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Next Level of Chamber with Donny Jones

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

Hello, Chamber Champions. Welcome to Chamber Chat Podcast. I’m your hosts Brandon Burton. And it’s my goal here on the podcast to introduce you to people and ideas to better help you serve your Chamber members and your community. You’re joining us for a special episode as part of our 2023 ACCE Chamber the Year Finalist Series.

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Brandon Burton 1:44
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Our guest for this episode is Donny Jones. Donny is the Executive Vice President for The Chamber of Commerce of West Alabama and the chief Workforce Development Officer for West Alabama Works. He’s responsible for the daily operations of the chamber including financial management and information technology and manages a contractual relationships with vendors and professional service providers. Donny is instrumental in ensuring that the regional workforce systems leverage federal state resources to develop and grow the necessary K through 12 and adult training pipelines to support the current and future workforce. He is a former appointed Member of the governor’s workforce Council, and is currently an appointed Member of the Alabama Workforce Board where he serves on the executive committee and Policy Committee and appointed Member of the governor’s Career Technical Education Task Force to enhance the CTE curriculum and appointed Officer the Alabama committee of credentialing and career pathways and appointed member of the committee for Grade Level Reading. The Governor’s Committee on Employment of People with Disabilities awarded Donny the Public Service Award for West Alabama and 2019 and 2022. He received his accreditation as a CCE a distinction that less than 4% of leaders in the chamber profession hold. He serves on the board of directors for the Public Affairs Research Council of Alabama, Tuscaloosa Educational Foundation, ACC foundation board, as well as other committees and ACCE boards. He also worships and teaches at five points Baptist Church reserves as Deacon he’s most known as a husband of Clara is a 29 year educator and father to Carson and Carter, the dining Welcome to chamber tap Podcast. I’m excited to have you with us today on the show and love to give you an opportunity to say hello to all the chamber champions and share something interesting about yourself.

Donny Jones 3:53
Absolutely. Well, as you can see, I don’t do much but chamber work and work in the community. So but I am a one of the things that I tell people is very interested in the in the chamber world, I don’t play golf. And so I’m one of the only chamber execs you’ll ever made that has never played golf. But I do have four animals that are in the record books that I’ve killed with my bow across the country. So with that being said, most of my board members never mess with me. So anyway, a lot of really cool things are happening in our area. Of course, if you guys have seen the NFL another cool tidbit about our chamber is you probably saw the number one pick with the NFL last night. Jalen is actually right down the street from us or has been his career at the University of Alabama where our chamber is actually just right on the edge of the campus. So a couple of interesting things about us and myself.

Brandon Burton 4:56
That’s right and as we record this, that’s end of April 2020 Three. And then to add on to that this morning, my son is getting ready for school and he tells me yeah, this is the first time that an Alabama players been taken number one overall in the draft. And he’s a big history buff of any sort. So you know, little tidbits like that just really geek him out. So plastic? Well, why don’t you tell us a little bit more about the Alabama Regional Chamber and just kind of how you guys are structured scope of work, you guys are involved with size of the chamber staff budget, that sort of thing to kind of set the stage?

Donny Jones 5:33
Absolutely, we’re, uh, we’re sometimes a little cold, a little different as a chamber, we’re actually the West Alabama Chamber of Commerce, we serve as nine counties on the western part of the state of Alabama around seven counties. So square foot mileage is about 7500 square miles, our chamber has around 1300 members, and those are all business members, we don’t do individual memberships, representing about 65,000 employees. One of the things that is a little different is we’re the Regional Chamber of Commerce. So today, you’re talking to the executive vice president. Also, we’re the regional workforce Council, Alabama has seven regional councils across the state of Alabama, which is really a sounding board for workforce for industry. We are housed within the chamber, there were the fiscal and managing agents for that. And we’re also the regional workforce board, if you’re familiar with WIOA, and the federal dollars, so and I’m the Executive Director for both of those organizations. So we really have two large boards that work together, our Workforce Board, which is called the West Alabama Works Board, and then our chamber of commerce board. And so simultaneously, we’re always working together and actually who we are, as an organization is one of the largest collaboratives, when it comes to meeting the needs of businesses through that our budget on the chamber side is roughly about two and a half million dollars. And then on the workforce side, which is in combination, it would be close to $4 million organization. So we’re at right now 24 employees, 15 of those employees actually are full time workforce specialists. So as you can see, workforce is the largest portion of our organization. And really, we focus on that as one of our primary objectives to deliver services to our business community, because as you know, workforce is the largest issue that a lot of our businesses are facing. So that’s a little bit about our chamber. And in our services, yeah,

Brandon Burton 7:48
that workforce is always important, but right now is definitely you know, cuts the workout for you with the workforce shortages and just, you know, shifting in the economy in that in that front. But as we focus in on our topic for our discussion today, we settled on the idea of talking about next level of chambers and and this topic intrigues me because chambers are constantly looking to see what’s the next thing that we need to do to be relevant, right? How do we as we look to the future, how are we being relevant? How are we making an impact in our communities, and I feel like we’re going to be touching a lot on that and our conversation today so we will dive in deep on this as soon as we get back from this quick break.

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Brandon Burton 11:09
All right, Donny, we’re back. So as I mentioned before the break, we’re talking about next level of chamber. So tell me what does that mean for you guys there, West Alabama. And as you guys have looked at this scenario, as just, you know, staying relevant and and keeping the chamber in the forefront of the community there. What’s the approach that you guys are taking?

Donny Jones 11:30
Well, let me maybe the best way to tell you this is is the tail of an opportunity that I had this past week to have dinner with one of New York, New York Times bestselling author, Andy Andrews. I don’t know if you know that in traveller. Yeah, absolutely. And the butterfly effect and all that. So, so we were having dinner, he was speaking to a group and, and he said this, he said, you know, the difference, you know, and a lot of people are reading the book, Good to Great. And he said nothing against that book. But everybody is using that now as the Bible of you know, How to Win Friends and Influence People, as 20 years ago. And he said, you know, the problem is, is many of us are trying to go from good to great doing the things that we do, and have always done but doing better and doing better than our competitor. He said, What happens if an organization actually actually looked at doing things completely, in a different way, and looking at it a completely different way of doing business? And he said, That’s really where he’s coming from, as he was saying that I was like, wow, that is exactly what our chamber of commerce, and our focus has been, for so many years, you know, it was, you know, go to chamber Institute and learn more about what other chambers are doing and best practices. But if you really look at that 90% of the time is the best practices of the same things that you’re doing, just trying to find a better way of doing it. And so what we looked at is we said, you know, what, what is our number one key issue for our members out of our 1300? Members? What is the number one issue? And as I’m speaking to different groups across the country? That’s one of the things I asked that question. And I’ll be in a group and I’ll say, How many of you guys as chamber professionals, and your chamber? How many of you do a capital campaign? In a majority of, you know, middle, middle sized or larger chambers do some type of capital campaign, they’ll raise their hand? And then I’ll say, How many of you, in this room did a survey of your business community as you were doing a capital campaign? Well, everybody raises their hand, right? And then I asked the question, how many of you was workforce? One of the key components and an underlying issue that none of them could solve? And had an answer for? A No, everybody kind of look around, look at each other. And then, you know, you’d see hands go up really slow, but most of the hands came up. And then I asked the simple question. How many of you, if that is the number one issue in your community, or one of the top three, have the majority of your staff focused on meeting that need? Not one chamber, except our president that’s in the room, usually, when I’m speaking raises their hand. Because when we look at we’re talking all the time to our small businesses and our industries that we we help and we say, listen to what your customer says, and then meet that need. But yeah, as chambers, we try to get our members to do what we think they need to do as engaging into our organization instead of going out and doing what they need and actually being the voice of business. Now, I’ll be honest with you, Brandon, one of the things as I’m talking about that, it raises the hair on a lot of chamber execs Next, because they’re like, well, by God, what so that’s what we’ve always done. And that’s how we’re gonna do it. I’m like, That’s great. That’s why dinosaurs died. That’s right. So if you look at membership organizations, not just chambers, but when you look at, you know, trade organizations and everything, everyone is struggling with membership, and the digression, I guess, of membership. And then also, you know, we also have best practices don’t know if anybody’s been to their state organizations, or ACCE or US Chamber. And you know, they’ll have a session that says, best 30 ideas, and 30 seconds, or whatever it is. And so they’ll go in there. And there’ll be 100,000 ideas of how to do the same thing the same way, but just put a different makeup on a pig and make it look different. But it’s the same deliverable. And, you know, there are some ideas, and I don’t mean to cut that short, because you can get great ideas, I love those sessions. But at the end of the day, when you look at your structure of the chamber, you know, are you still doing the same things? And so as you see these national trends of of less sponsorship dollars, of being more innovated, how do you, you know, I had somebody one time, say, you know, what, if, if I could sponsor my toilet paper, I put a business’s logo on there, we’re just trying to find more ways that our golf tournaments at our chamber and sessions at this than the other to do those kinds of things. And what it’s doing is, you can only do so much with a product. And then what happens is you degrade it so much that people aren’t really wanting to buy, right. And so what we’re looking at, and what we have done is said, You know what, we’re gonna focus on the number one issue. And in our region, it was workforce development. And so we still do the bread and butter place, don’t get me wrong, we still block and tackle, we still do the networking events, we still do the chamber and sessions, we still do the directories, we do all those things. But our focus really is on helping our businesses grow. And one of their biggest issues in a community where our unemployment rate right now is 1.8%. You know, and our companies are growing, and they’re bleeding at the same time. And so we’re really focused on that. So 15 of our staff members, or really 17 of our staff members are focused every day waking up, meeting that one need. And education and workforce development is where we really focus on, right.

Brandon Burton 17:32
So as you’re explaining all this, to me, it makes perfect sense. And as I think of chambers across the country, I think sometimes they get a little constrained when they think everything we have to do has to be mission focused. And then they go back and look at their mission statement. And well, our mission statement doesn’t say anything about workforce necessarily, you know, so maybe they’ve pigeon holed themselves too much by defining their mission statement. Rather than being that voice of business, and constantly just looking to see what the, what the next thing is they need to do to help businesses be successful and to build a stronger community. So I guess it may be a word of warning, I guess, as you as you drafted your next mission statement to, to look at that what what’s going to leave you that flexibility to be able to pivot and to be able to listen to the needs of your members. And what’s their number one, number two, number three needs that they’re facing? And how can you as a voice of business, step in to help them solve those issues.

Donny Jones 18:32
That’s exactly right. And, you know, we just, we just finished our five year capital campaign, which is, we don’t do a yearly business plan. We have a five year strategy that we implement every day, and we wake up and that’s, that’s our focus. But this year, we did something different this this next five years. And so when you look at and I’m going to be around a while I’m gonna beat the dead horse right here. But I want to say this. When you look at most business plans, for chambers, you have your vision, you have your objectives, you have, you know, your strategies, and they do their SWOT analysis and everything. And, you know, what we’re doing is we’re changing our entire organization to be here’s our vision. And here’s the deliverables period. Because I’d say at most businesses don’t really care about your strategy. They want to know that you’re gonna get things done. And so people are so tired of plans that sit on the shelf and nobody visits them. And we’ve got a plan and we send it out to all of our members and nobody reads it. They put it in file 13 Because they know it’s the same Oh, say Mo. So what we did was we said we’re going to take and we’re going to create a vision of where we want to go for example, in this category is lead business driven workforce and talent development. The vision is specific. It’s two sentences, and then boom, the deliverables. How many people were going to put to work? How many how many outreach events, we’re going to do all those kinds of things. And when you look at a conversation that I don’t know about other chambers, but we have is that our patriarchs are dying out in our communities. And the new leaders that are coming on board are not Civic, rent minded. You know, it’s not, I’m going to invest, because it’s the right thing to do. They are business minded, and they want to know that they’re getting a return on their investment. And so many times chambers make the excuse, well, we’re not really a chamber that makes your cash register ring, we grow the pie for everybody. And, you know, you say things like, rising tide floats, all boats, and we have all this thing, and this new generation of business leaders are looking at you and saying, You’re full of crap. It’s just all smoke and mirrors, and you would sell blind man glasses. And so they, they think that way. And so what we’re doing as a chamber is we’re saying, look, here’s the deal, we’re hearing what you’re saying, and we’re going to focus on delivering those policies, we’re still going to be an advocacy organization in the voice of business. But here’s what we hear you saying, and and that’s what we’re going to work on. And quality of life is one of those things. So what does that mean? I mean, quality of life for every community is different. Does that mean? Well, that’s like saying, random world peace, we’re gonna solve world peace. And so chambers are out there. And that’s what we’re doing. We’re telling everybody, we’re solving world peace, and everybody’s going, whatever. And so what we’re doing there is saying, this is our vision for what quality of life looks like, for our community. And these are the specific things that we’re going to do for you, as a partner in our community. And so that’s where we’re going is really changing this and changing the topics, instead of trying to sell everybody something that they really don’t want. Because people I think respect chambers, I think people you know, intuitively know that they’re important. But when it comes to, am I gonna pay my employees $2 More than hours so that I can actually keep my employees and keep my lights on? Or am I going to pay a membership fee, because it’s the right thing to do. chambers are beginning to lose that battle. So we have to really become a chamber that is consultant driven information and knowledge based, and actually somebody that’s helping companies grow and meet their needs. And so our niche was workforce developmental now.

