brandon Burton 18:21
So this policy meetings, are they being operated by a chamber staff? Are you running that? Or is it a somebody from the government affairs that runs that? How does that? How does that work?

Kate Bates 18:32
So a mix between the two, so each of our chamber committees has a staff liaison. So again, prior to us, that is our government affairs manager. Now prior to us having a government affairs professional, I was doing that, you know, so I was the primary staff liaison, and then ultimately tapped one of our other team members to help with just some of the administrative when we’re in person, the sign in sheet and that sort of thing. But we do have a staff member for it, who’s often opening and doing more of the logistics of things. And then we also do have our co chairs who are kind of more of the public face for a lot of these things. So they’re the ones who are giving the welcome. We’re introducing the speaker with support from our staff.

Brandon Burton 19:10
Awesome. So maybe shifting gears a little bit, then over to the membership support side. So I assume your government affairs position that you’ve hired for is engaging with the members to find out what their needs are there. What what is that? How does those How did those interactions work? As far as engaging with the members? Is it reaching out to them as a waiting? You know, are there enough people coming to you with issues? Is it what, how does that direction work?

Kate Bates 19:39
Great question. So that’s really where the integration with the rest of the team and the membership team in particular comes into play. So you know, we always put you know, information, all of our newsletters, we have you know, in our print newsletter, which we still do occasionally you know, now we’re down to quarterly on that. And when we do the advocacy section, we add information that if you’re having any policy issues, please reach out Our government affairs manager, John musoni, has contact information. So we do have some of those static things. And you know, we do often when we onboard our new members, we make sure that they know about John as a resource, but really a lot of the specific ones. So some of the members who’ve been around for a while will know or who read, you know, their newsletters will reach out. But often, you know, it’s our membership team. And we have two full time and now one part time membership professionals as well, that when they’re talking with our members, and just the regular interactions, if they hear anything, then they make the connection there to our government affairs manager. So that’s how a lot of that happens.

Brandon Burton 20:34
I could see where there may be some bleed over with different positions with among chamber staff, where, you know, not everybody is a membership person, but at the same time, if somebody wants, you know, inquires about membership, you’re not going to say, well, I can’t tell you anything, right? You’re going to, you’re going to help them where you can and then make that transition. So is there specific training that you do for different staffers, it just kind of learning on the job and just kind of learning the different vernacular and what those important topics are to address members?

Kate Bates 21:06
Yeah, I mean, we’re all in the membership business, no, anybody’s in the chamber business is in the membership business, we like to say, in terms of, you know, training for membership and Government Affairs sort of working together there. A lot of it. So whenever we onboard any new full time team member, a big important part of that onboarding process, is they meet with each other team member, or sometimes by department. So we’ll meet with the membership team together and talk about how they work together. And what that looks like, will often also have, you know, especially for the government affairs, roll, them just sort of sit in on a membership meeting once or twice, we also have all new staff members go to our chamber one to one, so that they hear how we’re messaging membership to new and prospective members. But a lot of that integration to with the selling, you know, so our government affairs manager, you know, if he’s looking through a county board agenda, and that’s kind of a pro tip for any of the chamber professionals, if anybody is trying to figure out, you know, they’re not sure where to engage, look at your local government agendas, and just start reviewing them and see what topics are applicable to businesses. So there may be broad topics coming up, or there may be individual businesses that have business going before that your government body. So when that happens, you know, our government affairs manager will if it’s a member, reach out to them, if he hasn’t heard from them already, and ask them, you know, how are things going? Is there anything we can do to support you in this, you know, if they’re hearing that they’re having some problems, or they’re not sure how the vote is going to do, that’s where we would engage more, if it’s a prospective member, if they’ve got a bigger item coming before our county board, then that’s when, you know, our government affairs manager and our senior director of membership will talk together, they actually have regular meetings together and figure out a strategy, you know, who it makes sense to reach out to the prospective member and offer support from there.

Brandon Burton 22:54
So, as you have these two advocacy buckets, do you see pretty well split 5050? As far as getting feedback from members, and where the value where they perceive the value to be? I guess, because I see the value there being very, pretty equal. But the perceived value, I guess, from members, does it seem to be pretty evenly split? Or do you see one way or the other having more perceived value and impact on your membership?

Kate Bates 23:23
So that’s hard to say, again, there’s certainly more of the policy position work, and that will impact more members. But the member support will impact the business more deeply, if that makes sense. So if you’re one of those individual businesses, that’s where you will never forget, you know, I mean, I was at a just out to dinner with my husband on Friday night at a local restaurant. And the owner came by and was talking about some of the challenges he’s having and some of the new ones that he had just brought to our government affairs managers attention the day before, but just talking about some of the other work and really talking about how he saves so much by not having to call his attorney for every single question about the county, because he has us as this resource. And you know, that is a member that I would be shocked if that renewal ever doesn’t come in for us, just because he has felt that value so strongly if chamber membership. But the policy position work is also incredibly important. Because again, you know, for larger businesses, it gives them a place to engage. And for the smaller businesses, they don’t have the capacity to have somebody looking at all of these things on their behalf. And a lot of it can be playing defense as well. You know, there’s a lot of other, you know, advocacy groups, we have a very active community, which is a wonderful thing. There’s something known as the Arlington way, we’re really anything that’s going to happen as to go through a big process with lots of community input. And if nobody is watching those things, from a business perspective, a lot of things can happen with unintended consequences for business. So especially, you know, for those reasons, really the policy positions are broadly probably, I’m using air quotes that our listeners can’t see but more important, but Can the member support is more impactful to those who are directly impacted?

Brandon Burton 25:04
Right. And I know sometimes the policy stuff is a little harder to communicate the value to members like, once they see something really happened, some real traction happens. And they’re like, Oh, we’re so grateful our chambers doing this. But a lot of the work kind of happens behind the scenes, in a lot of cases, maybe not with the large companies and things like that, that are able to engage in different level. But I can definitely see, you know, where we’re at each has a place. I guess the basis of that question is where I was thinking, maybe for the smaller chamber out there one or two staff, but they want to get involved more in advocacy, like, where should they start?

Kate Bates 25:41
So, Senator, it depends on what their starting point is, I mean, at minimum, setting up, a government affairs committee is a good place to start. And maybe your committee doesn’t have to meet, you know, twice a month, or even once a month, maybe it could be quarterly, that could be a great starting point for people, and really that convening power, you know, two of the things we haven’t talked about so far are convening and access. You know, even if it’s not your chamber, doing the advocacy work, providing the space to connect your businesses with the elected officials, is hugely valuable, and making your chamber that central place where businesses can come to and connect with the elected officials, and equally important with the county staff, so or city staff, or whatever your configuration is within your local government. But you know, both the people who are the official leaders, but then there’s also often the, you know, the people who really get things done within the county or city government. For businesses, that might be a specific role. But it might not be it might be somebody in a role that you might not think but you realize that any issue you’re bringing forward, they’re the ones solving, you know, and providing that access to your members is a huge benefit. That doesn’t have to be a huge left.

Brandon Burton 26:54
Absolutely. So and I love the pro tip that you gave of looking at the your, your county or your Government Board agendas to see what those hot topics are that are coming up to be able to stay engaged with what matters to the businesses in your community. As we start looking to wrap up here, I wanted to see if you have any other tips or action items for listeners that maybe they want to take their chamber up to the next level, maybe they want to get more engaged with advocacy, what what would you suggest for a tip for them.

Kate Bates 27:25
So I love the one takeaway idea. And whenever I give presentations, I always ask people at the end to try to take one thing especially we’ve thrown a lot of information at them. For this topic, it’s really hard to make it one takeaway that works for every chamber, not knowing where every one starting point is. So if you’re newer to this space, I would offer you know monitoring what your local government is doing. And looking at those agendas for items that impact business and pick one to weigh in on you don’t have to start if you’re brand new to this and feel like you need to make an impact on every single thing. Just pick one there. Another option would be hosting a session with your membership could be virtual or in person with a local official or a top staff person. Again, it doesn’t need to be too much work on that agenda if you’re just asking them to come in, talk about what’s relevant to businesses, and then give a forum for your members to have that back and forth interaction with them. If you’ve been in this space for a while, at action items could range from finding a new way to communicate your work, whether that’s an advocacy, specific communication or newsletter, or maybe doing a better job of integrating your advocacy work and wins into your regular newsletters and communications. It could also be doing some relationship maintenance with your local elected officials or local government staff. And if your team is big enough that you do have a separate person or people handling government affairs and membership, an action item could be to encourage them to meet and see how they can work together more and how that government affairs person can support the membership efforts.

Brandon Burton 28:55
I hope everybody had a pen and paper ready to just write it or you can back up on the podcast 30 seconds, 60 seconds and write those down again, because those are some great tips. I also been a fan of podcasting for chambers that do have a podcast, I think being able to share your advocacy efforts through your podcasts, having a little advocacy moment or segment in each episode I think would be very helpful just to help spread the work that you’re doing. And because a lot of that is behind the scenes, and they don’t really know that you’re doing it unless you say something about it. So Kay, I like asking everyone that I have on the show about how do you see the future of chambers and their purpose going forward?

Kate Bates 29:38
So I love that question. And we’re at an interesting reflection point right now for our chamber because next year, we actually turn 100 years old. So I was recently asked a similar question about as our chamber hits the 100 year anniversary. What do I think that you know, our founders would think about how things look now, and I think the two questions really come connect together. So you know, I think the why remains constant. But the how of what we do obviously looks quite different than anyone could have envisioned 100 years ago. And really looking forward at our industry more broadly, as long as the Chamber’s focused on the needs of our members and how to evolve the suit those, there will absolutely be an essential place for chambers. I think that the pandemic really showcased how vital chambers can be to the businesses within their community. We were again, a little short on time, so didn’t even dive into this. There’s so many different facets, but really a subset of the advocacy is being that resource for information for your members. And chambers really shone so brightly in this area during the pandemic, as new regulations were coming out and small businesses didn’t have the resources to keep up on their own. Now, we repurposed our government affairs professional, who was still advocating, but also to discern that information and distill it in a way that could be understood by the businesses so that they knew everything that what they could and couldn’t do and where to go for all the information as well. So that’s an example of the evolving, but you know, I think, absolutely, there’s a place a strong place for chambers, as long as we continue to look to our members, and see how they’re adapting and make the Adapt adaptations to help them moving forward.

Brandon Burton 31:16
Absolutely, man, when you gave that responsive, you know, the question you were asked about, you know, 100 years looking back, you’re kind of reflective of your chamber. Think 100 years ago, 1923. You know, we’re

Kate Bates 31:29
24, so we get out

Brandon Burton 31:31
there, yeah, so but the world has changed a ton, you know, in in those 99 200 years, and even looking forward, like, we have no idea what its gonna look like 100 years from now, and, but you know, if we can go one day at a time, one year at a time, maybe five years and look into the future and, and see what’s important to your members, see what’s important to your community to business, keep them strong and thriving. That’s what we’re all about. So thank you for that. For that perspective there. I want to give you an opportunity to share any contact information for you as well, like you mentioned, we were a little bit short on time as they’re going through this, we could talk for probably an hour and a half I bet on on advocacy. But if anyone wanted to reach out and connect with you and learn more about how you guys are doing things, they’re in Arlington, what would be the best way for someone to reach out and connect.

Kate Bates 32:20
So I can be reached by email at president@arlingtonchamber.org, or I’m also on LinkedIn as well and can be found there.

Brandon Burton 32:27
It’s all right. And I will have those in our show notes for this episode as well. So if anybody’s not familiar, you can just hit your little notes, show notes on your your podcast player, and then it’ll have a link to actually the page on my website that has the full show notes and transcription. So we’ll have it there. But Kate, thank you for joining us today on chamber chat podcast. And he provided a lot of value and perspective and would encourage anyone listening to reach out and connect with Kate to learn more about advocacy and how that can help impact your membership as well. Okay, thank you very much.

Kate Bates 33:03
Thank you so much, Brandon. It’s really been a pleasure.

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Merging Organizations for a Stronger Community with Kim Casko

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

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

Matt Morrow 0:39
Holman Brothers provide a great training for our sales team in terms of just outstanding sales techniques. But maybe even more importantly than that, they were able to provide us with a system a process that was repeatable and in that we’re able to see very clearly from one month to the next how the how the pipeline is doing, what prospects are in it, what kind of progress we’re making and what we can do to coach people to success.

Brandon Burton 1:01
You can learn more about Holman Brothers Membership Sales Solutions by visiting holmanbros.com.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Brandon Burton 35:28
your chamber of commerce chambers.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Culture with Miles Burdine

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

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

Kris Johnson 0:41
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Our guest for this episode is Mile Burdine. Miles is a native of Kingsport, Tennessee, and he’s been with the Kingsport Tennessee Area Chamber since 1994 and was promoted to his present position of president and CEO in 1999 Miles other career was with the United States Marine Corps. After graduating from University of Tennessee with a degree in business administration, he served on active duty for seven years before resigning and his commission and joining the Marine Reserves after having served 30 years and now retired at the rank of colonel Miles has extensive training and experience in war fighting tactics, terrorism, security, civil affairs, and the challenges faced in the Middle East. Three of his deployments have been to combat environments in Beirut, Lebanon and 1883, Operation Desert Storm in Saudi Arabia and 91. And Operation Iraqi Freedom in Iraq in 2005. And 2006. Miles and his wife, Denise have three daughters and three granddaughters. Myles, thank you for your service, first of all, and welcome to Chamber Chat Podcast. We’re excited to have you with us today. And we’d love for you to say hello to all the Chamber Champions and share something interesting about yourself so you can get to know you a little better.

Miles Burdine 2:51
Well, I’m Brandon, thanks for the opportunity first and yes, good morning to all the chamber staffers out there and chamber world and has really don’t really have much interesting about me, except perhaps of all three of my daughters named Laura and I’ve got two tattoos and locations that only people I want to see them can see them.

That’s about the only interesting thing about me. I’m not sure that’s even interesting.

Brandon Burton 3:17
Yeah, that’s good. That’s good. Well, tell us a little bit about the Kingsport area Chamber just to give us some perspective, maybe the size of the chamber type of work, you’re involved with staff budget, that sort of thing. Just to give some perspective, before we get into our conference.

Miles Burdine 3:34
We’re we’re relatively small community, there’s only about 55,000 in our community, but you go outside the city limits, of course, it grows significantly, but our chamber represents probably around 900 Different businesses or organizations. We’ve got a staff of 30 budget of 4.7 million and but I’ll add to that there’s about 31 million that actually managed by our, our accounting department, when you had other programs and projects and things that were involved in it within the community. And our list of programs, projects, events, things going on this building is quite long. We’re involved in the typical things that you might expect to chamber be involved in membership, of course, workforce development, government relations, or visit Kingsport program, small business development, sustainability, a healthy Kingscourt program list goes on and on and on. Things that go on inside the walls of this, this building.

Brandon Burton 4:41
Yeah, you’ve got your work cut out for you, you and your staff.

Miles Burdine 4:46
Pretty much. But you know, I look forward to coming to work every day. 28 years, I still look forward to coming in every day. Good.

Brandon Burton 4:53
And I think a lot of that will have to do with our topic for discussion today around the culture that you guys have built They’re at the Kingsport area Chamber and we’ll we’ll dive into that discussion a little bit deeper since we get back from this quick break.

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So Miles we’re back. And as we get into our topic for discussion today, culture is it’s an important thing at any company and especially at a chamber where maybe we don’t always have the you know, all the resources to be you know, super competitive on pay or, you know, things like that. So getting a little bit creative with the with how the office works, how the culture, the teamwork, how that all fits in and being able to attract and keep the right talent in your organization. We’d love to learn more about what you guys are doing there in Kingsport to develop the culture at your chamber.

Miles Burdine 8:33
Well, very well said, Brandon, we’re very proud of the culture we’ve created here. No, it’s been said the culture culture, Trump’s strategy, but part of our strategy is our culture. And I went back and look to see how many employees we’ve had. We have our 30 employees. About a third of them have been here over 15 years. Wow. I’m very proud of that. Now, along with that, however, some of the younger ones that we hire, we know that in fact, this morning, I did an exit interview for 28 year old, it’s found a better opportunity where he can make a lot more money and he has met not that he need my blessing, but he has my blessing. So I’m excited for him. But you know that the younger ones we are unable to keep as long as we’d like. And that’s just simply because We can’t pay them as much as they can make out in the private sector. But they they always come to me Xander view and we talked about why they’re leaving. And they’re always very, very favorable comments about working here. And that goes back when when we get ready to hire someone. They’ve already already been through an interview process with whoever is going to be their supervisor, but by the time they get to me they’ve already learned the things I’m I’m gonna tell you right now and that is you get a free job interview every day and this is this business because you’re around volunteers that can possibly offer you a better option. Anybody and encourage them to seek those opportunities to. And if you decide to pursue them, I’ll help you find another job a better paying job. But our culture is one of when I’m when I meet with them, and they’ve already learned this, but I’m looking for someone who they are I know they already have the skills, but I’m looking for someone who has the attitude. As someone who doesn’t step over piece by piece of trash, they pick up the piece of trash, and they show up to meetings early. So they can help set up and then they leave the meeting later so they can help put the room back to where it was. I’m looking for positive attitudes, as my father used to say, I’m an optimist, because I choose to be. And I tell them, what’s your dash to make a difference? Have you ever read the book the dash? Yeah, so you know exactly what to study. Right. Exactly. Right. So

Brandon Burton 10:54
and they usually don’t know birth and death for those listening, right?

Miles Burdine 10:58
Yeah, that’s correct. That’s correct. Yeah. And so but the dash is what’s most important part of its of your tombstone, if you will. And I’ll always give them the military analogy is the Marine Corps approach was and approach still here is, I want you to take that hill. And we’ll give you all the weapons ammunition and Chow you need in order to do so to get halfway up and you run out of bullets, let me know I’ll bring them to you. But I’ll leave you alone when you get to the top of the hill, holler. And we’ll drink a bill beer and celebrate. So giving them what they need in order to be successful, but holding them accountable to being successful as well. Okay, thank you. And, you know, a couple of the things that I’m really proud of our titles here. We always believe that people don’t follow titles, they follow courage. In fact, that’s my, my challenge coin those very words. But we don’t use administrative assistants, we only have the word assistants and they have our titles we use ministry professionals, the lady at the front desk is not a receptionist, she’s director of first impressions. We’d like to say we work with we don’t work for we all work for each other. And we don’t care who gets the credit. We do expect supervisors to take the blame for things that go wrong. And our our motto here is never above you, never below you always beside you. And it’s worked well. For us. It’s worked well for us. We’ve also got some staff committees that are set up and they’re led, usually by a younger staff members give them opportunity to lead when called fluff and puff. And that’s all they do is put on parties, gatherings, showers and puff I like lots of puff, I don’t know who came up with that. It’s certainly not something I came up with. But, you know, things that we can do that to get the staff together to have fun fact our Christmas party was supposed to be today, we had to postpone it to next week, because we’ve got so many people out sick this week that we have professional development committee and various other internal committees that give opportunities for everybody to participate in leading this organization. We encourage everybody to volunteer, I mean, we expect our volunteers to be here to volunteer for us. So we expect our staff to volunteer as well. And they, they certainly enjoy it. We have a policy here called Bring Your Baby to Work. We actually had some research done on it. And obviously it was done by someone who was about to have a baby, right? And came back and said, Here’s how we can do this. So we allow new mothers to bring the baby into work. And we’ve even got a room set up where they can breastfeed it, the only problem we ever have is people arguing about who gets to hold the baby. Right?

Brandon Burton 13:59
They can become distractions at times but good team building too. So that’s good.

Miles Burdine 14:04
We’ve also got a policy here called leave loudly. My My office is actually in the back corner next to the employee interests. And so we encourage employees not to try to sneak off to go to a soccer match or go watch a Christmas show or whatever with the kids. So they’ll stand outside my door here holler. I’m leaving, because I’m gonna go watch my son, practice basketball. And we celebrate love it. I know they’ll get the job done and I don’t care when they get the job done. So, yeah.

Brandon Burton 14:40
So you’re hitting on a ton of great points here. And yeah, I think some of these are definitely worth circling back to so one of the the thoughts that came to me as you were talking about as you hire people, that, you know, how do you hire culture versus developing culture? Then any thoughts on that?

Miles Burdine 15:03
Hiring culture. You know, finding the right people is finding people with the skills is not difficult. But finding people who match your culture sometimes can do. But typically, we as a as an organization, and me individually, I keep a list of people I see out in our community, whether it’s a server, who’s done a great job has, in fact, we hired a server like that one time and one of our community, our staff parties, and I just liked the way that person handled themselves and how hard they worked and ended up eventually calling them in and gave him an interview and hired. Um, so I guess the moral to that is you just never know who’s watching. That’s right. And who, you know, one of the things we like to be proud of here, too, is like to tell her what to do you know what the custodians name is? And they wonder what I vote yes, that is the colder you are no unimportant people. No unimportant task. In fact, I give a leadership presentation. It’s called scrubbing toilets with enthusiasm. It’s, it’s about learning how to follow from people you’re supposed to be leading and speak about. Daughter, I’m supposed to be leading her. But she taught me some great lessons in life and Lance Corporal in the Marine Corps, third Lord, third, lowest rank in the Marine Corps, my dog, people you’re supposed to be leading, influencing and teaching and so they do the same to you. And often, I get asked, you know, what did you learn in the Marine Corps, and it’s helped you in your job, and it certainly wasn’t learning how to say an Arabic Stop, or I’ll shoot that hasn’t helped me at all. But you know, the Marine Corps taught me some very, very valuable lessons most one of which is learning how to follow before you learn how to lead that first one, and first one out. Last one to eat, you don’t get to eat if there’s not enough, and probably the most important that wasn’t absolutely successful. And this is bringing everyone home safe. But all of those things are important lessons to be learned that have helped me in my career as Kingsport chamber.

Brandon Burton 17:27
Now, those are, again, you’ve got, you’ve got a lot of these great one liners that you can really dive deep on and it really digest more meaning in that so you know, the idea of having no one important people, I’d love to learn to follow before leading and never above or below, but always beside you. So these are are things that are obviously are being taught there at your chamber. So through the onboarding, are you introducing some of this culture? Is it just being engrossed with the the nature there in the office? Or how are you helping to teach and develop the culture?

Miles Burdine 18:11
It’s a little bit of both, but typically, it’s someone who’s already aware of us. And they want to be a part of us. Not always, but often. And so they they know our culture, and they know what they’re getting into when they get here. And so they know what the expectations are. And, frankly, they want to be a part of it. So we don’t have to actually make them do it. I mean, it’s, it’s kind of, you know, just like in the Marine Corps here. If I tell someone to do it, they’re gonna do it. But I don’t want them to do it, because they want to do it. Because I told him to do it. And there’s a big difference.

Brandon Burton 18:49
So you know, the idea of like, the the titles and never having a job that’s above or below you, always beside it. Have you ever had as a staff member, that you had to have a conversation with a heart to heart, so to speak and say, Look, we’re all one team together, and we all have an important role to play, but you’re no important, no more important than anyone else. And

Miles Burdine 19:13
I need to step we know that yes. And actually did not follow my own advice, one particular occasion and that was when someone came to me and said, Why did not get why did I not get that promotion? And I said, I owe you an apology. And the reaction was, oh, yeah, you do owe me an apology. But I said, I’m not gonna apologize to you for not giving you the job, not apologize to you for not telling you what you need to do get to get the job. And it was one of those things I’d avoided and did not pull the person aside and tell them what they were doing wrong. Tell them to adjust their attitude. Tell them to quit being an eight to five or tell them to quit using all their sick days when I knew they weren’t sick. Tell them to help pick up trash. Tell them to show up from eight meetings early. I didn’t do any of that. And so therefore, all those things I just said they were doing. And so I apologize them for not leading them not teaching them what they needed to do is my fault. And I didn’t do it until they came to talk to me now to that person’s credit. They’re still in our community. And when I see them, they always come up and say, hey, yeah, I got to the meeting 10 minutes earlier today, or help pick up trash or I know the custodians name, whatever. So they learned, yeah, just unfortunately, that had not led them before.

Brandon Burton 20:37
So it’s never too late to learn those lessons, I guess. But I also I think the way that you went about owning that and saying I owe you the apology, and, and really reinforcing what that culture is, the things that you’re looking for, that are important to growing and developing, or developing a team that has that cohesiveness and ability to work well together. Thank you a great example. So I like to think of the the chambers out there who were, you know, wanting to take their chamber up to the next level, what maybe tips or action items might you have for them that are maybe looking to instill more culture or more of a defined culture into their organization?

Miles Burdine 21:27
I thought a lot about that when he asked me earlier, and really the only thing I could come up with is very simple. Put your employees first makes you looking at a book saying okay, this pile of books, some have read some, some I haven’t it’s the title is put your employees first, your employees or work harder for you. There’ll be more loyal. They’ll do things you want them to do if you put them first. And really rather simple. And the other thing I thought about sometimes we as chamber, employees, chamber execs, especially wonder whether or not we’re making a difference, whether or not we’re in the right industry, whether or not we’re improving our community, providing better live better lives for our citizens or developing our businesses. And, you know, I’ve had that feeling before too. And what I will usually do is go find someone who’s recently moved to our community, and asked him, Why did you move here. And boy, it just makes me feel so good. Because they tell you the things that we’ve all taken for granted. While this is a wonderful place to live, and it’s there in every community, so I feel better once I talk to them.