Brandon Burton 22:32
Yeah. And I think depending on the community, depending on the chamber, the niche may look different. Absolutely. Workforce definitely is a niche where you can have some, you know, absolute deliverables, and you can have data to back up the work that you’ve done to say, here’s the results of the efforts that we put forth on your behalf. And when you look at the your chamber in general, you guys really are larger on the workforce side, budget wise, staff wise, I mean, the attention is going to workforce, because that’s where you hit while I assume that’s where you have those key indicators, you can go back to to measure success, and where you can go back to investors and say, this is where you’re getting your return. So I’m curious as you as you put that focus on workforce. I know we can talk for hours on this, because it’s something passionate that you’re passionate about. But what are what are those areas and workforce? In your bio had mentioned the K through 12? Programs? You know, I’m sure retention, is there education with employee or with employers? What are those those key areas that you’re focusing on with regard to workforce? Sure,

Donny Jones 23:41
absolutely. I’ll give you a prime example. On the K 12 system. We do large regional events, for example, worlds of work that we do, it’s what we call Disney World, steroids for workforce development. So we bring, we shut one of our community colleges down for three days, we bring every ninth grader in the entire region, over 5,009th graders up and they experience all the different job opportunities that we have. And it’s all hands on. And it is a big event. People come from all over the country to actually look at the event and say, how do you all model this? And so we’re in our schools, we’re touching our kids, we’re really all the way down into pre K. We have an educated workforce Academy, where we train all of our superintendents and principals and key leaders in our 12 school systems. We’ve graduated over 470. And they spent an entire year with us learning workforce development in changing the landscape of how educators think about this big topic. Then we’re also involved in our adopted school program, getting industries involved, and ensuring up our education system which is not the best in the country. And so we’ve got a lot of work to do and it’s going to take the into Park community, particularly the business and industry, community to really help shore up our education system. And then another example is bringing those resources. For example, we have this past year, we put over a million dollars in the hands of our industries through our workforce board, and through one grant alone, and we trained over 1100 workers and upskill those workers just in our small region, through our community college system, and being able to fund those kinds of things. We place over 3000 individuals in jobs over the last year, just in one sector. That’s the automotive industry. And then a lot of things into Brandon, here’s another way, and I’m going to chase a rabbit real quick. But how many chambers talk about diversity, equity inclusion, right? Let me give you what real diversity, equity inclusion looks like the 3000 employees that we placed in the automotive industry, because we had Mercedes Benz here, 78% of them were African American, of the 78% 51% were male and 49% were female. So when you begin to talk about what we’re doing for communities, and how we’re trying to be an inclusive community, instead of just having events, which we had our development, diversity, equity inclusion event for the chamber last week, so we still do that. But now we’re having discussions about how we’re really impacting those communities that feel like they haven’t been included. And we’re saying, Look, we’re focusing on your entire community, we’re not talking about these topics, we’re doing something about these topics, we’re making a difference when you look at the difference we’re making on the disposable income and the average, you know, family income for our minority communities, that is growing because of our workforce side. So you know, at the end of the day, I think our society is changing. From a perspective of less, don’t just talk about things, let’s get something done. And it’s time to move the needle. And that’s what our organization is really focused on in our communication is focus on that side of it, you know, not just, hey, look what we’re doing. We’ve done 10 events, this this month, what we’re really focusing on is we’re changing lives every single day. You know, last week alone, we put 100, high school students ninth 10th 11th graders into summer jobs, they’ll actually start in in three weeks, with 20 different employers. And we’re, you know, we’re modeling that out when we’re talking about it. And people are saying, We’ve got people every day that’s calling us and saying, how do we get involved in the work of the chamber because of what you’re doing. So those are the kinds of topics that we’re really focused on.

Brandon Burton 27:56
I love that you can just off top your head, you have these numbers, right? He can tell, you can say, we’ve helped 3000 people and jobs in the automotive sector and then go on to the diversity equity inclusion side, you can say, you know, your percentages of, you know, different races and genders. And those are numbers you can point to and say, here’s how we’re moving the needle. versus you know, we had a networking event, and we had 50 people show up. What came of that I’m sure something good happened. But how do you measure that? Exactly.

Donny Jones 28:26
And that’s, that’s what people want to hear. And what we’ve seen as, like I said, we just finished our capital campaign, the majority of people who increased in some doubled their investment over the next five years in our organization, the majority of those said, we’re investing because of what you’re doing and workforce development because that is key. We’re a huge manufacturing area, even though we have the University of Alabama and a huge healthcare sector. Industry is our big, I guess you’d say employment sector. And so individuals know, you know, that if we don’t solve that problem, because Alabama doesn’t have the largest population. I mean, as I was telling you, 1.8% unemployment is almost like zero. Unemployment, right? So how do we get more people in the participation rate? So we’re doing outreach events every single week. In two weeks, we’ve got what we call our signing day. So all the students that we’ve heard in all these events, you know, our apprenticeship programs and everything is going to look catalogue. Now, it’s not going to have 100,000 People like it did last night on the NFL signing, but we’re going to have a huge signing day and make a big deal that work is valuable. And you know what that resonates with our our, our members or our membership and the businesses and they’re saying you know what the chamber is bringing value back to our community and that is essential, soft skills. It is work is valuable, and we need everybody to be a part of growing In our community. And so it really is, if any of you think about what we’re doing is we’re really doing exactly what everybody else is saying they’re doing, right. But it’s turning that value into, you know, something tangible. And it’s not, Hey, did we do 10 referrals from our website to your community or your business? That’s not what we do. We’re, you know, and so we’re all the time as chamber, folks, we’re like, we gotta tell people about the value of our organization, and we say all these things, but nobody really knows how to do it, besides, create a new flyer with great pictures and people at a networking event and somebody with a governor and a mayor and all this. And so the, it’s the same old, same old. And so that’s why I said, we’re really taking it to the next level. So I’ll give you a kind of a, an analogy of we do things in a real systematic way. So our first five year campaign was called working as one, because we wanted our community to learn that we’re never going to take it to the next level unless we begin to work as one. So guess what the title of our next capital campaign was working.

Brandon Burton 31:17
One’s got to be in there. So working

Donny Jones 31:18
this one. Now, this campaign was actually called all in, because once you get everybody at the table, once everybody is working this one, now everybody has got to be only in to move us to the next level. And so that is really what we’re seeing in our community as people are coming to our chamber and really saying, how do we engage? How do we involve Coulson, you are an organization that’s making a difference. And, you know, I had somebody come to me, actually yesterday and say, I was at church the other day, and I had this family member come, or this church member come to me and say that my kid went to our well 2.0, which it was for graduating seniors, which was four weeks ago, or three weeks ago. And we put 200 kids, and they had 600 job offers, or 200 kids at major industries. And so when you look at that, you know, they were talking about this change this kids laugh. And so now they’re like, how do I get involved? So we’re creating whole new opportunities, where people do engage at a whole different level, because now they’re passionate about what we’re doing. Not just that we’re the chamber. That’s

Brandon Burton 32:31
right. So that leads up very well into my next question, as we start to wrap things up here. I like asking as we frag is for chambers that are listening, who are interested in taking their chamber up to the next level, what tip or action item would you suggest for them to, to consider implementing at their organization?

Donny Jones 32:50
Well, I’m the worst person to say this. But one thing I’ve think that I would suggest, is like the old saying that my mother used to say this all the time to me, which as you can tell, I talk a lot and are very passionate. And sometimes I don’t stop and listen enough, because I think I have all the answers. You know, God gave you two ears and one mouth for a reason, son. And chambers forget that sometimes. And so what I would say is if you’re going to check your chamber to the next level, is listen with an open and honest mind and hear what they’re really saying. And see what what the real eco ecosystem around your community is. For us, the struggle was workforce. For some communities, it could be loss of population growth, for some, it could be a need for a new strategy and economic development. Whatever that is. I would say that you listen to that, and then look at how you can become the very best at that. So you become the source of that for your community. But then you look at how do I deliver that if it’s economic development? What am I going to do? What am I going to create? How am I going to sell it? And how am I going to let people know that we’re the ones who do it? We hear all the time chambers say this. And Brandon, I don’t know if you’ve had speakers on here that say we don’t toot our own horn enough. Well, the reason you don’t toot your horn enough is because you really probably aren’t doing anything that’s a really of subsequent, you know, need. We every week. We are on the news every week. And we have four stations and usually it’s at least two of those stations. And that’s one of our goals. But if you look at 90% of those newsfeeds, it’s because of what we’re doing in the lives of people because their interest stories, right? So, you know, focusing on making a key difference and what is ain’t going to do and looking at things totally different. Like I said, you’ve still got to do the bread and butter plays. But if you want to grow your organization, I can say this from, you know, what we’ve seen where we went from, you know, seven staff members to 24. And it was all focused on those deliverables. So every new position that we have hired at the Chamber has been to give outcomes and deliverables not to do programmatic work. And so really look at how do you change in that direction? Yeah,

Brandon Burton 35:30
I love a said that to not only listen more, we hear that sort of tip a lot. But the caveat there of listening with an open and honest mind, because it’s so easy as you hear the needs of of your members or the struggles that they have to become a little defensive, maybe we do that for you, and you try to explain and rather than just listening and realizing maybe we’re not doing it well enough, maybe they don’t know about these things, because we’re not executing in the way that we need to. And

Donny Jones 36:01
I have to confess I was that guy. That’s why I said a lot of times, there’s people that are probably hearing us discuss this today that are actually getting frustrated at hearing me say, because they are so sad. And this is how we’ve always done chamber work. And this is what we’ve been told. And it’s not that you’re wrong. It’s just, you can be good to great all day long. And I would encourage you if that’s what you want to be be that. But what we’re talking about today is going from good to the best. Yeah. And that’s a way of thinking about it.

Brandon Burton 36:36
Yeah, that’s great. So as we look to the future of chambers, we’ve been at it feel like we’ve been talking about this all all interview here, but how do you see the future of chambers and their purpose going forward?

Donny Jones 36:50
Wow, that’s a loaded question. For me, particularly when what we’re talking about is a seat chambers that are going to be successful. Um, you know, I think there’s a place for for every chamber, but I think you’re going to see more chambers becoming more like merchants associations, or actually becoming more like a Deloitte deliverable organization, where their staffs are more like consultants that are actually doing incredible things and working with industry to raise the bar. In those sectors, I think you’ll see a lot of chambers becoming more sector driven, where they’re, you know, what they’re doing for manufacturing might look different than what they’re doing for technology, what looks different than what they’re doing, or healthcare. And they’ll probably have specialists that that focus on those key areas. The other thing is, is, once again, I think you’ll see more of a contractual organization that’s doing real contractual top work. For example, like we’re doing in workforce development, where you know, millions of dollars of our organizations actually to deliver services for the state of Alabama, or for a particular entity or a county or a city. You’ll see more of that. And I think you’ll see chambers being more innovative when it comes to those traditional chamber programs, and have they delivered in different ways. But I think you are going to see the larger chambers actually turn into more of more of that focused. This is our sweet spot. And that’s what we’re going to do, because once you try to become all things to all people, amount one HD, is very difficult for for you to actually have a core focus of your organization.

Brandon Burton 38:44
Absolutely. So as we wrap that, wrap it up here, I wanted to give you an opportunity to share any contact information for listeners who want to reach out and learn more. Hey, you guys are doing there at the West Alabama chamber, what’s the best way for someone to reach out and connect?

Donny Jones 39:00
Yeah, absolutely. If you want to reach out to us, our number here is 205-758-7588 websites that I’ll give you is WestAlabamaChamber.com and WestAlabamaWorks.com. We have hosted, I think 20 or so in the last 18 months, communities that have come in and flown in and done benchmarking trails, particularly on our workforce side. So we’re always open to that because we always learn as much from other Chambers as they learned from us. So it’s a great time to exchange. So if you know chambers are interested in that. We have a staff member that actually focuses on working all the details out and helping chambers, create their benchmarking trips on workforce development and flying in and actually doing that. So appreciate all the time, Brandon, thank you for having us here too. But yes, love to talk to anybody that might have questions. Yeah,

Brandon Burton 39:56
that’s been fantastic having you on the show today. And I think the perspective you bring and the insights the the work you guys are doing is really going from good to best and that best looks different every community. So I hope everyone listening is taking notes on those, those action items they can do to really survey and listen and have that honest heart in mind as they listen to their members to see how you can become the best. So thank you, Donny, for being with us today. I really appreciate it

Thank you enjoyed it.

Brandon Burton
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Clean Energy & Chambers with Ryan Evans

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

Hello, Chamber Champions. Welcome to Chamber Chat Podcast. I’m your hosts Brandon Burton. And it’s my goal here on the podcast to introduce you to people and ideas to better help you serve your Chamber members and your community. You’re joining us for a special episode as part of our 2023 ACCE Chamber the Year Finalist Series.

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

When it comes to publishing a Chamber Map directory or Community Guide, Community Matters has a trusted experience to help your chamber accomplish your goals. With different advertising sales models and publication styles, Community Matters will help you create a non-dues revenue machine!

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

Becki Womble 1:03
I’ve been using Community Matters for probably six or seven years now. And in a previous life, I sold commercial printing so I can highly recommend Community Matters because it’s a complete turnkey job for any busy chamber exec and it’s a wonderful, beautiful printed product whenever you’re finished. And I just I’m very sold on Community Matters. And with a printing background I just big endorsement from me.

Brandon Burton 1:44
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Our guest for this episode is Ryan Evans. Ryan joined the Chamber for Innovation and Clean Energy in March 2019 and serves as the executive director. Prior to being named Executive Director Ryan was a member of CICS National Advisory Board for six years. Previously, Ryan served as president of the Utah Solar Energy Association for three years, which is a trade association he co founded was an executive for 13 years with the Salt Lake Chamber, which is one of the largest chambers of commerce in the country, and served as the Executive Administrator for the Utah State Chamber of Commerce. Ryan is a recognized leader and regional speaker both locally and nationally on renewable energy policy and economic impacts of air quality community engagement and relationship building. Ryan is an IOM graduate, and now serves on the US Chambers National Board of Trustees. Ryan attended the University of Vermont and graduated with a bachelor’s degree in psychology from the University of Utah. Ryan, I’m excited to have you with us today here on Chamber Chat Podcast, love to give you an opportunity to say hello to all the Chamber Champions out there listening and share something interesting about yourself so we can all get to know you a little better.

Ryan Evans 3:12
Thank you, Brandon, appreciate the opportunity to be on the chamber chat podcast. Listen to you a bunch of times. And this is great to actually be able to speak with you and speak with the Chamber Champions listening in today. Something fun for me, I guess, in terms of interest for me, I’ve been in the chamber and association industry for just over 20 years now. It’s kind of crazy how that journey started. I was an entrepreneur. Prior to being in the chamber industry, I own my own restaurant, I was a trained chef at one point when that when I left that partnership as a lot of restaurants don’t, you know, have the tendency to fail. I was one of those. One of those cases, started looking for a job that would maybe help given or maybe work given my managerial background, but not something that actually I didn’t want to start from scratch again. So I started looking for sales positions, knowing that at least that way, if I worked hard, I could make money. And sure enough, the Salt Lake chamber was hiring at the time. And little did I know that that would lead to a 20 year career after starting they’re making $13,000 An hour plus or $13,000.