Brandon Burton 22:38
And that’s a yeah, you can feel better, especially if they mentioned things that you’ve been working on focusing on to further develop your community. But I think that also gives you some great material to go forward with whether, you know, I’ve heard that some of the best marketing material for a company or say, even for a chamber to help spread the message of what the work that you’re doing, is to use the language of the people that you’re trying to serve. So as you go to those new people and ask them what made you move to our community, and you can take that language, you know, what is it that that drove them to come to Kingsport and then to be able to repurpose that put that back out in the community. So you’re you’re speaking that same language to other people who may be looking for that fit to you know, in a future move or whatnot. So

Miles Burdine 23:30
well said we actually, you know, one of our networking breakfast called fourth Friday breakfast, which we copied off the Bristol chamber, which is the first Friday breakfast. Okay, we’re good at stealing from each other anyway. We started a part of the the event, it’s a networking event, but we also have a presentation that will have little segments and we have one on there called fresh set of eyes. And it’s a newcomer to the community who stands up and talks for three minutes why they chose to live in Kingsport, Tennessee. And you can see the people in the audience who’ve been here forever. Look it up going, Man, I forgot about that. I feel good about where I live.

Brandon Burton 24:12
That is awesome, fresh set of eyes. So it’s anyone listening doing your r&d right now? That’s a good one right there a fresh set of eyes, you know, it’s at a luncheon or whatever it may be set aside a few minutes and have a newcomer to the community share what they love about the community went through them there. That is a that is awesome. I love that one.

Miles Burdine 24:34
I guess Brandon, the only other thing I might suggest is, you know, no community is perfect. We certainly are not. But one of our attitudes here is we we seek the problems to help solve them. We may not be leading the solution, but we’ll always be at the table. You know that old saying around chamber world if you’re not at the table, you might be on the menu. There’s a lot of truth to that. We’d like to be at the table because we feel like that chamber, that chamber brand helps us to get people around the table who can solve community problems. And we want to be at the table, we may not be the only solution, but we can certainly help to solve community problems. So don’t run from them seek them out.

Brandon Burton 25:22
Absolutely. In the chamber world is one of the few examples I can think of seek out problems to solve. So that’s awesome. Well, Miles as we look to the future, how do you see the future of chambers of commerce and their purpose going forward?

Miles Burdine 25:42
I think it depends on the community, but our brand, that word Chamber of those words Chamber of Commerce, it carries a lot of weight, cares, a lot of Worcester, last is Arabic for influence. So it’s up to us to as chamber execs to just how much influence we can have. And that’s dependent depends on the individuals who are within the organization itself. You know, volunteers come and go. And we obviously we need to support them and promote them and give them all the credit. But the important work most important works done by the staff. And it’s up to us to, to keep carrying that water forward. I think our brand is one that that gives us the opportunity to help improve the lives of others and businesses and community in general.

Brandon Burton 26:43
I love that. And when you talk about influence, I thought of a Casey Steinbacher is ebook from relevant to essential and she talks all about the importance of chambers, understanding their role in their community to be influencers. Then she talks about the you know, the 16 year old with the cell phone in their bedroom that has a social media following of millions of people and making a very healthy income by being an influencer. And she really talks about that that’s, that’s what Chambers of Commerce needs to be as a force for influence within the community. Identifying those needs, solving those problems and, and being influential. And I thought I had an idea when you were talking about that, talking about fresh set of eyes, this would be a great idea for a chamber to do a podcast, where they focus and you can call it fresh set of eyes and bring on those those newcomers to the community and tell why they came in and can be a short three to five minutes segment. And boom, you’ve got a way to influence your community and share those stories

Miles Burdine 27:51
is a great idea. I’m gonna go talk to Vanessa Bennett. She runs our leadership programs. And she does a podcast every week. But it’s usually focused on just people in general, talking about the things that they’re working on. But I hadn’t thought about doing what you just described, is a great idea.

Brandon Burton 28:09
Yeah. When she puts it out there, I’ll help share. So. Yeah. So Miles, this has been a fantastic conversation. I think it’s so important for chambers to be mindful and be intentional about the culture that they’re creating in their organization to be able to attract the right people as they hire, but also to retain those people. You know, like, as he said, about a third of them, would you say a third of your staff had been there? 15 years? Is that right? Yes. Yeah, that is awesome. I mean, you just don’t see that in companies anymore, let alone in the chamber world. So

Miles Burdine 28:47
no one’s been here. 36 years. Another one just retired this past summer, after 34 years.

Brandon Burton 28:54
That’s awesome. Yeah. And of course, you know, there’s going to be those times that makes sense where a staff member finds it another opportunity that helps to develop their career and you celebrate those and you hate to see him leave, you know, for selfish reasons. But you are glad to see them move on and continue to develop especially as they are able to serve others in the community hopefully, so

Miles Burdine 29:16
Well, the way I look at it, too is they had a favorable experience here. They’re out in the out wherever they are, and they’re one of our advocates now. That’s right.

Brandon Burton 29:24
Yeah. And oftentimes they end up being members to whatever business they go to. So well, Miles. I’d like to give you an opportunity to share any contact information for listeners who might want to reach out and connect and learn more about how you’re establishing culture at the Kingsport area Chamber what would be the best way for someone to reach out and connect with you?

Miles Burdine 29:45
Yes, sir. My direct line at work is 423-392-8807. My cell phone is 423-956-1988 everybody in Kingsports got it so you’re welcome to it as well. My email address is mburdine@kingsportchamber.org.

Brandon Burton 30:12
Very good and I’ll get all that in our show notes for this episode so people can click on click through those and scroll to the bottom of the shownotes for Miles contact information to reach out and maybe learn more about what what they’re doing there in Kingsport to be intentional about building a good strong culture but Miles is you’ve delivered a lot of great value today. I know this is going to be very helpful for a lot of chambers out there listening. So thank you for that. Thank you for sharing some time with us today on Chamber Chat Podcast and wish you the best as you continue to develop your team and establish that culture there in Kingsport.

Miles Burdine 30:51
Thanks for the opportunity Brandon.

Brandon Burton 30:53
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5 Lessons Learned in 2022

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Brandon Burton 0:00
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For this episode, I decided to do a top five lessons learned in 2022. Now as I record this, it is Christmas Eve 2022. And this episode we’ll be releasing on the Tuesday between Christmas and New Years. So purposely, I want to keep this episode a little shorter, just so you can still get some good value out of it and ideas. But I want you to be able to spend time with your family and get those things done around the house that you don’t normally have time to do because you’re your normal busy schedule. So before I get into those top five lessons learned now some of the lessons that I’ll share are ones that were directly related to podcast episodes that I’ve I’ve put out over this last year. And some are just lessons from observing the world and things going on in the environment. So keep that in mind as I go through the lessons. But before I get into those lessons, I wanted to share a personal lesson, I guess you can say that I’ve learned and that is that over, I guess almost four years now doing the podcast, I have reached a point where my time is being stretched very thin, a lot of responsibilities on my plate. And I’m at the point where I need to bring on some help somebody to help to edit and produce the podcast episodes, just to free up a little bit more of my time to where I can focus more intently on getting great guests on the podcast and other projects and special interests that I have to develop that are related to the show. So with that I’ve in you’re familiar as a chamber professional is you see a need for growth within your chamber. The next question is how do you go about providing the financial backing to justify it. And we just had a great episode last week, I believe it was last week where we had Susan Williams on. And she talked about staffing. So that episode came at a really good time for me, as I’m thinking about things that I need to do to staff up the podcast, and create a better experience for all of you as well. So continue to serve, you know, bigger and better going forward in the future. So as I was trying to figure out the best way of doing this, we do have some regular show sponsors. So I would love for you to support them and, you know, buy their product support their businesses, because that keeps their sponsorships coming to Chamber Chat Podcast. But I also, over the years have received messages and emails and ran into some of you at conferences, who have expressed the great value that that you find out of the podcast that lessons learned the way you’re able to stay and be able to stay engaged and continue to learn within the chamber space. So if you are one of those people, and you would like to find a way to support the podcast, a way to continue to see the growth of it. What I decided to do was I created a page on my website so chamberchatpodcast.com/support where you can become a sponsor yourself.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Staffing with Susan Williams

Below is an auto-generated transcription of my conversation with Susan Williams. 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.

Brandon Burton 0:54
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Our guest for this episode is Susan Williams, Susan has served as the president and CEO of the Venango Area Chamber of Commerce in Pennsylvania since 2007. Following 21 years in a banking support position. Her volunteer work led her to seek a job where she could impact the community through leadership, business and relationship building. She shares that her leadership journey continues, especially as she strives to engage others, in many of the programs that the Naga chamber has in recent years, much of that focus has been on education, young professional development and business advocacy. So it isn’t I’m excited to have you with us today on Chamber Chat Podcast, I’d love for you to take a moment to say hello to all the Chamber Champions listening and to share something interesting about yourself so you can get to know you a little better.

Susan Williams 1:50
Thank you. It’s such a pleasure to be here. And anyone that knows me knows that I love being with my chamber people, I have really relied on a strong network to get me to the position I’m in where I’m very happy in a growing chamber. And so it’s it’s really a pleasure to be here. So I think one of the interesting things about me is that I’ve been fortunate enough to have really wonderful, you know, areas to work in my 22 years in banking, were a pleasure. And I often was told you’ll you’ll never find a job that you’re as happy. And that affords you as much opportunity to do what you love. And I don’t know that I thought that but I definitely got there. I knew the moment I arrived in a seat at the chamber that that it was where I belonged. And that was 18 years ago. So and that experience with both the bank and the Chamber has led me to be able to do really fun things in the rest of my life. So

Brandon Burton 2:49
very good. Now, I’m glad you found the right fit, you found that chair that’s nice and comfortable in that position that fits your personality and your your character traits. Well, so Well tell us a little bit about the Venango chamber area Chamber just to give us an idea of you know, size scope of work staff, as we’ll be discussing today, budget, things like that, just to kind of give us a perspective. Well, like many

Susan Williams 3:16
small world chambers, we were a City Chamber, we were formed in 1912. So we’re well over 100 years old. But we went through a merger in 2008. To become a Regional Chamber, we had leadership that believed that as they looked across our membership, we served a greater area. So that gave us a really great opportunity to grow. And we have done that since 2002 1005 was when that merger was completed with a small business organization. So we are about 450 members, but we are growing and growing as much. And in attracting the right members as growing in numbers. Our budget is around $250,000 a year. And our staff size is at full tilt six. We in fact last summer we had seven but we take every opportunity we can to engage summer interns. So that often gives us a chance to add some capacity during some of our busier times.

Brandon Burton 4:18
Very good now that that helps for sure. And I’m excited to to get into our topic for today. As I mentioned before, we’ll be talking about staffing. And as we look across the chamber spectrum, you know, there’s chambers of all sizes, whether they’re a volunteer only organization, or maybe they have a part time leadership or maybe one staff or two or three versus you know, some that have, you know, 30 or 50 staff and some of these huge chambers. But I think having a focus discussion on staffing is helpful for any level chamber just to kind of get some of those ideas around. You know what to look for what develops a good team what develops a good I’ll say culture even amongst your your office and your staff. So we’ll dive into that discussion around staffing as soon as they get back from this quick break.

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All right, Susan, we’re back. As I mentioned before the break, we’re we’re talking about staffing today. So I’d love for you to maybe just tell a little bit about your story there at the Chamber start where you want to start as far as you know what, what stands out to you with, you know, those important things and you look at staff in your chamber, right what I

Susan Williams 7:37
think of my approach to staffing, it’s important to start at the beginning when I was hired by a gentleman who was a mentor. He was my eighth grade geography geometry teacher. And years later, we’ve gotten involved as community volunteers. So when I had a break in my employment from my banking career, and talked to him about where I might land, he suggested that the Chamber might be the place but there wasn’t an open position. Well, as luck would have it, about a year later, there was an opening at the chamber. And I approached him and said, Is this something that where I might be a fit for an administrative assistant, and a very quick conversation led us to believe that it might not be right at that time. But that evening, I got a call from his staff. These were young women who were part time employees. And they said, We saw you come in, we’d like to interview you for the position here at the chamber. And that was my first introduction to really involving the people right, right on the ground, the staff in that process of interviewing, of course, Ron had welcomed them and doing so. And while I said, Well, I’m not sure if you’ve, if I was a great fit, they said, we definitely want you to come in. And again, once I got in there, I knew I was at the right place. So the full time staff was just me and the executive director at the time. But I had the opportunity to work with these young women who I’ve watched him develop and take their best skills and use them to accomplish things in the community and for the chamber, and really show me in the next two years, how to do that. He had a heart for young people. So while a lot of times I see people in all industries, look for staff that can kind of prove what they can do. He taught me how to look for people’s strengths and build on those. So that that was my first step into really hiring myself and developing a staff that would serve our community in our chamber.