Brandon Burton 4:18
Are they still hiring? Let me sign up

Ryan Evans 4:22
1000 a year plus commissions and I made it work pretty good. But yeah, 30,000 hour would be one heck of an opportunity. That’s right. So I know that that all steamrolled into, you know getting into clean energy and eventually this role here where I get to meld both the clean energy world and the Chamber history that I have, and it’s a great relationship. So it’s been great. Absolutely. It’s

Brandon Burton 4:44
like your background has been perfect for this union to bring into the chambers for innovation to clean energy very much. So speaking to that, tell us a little bit about the chambers of the chambers for innovation, clean energy, just kind of The size, the scope of work staff, just give us some perspective of where you’re coming from, with the organization to kind of set the stage for our discussion today. Absolutely, thank

Ryan Evans 5:10
you. So chambers renovation and clean energy as we affectionately like to call it, CIC II, as you alluded to Brandon, we are a national network of about 1300 chambers and economic development associations across the country, doesn’t mean we work with every single one of those every single year. But those are the groups that we stay in touch with quite a bit that we work with. Our whole role is to help advance the clean energy economy, at chambers innovation in clean energy, we’re not an environmental group, we’re not anti anything, we are strictly clean energy experts, and help to look to educate chambers on how they can capitalize on this growing segment of our economy, how they can be better involved in promoting good clean energy policy, how they can what what they need to know, to better understand the technology that exists and how to get past a lot of the misinformation that’s out there, whether Pro or negative regarding clean energy, we do a lot of best practice sharing of what chambers are doing across the country. And then we’ll get in and we’ll even advise chambers on particular public policy issues at the state or local level that they may be experiencing. firsthand. So again, we you know, our whole role is to work with chambers. And we do that for free. We have funding in place that allows us to work with any chamber anywhere. Typically, I mentioned 1300. But typically we work with we try to work in about seven or eight priority states at one time. And he states where we spend a little extra time, given that they’ve got more opportunity for clean energy or more challenges being presented for clean energy. And so we sort of rotate that out on on any given year. But as of right now, the states where we spend most of our time are Ohio, North Carolina, Florida, Arizona, Colorado, South Carolina, Virginia, and in some work in the Northeast as

Brandon Burton 7:04
well. All right, well, that definitely helps give some perspective as to the kind of work you’re involved with and the the approach you take with some of the these chambers and 1300 chambers that you work with. As we focus our discussion today. I’m kind of halfway joking. But when I say we’re going to talk about clean energy and chambers, even if they don’t think that it matters or something that they care about at the moment, we’ll talk about why it does matter. And how your local chamber can get involved, why you should be involved, what opportunities are out there. And we’ll dive into this discussion much deeper as soon as you get back from this quick break.

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Donna Novitsky 9:33
Hi, everyone, Donna from Yiftee here with another fun fact about small businesses. Did you know that there are 77 million people working in small businesses in the US? That’s almost half of the entire civilian workforce. But I know that you already know the value of local businesses. That is why we created community cards. They bring revenue to your members’ businesses that today is leaving your community and going to national brands and e-commerce companies. In addition to consumers we see schools, hospitals, city governments and companies buying community cards in bulk instead of buying big box store and online gift cards. Community cards keep local dollars local. For more info come to a demo or email us at sales@yiftee.com. We look forward to meeting you back to you Brandon.

Brandon Burton 10:27
All right, Ryan, we’re back. So as I alluded to, before the break, today, we’re diving into how chambers can get involved with with clean energy, why they should care, maybe that’s a good starting point, as far as why chamber should care about focusing on clean energy. And then you mentioned a couple items, you know, before the break is to, you know, the economic impact and things like that. But talk to us a little bit about why chambers should have clean energy on their radar and be intentional about trying to promote clean energy in their communities.

Ryan Evans 11:02
Sure, thank you. You know, honestly, this conversation would have been pretty different five years ago. But now, I think there’s no doubt that anybody, you know, nobody has a doubt that we are in the midst of an energy transformation in the United States of America and across the across the globe, really, we are, over the last several years, clean energy speed between solar and wind have been responsible for more than 90% of new electric generation built across the country. So in other words, we still have a lot of our electricity coming from natural gas, which is the number one on the fossil fuel side. And again, we’re not anti anything, we’re all of the above, we just truly know that the Clean Energy Economics will win out in the end, as natural gas started to actually overtake coal. Many years ago, when coal was the workhorse for electricity, then it became natural gas. And it still is natural gas. But now it’s really starting to shift towards more renewable energy sources. So that’s sort of number one is that we’re looking at the future of America being very much powered, whether it’s 100%, like some people think, or at least very high into the 80s, a 90%, by some sort of cleaner energy than we have now. So that’s a significant number one. Number two, your members care about their utility bills. That’s one of the highest costs of doing business in any state. So what is your electricity and heating bills look like? And where is that source of that pain point coming from? In most states, that’s still natural gas. And for a long time, natural gas was a great lower cost option for communities. Now, however, we’ve seen, especially in the last two years, the fluctuation within the volatility of natural gas pricing. So a lot of corporations are really being attracted to the fact that solar and wind are now the cheapest form of electricity you can get. And when you enter into a contract for these corporations that again, are members of chambers all over the country, they’re locking into those price points that they sign these contracts for, for anywhere from 20 to 35 years. So there’s absolute predictability in their electrical costs going forward, at least for that segment that they’re getting from clean energy. The other factor that I’ll mention is it just brings it back to home wherever you are, there are clean energy jobs being created on a regular basis. There are more people in employed in the solar industry alone than all of fossil fuel industries combined. That’s just solar. That’s not wind, that’s not electric vehicles. That’s not batteries and energy storage, and energy efficiency. So clean energy is a job creator, like no other. And then it brings home capital investment, it brings home economic opportunities and tax revenues for communities. So there are lots of reasons why chambers should engage or at least be interested, and at the very least be willing to provide good information to their communities, because there’s just there’s a lot to it. And a lot of voices get heard. And I think it’s given the amount of opportunity and challenges there are, it’s just important to at least be a good provider of information for your members and your community as a whole.

Brandon Burton 14:32
Right. So it’s been a couple of years ago now but our electric provider, I’m in Texas in our electric provider, we’re part of a co op and each year they do a brisket dinner, you know so we can go and as a member of the Co Op, they provide the brisket dinner, they do a little dog and pony show about the work they’re doing and at this particular dinner I was at they put up on the slideshow, this solar farm that they had and like, Wait, that’s like, right around the corner from my house. And I had no idea that the solar farm was there. And sure enough, I’m pulling up the Google satellite images, and it’s, you know, probably a mile from my house, and had no idea. But if it was a natural gas plant or something else, like, other things would definitely stand out, and you would notice, but um, just the clean energy can make such an impact in a community without being, you know, super noticeable. But so I think that our Electric Co Op did a good job of explaining that. But as far as the chamber goes, he said, you know, most importantly, even if it’s just sharing, you know, accurate good information with their community with their members. Obviously, we can point them to you to your organization to get some that that good information to share. But as the chamber looks to get involved and say, Yeah, this is important that we create jobs in clean energy, because that’s where the future is going. Or it’s important for us to help lower those utility rates for our member businesses, and for just our community in general to be able to thrive more and have more discretionary income, all these different points that you touched on the job creation. If a chamber wanted to get involved, where do they start with being able to try to move the ball try to move the needle, so to speak in their community?

Ryan Evans 16:27
There’s, there’s quite a few places you can start. And actually, I want to jump back really quick if it’s okay, Brandon, and just common, Texas, just because you brought up Texas and you brought up two things that I’m pretty passionate about. One is realistically, most solar installations you don’t notice. So you’re absolutely right, there’s a lot of misinformation that they’re obstructive that they’re an eyesore. But yet, most times people have no idea that they’re within a mile or two of their home, because they have that low profile, and you can put up trees around them, you can put up shrubs and bushes around them. So I appreciate and love the fact that you didn’t even notice not necessarily. But then also just on Texas really quick. It’s Texas is one of my favorite stories to tell because even though they have been traditionally one of the the number one oil and gas state in the country, and they are known as an oil and gas state and Houston particular huge oil and gas market, right. Yet, Texas is the number two state in the nation for most solar installations in terms of size of those installations combined. And number one, as far as wind, this is a state that truly embraces the all of the above energy form, you know, mentality in an incredible way. And, you know, chambers, like the Greater Houston partnership, for example, are all in on this all of the above factor and even looking at new technologies like carbon capture, and all these other great things that we see out there. So I just want to throw my you know, throw a shout out for taxes just in terms of, you know, that typical state that has learned that they don’t have to just be dependent on that fossil fuel economy that there is this huge other opportunity out there for the state and for electrical ratepayers and whatnot.

Brandon Burton 18:07
I will say if you ever drive between Abilene and San Angelo, you will see the wind. As far as your eye can see, you will see windmills. So

Ryan Evans 18:16
yeah, there’s a lot of places around the country that are like that, where you just see them. But a lot of cases, there’s really not much else there. So they may as well, Saturday. Right, right. And you know, as far as how you get involved, there’s lots of ways number one, I guarantee that almost every single chamber in the country has some sort of clean energy industry a company within their membership, it may not be a solar installer, it may not be a manufacturer of solar or wind turbine parts. But it might be somebody who supplies workforce to that it might be a company that is a fencing company that puts up temporary fencing around renewable energy installations as they’re going up. So there’s, it’s incredible the supply chain that exists out into the clean energy world. So one, look at your own membership and see who’s there and see what the important issues are to talk to your utility. I always recommend you, you know, work with your utility on clean energy, because ultimately, they’re going to be the one that does a lot of it outside of the private companies that develop. But don’t also take the utilities word for it completely ask questions, look for what might be the best opportunities for your entire region and start a business Coalition for you know, that looks at sustainability and clean energy by starting a committee like that. It’s amazing what you’ll learn from your members in terms of what they’re doing to either procure clean energy on their own or through the utility, what they’re doing internally to improve their emissions outcomes so they’re more sustainable. It’s it’s pretty impressive to see what businesses do and it’s one great thing chambers can do is promote what their businesses are doing. Proactiv basis as well, that’s that’s just a great thing. Another thing that you can do, if you want to get involved is reach out to us, of course, I’m not going to give a sales pitch there. But that’s what we do. If there’s, you know, we’re happy to chat with any chamber anywhere all the time, just to say, hey, here’s the hotspots that we see, maybe this is a chance for you to engage. And lastly, look in your state for some sort of a state level clean energy or solar industry association. So prior to, as you mentioned, in the my introduction, I was the president and founder of the Utah solar industry association, we worked with chambers all across the state, trying to help educate them on solar policy and clean energy policy and how they can help protect the jobs that, you know, we’re being built by this industry within the state. So look to those associations and bring them as partners or ask them to be members, so they can kind of make sure your members are informed on the hot topics of the day regarding the clean energy industries. Yeah.

Brandon Burton 20:58
So I don’t mean to keep going back to stuff to this example, in Texas. So chambers are known for being conveners, right. And as I see a lot of this land, like with these wind farms that we’re talking about, not only are they wind farms, but they have their oil rigs that are going, they have their cattle that are grazing on the fields. And so they’ve got multiple streams of income using this land that’s very agricultural based. And if a chamber can see and recognize these opportunities, be that convener to make some introductions to help introduce some of these clean energy capabilities. On to that, that rancher or that person who has an oil rig set up or whatever it may be, I mean, we’re talking things that are very hyper focused in Texas, for sure. But other parts of the country, the land may be used for something else, but it could also be used, in addition to for wind or solar. So that convener make those introductions. Yeah,

Ryan Evans 21:58
no, that’s a great point number one. Yeah. So always and chamber should know this. And they do know this. And mean, chambers are conveners of the voice of business, the, you know, the, they’re the convener of the business communities, and realistically for their whole community. So there is an opportunity just to talk to people about what is possible. And yeah, in Texas, you will often see wind turbines right next to oil rigs, and maybe cattle grazing as well. In Ohio, you may see a solar installation, where, you know, maybe 5%, of a generational farm is being utilized for solar energy along with 5% of another farm nearby them and 10% of another farm nearby them. But those, that five or 10% of the farm property is actually giving annual revenue anywhere from 100,000 to $300,000. A year to those farm owners. And a lot of cases, it’s helping keep farmland in a family name and helping them not to have to sell it off, or because it’s a lease arrangement, or even turn some other land into a subdivision for homes. I mean, that’s, that’s just and once you put homes in that property’s gone with a solar installation for, you know, for example, in a rural farming community, typically those panels have been in the ground for, you know, 30 to 35 years, but at the same time, like you say, you’re farming on the rest of your property, you can still do some agriculture underneath the solar panels. And a lot of case you can still graze animals like sheep throughout an entire solar area. So yeah, there are lots of other ways that you can promote the land and utilize the land for economic or just community benefit.

Brandon Burton 23:40
Right. And from the farmer perspective, I say, you know, there’s a lot of government subsidies for farmers to either not grow a crop or to grow, you know, more, you know, mono cropping, you know, which has its own issues. So to be able to introduce another stream of income for these farmers could really help them actually farm what they need to and want to farm versus what the government’s paying them to do. And it gives them a lot more freedom. Absolutely. And

Ryan Evans 24:07
if you get farmer start on this, a lot of them are going to tell you, this is a property rights thing. If I want to put solar on my farm, I want to put solar on my farm, and they get pretty passionate about it speak out in lots of different state houses across the country on their property rights. And it’s don’t get in the middle of a farmer and their property rights. I’ll tell you that much right now.

Brandon Burton 24:25
That’s right. So for chambers that are listening, I’d like to hear maybe a an innovative example or two where you’ve seen whether it’s a chamber stepping into introduce clean energy policy or just implementation of some sort. What are some of these innovative things that you’ve seen across the country as as people try to lean more heavily into clean energy? Yeah,

Ryan Evans 24:52
there’s, I don’t know if I can go to innovative on how chambers participate, but I can give some really Good examples of how chambers have engaged. Okay. Oh. And that’s it’s just sometimes tough because chambers are generalists for the most part, right, they need to know a lot about a lot of different industries. And so sometimes it’s really hard to dig really far into one particular topic or subject matter. But you know, in the case of chambers, one thing that we are always encouraged by is when we see coalitions of chambers that stand up for clean energy. So we’ve seen it in Ohio, when Chambers as a collective whole, all stood up and spoke out against negative anti renewable energy legislation a few years ago, in the Northeast, and now in the southeast, we’re seeing a lot of rallying by chambers to support the possibility of offshore wind development, off the coast of the East Coast. And we’re beginning to see a little bit of that in the, in the south er, in the in the south, and in the West, and the Gulf Coast and off in the Pacific Ocean, off the coast of California, and Oregon and Washington. So we see a lot of this convening and working together. We’ve seen everything from electric vehicle ride and drive and demonstrations, to clean energy industry, hosted forums and conferences, all around renewable energy and sustainability. We’ve seen energy tours. So in Utah, where I used to live, the Salt Lake chamber had few years in a row had done energy tours, where they took their members out to various energy installations. And one of them was all about clean energy, taking them to wind taken to a solar farm, etc, etc. In and, you know, clean energy, sort of a broad topic, but, and even just a couple of weeks now, the St. Pete chamber in Florida is doing a sustainability and resilience tour, they’re going to take some of their members down to see how, amongst other things, clean energy benefited certain areas to keep the lights on, as well as other resilience efforts from some of the other communities that they can bring back to St. Pete to learn from so that they are a more resilient, more resilient community for future storms. So lots of different ways that chambers have been engaged, whether it’s op eds, whether it’s events, or just, you know, fighting for good policy at a state house or the federal level.