Brandon Burton 9:43
Yeah, I love I love that that origin story. I like hearing how people find their way into the chamber industry. And one of the things he said it’s kind of stood out to me is how he taught you how to look for those strengths, those things that you need at your organization and and hire for those strengths. I know a lot of times as you’re looking to fill a position at your organization, you, you probably get people applying that aren’t really sure what the chamber does. Yeah, it’s a lot.

Susan Williams 10:15
Yeah, well, and to be perfectly honest, I didn’t know what the chamber did. Yeah. In my, in a position I served briefly before coming to the chamber, I watched that organization join the chamber, went to a chamber mixer. So I got a little tiny taste of what that was like. But there’s so much to learn. And I think, as we’re hiring staff at the Chamber, we need to be ready to really, you know, take the opportunity to teach people even that have lived in the community for a long, long time about how to approach the community in a different way. We have an employee now that’s just been here over a month. And she’s she’s very well connected in the community. But she’s astonished at what she didn’t know, our favorite things to teach people is, is to introduce them to people they don’t know and teach them about things in the community that they might not be familiar with.

Brandon Burton 11:08
Yeah, I love that. So as you look to hire for strengths, those needs, I’ll say, your organization, how do you go go about the onboarding of helping maybe it’s in the interview process, maybe it’s once they’re hired, that you really give them a deep dive on, here’s the type of work that we’re involved with here at the chamber?

Susan Williams 11:28
Well, maybe starting with the fact that we really have taken a very different approach. Now, first of all, I really love the internship model. So we’ve been fortunate enough to be able to have at least one intern every summer since I’ve been here at the chamber. And several of those interns have gone on to come to work for us after graduation. None of them expected that to happen. When they enter on their first year, too. It was just a summer job. But in allowing them to grow and learn the community and really give them an opportunity to shine. Most of our interns are excited about an opportunity to come work here if if you know it, if it feels itself. Yes, yes. So that has been a strategy that we’ve really liked. But also, you know, I’ve had a couple times in my 18 years where a position opened up. And so we actually had to invite resumes and applications and had to go through the traditional process. But we learned as we watch the rest of the community, and got to meet people who are looking for changes, that a better strategy was to watch for the right people, and then see if you can create a position. And that’s where we’ve really had some success. And the first time I couldn’t imagine how that could happen. Because we all go right to our budgets, say well, if we could hire more people, we would we just don’t have the money. But I have found that when I find the right people, I can find the money. Finding the right people has given me the opportunity to go and talk to stakeholders, including my board of directors, and tell them what we could do if we had the right people. So in it, my first and most successful case of that we had an opportunity to to get some grant money to to get something to happen. It’s and I can give you a little bit more information for the listeners that want to dig in. It’s a program I’m really proud of called be here. venango.org. But when we saw that we had the right person, then we could go to the grantor and say, We know you have something you want done in the community. We didn’t know we could do it before now we can we have the right person, and we can make this happen will you give us a chance. And since then, we’ve gone on to do that with at least a couple of other areas that our chamber serves in.

Brandon Burton 14:01
I love that idea of looking for the right people and then creating the position. And I can’t tell you how many times I’ve heard somebody who’s the president CEO now at their chamber that when they came into the chamber work, that there wasn’t a position at the time that a position was created for them because the strengths and the skills are recognized and the love for the community or connections or whatever it may be. They were the right person so position was created and then you know a careers developed. I was going to ask you, when do you how do you judge when it’s time to bring on you know, a new staff member? What are those things you consider and you kind of answered it with that last question was looking for the right people in creating the position but I know sometimes that happens from the the other side as well. So

Susan Williams 14:52
there are any number of different things that can happen with the be here position. That program manager was hired around the opportunity for money. Now I do not normally let money drive my decisions. So it was it was something that I had known for a long time that a good partner and a community wanted to get done. It just happened to have money with it. So I don’t generally look for money first. But if I can know who’s out there in the community, then as those opportunities for programs we want to develop or openings come that that’s when we say, Oh, who do we have our eyes on. And that’s happened very successfully with our last two openings. So the last catalyst for growing our staff was the pandemic. So during the COVID pandemic, we had managed to stay afloat and actually thrive. So I did do a layoff of my full time employees, but only a small layoff. And during that time, we strategized very carefully and a few hours a week, how we could continue to serve our members that worked so well, that as we came back, we realized we couldn’t continue that pace full time without more help. And of course, we also had some changes in how people wanted to work, we still come to the office, but there’s more need for flexibility for we had growing families and things like that. So as we look to start to make sure that the employees we had had everything they needed, which is should be another part of our conversation, we also knew that we needed to add more staff. And my staff quickly told me who I needed to hire. And they knew who had stepped into our path who was showing up and everything we would do, who really understood our mission. And I said she’s not going to work for us. Great job. And they said, We think you should check. And so an afternoon walk within the next couple of days revealed that we had someone that wanted to come to work for us was a perfect fit. And then it was just a matter of, you know, working with my board and re examining my budget and, and seeing that we had room for for our, you know, our last person.

Brandon Burton 17:04
So that leads into the next question I was going to ask is, as you find the right person, typically the right person, because they have great skill set or connections or whatever it may be. But typically, that means that they already have a job. So how do you go about attracting them, convincing them that the chamber is really the place they need to be? And if you’re doing that, and taking them from a member business, how do you work that that exchange that transition, it’s really

Susan Williams 17:35
hard in a small community not to take someone from a member. But that is, that’s the advantage of the intern hiring, hiring your own employee. But you know, our, our best way to bring someone from somewhere else, when we are I think most of it admittedly not paying as well as we’d like to, is to make sure that you have a culture that’s attractive. So that’s always been our draw. I believe in lifelong learning for myself and for my staff. So it’s been really important for us to communicate to everyone in our membership, that we want an opportunity to grow our staff to grow them here, to help them take those strengths that they they want to do more of take the things they don’t like to do and do less of when possible. And all the while preparing them for the job they want to have at the chamber or somewhere else. So we have had a couple of move on from us over the years. But they’re often the ones crying as they tell me that they’re going to something that they know they need to do. And I’m smiling because I know that was the plan all along, that we want to develop good people to do what they what they want to do what they need to do what’s best for them. And when possible, we tell them, hey, we’ll bring you back. And if it doesn’t work out, you know, we will do everything we can to welcome anyone back.

Brandon Burton 18:58
Yeah, you’re leading this discussion, right where I want to go, that was my next thing. So we often will bring on staff, they get developed, they’re a great part of the team. And then usually it’s one of your Chamber members that see what a great asset this staff member is. And whether it’s a skill set and sales or community development, whatever it may be, but they they reach out and and track them and bring them on to their business. And and you’re right, you know, internally you’re excited for this for your staff member who’s going to move on develop new skill sets and continue on in their career. But I can I also see chambers where the turnover is it seems to be constant. You know, every year they’ve got new staff, a new team. So it’s constantly training and getting new people up to speed and I guess I’m not really sure what the question is here that I’m trying to add. I see

Susan Williams 19:52
that as well. So I think you have to examine why are you having that turnover? So if you’re having the turnover really frequently? Are you really developing people that well that they’re moving on to a better position? Or perhaps is there something you’re missing about what they’re looking for? Because I don’t think I’ve had anyone move on for the money. Right? You know, so people don’t tend to leave jobs to make more money. Occasionally they do. But But you, and I always invite them to have that conversation. So we can examine that. But it’s usually something that just has them not quite satisfied in the job. So we work very carefully to be having those conversations all the time to make sure that our culture is good to make sure that they have what they need. So most of our employees have stayed quite quite a while. So we don’t have much turnover. So I would really want to examine that if I’ve got people leaving frequently to make sure that there isn’t something that you need adjusted.

Brandon Burton 20:56
Yeah, that’s a that’s good to take that that check inside and just know, look at the culture, see, what are the real reasons versus the stated reasons why people are leaving, and see if you can do something to help keep them there a little longer? Or maybe you are just fantastic at building and developing the talents and they are able to move on and continue growing and and maybe they’ve outgrown their position at the chamber. So in and even at that, I would say there’s there may be opportunities. If somebody is developing those skills and outgrowing their current position, what can you do to keep them at your organization develop new responsibilities, or new positions or titles or whatever it may be to help them continue to progress within their career. Have you had any any experience with that with you know, as you see somebody developing to a certain point is being able to create those opportunities within your team

Susan Williams 21:57
that they might leave? Yeah. Well, when I think about it, but because most of ours have left, because there’s something quite different there, they’re going to do, they’re looking for a different experience. So it’s, it’s probably been more of that for us, our last employee that left we’re really excited about she had started her own business. So she had done that while at the Chamber, we were really excited to watch her grow there. And it became evident that that’s where her attention needed to be, she needed to be fully immersed in her own business. So she’s a chamber member. So that’s great, we zero all the time she’s close by. So I think if your turnover is a lot, you would want to be looking at making those changes. For us, we consider it we have an exit interview, we talked to our staff, about what what they liked, and what they didn’t like, what they’re excited about that they’re going to. But I think you have to get comfortable with the fact that that some of that change comes I mean, after 18 years, I’m starting to have the conversation in my community about what things look like, at some point when I go ahead and move on. And people get really anxious about that. But but the reality is part of that moving on allows room for someone else to to develop, there’s there will always be things, things to do, there’s room for all of us. But certain positions you do, you do need to make room for others to

Brandon Burton 23:21
run if you can have that discussion far enough ahead of time, and you can help develop the successor and be able to have a smooth transition, there’s so much value to that for the organization for the members, for you, you know at the exiting CEO to be able to have that peace of mind that you’re leaving it in good hands.

Susan Williams 23:39
And speaking of that, you know, there’s the idea of the successor within those positions being opened up. So we’re believers on great onboarding, too. So that’s a really important part of bringing people on. And getting them as part of your team and keeping them we’ve we have some members, even in manufacturing that are just doing phenomenal things on onboarding. And so we’ve taken some note from them, but we’ve developed some things for ourself over time. So we see that as a as a long process. So we we work together as a team, everybody takes pieces of it. And we onboard, you know, over a week over a month over a year. So that you know that we definitely have a cycle like most chambers, we have a cycle of activities that happen. So you live through your first festival, your first annual dinner, all of those things and then you have you know, you have the things that change one from year to year. Like like a pandemic. But I think the onboarding is really, really important and something that you should be thinking about if you’ve got employees that aren’t quite settled in or are are leaving you sooner than you thought you might not be bringing them on as strong as you could.

Brandon Burton 24:49
Right. So maybe let’s circle back for a minute on the your internship program. So are you working with the school district are you work how are you of attracting you’re the intern, typically one per year,

Susan Williams 25:05
typically, one we’ve had a few years where there was the some nice funding to help us weep, we have always in all of my 18 years here, we’ve been able to find a funding partner. So whether that’s our state program at a percentage or some of our career services, because they believe in that have most recently been almost fully funding, that a reimbursement of our intern, so we are always out there making sure that we have that. And some cases, again, we’ve been able to have more than one. For the summer term, we have always been able to identify a network from or we have always been able to identify an intern from our network. So because we have a long history of having interns, more often than not, they come to us and ask for an internship. And it’s often you know, the child of one of our members, or if we’ve, if we’ve needed to go looking, we go to our schools, we have a great relationship with our schools, we have some contacts, we trust a lot. And we always give them a little bit of an idea of the strengths we’re looking for. So we’re usually looking for someone that’s either in business, communications, hospitality, kind of things that align with with what we do, yeah. But we’re also looking for a great personality, that is a problem solver that’s not afraid to pick up the phone and asked for something. So having a really good vision of what the intern looks like, and what kind of experience they’ll have is a is a great start. And typically, our interns aren’t really, really concerned about what that we paid, we’ve been able to do, you know, a fair wage, you know, above minimum wage, but that’s usually not their question. They’re usually looking for an experience. We have not had interns that use their internship for their credits. So I know, in you know, some schools give them that opportunity, we always ask them if it’s something they need, if it’s something that we can help them with. But they’ve all come here for the just the experience of working in a community organization with a good reputation. And we tell them, you know, the benefit is they’ll leave with more context than they could imagine.

Brandon Burton 27:17
Right? So it sounds like you actively look for an intern like sometimes they they show up and the right person is there. But have you seen a change at all over the last 18 years? He talked about having somebody willing to pick up the phone and be social be personable? Has there been a change with these, you know, young people getting ready to enter the workforce? Has there been a shift? And how do you focus on training them? Are you just looking for the right person that already has that skill set?