Brandon Burton 27:29
Very good. Those are all really good examples and ways that chambers can definitely get involved. So this question may be coming from left field for you. And if you don’t want to answer it, we can edit it out. How have you seen any integration with with Bitcoin miners? And no, there’s been a lot of talk about the energy consumption of Bitcoin mining. And then Bitcoin miners trying to make the argument with clean energy and using some of these resources to offset some of those carbon emissions and whatnot. I’ll be

Ryan Evans 28:09
honest, you may want to edit this out, I don’t know Brandon, I can give a little editorial on that. It’s, it’s a tough sell, because it is high high energy usage. So we, however, did see you know, in for a little bit in Miami, we started talking about it because the local government in Miami was really trying hard to attract some Bitcoin industry there. But that energy usage was really tough, because, you know, Florida can only expand so much in terms of their energy development, their energy usage, etc. And, you know, one of the selling factors was they have such a huge nuclear, new as nuclear energy is such a huge part of their overall energy resources. And, you know, the Bitcoin it was trying to sell that, but all of that energy was already being utilized for something else. So all of this would have just been, they would have had to develop new energy. And at that point, you’ve for the most part, it’s going to make sense to build solar. So I think in general, when it comes to Bitcoin, it’s great. There is an opportunity there, but it should not be done trying to sell it as utilizing existing resources. I think in a lot of ways. If you are going to law and try to get some bitcoin manufacturing and mining going on in your communities, you really do need to look at how are we going to provide new generation to, to supply that particular operation? Yeah. All right. Well,

Brandon Burton 29:40
we’ll we’ll see what we do with that. So I’d like to ask everyone I have on the show, if there’s any tips or action items that you’d be willing to share with those listening, if they wanted to maybe get involved more with clean energy in their communities or We’re maybe something totally off topic, but for these chambers who want to take their organization up to the next level, what would you offer for them?

Ryan Evans 30:07
Thank you. Yeah, I’ve got a few things. So number one, if not every chamber is engaged in advocacy. And I understand that, at the very minimum, though Chambers as the voice of business and conveners in their community should look to be a good source of reliable information. And much like a lot of other things in the world, there’s so much misinformation put out in the world about clean energy. There are so many groups that are not local, yet, they’ll bring in people from, you know, from far away to come in and fight renewable energy projects in small communities, and make it seem like this opposition is so loud, we call them NIMBY groups, so not my backyard groups. So if nothing else, I think it’s really important that chambers look to be sources of good third party reliable expert information. So that those that actually live in the community can, you know, can really look at the facts and say, We want to make a good informed decision. So that’s, that’s sort of number one. Another just sort of tip and maybe a tidbit that I want to throw out there. There is, you know, chambers by nature tend to really love bipartisan policy. That’s sort of how we work right, we bring people together so that we can find the common ground, what’s best for the business community, what’s best for an economy, an advocate for that, whether it’s coming from the AR side, or the D side, it doesn’t really matter, we try to find the best possible policy for business businesses in our state. You know, and we certainly saw a really good example of that in the bipartisan infrastructure package that was passed two years ago, phenomenal is twice something 20 years in the making, it’s something we should all be proud of in the chamber industry that we’ve all fought for it. And that’s going to lead to everything from bridges and roads, but also to transmission lines for more utilities, for more electric vehicle charging infrastructure out there in the world as we make this transition. So there’s lots of clean energy angles on that. But the tidbit that I want to share that, yeah, I built it up to get to it. There was, you know, not a lot of chambers love the fact that the inflation Reduction Act was passed on a partisan basis. And I understand that, and I completely agree, this is a tidbit that I think is really important for people to understand. If you take away all of the other aspects of the inflation Reduction Act, and only look at the clean energy provisions within that which, you know, amounted to about a $379 billion package way, way less than what that quote unquote, green New Deal was being presented as many many years ago. But that particular legislation, just the clean energy provisions, almost every single major component of that policy has a history of bipartisan support. And a and a lot of them have a proven return on investment for that type of state tax incentive. As a lot of people say that inflation Reduction Act is really carrot heavy, and very stick light, meaning it’s all about the incentives trying to you know, trying to drive innovation and spur this new aspect to our economy, rather than penalizing and putting out more regulatory efforts that none of us really like to see in the world. So again, just I think it’s really important that something that I’ve been very passionate about is saying, if you just take out those clean energy aspects, you will see that so many of them either had bipartisan support, or suggested by and promoted by Republicans versus the Democrats that voted for the package. So really just go beyond the talking points of partisan and say, Ah, actually, there’s some really great stuff in here that’s proven value, and has proven to be supported by both sides of the aisle and people across the country.

Brandon Burton 33:56
Right. I appreciate you sharing the tips and tidbits with us there. As we look to the future of chambers, and I see a lot of the work you’re doing is future leaning. But as we look to the future of chambers, how do you see the future of chambers in their purpose going forward?

Ryan Evans 34:15
I think chambers have a more important role now than they’ve ever had before. We’ve, you know, been building up the chamber industry for 100 years, you know, over the last 10 years, I think they’ve gotten more and more influential. Really, there’s so much within the industry that’s really looking to lift up chambers, whether it’s a rural chamber, a State Chamber, a Regional Chamber, whatever it may be. But I think now is maybe more important a time than ever, because there is so much that at least that I see legislation that tends to move from state to state and Statehouse to statehouse and so it’s an opportunity not only to really stand up for your business community and those things in your state or your region that you see as important to your quality of life. But it’s, you know, it’s really this chance to look and say, Hey, what’s happening over in this state? And is that going to come to my state? Because chances are these days it is. And I bring up things in my own mind when I say this, but things like dei policies, so you know, something that the Chamber world has been super passionate about, and very much engaged in terms of advocating for more dei within their communities within their businesses and building up certification programs around Dei. Yet, in a lot of states, we’re starting to see anti from various administrations and now maybe state houses of the legislature, we’re starting to see sort of pushback on that dei work. And it’s, you know, this isn’t even in the world of clean energy for me, but it’s really important to chambers, and therefore, it’s sort of just a good example of things to look for, that you can learn from other states, what they’ve already gone through and say, Hey, is there a good chance that’s going to come to my state? And how do I either fight it off or engage it depending upon what the policy might be? How do we best represent the business community, rather than being caught off guard, let’s make sure that we’ve got our best arguments upfront and ready to go to help be, you know, again, that longtime voice of business for our community and represent our members the best we can. I

Brandon Burton 36:27
love that perspective. And that’s really one of the greatest opportunities of living in the United States is you’re able to look at other states and the models that they do and, you know, be in these individual laboratories and saying, This is what worked well there. And this is didn’t you know, and as we apply it in our communities in our state, this is why it could be good, or why it would be a disaster and really be able to make a good argument based on facts and data. So I think that’s a great perspective. Well, Ryan, this has been a for me at least, it’s been a fun conversation. It’s been an eye opening conversation, I’m sure for many, but for any listeners who wanted to reach out and connect with you to learn more about what the Chamber’s been have raised innovation and clean energy can do and, and how you can maybe work with them, what would be the best way for them to reach out and connect? hit

Ryan Evans 37:16
our website, which is ChambersforInnovation.com. Feel free to email me directly my email is revans@chambersforinnovation.com. More than happy to chat with anyone, whether it’s just a question, you want to do more, you’ve got something that you’re just not sure about whatever the case, the issue may be, and again, this can be anything from electric vehicles and electric vehicle charging, to offshore wind supply chain to solar and wind, whatever it is, if we don’t know the answer within our team, we certainly can point you in the right direction to some some great experts out there in the world, that can be a really good news resource for you.

Brandon Burton 37:57
That’s awesome. I will get that in our show notes for this episode, as well. So people can pull that up and get in contact with you. But it’s been great to have you on the podcast. Ryan, I appreciate you setting aside some time and and to share some of these insights with the Chamber champions that listen and to really help sharpen their focus on why focus on clean energy in their communities is important. So thank you for being with us today.

Ryan Evans 38:22
Thank you, Brandon. I appreciate it.

Brandon Burton 38:24
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3P vs. 3C Chamber Debate with Jill Lagan

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

Hello, Chamber Champions. Welcome to Chamber Chat Podcast. I’m your hosts Brandon Burton. And it’s my goal here on the podcast to introduce you to people and ideas to better help you serve your Chamber members and your community. You’re joining us for a special episode as part of our 2023 ACCE Chamber the Year Finalist Series.

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

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

Becki Womble 1:03
I’ve been using Community Matters for probably six or seven years now. And in a previous life, I sold commercial printing so I can highly recommend Community Matters because it’s a complete turnkey job for any busy chamber exec and it’s a wonderful, beautiful printed product whenever you’re finished. And I just I’m very sold on Community Matters. And with a printing background I just big endorsement from me.

Brandon Burton 1:44
To learn how Community Matters can support your chamber with your next publication. Please visit communitymattersinc.com/podcast To request your free media kit and request a proposal to find out what kind of non-dues revenue you can generate.

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Our guest for this episode is Jill Rowland-Lagan. Jill is the native of Boulder City, Nevada, and she is an experienced entrepreneur and community leader and has been the Boulder City Chamber of Commerce CEO for over 20 years. Driven by the need to see others succeed. She takes pride in providing each chamber investor with their time and consideration so that they are empowered to surround themselves with success as well as the CEO. Her goals include building the business community to be economically strong, and setting the chamber at the forefront of that by being a bright light in Boulder City that provides excellent and community service to visitors and to those doing business in Boulder City. Jill, I’m happy to have you with us today on Chamber Chat Podcast, I’d love to give you an opportunity to say hello to all the Chamber Champions who are out there listening and share something interesting about yourself so we can all get to know you a little better.

Jill Lagan 2:54
Well, thank you so much for inviting me to be a part I am truly honored. And I have an interesting tidbit that I’m very, very proud of and honored to say that my daughter is an Olympian, she is an Olympic shooter. She shoots air pistol standard 22 as a wonderful female athlete for the United States. And so she was able to participate in the Tokyo Olympics. We were unable to be there. So it was a little little disappointing. So we’re kind of excited that she is again in the running for the Paris Olympics. So Summer Olympics next summer. And that’s one of my all time favorite things to share.

Brandon Burton 3:35
That is fantastic. I wonder. So last summer, our family took a trip to through Colorado and Utah. And we stopped at the Olympic Museum, the new and Olympic Museum in Colorado Springs. And they have a table set up where you get to meet an Olympian and there was a Olympian doing the same event that your daughter is somewhere has your daughter been there manning the set the booth there at the at the Olympic museum. I wonder if

Jill Lagan 4:04
she trains at the Olympic training center there. I don’t know if you went to just the museum where if you actually went to the Olympic Training Center itself, and she does work in both of those different locations and has the honor of being able to sit there at the table and get to visit with people and take them on their tour. And so yes, so she lives in Colorado Springs and has been doing some great things for our for the United States. I’m very proud of her.

Brandon Burton 4:31
That is awesome. Well, thank you for sharing that tidbit. You gotta be a proud moment. But why don’t you take a few moments and tell us a little bit about the Boulder City Chamber just to give us an idea of the size of the chamber scope of work staff budget, just to kind of give us some perspective before we get into our topic of discussion today.

Jill Lagan 4:53
So here in Boulder City, we’re just on the outside of the Las Vegas Valley and we are considered a rural community we have just over 14,006 33. And so that was the last demographic count that we had, that we participated in. And in this great community, we actually are pretty phenomenal in our space because we are over 204 square miles. And the idea then of having such a small population, but be able to protect our resources, and that’s something that this community it feels very strongly on. We have a control growth ordinance here in our community, we also have no gaming, we are the only municipality without gaming in the state of Nevada, which makes us a little bit different in the fact that we don’t have those casino, the tax revenue coming in and flowing into our community. So we work pretty hard at being unique, and then making sure that we take care of each of our businesses, because they respect that factor. And it provides such a great quality of life for our residents as well. It’s also a wonderful way for tourists to be able to have the nightlife and the fun of the Vegas valley and then have a little bit more of that outdoor recreation experience here in Boulder City. So we spend a lot of time promoting that our chamber itself has 438/39 members right around that. And we’re really honored that each and every one of them gets a lot of our attention. We pay attention to making sure that they feel like they are heard and that their voice matters. And so we’re grateful for that word, just just over 250,000 on an annual basis as our budget. And we spend a lot of time doing a little bit of everything. So we also operate the economic vitality Commission. It is a nonprofit that we’ve formed because our city does not have an economic development division. And so we operate as that for the city. We also have the Tourism Commission. Like I said, we operate the Nevada State Welcome Center here in Southern Nevada. And so as people are coming across the new bridge, that is the right there at Hoover Dam, as they come from Arizona into the state of Nevada, we are kind of that first stopping point. And so we are grateful that we are able to introduce them to Nevada and encourage them to travel all throughout the state. And so it’s I have one staff member, she is an amazing office manager. And we’re really grateful for her. And then we wouldn’t be able to operate without our 25 plus volunteers. And they are the ones that help us man the phones and operate the in the lobby at the reception desk. And then of course, also for all the different special events, I have a board of nine, and they’re all very active. And I’m grateful for them. And I’m also grateful that we have people who are kind of on a waiting list to be able to be on our board to be able to participate. That’s always that’s been a big deal for me. And so I’m grateful that they see the relevance and the importance of the chamber in Boulder City. All

Brandon Burton 8:02
right, well, that definitely helps to paint the picture and you guys are very involved for you and one other staff person. So like you said heavily relying on those volunteers who step up and help out and, and you guys are managing it well. It seems to be able to keep all those things afloat.

Jill Lagan 8:19
We’re trying we’re doing the best we can. And like I said, our volunteers are heavily recognized, we always want to make sure that they realize how important they are. And I think they even see that. Without them. We would not be operational. And I know that they’re very proud of the work that they do because we do great work here. Absolutely.

Brandon Burton 8:39
So the topic that we decided to settle on for our conversation today. The the title of this episode might seem a little contrarian. So we’re talking about a three P versus a three C chamber debate. And for those who have been in chamber role a little bit know the difference between a three P chamber and a three C chamber. And we’re going to get into a discussion about why we may not want to just totally neglect the three P’s as we move forward with chambers but we’ll get in deeper in this conversation as soon as we get back from this quick break.

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Brandon Burton 12:12
All right, Jill, we’re back as a tease before the break there, we’re going to be talking about three P chambers versus three C chambers and maybe the debate that comes up with that, but specifically, from the perspective of a smaller chamber. I think for some of these really big, maybe reasonable regional chambers or larger cities, it’s easy to get on board with the argument of a three C chamber and it makes a lot of sense. But for a smaller chamber, I think there’s and I think we both agree there’s still some value in some of those those three keys and being you know, involved there more locally and and doing some of those traditional things chambers have done. You mind sharing some of your thoughts from your perspective as a chamber of you plus one other staff? I would put you in the smaller chamber category. But how do you see that debate with the three P versus three C?

Jill Lagan 13:08
You know, I am a huge advocate of three C’s and I always will be having been a former board member with the W the Western Association of chamber executives. And still currently on the foundation there, I absolutely believe in the work that is being done and in the idea that many chambers need to relook at what it is that they do their performance. And whether they’re doing the parades, pageants and pancake breakfast, for the right reasons. Because I believe that you can still be a three C chamber, you can still be that champion that convener, you can still do those great things. But I think that in some of our rural communities, especially the the person that leads or the the entity that leads that organization and that community with those pancake breakfasts, those grades, those pageants, those things that make that community special, that might drive the tourism to that area that might create that quality of life. I think in those communities, it’s very valuable and still very relevant for chambers to be a part of that. I will say that I truly do believe that that collaboration is what makes it important for chambers to understand, what are they good at? You can’t be good at everything. You can’t do everything 110%. So what can you do that you do really, really well. And I do believe that in some of our smaller areas and smaller communities that they still need to do the peas and the C’s. And it means that for smaller staff, we kind of have to be on top of a lot more than some of the larger metro chambers. They have such they play such a key role and I I feel strongly about what it is that they do as well. But we see that in many of those communities. They’re really taking a larger role in the political side of things and Government Affairs and For me here in my region, I am so grateful that we have the Metro Chamber, the Vegas chamber, the Henderson chamber, because I don’t have the time to stay on top of some of those things. So I, I kind of have to glean from them some of that information. I’m grateful for that. And so I see where their relevance level lies. Here in my community. However, if we weren’t doing the Christmas parade, there will not be activities that are happening in centering around that time. And that’s where we bring people into the community to stay a little bit later to shop in those shops to provide those retailers some of that opportunity as well. And so I see relevance in both locations, large, small, but I also see the importance for each chamber to determine what it is they do best and what it is they can do to remain relevant in my particular community. I have to do PS MCs.

Brandon Burton 15:51
That’s right. So it’s not a it’s not a matchup necessarily of the peas versus the C’s. But it’s the peas and the C’s. I was going to ask you about how you work with your regional chambers and Metro chambers to especially on those areas of advocacies and public policy and things like that. How are those relationships fostered? How do you develop those and, and really, I’m asking this because I know there are a lot of newcomers into the chamber world who typically will start at a smaller chamber. And they need to know how to build some of those relationships. And to really lean into that advocacy side, even though you may not have the staff and the bandwidth to take it all on yourself.

Jill Lagan 16:35
Well, because I don’t have the staff and the bandwidth, I am really a champion for making sure that you utilize your your key partners. And for me here in Southern Nevada, that means Vegas chamber Henderson chamber, they are really my go twos, as well as our ethnic chambers, I don’t have the ability to formulate an entire Hispanic Chamber, Asian chamber or urban chamber, but I have got some really great friends and other CEOs that do that really well. Why would I want to reinvent the wheel or even attempt to do it in a halfway manner, I very much want to lean on those people and collaborate. And it makes us stronger when we are partnering with those other chambers and see them as a in the collaboration sense versus in some kind of a competitive sense, because I really do think that we’re all stronger as we’re as we bridge together and our voices stronger. When we’re all together. We really noticed that here in Southern Nevada with our different legislative sessions. And when it when it stated that the chambers have this opinion, that speaks volumes to those elected officials and those policymakers who are worrying about what does that do to the business community? And how does, how is that impacting some of the residents that are a part of those communities. So I truly believe that those partnerships and collaboration are key and essential. And I’m very grateful that we’ve always had a great relationship with our partners in the Vegas valley. And I know that in some communities, there’s an you know, we’re we’re getting to the point where a lot of the the chambers and who they represent and the communities they represent are all merged, right. And so in some of those areas, we have to think of, it may not be that a small chamber is small because of the rural area. But small because they’re the people that they represent are in a small geographic section, even though they represent a small, larger community. And so not all small chambers are that because of the population, it also has to do with the region that they represent. And it’s even key for them to be able to be a part of what the other chambers are doing, and making sure that we have a stronger voice together.

Brandon Burton 18:54
Absolutely. And I would even argue that the sense of community and in what communities are has changed, as the world has gotten smaller. It used to be that you lived in a community because you worked in the community and you went to church and that community and your kids went to school in that community and and now this community can mean county wide, it could mean you know neighboring communities that you commute into and whatnot. So being able to collaborate with those neighboring communities, if you will, that to use that term a little more loosely, I guess. It’s just being open minded to being able to see where those opportunities are to make a stronger overall community. So I think there’s a lot of advantages, though, to for a smaller chamber where you had mentioned the Christmas parade really draws people to your community and allows for more shopping and businesses stay open later and really being an economic driver at that time of year. What are some of those other advantages that you see as a small chamber and maybe some of those is a piece that you hang on to.

Jill Lagan 20:02
So I in going back to that specific example, not only are we able to allow for that impact that comes in from the financial side, but we also take that time to recognize some of the special people in our community and to highlight great businesses, the businesses of the Business of the Year to talk about and spotlight some of those different businesses that are doing great things, maybe spotlight the nonprofit that has done something phenomenal. And so it gives us an opportunity also to highlight those key individuals in our communities that are doing good things and are doing the things for all the right reasons. And so also to recognize and acknowledge elected officials who are paying attention to the business community. So we we kind of balanced the idea of making sure we safe thank you and recognize those things that are taking place, at the same time as obviously creating that economic boon for that that short period of time, we see especially here in our community with the fact that we have a control growth ordinance. We need those many population explosions on the weekends when we’re doing special events. And I realized events are very, you know, they they take up so much time, they’re time consuming. Within staff, they’re time consuming in my thought process. So I’m not able to think through, you know, maybe something else a new program, but they also are very valuable for us to bring people into this community. And so I know that for us, it’s important for us not only to recognize the things that are going on here, to spotlight that with the different media that are paying attention because of special events. But also for us to acknowledge the good that the citizens here are doing. And whether we recognize them at a special event, or we’re providing them with a little bit of additional media attention. Those types of activities are secondary, but they are still very valuable. And I think that that’s one of the reasons that we’ve been so successful in having those events, bringing those people together and staying informed on who and what and the things that are going on in the community. I know that it takes time to have those planning meetings. But in those planning meetings, a lot of activity are going on, I might be able to find out a little bit more about what their needs are. They’ve got volunteer needs, they’ve got, you know, they’ve got money for a scholarship, but they’re not getting any kids to participate, that gives us the opportunity to reach out to the schools, let them know that some of these different programs that are available and making those connections. And so we can’t get to that C word of connectivity and convenience those people with we’re not if we’re not doing those things in our smaller communities.

Brandon Burton 22:46
That’s right. And I love that was you are getting together to plan a big activity, parade or whatever it may be, to, you know, keep your eyes and ears open, because you’re going to learn so much as you deal with those volunteers and businesses that are being a part of this, that then you can build upon and continue that momentum of your chamber, just by being aware and paying attention and not being so hyper focused on that one event that you’re working on. Because it does take a lot of bandwidth. So you may have to be, you know, very intentional about paying attention to those other signals, as you see them, call them signals.

Jill Lagan 23:24
And you know, we’re we want to Chamber’s always want to be part of the solution, right? We we pride ourselves on finding those solutions in our communities and for our business owners. And so you would not know that you would not know what we’re the the need is if you weren’t connected if you weren’t involved if you weren’t engaged. And so I think that that’s one opportunity. You know, sometimes I don’t have the solutions, but I have the ability to bring the two people together that need to create that conversation, that dialog to get to that solution. And so I see us as being really that, that conduit, and we would not have that opportunity if we weren’t involved and engaged in what’s going on in some of the different organizations and I find that to be many rural communities, many small communities, that’s where they excel and that’s the that’s what they do so well that creates that relevance for that community to have the chamber.

Brandon Burton 24:18
Absolutely. So I’d like to ask it for Jack column chamber champions listeners to the podcasts that are out there who are interested in taking their chamber up to the next level. What tip or strategy or action item might you offer them to be able to accomplish that?

Jill Lagan 24:37
I know that had I not had a wonderful mentor Kara Kelly was with the Las Vegas chamber at the time, had she not introduced me to Western Association of chamber executives. I would not be where I am today. Having the ability to get together with your peers and understand best practices have that professional development time. You know right down to it. Just thinking about your own your own mental health, and having that dialogue with others as they, during the pandemic, I don’t know what I would have done without having those connections to those other chamber CEOs, and membership. You know, managers and all of those people who we come together, we exchange great ideas, you also have the opportunity, I learned even more with ACC E and some of the other Association organizations meeting together with them, it has been probably the biggest thing that has excelled my career and has helped us make this chamber better had I not had those relationships, if I had not had those peers to go to, to bounce ideas off of even just simply finding out about some of the different vendors that they use that they have vetted out and know that you know, this is a great credit card processing company, or this is a great insurance program. So having some of those things and meeting up with them. And being a part of those different organizations, I 100%, highly recommend, I truly believe that they are what has made my job a lot easier. Yes,

Brandon Burton 26:08
it’s much easier to learn from others who have gone through and gain some of those bumps and bruises themselves. So you don’t have to do that yourself.

Jill Lagan 26:18
But you know, when you get back to your board, and you’re reporting to your board, it is so valuable to be able to say my peers in these six communities or, you know, in the western region or the eastern areas, it, it creates a quite a bit of stability, continuity, and it gives you the ability to share with your board and other people that other people are doing this. And it has been proven.

Brandon Burton 26:42
And I would say one of the big reasons why I started this podcast was I would work with chambers who I saw were really struggling, I saw some that obviously were doing very well, but some that were really struggling. And the more I learned about it, they were not members of their state association or the regional Sesay or their IT WAC E or ACCE they weren’t learning from their peers. Maybe they had a neighboring chamber that they were connected with. But that was about the extent of it so that that the podcast could share some tips and strategies and best practices, and really be able to get people like Jill on to encourage you to be a part of these Peer Associations. So you can learn and build those relationships, and learn from your peers to really accelerate your growth in the chamber industry. So thank you for sharing that as a tip and action item.

Jill Lagan 27:36
You know, it takes a lot of pressure off of us when I don’t have to have all the good ideas. And I know that I don’t and I love being able to give credit to another chamber for some of the great things that they’re doing that I can say, hey, let’s give this a try. take some pressure off of me. Right, exactly.

Brandon Burton 27:53
So I’d like asking everyone I have on this show this question. As we look to the future of chambers of commerce, how do you see the future of chambers in their purpose going forward?

Jill Lagan 28:06
I have always had a huge passion for chamber work. And the fact that we represent the business community, those voices need to be heard, especially in that small business realm. Obviously, they are going to be the lifeblood of this country from now until whenever. And so I really want to make sure that chambers are relevant in small communities. And I feel like the the best way that they can do that going into the future is putting aside any ill will or bad feelings that might have happened through lack of collaboration. Maybe they had an economic vitality, or an economic development entity come into town and they didn’t get a seat at the table, go ask for that seat at the table. Make sure that you’re opening those doors be a part of some of those different activities that are taking place in your community that makes it so important for you to be at that table. Make sure that when the city council creates new new programs and new scope of work that they know that they need to reach out to the Chamber of Commerce to ask those questions, how that fits how they fit into that picture and how they feel they feel that that’s going to be impactful to the business community. I really believe that being part of those regional organizations, whether it’s economic development, whether it’s, you know, some of the different programs that are happening statewide with your legislative issues, government affairs type activities, I feel like if if we are more engaged and involved and part of some of those bigger pictures, that’s how we fit in so that they can see that when the chamber speaks. It means something when the chamber is engaged or asked to be a part of something or ask their opinion. I feel like if we’re not part of all of that, and we’re not making sure that we have a seat at the each of those tables that we will get left behind and I know that that for me is something that I’m always paying attention to. I want to make sure that without burning us out, obviously, you only have so much time but making sure that you have made a splash in your community so that people are calling to the chamber to make sure that they know that that the Chamber’s opinion is high, and that they have the ability to make a difference in that community. So that doesn’t happen without that collaboration. And in some communities, it may not be especially new people, if you’ve got a new chamber, exactly. It’s just trying to get in and trying to make a difference in that community, the best thing they can do is go meet up with their elected officials, the leaders of the economic development organizations, the leaders of the tourism organizations, and make sure that they realize that they want to make be a part and be a part of the solution for that community.

Brandon Burton 30:42
Absolutely. Well, I wanted to give you an opportunity jail for anyone out there listening who’d like to reach out and connect from you and continue this conversation or maybe learn more from from your example and connect with you what would be the best way for someone to reach out and, and make that connection? Well,

Jill Lagan 31:03
thank you for that opportunity. And I’m going to do a shameless plug for The Best Damn Podcast, which we also host and we’re very excited that we have that chance. And obviously, podcasting is probably something else that people need to look at for the future. We know how important that has become, and what a great tool and a resource for our communities. And not only that outside of our communities for us to be able to reach a broader audience, much like chamber chat does. And so I very much want to introduce that to everybody. But my website is BoulderCityChamber.com. And anyone’s welcome to give me a call or an email, our phone number is 702-293-2034. And my email is jill@bouldercitychamber.com. Awesome.

Brandon Burton 31:50
And I will get all of that in our show notes for this episode, including a link to the best day in podcast. And, and I couldn’t agree with you more the value that a podcast brings for a chamber, but just getting your message out there telling the work you’re done, you’re doing telling the stories of your members and just you know, bringing in those outsiders who maybe are coming for a visit or looking to relocate to the area, just give them a sample of what your community is about. And I will do a shameless plug for my podcasting guide and course that I have four chambers to get up and go on with the podcast. And you can find that at chamberchatpodcast.com/pivot. So there’s a free guide to get started, and then a link for the podcasting course as well. But, Joe, this has been great having you on the podcast, you brought a lot of value and great perspective that I think some people may be a little hesitant to say out loud. So I’m glad we had this discussion and and hopefully some of the smaller chambers out there listening can say yes, that’s what I feel, you know, and they can resonate with that and, and really lean into that work that matters. So thank you for being with us today. And then enjoyed having you with us on the podcast. Thank

Jill Lagan 33:03
you. Thank you for this great opportunity and thank you for your great work.

Brandon Burton 33:07
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Small Staff, Big Impact with Jodi Owczarski

Miles Burdine Chamber Chat Podcast promo image.

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

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

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

Hello, Chamber Champions. Welcome to Chamber Chat Podcast. I’m your hosts Brandon Burton. And it’s my goal here on the podcast to introduce you to people and ideas to better help you serve your Chamber members and your community. You’re joining us for a special episode as part of our 2023 ACCE Chamber the Year Finalist Series.

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

When it comes to publishing a Chamber Map directory or Community Guide, Community Matters has a trusted experience to help your chamber accomplish your goals. With different advertising sales models and publication styles, Community Matters will help you create a non-dues revenue machine!

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

Becki Womble 1:03
I’ve been using Community Matters for probably six or seven years now. And in a previous life, I sold commercial printing so I can highly recommend Community Matters because it’s a complete turnkey job for any busy chamber exec and it’s a wonderful, beautiful printed product whenever you’re finished. And I just I’m very sold on Community Matters. And with a printing background I just big endorsement from me.

Brandon Burton 1:44
To learn how Community Matters can support your chamber with your next publication. Please visit communitymattersinc.com/podcast To request your free media kit and request a proposal to find out what kind of non-dues revenue you can generate.