Susan Williams 27:47
Yeah, well, there’s a change year to year, because just because of different personalities, we’ve had some very outgoing interns and some very quiet ones. In our case, they’ve all been young women, we would welcome a man in our office, they just haven’t come and ask for the opportunity. We have, of course, lots of volunteers. And we have a very, very active young, professional group. So a lot of young men that we interact with there. But the personalities of the young women are different, but our expectations are the same. So again, that kind of onboarding and orientation helps them understand what the expectations are. So even our more introverted interns, the ones that maybe find it a little more uncomfortable to pick up the phone or do some of those things. We prepare them we model the behavior. We help them with some tactics that make it more comfortable, you know, start with a when we know who they can call that will say yes and no, start there. Don’t throw them right into the, you know, into the lions pit and good luck. You know, we really try to set them up to be successful very quickly, like we do all employees so that they’re, you know, they’re they’re ready when the tough days come we can we can manage through those. Right there always are.

Brandon Burton 29:01
I like that I like setting them up with the wind helped build that confidence early on, because really, a summer goes by quickly. So you got to kind of front load those winds get get that confidence. And then But then no. Yeah.

Susan Williams 29:14
And we have had the good fortune many times to have interns that we’ve identified in advance enough that we can bring them into the office over the holiday season for even a week or two. And that gives us a chance to familiarize them with just our the layout of the office. Some of our systems are you know how to use the copier how to use the phones. So our summer intern is here now she just arrived in the last couple of days and she’ll work with us over the holidays to take us into the end of the year and and get us kicked off. You know we can is one of the things we’ll have her do early in the year is just update those kinds of documents that we use year to year and they just need new dates and things like that. But we try to give them things to do that are also really interesting and fun and challenging. Yeah, then invite them to give us input every day on what we’re doing.

Brandon Burton 30:03
I like that. And that’s a great tip to bring them in during, you know, that holiday, that winter break that they have from school and help get them familiar with the, with the office and some of the procedures and just kind of the layout. So When summer comes, you’re kind of speeding up that process.

Susan Williams 30:19
And the cost is nominal, you know, it’s, it’s really, you know, you can bring them in for a few hours a day or a few days a week. So it’s a really nice, nice time to bring them in. I shouldn’t say too, that one of the great advantages of our interns over the year is years is they have also been a really good connection to our young professionals. So we have a very active young professionals group, who also have been a feeder to some of our, our employees here. Some of them were active with their young professionals, some weren’t, but they knew of the active young professionals. So it gave them an opportunity to know and understand what the culture of the organization was like. But our interns are often that connection, because I was 18 years ago. But gradually I realized that Well, I love going into their things and grabbing their energy. It’s sometimes better to have one of our younger staff members actually doing the routine correspondence.

Brandon Burton 31:13
Yeah, no, that makes a lot of sense. So that’s a good point. As we start to wrap up, I wanted to ask you, if you might have any tip or action item for listeners who are looking to take their chamber up to the next level, what would you suggest for them?

Susan Williams 31:29
Well, if you’re looking particularly to grow your staff, or or maybe if not grow in numbers, strengthen your staff, I think it’s all about having good conversations and continuing to learn. The culture of work has certainly changed in the 40 years that I’ve been working. But people don’t change that much. We all want the same things. We all really value, being safe and having time with our families and feeling like we’re part of the community, just how those things change how how those things change is different over the years. So make time in every day to talk with the staff that you have to talk with your board and talk to your community about the kind of place you want to work and the kind of place you want others to work with you. And I think if you start there, you’re you’re bound to find people that have things in common with you. And you can set common goals and take your chamber wherever it’s meant to go. But you should do that as a team. So build your team with you know, starting with a really great conversation

Brandon Burton 32:34
like that. Thank you. So I like asking this question everyone that I have on the show, and you probably know it’s coming. But as we look to the future, how do you see the future of chambers and their purpose going forward?

Susan Williams 32:47
Well, I think the opportunities are great. There are there are so many different people doing so many different things in the community that we sometimes think we’re saturated, but I think as chambers, we know we’re not that the chambers play an important role in connecting all of those other things. So in your community, who can you connect with one another, that need is never going to go away? So make yourself valuable as the best connector there is in the community? And I don’t think there’s any chance that communities will think be a thing of the past, I think we can be really excited about the future of chambers.

Brandon Burton 33:27
Yeah, I like that. And I like to think of the constant, you know, evolution of what community means to so how are you making those connections and an ever changing definition of community?

Susan Williams 33:39
Oh, it does. You know, certainly, again, that having been a small city chamber and now Regional Chamber, we’ve seen that. But over the last couple of years, you know, I see myself in Zoom Zooms and calls with people from all over the world. And we have so much in common and we we care about the same thing. So I think your opportunity to grow your chamber in thought leadership is just, it’s limitless.

Brandon Burton 34:05
Absolutely. So, Susan, I’d like to give you an opportunity to share any contact information for listeners who might want to reach out and connect with you and learn more about how you work through interns or staffing in general, what would be the best way for for someone to reach out and connect with you?

Susan Williams 34:22
Well, anyone’s welcome to call me here at the office at 814-676-8521. to email me at s Williams at Venango chamber.org. I’m going to spell Vinay NGO, v n a n g o and we have a great website that complements our website that is be here for the ngo.org BE He REVN a ngo.org and I think everyone would enjoy taking a look With that, and seeing how we’re inviting people to really enjoy their experience here in our community,

Brandon Burton 35:05
I love that and and, you know, I’m tempted to go down the rabbit hole of tell us more about what be here if an NGO is that let’s just let people go check it out themselves and see, see what it’s all about

Susan Williams 35:17
might be a good reason for another episode someday.

Brandon Burton 35:20
That’s right. And well, we’ll have your your contact information in the show notes for this episode as well. So people can go on there and hit those links or shoot us an email and give me a call. But, Susan, I really appreciate you being with us today on Chamber Chat Podcast for sharing your experience and, and specifically around staffing. And I think you shared some some neat insights. And for some of those chambers that maybe you’re feeling a little bit alone, because they’re a staff of one or maybe staff of two, this might give them some encouragement to be able to reach out, explore some new opportunities and find the right person and then create the position. So I love that takeaway. So thank you for that.

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Grow & Protect with Frank Mulcahy & Ernesto Verdugo

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

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

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

Voiceover Talent 0:14
Now your host hangs blankets in his studio to reduce the echo, he’s my dad, Brandon Burton.

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

Our title sponsor is Holman Brothers Membership Sales Solutions. Let’s hear from Tony Felker, President and CEO of the Frisco Chamber to learn how the Holman Brothers have provided value for him.

Tony Felker 0:45
One of the key benefits that we’ve realized from Holman Brothers it’s actually happened many years after we started using them. We just completed our new strategic plan and understanding those subtle differences between transactional benefits and transformational benefits. The companies that knew what they expect has been a key part in our strategic plan. And we really want to thank Holman Brothers for that.

Brandon Burton 1:07
You can learn more about Holman Brothers Membership Sales Solutions by visiting holmanbros.com.

For this episode, we have a two-for. We’ve got two great guests for the price of one. So we’ve got Frank Mulcahy and Ernesto Verdugo. Ernesto and Frank are both Change Catalyst through their thought leadership and effective public speaking that leads to results. Ernesto is the 240/7 most traveled person in the universe. They worked for Renaissance cruises and KLM Royal Dutch Airlines before becoming a full time speaker and trainer. He’s worked with people from over 120 nationalities and 57 countries. He’s a little league baseball coach, a private pilot, and a master juggler. He lives with his wife and two kids in The Woodlands Texas.

Frank has developed a series of workshops over the past 38 years exposing the devastating impact of data breaches and identity theft, Frank’s immersion and identity theft prevention and red flag training began in his mortgage banking career is has he’s honed his mastery in all facets of identity theft in the workplace and online, as he has spoken to and trained over 835,000 individuals from the stage webinars and in workplaces against the ongoing threats of identity theft and misusing social media. As I have them with us today, we’re going to be talking about a new app that they’ve come out with called grow and protect. But Frank and Ernesto, I’m excited to have you with me today here on chamber chat podcast and like to give you both an opportunity to say hello to all the chamber champions that are out there listening and share something interesting about yourself so we can get to know you a little bit better, Franklin, start with you. Very good.

Frank Mulcahy 3:03
Thank you, Brandon. It’s a pleasure to be here today. And most importantly, it’s a pleasure to continue serving Chambers of Commerce because I believe that as an entrepreneur over the last almost 48 years, the chambers have probably been most instrumental to my growth. And I followed them from very, very small chambers all the way up to chamber galas. And it was as a result of my just everything that chambers gave to me that when we decided would grow and protect, it was time to get back to the chambers. And that’s what we’re going to share with the folks today is that we’re all in this together as one big happy family. And we’re all here to serve the small to medium sized business entrepreneur, on how they can grow and how they can protect their businesses in these chaotic times.

Brandon Burton 3:54
Very good Ernesto.

Ernesto Verdugo 3:56
Yeah, well, thank you, Brandon, for having us here. Your your introduction was very nice, very kind, very accurate. And all the stuff that you were saying one of the things that was not mentioned is that I am also the Vice President of Marketing of the US Mexico Chamber of Commerce. And it’s a little bit different than the other chambers of commerce that are around which are a little bit more local. This one is a by national Chamber of Commerce. And of course, I am delighted to be with your audience because we have a ton of stuff that we can help them with. So we will start we will start with our with our story. Basically everything started with the thoughts of my 13 year old daughter that basically taught me how to become a YouTuber. And then afterwards we started using YouTube as a tool of growth and we will tell you a little bit more on that story, but it is I am there I am delighted to be here.

Brandon Burton 5:00
That’s great. We can learn a lot from our children, can’t we? And oh my goodness, either directly or just seeing trends that are coming and how they’re interacting with technology. So what

Frank Mulcahy 5:11
what we, what, what we call that Brandon is actually reverse mentoring. Yes, we mentor them, they mentor us, and then we all collaborate and go forward.

Brandon Burton 5:21
That’s right. I love that. So tell us just a little bit about what your company grow and protect the app. What, what is it? And how long have you guys been doing this. And we’ll we’ll get much deeper into it. But let’s just give it an overview, just to kind of give some perspective as to why we’re having you guys on the show today to talk about this.

Frank Mulcahy 5:44
So grow, Grow and Protect is a chamber of resource library, Brandon, that we felt was necessary with the chaotic times that we were going into, and we’re going to talk in a little bit about how we started it way back in February of 2020. Before the lockdown, we knew times were going to change, what we didn’t realize is how devastating times would change. And so, Ernesto and I, we pivoted very quickly, we didn’t miss a beat. But we noticed that everybody else was falling behind. So the grown protect is meant to be a chamber resource library to actually put commerce back in Chamber of Commerce, to actually help the small business entrepreneur, to expand their business outside their local town, city, state, county, or even country by using the technology that Ernesto and I have been very, very blessed to have harnessed. And it was time to put it together in one spot with one module where apps where they can have it with them 24 By seven on all the devices and all this stuff, and everybody could grow, even the people that have technically challenged. Brandon, that’s the great thing about what we put together, one

Ernesto Verdugo 7:03
of the things that we noticed was that most of the chambers of commerce, they were offering a location, but the location, you know, it was, it was not the location that we thought it was exactly what was needed at that at that specific moment. And once again, as we were mentioning, for example, how they can use you to how they can start using them so that they can attract more, more business, how they can figure it out how to create a customer journey. And this is exactly what we started putting together and we put it we put it in very small bite size videos and lesson plans, so that they will not be struggling with you know, this is a full two hour course or anything that’s actually very, very easy for them to digest this information. And yeah, I mean, the people that take it seriously and then they you know, it’s we always say once more or less than that they will help you tremendously, so that you can start knowing how to go into the 21st century in my eyes. And this is one of the things that I always mentioned in my eyes. Unfortunately, many of the people which are actually doing business through it through chambers of commerce, they are a little bit behind in time. And we said well you know if this is what we need to do, we have to push all of this so that we can actually take people to the 21st century.

Brandon Burton 8:25
I like it so I’m excited to dive into deeper discussion about growing protect because I see great value in having a video resource library for chambers to point their members to to help them grow and protect their business and and get out of just the brick and mortar you know who’s in your local community. But let’s let’s broaden what that economy looks like. And I love how this is no cost to chambers so we’ll dive into that in much more depth as soon as they get back from this quick break.

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All right, Frank and Ernesto we’re back. As I mentioned before the break, I wanted to dive in deeper about grown protect. Frank, you alluded to kind of the beginnings of grown protect in February of 2020. Why don’t you tell us a story of how grown protect came to be and how the vision came and and how you guys enrolled this? Yeah, I’m

Frank Mulcahy 12:04
happy to do that. And we’re gonna go back to February of 2020, which was actually about three weeks before the great lockdown. And as international speakers, we were booked in Mumbai, India, at the world, HR 2020. Congress. And I remember that Ernesto myself, Dave crane, several of us that traveled together around the world. We were at the Taj Hotel, and we were talking about Wuhan, China like everybody else. The difference was because we’re only 1000 miles away, we started to realize that, yeah, they’re shutting down flights from China to the US. But what people didn’t realize is they were flying from China into India, India, into Europe, and then on to the states. And so we sat at the Taj Hotel, that second week in February, and we said, our whole world’s going to change, but we had no idea it would be two years plus, that businesses would still be suffering. And so we will wonder what we’re going to do. And Ernesto and he can tell you about it in a second. But he immediately once we got back to the states on March the 12th, when we had the great shutdown, he launched a web TV show, and never missed a beat had over 100 broadcasts had 1000s of people listening to it daily. And then I said, well, I need to, I need to become a YouTube influencer. And I need to take all my speaking virtual rather than public during the Great lockdown. And while my customers are not my customers, but while my competition, Brandon was wondering, What am I going to do now? There’s no public speaking, no access to people. I never missed a beat. And people were fascinated that at 69 years old, I became a YouTube influencer. But I took advantage of it because it’s relatively simple. And that’s how we started and we said, we have the skills. We did a survey, I met with Aaron Cox, who was the president of the Texas Chamber of Commerce executives. I went up to Austin had lunch with him. I said, I said, Aaron, this is what I’m looking to put together a library of two 300 videos of how people can actually protect their business grow their business, and they can do it even technically challenged. What do you think he said, we talked about this for five years at the Greater Texas Chamber of Commerce executives, but nobody knew where to start. I said, Well, my partner and I got it pretty much 50% bill. And we put together Boyd Brandon, with chamber executives that I’ve known over the last 40 plus years and asked for the curriculum, what would they think their businesses needed? And as a result, we have the growing protect dot app, which is as as you said, it’s free to chain Because of commerce to give back to the membership, so that they can grow their business. And the only cost is $1 to activate the mobile app.

Brandon Burton 15:11
So Ernesto, I think your daughter had a great spark of, I don’t know, Prophesy ingenuity, I don’t know what you want to call it. But she had some unique foresight to say you need to be a YouTuber, and make that shift. And I see how that’s paid off for you. And for Frank, and for the influence that you’ve had. How did you go from, I guess, taking the videos as a YouTuber, to organizing it into an app that has a training resource library, and specifically for Chamber members?

Ernesto Verdugo 15:46
Well, as Frank was mentioning, when we jumped into the web TV show, we knew that we had to go digital. So every I mean, in those days, some was not what it what it is right now. I mean, it suddenly started becoming a very important tool, we were actually not transmitting through through zoom, we were using other other software. And we were doing it through Facebook. And it was very interesting. That was the beginning of the lockdown. We went from having nobody watching the TV show to having for about 100 days in a row. We were having about 1000 1500 people watching the show every single day. And then we said, well, you know, this is it. This is the way to communicate in this time. And it was great. But then what happened was that after the after the lockdown, the initial lockdown started easing off, we started losing the audience. I mean, we suddenly were, you know, we were novelty during the time of the, of the lockdown, but then suddenly, I mean, we started losing the audience. And then that’s when my daughter told me Well, you know, the problem is, you have to go into YouTube, because YouTube is going to be the one of the platform, which is going to give you the most exposure. Now, the problem with YouTube is, it is the most effective tool, but it’s the most difficult to understand because you don’t have to think as a marketer, you don’t have to think as an influencer, you don’t have to think as somebody that wants to run social media or anything like that, you have to think like a real TV model. And then we started realizing, well, you know, this is basically if you have a channel, as they call it, you have to have some kind of programming. And this programming needs to be interesting. And you have to make sure that you have the enough retention for people to watch the content that you’re creating. And then we started experimenting. I mean, we started doing several shows Frank and I, some of the videos that we created were crap. I mean, we have to absolutely accept it. But then we started figuring out well, you know what, this is what works if we know exactly what kind of content and we make it fun, and we make it entertaining, and we make it you know, a way that people will be able to consume it, these little, these little 10 minute 15 minute videos are going to become very effective. And exactly what happened. I mean, we started having a lot of traction on those videos on YouTube. And then that’s when we said, Well, I think you know what, let’s also capitalize from all of this, and start putting it into a platform so that all the people in the chambers of commerce will be able to benefit from it. I love

Brandon Burton 18:29
that. And I like to you can own and admit that some of the videos are just crap. The best way to get better is just put in the reps, keep doing it. And the more practice you get at it, the better you get, and the more refined your process.

Frank Mulcahy 18:45
Aaron, let me add to that, Brandon, if I might. One of the ways that we’re able to get the quality of the videos increased, what we put, we actually put together an advisory board of chamber executives, people that had a minimum of 20 years as the leaders of chambers. And we asked them about the curriculum, we asked them about the lesson plans. And so although Ernesto, and I like to think that were the founders, there were a tremendous amount of chamber professionals that advised us to what they needed and what they wanted.

Brandon Burton 19:24
Awesome. So let’s dive into the content of it as the trainings what, as a chamber explores this is they look at an opportunity to be able to share this video resource library with their members. What kind of trainings would they expect to find in there that they could share with their members? Well,

Frank Mulcahy 19:43
we will go back and forth will each add on to this but I think I think the most important thing in the first lesson we start with is about mindset, the shift in the mindset as to how business and commerce is now conducted worldwide because most people Well, they’re still stuck at the best skills and attributes of five years ago, which are probably the excess baggage today. And so we have to make this fundamental shift that as time progresses, the way that we develop things, the way that we serve customers, the way we go to the marketplace, is constantly changing and evolving. And that’s where we work, first of all on the mindset, and the aspect that they can look for the future trends. And then from there, let’s do you want to give them a couple of the lesson plans that we did, and so from YouTube?

Ernesto Verdugo 20:36
Yeah, absolutely. Well, I mean, for example, one of the one of the ones that I think it’s very powerful is the digital stagecraft. There’s a whole lesson on how to communicate, as we are doing it right now in zoom. Still, you see people after two years that they still do not really know how to use some properly, they look incredibly unprofessional. And right now we can show in absolutely everywhere in the world, and you have to look your best. So that is one of them. I mean, the other one would be on the customer journey, as we were mentioning, and it was very, it was very funny, because we actually went to IKEA in in Houston to record these so that people will understand that right now is not that you’re selling a product, you’re selling a whole whole journey of what your products are, and how you can actually make the most out of every customer that goes into your into your business, customer acquisition. Lead Generation, we’re having LinkedIn training we’re having how to how to get your brand, across all over the place how to become Omni omnipresent, which right now it’s the most important thing in the in the world, because what happens now is that, for example, doesn’t matter what it is, if you’re going to go on a date, or if you are going to ask for a job, or whatever it is, the first thing that people will do is they will Google you. And you are not who you say you are, you’re a Google who actually Google says who you are. And that is one of those things that most businesses do not really take seriously. So if you go and search and pictures there, people are not going to take your series, but the moment that they see that you’re absolutely everywhere and omnipresent, what’s going to happen is that they’re going to have instant respect. And one of the things that Frank and I really found was that when you when people can see your accomplishments without you having to talk about them, what’s going to happen is, you know, the the Speed of Trust is going to is going to be there they’re going to be people are going to trust you right away. I mean, and this is exactly what happens when people hear my name. They go and google me, and they see that I am absolutely everywhere. And there’s over a million results about me in Google. People don’t question me, if I go to speak, and I say well, my fees $10,000. I can justify it because of course, I’m pretty well known. So that’s the important thing. And most people are still on found double with with Google. And that’s another of the lessons that we’re talking about just just to name a few.

Brandon Burton 23:22
Even just when I started chamber chat podcast, as I initially was reaching out to people to be guests on the podcast. Initially, it was hard, because people didn’t know who I was, if they went to Google and search me or the podcast, there wasn’t a whole lot out there. So they were really trying to do the research. And, and now if somebody searches, you know, chamber chat, podcast or my name, it’s going to be all over the place. But it I see that being that having that influence that Omni presence everywhere really is valuable in creating that that digital footprint, but it translates from what you’re doing in your brick and mortar building, to the web.

Frank Mulcahy 24:04
So absolutely. And you know, there was a study that I saw in Forbes magazine, Brandon, and it said, 65% of millennials and this is just six months ago, 65% of millennials prefer not to talk to somebody in the transactional process of making a decision. They want to go online, they want to see video validation, they want to see your brand as a company. Who are you Where have you been? What have you accomplished? I mean, if we stop and think about it random, people go to Yelp to decide whether they’re going to go to a new hamburger or pizza or Chinese restaurant based on the reviews of others. So we certainly have to we have to accept the fact that they’re going to be looking at us IP were a survey company a real estate a construction roofing, contracting, educate It doesn’t matter what we are as Chamber members, people are going to research you. And based on what they find, they’re either going to keep delaying the process to business with you, or they’re going to accelerate it because as Ernesto said, they have the trust. And that’s probably one of the key things. As we as we do the grown protect, we also do monthly live collaboration calls for the for the users. And we’re able to go to these lesson plans. And when they understand that tremendous growth happens in their business, Brandon tremendous,

Brandon Burton 25:34
right? So it’s interesting how these things come together. You know, Frankie had mentioned 65% of Millennials don’t want to interact with the individual with another in person, you know, transaction. And we’re nesto talked about the customer journey experience filming an Ikea my customer journey at IKEA is very different. Yeah, I’ll go there, knowing what I want. And I’ll go right to the warehouse, get the boxes I want and check out I refuse to walk through the maze of the customer journey at IKEA. So you know, everybody has these different different ways to interact. But being able to, to know your customer being able to be omni present, have those reviews out there be able to get that good feedback. And it sounds like all these trainings, you have address these various different topics and, and really kind of stack on top of each other to build a strong business to grow and protect, right. So tell us how does grow and protect work for a chamber? If a chamber wanted to adopt grown protect for their organization for their members? What does that look like? for

Frank Mulcahy 26:43
that? Yeah, the first thing I urged them to do is to give me a call, let’s set up a 1015 minute discovery call. And they can go to speak to frank.com, speak to frank.com. And they can book on my calendar. But what I’m going to explain to them, Brandon is that there is no cost to the chamber at all. Everything we’re doing is going to be in the realm. If they look at our video grow and protect that app, they’ll see that the message to the Chamber members is that the chamber is bringing these resources to their members. And it’s so refreshing because now rather than the chambers asking him for another sponsorship or another donation more time, they’re actually giving something back to the Chamber members, which is a $297 value. But the chamber member gets it for $1 for $1 lifetime access to all of the lesson plans, plus the monthly collaboration calls that are nesto. And I do what we’re doing live trainings with guest sponsors. And we’re bringing in, we’re bringing in all of the lesson plans, as Ernesto said, digestible chunks, three minutes, five minutes, six minutes, and the but they can walk through it at their pace. And they can choose somebody might say, I want to do the LinkedIn, because I really want to learn how to get a refined marketing statement, one that causes people to raise their hand and say, Brandon, please tell me more about chamber chat, or the contract. Tell me more. That’s what we’re doing is we’re walking them through this. So for the chambers, you’re going to increase your membership, you’re going to increase your membership fees, you’re going to increase your sponsorships and you’re doing it at no capital expense. So the first thing they did book that 10 minute discovery call and let’s see whether or not this is good for your chamber and we’ll set them up at no charge.

Brandon Burton 28:44
So as we start wrapping up here, I wanted to ask what would be one maybe tip or action item for chamber champions listening who want to take their chamber up to the next level? I’m sure you both have a tip but maybe Ernesto we can start with you on that response.

Ernesto Verdugo 29:01
Well, obviously I will definitely recommend that you take us on this on a call. You know we are we we have done is we have taken the way that chambers have done business forever but now we have taken it into the digital world. I mean everybody asks, well, how’s it possible we spend a huge amount of time and money developing this, this problem and then everybody says well how could you give it away for free and this is what I think it’s very, very interesting and then I’ll tie it to a very good tip. Normally for example, if chambers are having events, they bring out speakers and they the speakers also benefit because of of the exposure that they get. Well this is exactly the same thing but digital. So if it is if it is free, if it is at no cost and it is absolutely for education so that you can you increase increase the value that you provide to your chamber. This is an absolute must for for every chamber to, to be using it because it’s going to make a big difference. What with the results that you’re that your Chamber members second we’ll be having?