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

Our guest for this episode is Jodi Owczarski. For the first five years at the Michigan West Coast Chamber Jodi was accountable for providing leadership in all areas of the organization as well as serving as the integrator within the EOS framework. As the Vice President and Chief Operating Officer Jody was responsible for all human resources, accounting and finance functions, as well as managing the staff Facilities and Operations and directing the West Coast Leadership Program. As of September 1 2022, Jodi was appointed as president and CEO of the Michigan West Coast chamber. Jodi’s limitless capacity for solving math problems has been essential to creating budgets and balance sheets, and her inviting personality and quick humor, combined with our strategic thinking give her the edge when managing staff communities and volunteers. Jodi’s contagious energy ripples out into our business community. Working with the Chamber is a perfect combination of all Jodi’s previous work experiences, including as a self employed small business owner, serving as the community center director at a nonprofit working in HR for a large manufacturer and overseeing operations for an international consulting firm. Jody currently serves on a variety of boards and throughout the community and including ACCE Jody is an enthusiastic Spartan, with a bachelor’s degree in psychology with an emphasis on Human Resource Management from Michigan State University. Jodi, I’m excited to have you with us today here on Chamber Chat Podcast, I’d love for you to take a moment to say hello to all the Chamber Champions and share something interesting about yourself so we can all get to know you a little better.

Jodi Owczarski 3:41
Awesome. Thanks, Brandon. Truly, it’s an honor to be able to be a part of your podcast. I’ve been a fan for a long time and thrilled to have the opportunity to share what we’re working on at the West Coast chamber. I don’t know what more I have left. I feel like I could have you’ve summed up my whole life. You know more about me now than maybe my mom would even be able to say so. Thanks for the detailed intro. i Yeah, I’m honored.

Brandon Burton 4:10
Yeah. Well, we get personnel on here. So yeah. Well, tell us a little bit more about the Michigan West Coast chamber just to give us an idea, you know, size of the chamber staff budget that all play well into our discussion today, but also touch on the scope of work that you guys are involved with.

Jodi Owczarski 4:28
Yep, absolutely. So we’re located in Holland, Michigan. I’m glad you said Michigan West Coast chamber, because often if we’re called the West Coast chamber, people think we’re over in California. The West Coast chamber came about about 10 years ago actually when two of our chambers merged to make the West Coast chamber and that’s been a just a great process for us since that time, we have about 1200 members and recently grew our staff to seven so we’ve had a pretty small but mighty team by Stand the number of members that we serve. We are proud to be five star accredited through the US Chamber of Commerce, and hope to get that re accreditation status again when we reapply at this time next year. One unique thing perhaps about our organization is we run on something called EOS. The Entrepreneurial Operating System is maybe not as unique anymore. I think we were the very first chamber in the country to start running on EOS. But we’ve been evangelists because of the game changing that that has been for our organization. So we’re super active in our community, we say that we’re a catalyst for business growth and development. We’re a convener of leaders and influencers and a champion for a thriving community. Maybe not so unique, and we hear that often throughout the chamber community

Brandon Burton 5:51
right. Now, that is great. And I’m glad you mentioned the EOS system. And occasionally I’ll hear it in other podcasts that I listened to entrepreneurial bass podcasts and they’ll bring up the EOS system like the Michigan West Coast team or uses it Yeah. setting a good example with it. So hopefully, through our discussion today, we’ll have an opportunity to explore that a little bit and, and maybe how you guys implement that and along with our topic today. So as we focus on our topic that we’re covering for discussion today, it’s around small staff big impact. And that’s all relative, right? So each community, and staff sizes are all relative to you know, like Jodi mentioned, they’ve got seven staff but serving about 1200 Chamber members. So that is a relative small staff to that size of membership. Right now, some listening might have a membership, two or 300 and maybe be the only one but we’ll talk today about ways to make a big impact with a small staff and really getting the best bang for your buck as we go throughout this conversation today. And we’ll dive into that a little deeper as soon as we get back from this quick break.

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Brandon Burton 10:06
All right, Jodi, we’re back. I am anxious to learn more about how you guys make a big impact, especially with your staff size and leveraging opportunities there in your community to serve your Chamber members. So what are some of those fundamental ways that you leverage that impact?

Jodi Owczarski 10:27
You know, the big thing for us, Brandon, I think is that part of Eos is being super clear on who you are, and what your focus area is in for us. When we look at making an impact, we really look at five different areas for us to work in the first being advocacy. I know that can mean a lot of different things to a lot of different people. For us, that means that we promote a business friendly environment, through access to elected officials and education on important business related issues. That’s, that’s a big focus for us. The second is business building, we want to help provide visibility connections and resources for business success, that really comes into play with our smaller businesses that are in our chamber. Third area for us is community impact, we think that we can maximize the community, the impact on our community through collaboration and innovation, right? Not everything that we do is business focused, because we know that if the community is strong, business is strong, and vice versa, right? Strong business leads to strong community strong community strong. And so we want to make sure that we’re right at that intersection, to make sure that we can help provide a thriving community. Fourth area for us leadership and talent development, we deliver education and training opportunities for employees to just grow their abilities. This has become especially important threw out this kind of post pandemic time staffs are stretched, thin, people have been pushed into positions that perhaps they weren’t quite ready for, or they’ve not been trained appropriately for, we want to fill that gap and provide opportunities to help develop the leadership and talent skill set within our employee base. And then the last one is inclusivity. We want to foster a culture of belonging within our business community, we want everyone to feel not only like there’s a seat at the table for them, but that we expect them at the table, we welcome them to the table, we’ve got a seat for them, and we want their voice to be present.

Brandon Burton 12:41
Absolutely, that makes a lot of sense. And it’s imperative, I would say to be clear, and who you are and what your areas of focus are, to be able to know what your day to day tasks and responsibilities are. Right, if you’re not clear that you just kind of wander?

Jodi Owczarski 12:57
Well, and I think honestly, Brandon is the chamber, when people don’t know where to go with something, where do they go, they go to the Chamber of Commerce, right. And so we get inundated with all kinds of I’ll call them opportunities to to be involved. And some of those things are fantastic. But if we don’t know who we are, and what our purpose, what our niches, it would be really easy to just get pulled into a ton of different directions and be less impactful. Knowing what our niches what those five things are that that we’re going to work on. If it doesn’t fit in one of those five, we’re gonna have to say no, for us, and our role may be just helping them find others that might be better suited to help with the work that needs to be done.

Brandon Burton 13:46
Yeah. And you often hear oh, but it’s great exposure. Yeah, the chamber is great. But you know, and I have to remind myself that people also die of exposure, so you need to channel that right,

Jodi Owczarski 13:59
I’m gonna I’m gonna hold on to that one.

Brandon Burton 14:04
So it helps being able to narrow down what that focus is. So you can kind of weed out those extra opportunities or exposure and really hone in on what your work what what you guys are focused on. So once you have that clear identity and focus, taking the staff that you have, how do you leverage your staff into delivering in these five key areas?

Jodi Owczarski 14:28
Yeah, you know, the big thing for us, honestly, Brandon, as we start before, considering staff, and look at what work needs to be done, and then creating those roles. So whether you have a staff of one or a staff of seven, you’ve really got to clarify what that work is. Usually it should be kind of those three to five main pieces of work that need to get done, and then find the right people to do that. And so for us, we work off an accountability chart, so that we’re all on The same page of who’s accountable for what looks a lot like an org chart, but really works more from this accountability standpoint. And once we’ve got that clarity, when all of those other opportunities and exposures come up, we’re again focused back on what are the three to five most important things that we need to focus on. And so we really leverage our staff in that way to make sure we continue to stay honed in and completing the most important work, because there’s always more to do. And I

Brandon Burton 15:33
love that approach of really being, you know, clarifying the work. And as you mentioned, finding the right people. And I’m thinking for those with a really small staff, if they’re a staff of one or two, it may not be where they’re finding the right people to do it. But maybe it’s finding the right time and blocking out the time in their schedule to focus on those areas of work. So really blocking in clarifying what that work isn’t needed needs to be done and assigning the time or the people to that, I think is key,

Jodi Owczarski 16:03
for sure. Further to that, for us, we work in 90 days segments. So we work at a quarter at a time. So at the end of each quarter, we look back and review, how did we do this last quarter accomplishing what we needed to get done. And what’s the most important work that needs to happen in this next 90 days for us to be successful and on track. And so there may be additional tasks and projects and things that bubble up that needs to be tackled in that 90 days. And as we assign those to an individual, it also gives them that clarity and permission really to reprioritize their tasks and know this is my number one priority in this 90 days, this has to get done. And so that that additional clarity really helps keep us on track.

Brandon Burton 16:54
I like that idea gives you a little kind of Sprint’s to be able to be accountable for exact area of work. And, and I’m sure that all fits within those 90 day sprints, or focus all fit within the mission of the chamber as well, it does. I’ve seen as we’re recording this, it’s March of 2023. And we’re coming off of these, these Silicon Valley Banks and everything that have crashed and, and as I’m diving into that a little bit just learning about it. All these banks are public banks, and they look at one quarter at a time to try to perform for their shareholders. But they don’t have that driving mission that’s driving that organism. And you can get in real trouble if you’re just you know, looking at the next month or 90 days or quarter, or whatever it is, without that bigger mission. That’s right purpose and focus. So

Jodi Owczarski 17:50
sure. For us, we back our way in right. So we start with a 10 year target of kind of where do we want to be 10 years from now? And then, if we pictured three years from now, what would be on track to get us to that 10 years, right? And then here’s our one year goals. Here’s our one year plan of what do we need to accomplish in the next 12 months to keep us on track towards that mission? That way any of those 90 day sprints or projects, we call them rocks? align with that to make sure are we on track to meet our goals for the bigger picture, right for that one year plan? And what do we need to do in the next 90 days to make sure we hit those goals?

Brandon Burton 18:32
Yeah, I love that. It may be helpful for listeners who I think a lot of chambers that have heard of the EOS system. But maybe it may not be so easy to just summarize in a nutshell, but maybe give it your best shot just so if someone’s listening and like what is EO that it will just save them a Google search and and just hearing from the chamber that implemented it first. What is it and what how does that work? Yeah.

Jodi Owczarski 19:01
ELS just really takes all of the best business practices from a variety of sources and puts it in one easy to follow kind of recipe or cookbook. For us, it means that we have absolute clarity on who we are, what we’re called to do, what our goals are, and what we need to accomplish those those things. So it’s not anything super unique. It’s just taking all of those best principles and putting them all together in in one place. So it’s it’s having that clarity. It’s giving you a long term vision. Our our strategic plan is really a kind of a two page document that’s called a VTOL vision traction organizer that just has everything in one place. You can ask anyone on our team, what our goals are, where we’re going and what our core values are, and they could just knock those out like this right it’s it’s not That’s something that’s a document that’s put away and we pull out every three years to see if we’re on track. It’s living and breathing in driving the work that we do.

Brandon Burton 20:09
So, for those listening, you may hear Entrepreneurial Operating System and think it’s an app or a program or something, it’s really just more of a framework to kind of structure the organization around and keep you on track with your, your purpose and those core values that you mentioned.

Jodi Owczarski 20:25
Absolutely. There’s a book called Traction by Gino Wickman. That’s the cookbook. So yeah, it’s a pretty easy, a pretty easy read. But once you kind of work your way through that, it’s like, Ah, this makes sense. Yeah.

Brandon Burton 20:43
So for those who are listening with the smaller staff, and I feel like every chamber out there can really, you know, hone in on this, because I feel like every chamber is always understaffed for everything that’s going on. Once they, you know, kind of focus in on their their areas of work their their areas of focus of purpose, I guess, clarifying the work and who’s going to do the work? What next steps would you suggest or what, what’s the next thing to try to really maximize the impact that they have with their limited staff?

Jodi Owczarski 21:17
You’re exactly right, you gotta have clarity and your purpose and your needs, you’ve got to find the right people, right, that can do that work. And then you’ve got to build the culture that are keen to keep your all stars in place. So it’s really easy, especially for chambers to just burn out, right? Chamber work is that eight to five, Monday through Friday. Chamber work is all encompassing 24/7, if I go to a wedding, I feel like I’m still representing the chamber, right, and so it never ends. So it’s also creating those boundaries for yourself to make sure that you continue to have gas in the tank, to be able to do the work that is so incredibly important for our community. For us, I sound like an EOS evangelist, I swear they’re not paying me to say these things. But a game changer for us this year, is we read another book called The EOS life. And essentially, it boils down to five questions and whether you do EOS or not. I love this self reflection to make sure you stay on track. One is you have to say yes to all five of these questions. Are you doing what you love? Are you doing it with people that you love? Are you making a huge difference? Are you compensated appropriately? And do you have time for other passions? We hold ourselves accountable to those five questions. Because if any of those answers are no, our time here at the Chamber is likely going to be short, right? If we’re not loving the work that we do, we’re going to end up finding our way out. The biggest issue we’ve had, frankly, is time for other passions. And so we continue to put guardrails and bumpers in place to make sure that our team is getting out. And they’ve got time for other things. And I’m asking them, what what makes you happy? What brings you joy? And we’re actually tracking on a scorecard. Are you doing those things? Are you filling that part of yourself so that you can continue to feel vibrant, joyful and prepared to do the work?

Brandon Burton 23:26
Right? Now, that’s so important to avoid that burnout and make sure in developing that culture, make sure people are enjoying life, make sure they enjoy coming to work, that they enjoy the work they’re involved with. And if not, you know, let’s make some adjustments. Let’s see, you know, what does bring them passion, let’s encourage them to take some vacation days, let’s encourage you know, those things that are going to help to sustain you know, a good, a good healthy balance, if there is such a thing.

Jodi Owczarski 23:56
And you know, and there is and I think if you’re a staff of one, you might think that’s almost impossible to do. But I would challenge and say it’s more important than ever, that you can say yes to all five of those things, right? Because it all does boil down to you. So if you can’t say yes to all those things, if it’s if it’s a time issue, then figure out what what has to come off your plate, you can’t do everything. Right. So goes back to knowing what your purpose is, and and making sure that all of your time is spent on those things. And kind of peeling away the rest.

Brandon Burton 24:33
And if you’re a staff of one, just feeling totally overwhelmed, you know, utilize your board, utilize your volunteers, you know, do you guys how do you utilize volunteers in your board there at the West Coast chamber?