Brandon Burton 30:20
Very good. Frank, do you have anything you’d like to add as far as a tip or action item for listeners? Yeah,

Frank Mulcahy 30:26
yeah, I want to continue on that same thought that Ernesto just had there. As he said, chambers. And I said it earlier that I grew my entire business, Brandon, from Chambers of Commerce. I started with rotaries, Lyons, Kiwanis, but I very quickly realized the business community is at the chamber. And so you know, most chambers, they bring in a speaker, but it’s complimentary. We really don’t get paid like we do when we get on the big stage. And so I realized that if I could, if I could put together virtually a library, which I think today and so we’ve got over 270 lesson plans within the growing protect app with about 50 more planned over the next quarter. Then what’s gonna happen, Brandon, is that the CEOs, the executives, the association’s, they’re going to, they’re going to stop and say, you know, this is great stuff, whether it’s pocket filmmaking, client acquisition, customer traction, digital optics, refined marketing statements, whatever it is, and they’re gonna ask us, can you come in, for instance, you introduce me in the bio, that I’m very, very big in the cyber awareness arena. But I’m also known worldwide for disruptive, abusive behavior in the workplace, which is devastating to the workplace. And it’s amazing how the chambers have grown my, my training companies, where I come in and solve workplace bullying situations for clients, like the city of Houston, the state of Texas, the National Nuclear Security Administration, I never would have had those contracts. Brandon, unless I had spoken at that chamber. At some point in time, we don’t know when we just know that the more we serve, the more we profit, the chain, a complimentary.

Brandon Burton 32:17
Very good, I liked those responses. So I’d 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? And we’ll give you both a shot at this as well. So Ernesto, if you want to take first stab at that, yeah,

Ernesto Verdugo 32:35
I think the the, you know, right now we have seen it. I mean, in my eyes, a lot of the chambers are little pockets, which are, you know, in everywhere, and right now, because we are going in a global way of thinking, I think, I think the future of the Chamber of Commerce, business is to be able to provide opportunities locally, but also globally. And, you know, it’s it’s one of those things that it’s inevitable. So I think that’s where I see the that’s, that’s why I’m very excited about, you know, working with with several chambers, because every time that we talk to them, and we tell them our vision of how things are going to be working. And they always say, Yeah, I definitely think that that’s the way to do it to actually grow locally, but also have a element of globalization to for our members.

Brandon Burton 33:32
Love that. Frank, what is your future, the Chamber vision look like?

Frank Mulcahy 33:37
It as I talk more and more with our advisory board every month, it’s about developing more avenues for commerce, Chamber members want to know, what are they getting for the return on investment? And what you know, how are you helping me to grow my business. And unfortunately, with these online courses, that that Constant Contact, that’s not cutting it, with Chamber members, from as far away as Sri Lanka, and Malta and London, and all across the United States, because in the last year, we’ve actually grown to almost 300 chambers that are now offering a growing protect app. And as more and more of the people are on the collaboration calls, Brandon, that creating that, that that connection that Ernesto just talked about, outside of Houston, or outside of Texas, or outside the southwest, but they actually can pick up additional clients and prospects all across North America and the world. And in the digital economy. We all have to we all have to accept this. That somewhere right now. There’s an 11 or 12 year old sitting in the bedroom with a cell phone and an Internet connectivity that is becoming our next competition. because they don’t need the back office, they don’t need the business plan, they don’t need the funding, all they need is a little bit of grasp of where the technology is going, and how they can use all these channels we talked about and grow and protect, we walk you through every single one of them, and then start to implement them a little bit here, a little bit there. And the next thing you know, your members are now picking up new product lines, new customers around the world, additional avenues of income, and they’re going to use the internet, rather than being used by the internet. And that’s the greatest value that we provide.

Brandon Burton 35:41
That’s great. Yeah, be it be a creator of content instead of a consumer only of content. So well, I want to give you both an opportunity to share any contact information for anyone listening who’d like to reach out and connect and, and learn how to work with growing protect, what would be the best way Frankie had mentioned, speak to frank.com? Are there other ways that you’d like people to reach out and connect?

Frank Mulcahy 36:08
Yeah, and you know, again, they can reach out just go to Google put in Frank Mulcahy. groan, protect, you know, but speak to frank.com is the best one, Brandon because they can actually go into my calendar, and book a collaboration call. It’s free. We’ll have an online cup of coffee and show you what we can do for your chamber, and make you part of the ground protect family where you actually can now serve your chambers. And a lot of the chambers, Brandon will actually come and do live presentations for them, depending on where they are geographically and where we are. But we can we can tailor any program for any chamber. Because we have Chambers from all around the world now and every nationality. And there’s never any selling. It’s all about serving and delivering value, no selling. And if people raise their hand and say Ernesto, Frank, Brandon, please tell me more. That’s what we’re looking for us that relations.

Brandon Burton 37:14
Right. That’s beautiful. Well, thank you both for joining me today on chamber chat podcasts and joining all the chamber champions listening, what you guys are doing is definitely creating a lot of value. It’s creating a opportunity for Chamber members for these local businesses to further develop their business and to become stronger to become more resilient going forward into the future. So appreciate the work you guys are doing, and especially focusing on on Chambers of Commerce. That definitely is our niche. So thank you for that. And thank you for joining us today.

Frank Mulcahy 37:55
It’s my pleasure. Thank you, Brandon.

Ernesto Verdugo 37:57
Thank you, Brandon.

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

Endorsing Political Candidates with Scott Ashton

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

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

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Brandon Burton 0:00

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

Voiceover Talent 0:14
Now, your host he traveled to Colorado on a mission to find his favorite ice cream. Here’s my dad Brandon Burton.

Brandon Burton 0:21
Hello, Chamber Champions. Welcome to the Chamber Chat Podcast. I’m your host, Brandon Burton, and it’s my goal to introduce you to people and ideas to better help you serve your Chamber members and your community.

Matt Morrow 0:45
Holman Brothers provide a great training for our sales team in terms of just outstanding sales techniques. But maybe even more importantly than that, they were able to provide us with a system a process that was repeatable and in that we’re able to see very clearly from one month to the next how the how the pipeline is doing, what prospects are in it, what kind of progress we’re making and what we can do to coach people to success.

Brandon Burton 1:07
You can learn more about Holman Brothers Membership Sales Solutions by visiting holmanbros.com.

Our guest for this episode is Scott Ashton Scott is the president and CEO of the Oceanside Chamber of Commerce in California. He has been on the staff at the Chamber since 1996 and took on his current role in November 2016. Scott is originally from Massachusetts, and began his career at the South Shore chamber while attending graduate school at Suffolk University in Boston, where he earned his Master of Public Administration degree. Scott has more than 30 years of experience in the chamber industry in a variety of sales and management capacities. Scott serves in volunteer and or advisory capacity with numerous local organizations as well. Scott resides in Oceanside and enjoys reading, hiking, walking and studying health and nutrition.

Scott, welcome to Chamber Chat Podcast. I’m happy to have you on the show now. And this has been a work in progress over several months. But for glad we can make it happen. Why don’t you say hello to all the Chamber Champions and and share something interesting about yourself so you can get to know you a little better.

Scott Ashton 2:20
Sure, grant. And thank you for the opportunity. And like you said, and now this has been a long time in the works. Thank you for your patience and bearing with me to find a time that works for both of us. So something interesting about myself. Well, you know, one of the statistics that I heard recently is that people entering the workforce now will have 14 different careers over their lifetime. And I don’t know if this is interested or not. But I’ve had one career in the chamber industry is all that I’ve known my entire career. So I remember growing up as a little boy, and I couldn’t think of anything else other than wanting to work for our chambers Sunday series. I’m just kidding about that. Okay.

Brandon Burton 3:07
How did you get exposed? Tell me more.

Scott Ashton 3:10
But I guess like, like most people I’ve met, you know, the, just kind of something that we fall into. So I went to I was born and raised in Massachusetts. And as of right now, I lived almost exactly half my life, the first half of my life and Massachusetts and the second half so far in Southern California, so that I went to college as a criminal justice major with a minor in Spanish, got out of college still didn’t know what I wanted to do is I went right into graduate school and had to find work while I was going to graduate school at night. So my friends, my friend, Kristen said, let me introduce you to my dad, he runs the Chamber of Commerce, and he knows tons of business people and can help you find a job. So I took her up on that I went and sat down with her dad who ran the South Shore Chamber of Commerce, which is on the south shore of Boston, one of the largest, I think it’s still to this time, one of the largest chambers in that in that state. And I sat with him for a while and he said, Well, you know, until you find something else, why don’t you just sell memberships here at the chamber? I was like, Okay, I’ve never sold anything and have no idea what a chamber does, but I’ll give it a try. And turns out I had some skills that I never would have imagined that I had and I had some success in selling memberships. I stayed at that chamber for about two and a half, two and a half years and then the membership director position opened up at the Cambridge chamber which is had an office right on Massachusetts Avenue and Cambridge about halfway between Harvard and MIT, so is an amazing opportunity. I was fortunate to get hired for that position, and did that for about two and a half years. And then my wife, who had grown up in Southern California wanted to get back here. So what I knew as a chamber career, so I just got on the phone started calling chambers and asking if they had any openings. And I connected with Oceanside, they did not have an opening, but there’s apparently something in that conversation, a conversation that intrigued them. So they invited me to fly out and have a conversation with their CEO and couple board members. And they created a position for me in 1996, doing membership and business development, which I did here for about 20 years. And then when the CEO position opened up, I really wanted it. Most of the board members at that time were people that I already had built a great relationship with. I had worked with them over the years. Some of them I had sold them their membership to the chamber. I just started reaching out to the board members and letting them know how much I wanted to position. Thankfully they hired and internally and now it’s been six years that I’ve been in the CEO role at the chamber.

Brandon Burton 6:18
Yeah, I love hearing how people come into the chamber industry because it’s always you everybody falls into it a little different. So it is yeah, it is funny most of it’s by accident, most of it yeah that’s what I say falling into it and not not that they found it or you know went after but they fell into it and but luckily the chamber world tends to attract the right people. So glad you found it. Glad you’re here will tell us some about the the Oceanside chamber just to give us some perspective like sighs staff budget type of work, just to give us some some perspective before we get into our conversation.

Scott Ashton 6:55
Yeah, so our size is about 620 or so members. budget right now is a little over a million dollars. We have a staff of eight, couple are part time The rest are full time. And last year, our chamber celebrated its 120/5 anniversary of serving the business community. So we’re we’re one of the oldest chambers in San Diego County. And I the year that I started at the chamber it was its 100th anniversary. So I was here for the 100 and 120. Pets. It’s really another

Brandon Burton 7:37
25 years and yeah,

Scott Ashton 7:39
I do not

Brandon Burton 7:43
come back as a by standard then I guess maybe yeah. Maybe a member of some sort. So yeah.

Scott Ashton 7:50
Hope to be around and be able to celebrate, but not in this position. 25 years.

Brandon Burton 7:59
Well, that that does help. As far as type of work. Are you guys chamber only? Are you tourism? Are you economic development? What what do you guys cover?

Scott Ashton 8:09
Yeah, no, that’s a great question. So when I first started at the Chamber, we ran the we ran the tourism operation for Oceanside. And about 12 years ago, we helped, we helped create a separation where they are now funded through through a transient marketing districts tax. So it’s a hotel tax of I forget the exact amount, I think it’s close to 2%. It funds that operation where previously, every year or two we had to go to city council and and request a portion of the T ot taxes in order to be able to fund the visitor operation. But now they have a steady stream of income. And makes me wish at some point that we we had handled that a little differently and didn’t give up that operation because now they have a budget that’s three or four times times the size of our chamber budget. But we work really closely with them. I’m on their board. They’re CEOs on my board, we’d have a great working relationship. So yeah, so while we’re not the point of contact or the main, you know, the the main organization working on tourism anymore, it’s still a very important part of what drives our local economy. So we’re of course involved in it. Workforce development is another key area for us. Small business advocacy, which I’m sure most chambers you’re talking with, are engaged in that and then political action is is the other key element that I think we’re gonna be talking about shortly.

Brandon Burton 9:49
That’s right. And so that’s a good transition right there. So our topic for conversation today people may have seen as they look at the title of this episode, but we’re going to be talking about chain Bruce endorsing political candidates. So I know that’s a topic that some chambers you know, want to shy away from or maybe they are interested in getting into, but they don’t know where to start and there’s some fear or maybe they’re doing it and there’s something they can learn and adapt or maybe it hasn’t gone well and maybe it went really well. So we’ll we’ll dive into our discussion around that and what you guys are currently involved with as soon as I get back from this quick break.

Visit ChamberNation.com to learn more.

All right, Scott, we’re back. So endorsing political candidates. How did the Oceanside chamber come to the decision that you guys wanted to endorse candidates?