Jodi Owczarski 24:46
Great, great question. We’ve really changed the expectations that we have for our volunteers. We had a huge ambassador program we had I think over 100 ambassadors. They were ineffective. It was cliquey. Anybody who wanted to be an ambassador could just be an ambassador. It was more of a social club than anything else. And a couple of years ago, we decided that that just wasn’t representing who we were as an organization. So we pushed pause, and completely flipped that program, we took what we do for our organization, from an EOS clarity standpoint, and put that same principles into place for our ambassadors. And so they had to know who we were and what their purpose was. And we had expectations for them. We’ve started an application process and an interview process for them to be a part of this important team for us. We’re down to I think, 40. Now ambassadors, and they are doing such incredible meaningful work for us that I can’t imagine not having them as a resource, and an extension for our team, we have a very robust member engagement process, we call them journeys. Here, it’s a defined track of what a member can experience, the touch points they’re going to have with our organization. We don’t want them just hearing from us once a year when it’s time for them to write another check, right. And so we’ve got the structure journey, that would happen throughout the year, we can’t do all of those touch points for 1200 members, with a staff of six or seven, not in that do it well. And so we engage our ambassadors to do a lot of that outreach and engagement. And it’s a great opportunity for them, right? It grows their connections for their own job outside of the chamber. But it also provides the that meaningful contact from the Chamber’s perspective, and gives us the insight that we need so that if a membership is at risk, we know about that before, it’s just a lack of payment for an invoice. And so we can get on that issue earlier.

Brandon Burton 27:00
Right now, I love the way you guys are have changed that Ambassador program and really creating that that honed in focus. Do you know how did that transition go go from going from 100? down to four? Because I can just see, listeners be like, yes, that’s our ambassador programs, clicky. It’s way too big and effective. But you don’t want to, you know, push people away. So how do you do that transition?

Jodi Owczarski 27:27
Great question. So the first year, we allowed, we provided clarity on what the new expectations were going to be. And we allowed everyone who was currently an ambassador to reapply, or to apply and be accepted in that first year. But they did have to apply. But we weren’t going to turn any of them away. Some of them with the new expectations in place. They’re kind of like, yeah, that sounds a lot like work to me. And I think I’m out. And so that was great, right? They self selected out. Yes. Others kind of came through that first year and thought, whatever, you know, they they knew how it was going to be. And after that year of clarity and expectations. They’re like, yeah, that felt a lot more like work. I’m out this year. And so it wasn’t an abrupt change. Others, we had to have some direct conversations like, it might be time, you know, you’ve served us well, we’re so appreciative of the number of years of service you’ve had. But it might be time to let somebody else have this opportunity. And that really had gone over pretty well. But you know, it probably took three, three years or so to really get it down now to this just all star all star team of ambassadors.

Brandon Burton 28:45
Yeah. I’ve been intrigued with all these different Ambassador programs that different chambers do and from applications and interviews to I’ve heard of some that, you know, the ambassadors pay to be part of the program. And it really helps to kind of not weed out but really qualify those who are really there to show up and do the work.

Jodi Owczarski 29:07
Absolutely. We’re turning them away now. Right. I mean, I saw the list of I’m thankful I don’t have to make the decisions, because I was like, Oh, are you kidding? This person doesn’t get to be an ambassador. But it’s it’s the right thing. Right. And so now you’re raising the bar and creating it to be something that people aspire to. What a mind shift,

Brandon Burton 29:26
right? Absolutely. And really, if you’re not qualifying those ambassadors as volunteers, somehow it really ends up just creating more work for you either damage control or hands on with each of those volunteers. And so help yourself by by helping to qualify those who are volunteering.

Jodi Owczarski 29:48
100%. You know, that makes me think of something else. Brandon, I think that so often in the chamber industry, we think about we’ll just we’re just grateful for anybody that will help or any members that will join. And we’ve kind of changed that mindset here. So even from a membership perspective, we raid our members a, b, c, d, if we’re clear on who our ideal members are, we spend more time going after those ideal. And we’d spend more time trying to retain those ideal, because we found that we spent so much of our time and energy chasing and dealing with these problematic members that were paying the very lowest tier membership dues, and really weren’t well aligned with chamber membership. Well, we take their money for a membership, absolutely, well, we support them 100%. But we’re not going to spend the same energy chasing after them. And once we gave ourselves that permission, we were so much more impactful. So I mean, we’ve been retained last year, we retained our membership at over 92%. Right, you find the right the right recipe, and it works. The same thing is true. From the volunteer standpoint, I kind of identify and define what’s your ideal Ambassador look like? And go after those people and raise the bar, don’t just be like, oh, we’ll take whatever we can get. Because those problematic ambassadors that don’t align with those expectations. Oh, they are soul sucking, right? It takes all of your time, all of your energy, and they don’t. And you don’t get anything for it. It’s just a double negative.

Brandon Burton 31:33
Yeah, well, and you can go another step with recruiting your board, right? It’s it across the board, whether it’s a member of volunteer board member, and the example he gave with the members, it’s kind of the membership paradox, right, like those that need the most help that need the most attention, can’t afford to pay more than just the basic entry level membership. So being being clear on that is very helpful. Absolutely. So Jody, as we start to wrap things up here, I wanted to ask you, if you have any tip or action items that you might suggest for listeners who want to take their chamber up to the next level, what would you offer them?

Jodi Owczarski 32:14
You know, I think one thing that is often a struggle for people is kind of making decisions based on data. And so I think don’t let data be something that is carrying you use that to inform your decisions, and your work, whether it’s to go to the board and say, I need another person, or if it’s to define new opportunities for you, or if it’s to kill the sacred cow, right? It’s that program that you’ve done forever, use data to help drive those decisions. We have a very robust scorecard system, that we go over once a week as a staff, with those key metrics that show us whether we’re on track or off track. And we use that really to drive the decisions forward, what are we going to continue to do? What do we need to stop doing? Or what additional resources we need to take things to the next level? So don’t be afraid of data really can be your friend?

Brandon Burton 33:14
Yeah. Especially as you go to your board and say, I feel like we need to get rid of the sacred cow versus we need to get rid of the sacred cow look at you know, what it was five years ago? This is what we’re getting now. The engagements not there. The money’s not there, whatever it is, it’s not aligned with our mission anymore, basically.

Jodi Owczarski 33:33
Yeah, yeah, absolutely. You know, sometimes killing those sacred cows are the best things that you can ever do. Because it gives you opportunity, space capacity to do something new that might be more meaningful for your organization, for your community for your members. Don’t be afraid to try something new.

Brandon Burton 33:52
Right? 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?

Jodi Owczarski 34:03
Now, that’s such a great question. I was talking to somebody about that. Yesterday, I talked before about the fact that we’ve got a 10 year target, right? Where are we going to be 10 years from now. And our 10 year target does not include the words Chamber of Commerce, we say that we’re going to be an organization that, right, because I don’t know what this is going to look like. And I don’t want to restrict myself so far to say that I do know what that is. Maybe it’s a chamber of commerce. But we know that we want to be the essential business resource and leading connector in the middle of a thriving and prosperous community, whatever that might look like. I think that that the needs from our business community are evolving so quickly, that we’re going to have to continue to change to be relevant and important for the community to continue to lean out in that way.

Brandon Burton 35:01
Yeah, I like that. I had a thought just as you’re given that response that has never really crossed my mind before. But when you talk about not necessarily being married to the term Chamber of Commerce, I’ve seen a lot of chambers make that shift already, right, where they’re, they’ve changed, they’ve taken chamber out of their name. But, you know, in today’s world of digital, you know, keyword research and you know, as people look at terms they’re find found on search engines. Chamber has multiple definitions, right? If you do a search for chamber, I mean, who knows? What’s going to come up? Right? Is there a more defining word or term that can be coined to really encompass what a Chamber of Commerce does? Right? So more clarity and more focus on allowing the community to understand you know, what this organization does,

Jodi Owczarski 36:05
right? I don’t know what the answer is to that, frankly, and maybe we’ll still be a chamber. But we want to be open enough to the fact that that might not be the same label that we have. But we’ll continue to evaluate that year over year. Regardless of what we’re called, I think that there’s a need for an organization, like a chamber of commerce, to be at the core of, of any community to really help it thrive, and to be the best that it can be,

Brandon Burton 36:37
for sure. But God, this has been a fun conversation. I’m sure people have been jotting notes as they’ve been hearing your talk. But for the listeners who might want to reach out and connect with you maybe learn more about the EOS system, or just in general how you guys are doing things Sarah at the Michigan West Coast chamber, what would be the best way for someone to reach out and connect?

Jodi Owczarski 36:58
Absolutely, I we love that. I love it. Personally, our whole staff does. So I would encourage you to visit our website, WestCoastChamber.org. And take a look, feel free. All of our contact information is on the website on our staff page. So if you’re a membership person and want to connect with Jess or Britt, reach out, they’d be happy to hear from you. If you want to talk to me about chamber in general, or anything about EOS forward thinking, click right there on the LinkedIn, contact me directly there as well. We truly are passionate about the work that we do, and are always honored to have the opportunity to talk with other chamber professionals to help support the work that you’re each doing in your own individual communities.

Brandon Burton 37:45
That’s perfect. We’ll have of course links to your website and staff page and everything in our show notes for this episode. So anybody can can find you there as well. But Jodi, thank you so much for being with us today on chamber chat podcast for sharing your experience and how you guys are doing things there at the West Coast chamber. I really do appreciate it.

Jodi Owczarski 38:05
Appreciate it. Thanks so much, Brandon.

Brandon Burton 38:07
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Winter Park Chamber-2023 Chamber of the Year Finalist with Betsy Gardner Eckbert

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

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

Hello, Chamber Champions. Welcome to Chamber Chat Podcast. I’m your hosts Brandon Burton. And it’s my goal here on the podcast to introduce you to people and ideas to better help you serve your Chamber members and your community. You’re joining us for a special episode as part of our 2023 ACCE Chamber the Year Finalist Series.

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When it comes to publishing a Chamber Map directory or Community Guide, Community Matters has a trusted experience to help your chamber accomplish your goals. With different advertising sales models and publication styles, Community Matters will help you create a non-dues revenue machine!

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

Becki Womble 1:03
I’ve been using Community Matters for probably six or seven years now. And in a previous life, I sold commercial printing so I can highly recommend Community Matters because it’s a complete turnkey job for any busy chamber exec and it’s a wonderful, beautiful printed product whenever you’re finished. And I just I’m very sold on Community Matters. And with a printing background I just big endorsement from me.

Brandon Burton 1:44
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Our guest for this episode is Betsy Gardner Eckbert. Betsy was raised in Winter Park, Florida, where she came full circle in January 2017 to become the president and CEO of the city’s Chamber of Commerce. She’s focused on innovation and closing the relevancy gap to modernize the organization earning the 2018 chamber Innovation Awards grand prize. Previously in 2009, she moved her family to London, England, where she became Director of Business Development for a mentor consulting limited a UK consulting firm advocating for gender diversity at the board level. She would go on to co found an International Children’s luxury brand of UV protected swimwear long wave apparel limited that was marketed in 14 countries. Building a successful career after taking several years off to raise her two children led Betsy to create relaunch career reentry for professional women at the Chamber of program with more than 100 graduates, many of whom have rejoined to the workforce. In April 2022. The Winter Park Chamber of Commerce released its prosperity scorecard, and ESG embedded scorecard with a commitment to values beyond simply the financial bottom line. Betsy is a graduate of the University of Florida where she was named the 1991 outstanding female leader and has been inducted into the school’s Hall of Fame. She was also a previous guest on Chamber Chat Podcast back on episode 66. For any of you who want to go back and listen to that episode again. But Betsy, it’s a pleasure to have you back with us on chamber chat podcast, I’d love to give you an opportunity to say hello to all the Chamber Champions that are out there listening and to share something interesting about yourself so we can all get to know you better.

Betsy Gardner Eckbert 3:55
Well, Brandon, thank you so much for having us and for giving us an opportunity to highlight the work we do that serves the Winter Park community and boast a little bit about the dedication of our team to enhancing the quality of life and business in Winter Park. I really appreciate having this opportunity. And I was reflecting on how much better the conditions are meeting with you today than they were back in the early days of the pandemic where I did a podcast with you from my kitchen, a place I thought I’d be working from for two weeks, which spanned into about four or five months. So we’ve really come a long way since then I’m grateful for the opportunity to be doing this from my office and having a more business like climate for responding to these questions. You know, I think an interesting fact about me is one that my mother hated. And that is a back in in 1999 I took a six week leave of absence from my job and I hiked the Appalachian Trail which my mother described as an unladylike thing to do. Because I was basically living in the woods for six weeks, but it was a really transformational journey for me. I brought a lot of focus into my life, and I was able to move on with intention into the next chapter. But it also taught me a lot about how things don’t go to plan. What happens when you gotta hike through the rain, and when you can’t find the campsite, you’re supposed to find or setting things up in the dark or getting blisters, how you work through and push through some of that stuff has been really helpful for me moving on in through my life. So yeah,

Brandon Burton 5:31
that is really interesting. In the Appalachian Trail, it definitely builds character and a lot of people who spend any time on it. So that is, that’s fantastic. I think that’s awesome. You took that time to do that. I’d love to hear more. But why don’t you tell us a little bit more about the Winter Park chamber just to give us an idea of the type of chamber you are the size staff budget scope of work you guys are involved with and kind of go from there to set the table for our discussion.

Betsy Gardner Eckbert 5:56
So Winter Park is one mile from the Orlando city line. So that city line is one mile from my office. So we we have we use the Orlando airport we shop at Orlando malls, we drive on Orlando Roads, we’re very much integrated into the Orlando MSA. But Winter Park itself is a 29,000 person community spanning nine square miles. However, we are a $4 billion a year economy. And a lot of that is driven by our top industries health care, higher education we have to higher education institutions within the city of Windsor Park. We have financial services, professional services, real estate, restaurant retail are some of the biggest players in our economy. And what’s interesting is that we’ve got about $130,000 of gross regional product per worker in our economy. So it’s a very robust engine. Even though we’re small, we’re mighty, because primarily a lot of Central Florida CEOs live and to some degree work in Winter Park. So what we lack in size, we make up for an influence. And we’re awfully proud of that. You know, one of the other things to frame for our listeners today is that, you know, our job growth has been 10% over the past five years, which has outpaced the nation by almost 7%. And so what’s happening in our community is a real window into the explosive growth that’s going on in the region. And the wraparound problems that come with explosive growth are ours to solve. So that’s a little snapshot of what we have going on here in Winter Park.

Brandon Burton 7:35
Oh, that’s fantastic. I think he just energized everybody to think how can we be like Winter Park, right? He hasn’t done a great, great work. What

Betsy Gardner Eckbert 7:42
I what I didn’t say is that we’re a category two competitor, which means that we’ve got 15 people on our staff about seven FTEs. And we’ve got a $1.2 million operational budget annually.

Brandon Burton 7:55
All right, that’s perfect. So typically, the way I like to structure these chamber, the or finalist interviews is to really focus on the two programs that you guys submitted on your chamber, the your application. So what I’d like to do is, is have you tell us at a high level what the two programs are, and then we can dive into each of them a little bit more in depth.