Scott Ashton 13:31
Yeah, it was a it was a slow evolution. When I when I first started at the chamber. I don’t think it’s anything that they would have even imagined taking on at that point. But at some point along the way, we started doing candidate forums and getting warmed up to that realm a little bit. So fast forward to 2018. Where we had we had done our candidate forums were that year were heavily engaged in trying to defeat an initiative on the ballot, I was the land of local to Oceanside land use initiative, which was basically for ballot box zoning, which we did not want to see happen. So we got heavily engaged in that and fortunately defeated it. So we we exited the 2018 elections with a sense of boldness and wanting to see how much further we can go in the political realm. So in December of 2018, we did a survey to our members and asked them, you know how helpful the information that we put out on that ballot measure was to them and you know, making their decision on voting and got really good feedback on that. And we asked some other questions on the survey about the candidates that have won the election. You know, do you think this person is business friendly or not? And you And then we worked our way to the question on how important is it to you that the Chamber be involved in helping elect business friendly candidates. And it was almost 90% of the survey respondents indicated that it was important to them that we help elect business friendly candidates. So, I know that can mean a lot of different things, you know, that can mean doing forums or publishing scorecards. But what I and our board took that to mean is that, Hey, we should move forward and considering endorsing candidates. So we took those survey results to the board, and our board was, you know, boldly decided to move in that direction. So when we did that survey, we also asked, Hey, would you be interested in being part of some more extensive conversations on this topic? And we had quite a few members that said yes to that. So in 2019, we started holding focus groups with small groups of our members to ask them, what was important to them. And in city council candidates, what what are the things that you want them to address and what what you want them to do. And so we were able to gather a lot of data on what was important to our members, and what they wanted to see and the candidates going forward. And from there, we will use that to develop our policies and procedures.

Brandon Burton 16:30
So I know you as you try to speak as the voice of business as as the chamber, you’re taking a collective of voices, whether it’s staff or board members, or your members, in general, to say this is a candidate that we support, or we’re behind this candidate. Did you have to work through any, you know, putting aside you know, personal feelings? Or, or maybe a board member that didn’t necessarily agree, how do you manage some of those waters that can get a little bit muddy?

Scott Ashton 17:05
So that that is a great question. You know, we have a very diverse pack. And it’s purposely set up that way where we have equal number of seats for for Republicans, Democrats and no party preference. And while when you start to talk about state national issues, there would be strong separation amongst those people. But we find that on local issues related to development. For us, you know, sand retention on our beach is a big issue, housing, workforce development related issues, that there’s really strong unity across parties on that. So. And one of the points that are, you know, when our PAC is going to make a recommendation to the board, they do make a point to remind them that, hey, you might have some personal thoughts on this. But remember, you’re wearing your chamber hat right now. And, you know, please approach it from that perspective. So, and I know we’ll talk about some of the specifics of the elections a little bit, but in the two election cycles that we’ve endorsed candidates, we get have unanimous, unanimous approval from our board of directors. So our PAC has done their homework in both election cycles.

Brandon Burton 18:27
That’s great. And I think it’s good for other chambers to hear that too. Just a reminder of once he started talking about things on a local level, it’s a lot easier to gather consensus and people around one common goal. So take, take that charge and go do it. So. So as we’re talking right now, it’s beginning it’s beginning of December 2022. So we just came off of an election cycle. And you’re just talking about that fed a couple election cycles now to go through with endorsing candidates out, how have those gone? Have you? You know, from the candidates you didn’t Dorse the process along the way the outcomes? What’s the experience been like?

Scott Ashton 19:08
Yeah, so it all goes back to 2019, where we put in that worked with our members, we had those focus groups, we found out what was important to them. And then we developed policies and procedures as to how we will approach the endorsement of candidates. And so far, it’s been just sticking with city council races, you know, here in Oceanside. And so we had this all put in place prior to 2020. And then, when 2020 came along, candidates started piling and so on. We had these policies and procedures in place that allowed us to send out questionnaires to the to the candidates that had filed just to get their feedback on business related issues. And from there, we decided who we would interview or do a personal interview with at the next step because of what happened in 2020. The personal interviews ended up being zoom interviews instead. So we couldn’t sit across the table from them. But what we decided to do, because of the volume of candidates was relatively low. We invited everybody that filled out our survey to come in for an interview, even, you know, even if they’re there, they didn’t have the exact answers to the questions that you know, that we are hoping to hear from them. We still invited them in for an interview, and we were able to manage that volume of candidates. So in 2020, we had three races, and we had two city council races and neoral race. The mayoral race became complicated because we had two business friendly candidates that had been good friends of the chamber, that they couldn’t agree for one of them to back out. And they both stayed in the race. And we basically said that we’re not going to choose between them. We just made a statement that both of these candidates have been good supporters of the chamber and of the business community. And we left it at that. So we focused our effort on the two city council district races, and I 2018, I think was our first year and going to two districts, city council races used to be city wide. So the two district candidates were incumbents that had were in their current seats by appointment. And they had been business friendly. And it was a very easy decision for us to get behind these two candidates. They both ended up winning their races. One was, I think, by less than 1000 votes. So I think we really had an impact there. And we were able to donate, I think in the range of about $12,000 total that we had raised through our political action committee. And we were able to help them out with their to get across the finish line. So we were we were successful in that in that first run, and that embolden us to keep moving forward. Very good.

Brandon Burton 22:12
So do you feel and I don’t know, maybe you have some data to back this up? Or not? Maybe it’s just a feeling but how do you feel the impact of your chamber supporting candidates? How has that helped to motivate people to vote? I mean, to me, it’s always discouraging when you see such small numbers, turnout for elections, and trying to engage that that big population that just doesn’t vote? Do you? Do you have any feeling or any data on how maybe that needles moved over time?

Scott Ashton 22:45
I really don’t. I think we were a little early on in the process to see if we’re making any impact on on voter turnout. But I think we are, you know, the Chamber brand is very well respected in the community. And as we’re able to put forth our candidates, I think people pay attention to that. The other part of it is we have found common ground with there’s two other major organizations in Oceanside that endorse candidates, and that is our Police Officers Association, and our Firefighters Association. So going back several years, they used to endorse the candidates that would basically tell them, you know, what, what they wanted to hear that they would be taken care of. But these are the same candidates that were opposing development and gross. So one of our PAC members had a conversation with with both of the unions and, and just, you know, shared with them that, hey, if you if you want to get paid, what you should be paid, we need growth in our community, we need that development, we need to expand our tax base. And they have been really on board with that and supporting pro development candidates. So you know, the we’re going into it where it’s not just the chamber endorsement, but it’s our candidates have been endorsed by the chamber by the police and fire associations. And that’s a big deal. And in a relatively small city. Yeah,

Brandon Burton 24:13
I love that. And I like that you guys are doing interviews too, with these candidates to be able to help share the story, what their vision is, and give a more informed option or choice to voters. Yeah, I know, not every community is has done that or is equipped to do that unnecessary or maybe they don’t think they’re equipped to do that. But I see a tremendous value because I mean, most times you go to the ballot, and you see names of people that you don’t know who they are. And the especially the common person in the in the community has no idea who some of these names are set to create some exposure and some connection as to what these people stand for besides an R or D next to their name, I think is very helpful. So Do you have any any tips for chambers who want to maybe get their toes wet in this as far as conducting some of those interviews? Or how to get started?

Scott Ashton 25:12
Yeah. So just for clarification, are the interviews that we do are just for our path or not public interviews? So we’re asking them, you know, the questions are important to our business community and how they would approach those issues. And that’s, that’s what we’re using as to decide on where we’re going to put our endorsement. But there are, you know, there are other great resources in our, in our community, we have a local TV station that allows for, for each election cycle for a candidate statements, and, you know, people in the community can hear from the candidates directly on that. But what we’re doing is we’re doing our interviews we’re bringing, we’re bringing our recommendation to the chamber board of directors, and then we’re sharing that with the community in a variety of ways. One of the things that we have is, we do a quarterly magazine that gets mailed out to a lot of the business people and residents. So what we’ve done when we have endorsements, is we target the distribution of our magazine into that district. So ideally, you know, most if not all of the residents in that district, are hearing from us and on who are endorsements are and those endorsements are on the front cover of the magazine.

Brandon Burton 26:35
Awesome, awesome, great idea. So, overall, I like to asking if, if you have any tips or action items for listeners who would like to take their chamber up to the next level? What might you suggest for them? And maybe it has something to do with endorsing candidates, maybe it’s something totally different.

Scott Ashton 26:58
I would say, ask your members what they want. And that’s how we get started on this path, is we you know, we decided to just reach out to the members and see if they wanted us to be engaged in this. And like I said earlier, I know there are a variety of ways for our chambers to influence elections. And it can be just, you know, doing forums, which we did, and publishing scorecards, which we’ve done, not so consistently over the years. But I feel like endorsing candidates is a chance for you to have a real mark on on the elections and to make a real difference. But the starting point is to ask ask the members. The other important tip is to know when to stay out of a race. So I mentioned in 2020, how we stayed out of the mayoral race. This year, we had two districts up for election, one of them was a was a pro business incumbent that we chose not to endorse because of some complications within that race, not the least of which was somebody from her same party, that that would not back out of the race. And we just mathematically didn’t seem like there’s really any path for her to win. So instead of us, and she did not win. And so instead of us, you know, diving into that race and potentially burning a bridge, we stayed out and now we’re trying to build a relationship with a person that that did win that race and with some success. And but the race that we did indoors in one of the districts was a retiring fire chief, who is very well liked in the community, the chamber, police and fire associations all got behind him and he had a strong victory. And that was our first time getting involved in doing an independent expenditure, is there now caps on how much we can donate directly to a candidate. So we put some money into a mailer to support the candidate and there’s no limitations and how much you can spend on independent expenditure on behalf of the candidate.

Brandon Burton 29:09
Okay, so I know, chambers that are listening there, they’re having questions like, but what about this? What about that? What if so, has there been any negative fallout for that’s come from endorsing candidates?

Scott Ashton 29:24
Nothing measurable. You know, it’s interesting going back to that mayoral race, in 2021 conversation I had from a member that was upset was that he couldn’t get out of his mind that he kept selling me you guys endorsed selling science like No, we didn’t endorse in that race. But I guess the fact that we put out a statement saying that these two candidates have both been business friendly was enough to digital but no, the feedback has been great. I think people appreciate that. We’ve taken that had a bold step to put ourselves out there. And they were very thoughtful about how we approach it and try to be very transparent. And we share why we’ve endorsed the candidates and how they aligned with the goals and objectives of the chamber. Yeah,

Brandon Burton 30:17
I think that makes a lot of sense. When with the feedback from your survey, like I said, 90%, saying, yes, if they wanted you to endorse, I didn’t imagine there’d be much negative fallout. So as we wrap up, I wanted to ask you, how do you see the future of chambers and their purpose going forward?

Scott Ashton 30:39
Yeah, I, the direction has certainly changed a lot. And in COVID, certainly had had an impact on that. For us. We’ve slowly moved away from being dependent on events. In the coming year, we actually are doing away with our largest event that really just did not have a strong connection to our mission, and our vision as an organization. So in the event represented about 12, or 13%, of our gross revenue, and so so that’s, it’s hard to let go of something like that. But it’s the right thing to do. So but what what’s freeing us up is, it’s given us the opportunity to focus more on the things that are essential to our business community, the the advocacy, the political action, workforce development, and also, we’ve created a Leadership Academy. So by turning away from some of the things that that brought in money, but didn’t have a strong value to our business community, it’s given us a chance to create some some new programs that do bring value to our businesses. Right.

Brandon Burton 32:00
That’s great. And that is a bold step to step away from from that, that much of your income.

Scott Ashton 32:08
Yeah, and I’m, I’m seeing, you know, just in general, because I know you weren’t just asking about our chamber, but I’ve seen that with other chambers too, and just moving in that direction of being problem solvers in their communities, and, you know, focusing your efforts and using that, to drive revenue opportunities rather than events.

Brandon Burton 32:31
Right, keeps you relevant. That’s for sure. So Scott, I’d like to give you an opportunity for anyone listening who’d like to reach out and connect and learn more about how you went about this process to decide to endorse and the whole process what would be the best way for someone to reach out and connect with you?

Scott Ashton 32:51
Yeah, so well, and I love talking about this, I hope people will not hesitate to, to give me a call. So best thing is just pick up the phone call me at the Oceanside Chamber of Commerce as 7607 to 21534.

Brandon Burton 33:06
Very good, I will. I’ll get that in our show notes for this episode as well, so people can look that up and give me a holler. But um, Scott, I appreciate you hopping on here and visiting with us today on Chamber Chat Podcast for your bold leadership and being willing to share these experiences you’ve had and how things are going there in Oceanside. Thanks for coming on and joining us today.

Scott Ashton 33:30
Thanks, Brandon. I really appreciate the opportunity. If you

Brandon Burton 33:33
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