Betsy Gardner Eckbert 8:18
So program, one is our relaunch program, which you referenced in my bio, but not just that we started it, we underwent an enormous transformation in the way we delivered that program. And that was to move it from a five session of four hours in length each session live delivery to an online delivery, which we began beta testing in late 20, moving into 21. And then we made the actual launch of the kind of this official model and 2022 was our online platform for delivery, which meant that so much of the curriculum had to be moved to self starting work at home and homework that would come back to our sessions online. We started beta testing this during COVID, naturally, because we couldn’t meet live and in person. And we were concerned that we there was going to be a kind of loss of emphasis or focus or impact to what we were teaching and presenting when we moved to an online model. More importantly, we thought that there was going to be a deterioration of the safe space that’s created for our participants who are struggling with confidence gaps is the reason why they’re not really approaching the job market. And if we don’t have some kind of vulnerability and authenticity in the unpacking of these confidence gaps, we’re not going to help these women close them. So we were concerned moving to an online format would be two dimensional, and it wouldn’t have a sense of togetherness that we had created so well in the classroom. And we were ably served by our vice president of programs, who used her significant get an understanding of program delivery, certainly online delivery and how adults learn to help us create a model that not only worked but exceeded the one that we were delivering before. And we got higher engagement from the women in the class because we mandated Facebook group participation. So people are now connecting to each other for coffee in between classes, and they’re sharing, you know, vulnerabilities and struggles and strengths. They’re sharing when they get hired to be an inspiration to the other people in their class. And so and that lives on those Facebook groups live on and they’re private, of course. So we’re really proud of the way that that that has delivered on our core promise to the people that take the class. But what we hadn’t realized was that we were going to start creating regional and national impact with this program. And, you know, when I came into this role, over six years ago, the board asked me to turn my focus and the focus of our staff to a more regional focus, instead of this parochial Winter Park nine square miles focus, we don’t live, you know, they’re not borders that are sealed off here commercially, or otherwise. So we’ve got to live regionally. So when we offered the class online, we started getting people from all over Florida taking it. And then from there, we actually moved into I think it’s five states total that we’ve delivered the program to now. And chambers over the years have come to us and said, Hey, can you help create this class for us to use and actually, unintentionally we did, by making it available through this online learning platform. So now it’s open to anyone who wants to do it, we do an application process to make sure there’s a good fit for this program, because what I will say is that there are well meaning people who realize that we’ve created an amount of networking, capital, and social capital in this program that people want to take advantage of that don’t quite fit the profile of the woman who’s been staying home with children. And so we want to make sure that we’re filtering for that and filtering for professional women who are well educated about 45% of our participants have advanced degrees, that means Master’s or, or doctorates, who, if you can imagine, are struggling with a confidence gap and failing to re approach the job market because of that. So we desperately need their talent in Winter Park, because our job growth is outpacing our population, which is creating strain on our infrastructure and otherwise, and so we we need these talented women to come back to work. It’s a workforce solution that meets the needs of our community. Because there’s enormous demand for degreed, highly sophisticated, polished professionals to serve in the types of jobs that we have in this community.

Brandon Burton 12:50
Yeah, so there are I love so much about this program. One is it, it was something you had started before the pandemic happened. So you have the in person model, you’re kind of, you know, your hand was forced a little bit to reinvent and reimagine what this could look like. So as you compare the old structure to the new structure, I’m sure there’s things that have stood out to you. But what are some of those main takeaways that you see with with moving to the structure being online?

Betsy Gardner Eckbert 13:18
Well, I think it gives. So one of the things that we say to the women who take our classes, we are not going to find a job for you, we’re not going to take the thrill of that away from you. We’re going to teach you exactly how to do it yourself. And then you’re going to feel the pride and satisfaction of knowing you did this on your own. So I think when we shifted the model to have more homework based and less, no one’s going to sit on Zoom for four hours, right? I mean, maybe somebody will, but I don’t know who those people are anymore. So we want to make sure that we’re using our zoom time incredibly preciously. Because it’s very hard to keep adult learners engaged on a zoom platform. And we know that so what we’re trying to do is make sure that you know, we’re doing the the work of, of the women teaching each other what they need to learn in that platform. And we play the role of sophisticate, I’m sorry, a facilitator, and teacher. But what I will say is, having the work shift at home, gives them an even greater sense of ownership of the process, which I think is an as a consequence, we couldn’t have anticipated when we did that. And then I also think they’re getting the opportunity to we make them present a vision board on a video and put it into this Facebook group. And we make them basically interview online, which for many people is going to be their first entree into a career search experience. It’s a zoom interview or a recorded interview. So we make them present themselves on Zoom. And we make them present themselves in recorded videos where they’re presenting who they are, what they’re about, which are actually strategically advantageous to our candidates because they’re probably going to have to do that in the real A world. Now these are technophobes because they’ve been at home. That’s one of the greatest divides between women who are in and out of the workforce is they feel that there’s some big technological boogeyman, that that is going to make it impossible for them to return to work. So when we close those gaps by presenting the recorded interview that is recorded on your phone, or we do the Zoom based interviewing, they no longer have those fears. And they’re much more likely to re approach so that that was one of those sort of unintended consequences that we found that we get asked all the time, when are you moving this back to live? And the answer is never, because it’s much more powerful to deliver it this way. And we’re getting a better result. So with intention, we’re keeping it this way. And it’s really funny, because you know, they only see me on Zoom. And then we’ll end up having live events, because we do recall events with our community, we’ll get together for kind of what we call after care events, they’re, they’re called power ups will bring in alumni and prospective women to come and have hear a topic about something like the imposter syndrome or topics that are relevant to this population. And when they see me for the first time, it’s like they’re seeing somebody from TV, and I’m like they’ve never been in person. So it’s really interesting, that dynamic, but what I do love is that the groups that are forming in these classes have got a greater sense of authenticity and connectedness, because they’re doing shorter touches more frequently on their Facebook group, we just had one get on Fourth of July and was wish everybody Happy Fourth of July, their class ended three months ago. So they’re still very much in touch. And the powerful thing is, when one of them gets a job, it’s role modeling for the rest of the people that get jobs, because it usually takes about six months after our class for them to get hired, on average. So it’s really that’s a really powerful consequence. Yeah.

Brandon Burton 16:52
So I think one of the other things you had mentioned about being intentional about this program is that it’s about building that confidence, or rebuilding the confidence in these women who’ve been out of the workforce for so long. And I see where the online platform, it removes some barriers, where they may not have the confidence to show up to an in person, you know, the seminar event kind of situation. But when it’s online, it the threshold is a lot less to get involved. But then there’s more of a stickiness factor that kind of keeps you in there as well. So I’m sure there’s been examples of that, that you’ve seen people coming out, or maybe just more registrants. And and so maybe talk to that and and also talk about how you broadcast this to the women in your community to attract them to the program.

Betsy Gardner Eckbert 17:37
So I really love that you seized upon that, because we we say internally, we measure our success with relaunch in tears, for a woman to come to grips with her competence gap is inherently vulnerable and sometimes terrifying. Maybe it’s a sad process, you know, not all of the women that go through the program are undergoing a fracture in their marriage, but some of them are, and they’re coming to grips with some really painful features of their lives. And so when they can come to us and unruly, sit with that, and kind of let it wash over them and they can work through it, then they’re by the end of our five week course, ready to have the confidence to go back to the workforce. So we they cry more from their own house. So when we’re on the inverse is I didn’t like interviewing with you in my house, but I like interfacing with you in my office versus true for relaunch, they feel much more comfortable at home. And they’ll share more about what’s at the core of their competence gap, which is when the magic happens, that’s when we can really work to close it. So I think that dynamic of being able to, to feel comfortable in their home and they’re each in their homes, they’re all in a way in the most comfortable place they can be it’s private, they’re not exposed. The other piece is in the beginning. They don’t feel like they belong at the Chamber of Commerce building because they’re not in full time work or part time work. So for some of them even. And so, you know, they feel like you’ve got to be a member of the club to come to the chamber, but like you have a right to be here. What’s really interesting is that many of them report because they get member rates on our events a year after they complete our program, as they say the chamber feels familiar and comfortable to them. So they feel like they’ve got a right to come. So it removes that barrier of just physically arriving at the chamber, which I think can be intimidating to some of our participants as well.

Brandon Burton 19:32
Yeah, I think that’s great. As far as the how the program is facilitated? Is that chamber staff that facilitated is it alumni you bring back in? Is it accommodated? What does that look like?

Betsy Gardner Eckbert 19:43
Now one of the things we do is we survey every single class so we feel really confident about our delivery model and I teach every class and then our programs manager is Ashley billings, and she helps deliver the class so she’ll do all of the admin she’ll do all of the work of getting everybody there. So each week they get a PDF of their whole workbook. So we, we send them a whole workbook, which we have them get a notebook. And they are meant to print out the PDF worksheets, and fill out their worksheets from the week before and their homework packs. And so Ashley does all of that connective tissue so well, and she’s kind of like their, their concierge, their captain of their ship, and they have a deep connection to her. And I just kind of shoot in and teach the class. One of the things that I think is essential is nobody wants to believe us, we tell them that we can help them. And I think if I didn’t have the authentic journey of my own 13 year career break to stay home and focus on my children and the soul crushing and arresting experience of going back to work and feeling really terrified by it. They wouldn’t they sometimes they don’t even believe me when I tell them that that I can help them right. And so I think Ashley and I are both returned to work moms. And I think if we didn’t have that journey, we wouldn’t have a secret sauce in this program. And I think they have to trust us that we can help them. Because there’s just a shockingly low level of self belief for women who’ve made the choice to stay home with their children. And this is something that’s been documented by reports by McKinsey, Morgan Stanley, this is a very big problem. Because this is what’s called the leaky pipeline for talent. And what we really can’t afford to do, it’s like losing a customer. Once you’ve paid the acquisition cost of a new customer, you don’t want to lose them once we’ve put people in a talent pipeline. And we all know how hard that is to do. And that’s core chamber work to put people in a talent pipeline, the last thing we want to do is lose them. And that’s exactly what happens with women who stay home from work. So it’s hard for us to find these women, you asked about how we find them, it’s hard for us to find them. And we have to buy Facebook ads we have to go through we do presentations at PTA meetings, we reach out to places of worship, we reach out to preschools, but the big most effective thing we do is we ask every woman who completes the class to fill her seat because they all know somebody. And when someone comes to you as a stay at home mom and says, I think this class can help you to it did this for me. That’s the most powerful way for a woman and we create the power up programs so they can come kind of check it out and see the shop window. We also have a luncheon in April every year, where we pay tribute to our woman of influence our woman of influence is a woman who’s in full time work, who has made a difference for bringing other women along in the community. And then we also are now giving our lifetime achievement award to a woman who’s probably retired but still making a significant contribution to the community. I’m pleased that we were just able to honor the former Lieutenant Governor of Florida and that way and so when we’re honoring those senior members of our community, their friends come out. And that’s when we have a graduation ceremony for the people who’ve completed the program so that our participants can meet senior women who can help catalyze career growth and promote awareness of the program.

Brandon Burton 23:21
That’s a great idea. I love it. Well let’s let’s look at shifting gears into the other program on your chamber the your application as soon as we get back from this quick break.

Are you looking for a year round affordable and timely shop local campaign for your chamber or CVB Look no further build a custom each shop play mobile app with App My Community by visiting appmycommunity.com/chamberchat. App My Community mobile apps are not just simple membership directory listings. They provide many more capabilities to engage with your community. Provide your residents with a robust events calendar partner with a local fare festival or Farmers Market provide a schedule map and other resources to promote the event. Run a Small Business Saturday campaign any time of the year using built in scavenger hunts allow your membership to communicate directly to their customers via push notifications. Your app my community mobile app will be a unique member benefit allow you to generate non dues revenue with sponsorship opportunities and best of all provide a valuable resource to your community please visit appmycommunity.com/chamberchat now to receive 10% off your first year of an App My Community mobile app.

App My Community creates mobile apps that allow you to engage directly with your community. Enhance chamber membership by providing a unique advertising and communication channel to residents and visitors. Not just a member directory, App My Community has the tools to be useful to residents on a daily basis. Learn more at appmycommunity.com/chamberchat.

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Raquel Borges 25:50
Hi, I’m Raquel I work with Yiftee to help over 500 chambers cities and downtown’s across the US keep local dollars local and support their small businesses. Our CEO Donna Novitsky and I will be at the ACCE Conference in Salt Lake City from July 31 to August 3, and we would love to meet you swing by our booth to say hi and learn about our community gift card program, Community cards are custom branded for your community, and can only be used at your Chamber members businesses, plus the program is free. You can learn more by visiting yiftee.com. That’s yiftee.com or emailing us at sales@yiftee.com. See you at the ACCE Conference.

Brandon Burton 26:39
All right, Betsy, we’re back. So I love everything you had to share with the relaunch program that you guys have is that focused on workforce and bringing women back into the workforce. Let’s shift gears over on to the Winter Park prosperity scorecard what that is and kind of how that came to be and what what all that it encompasses.

Betsy Gardner Eckbert 27:01
So as I spoke earlier, we’ve got tremendous pressure on our local economy that wants to grow, and is growing, but not in the way we need it to. And the kind of growth that’s happening is creating enormous strain on our infrastructure. So every time we have a municipal election, which is every year in March, we have the number one issue that rises to the top is traffic. So of course we’re sitting in this area of explosive growth, and you can expect traffic to be a problem. So if you ask people, especially retirees, what do you think is the biggest problem and Winder Park others too much traffic? Well, the reality is we’re operating a $4 billion a year GDP. So there’s a significant enterprise and Winter Park. And we have healthcare needs. We have a hospital here we have two higher education institutions and Winter Park. And there are people who need to get here. Now the reality is Winter Park has 6000 more jobs than people to do them. So how are we going to get them here, they’re going to drive and clog up our roads. So until that changes, we’re going to see a continued strain on traffic infrastructure, road infrastructure and quality of life, quite frankly. And so what we’re looking at is a holistic approach to not only managing growth, but to promoting it, and making sure that we’re taking all the factors into account that we can, as we try to deliver growth that aligns with the values of our community, high emphasis on quality of life, high emphasis on arts and culture, high emphasis on, you know, historical way of doing things. Florida is really about a 70 year old state. And actually, with the advent of air conditioning, that’s when things exploded here, obviously, right? There were bits of Florida for a very long time that still had a frontier feel to it. Now we’re experiencing our centennial this year. And that means that our chamber was founded in 1923, when margins around Winter Park were frontier feeling. And so we’ve had a sustained presence of supporting the business community here for a long time. And we have people who are committed to making sure that winter parks quality of life stays high. But that very little changes here. And so that’s a mismatch with what’s going on one square mile or one mile from our office with respect to Orlando. So we have all these strains on our community. We need to support the growth of our businesses, we need to make sure that we are driving economic growth and not just helping people fight for market share, but actually grow the pie and you do that one of two ways. The first way is you grow in population and the second is that you increase productivity. And so if we’re going to grow in pop violation to meet this delta between 6000 jobs and people, we have to use land differently. And we do not currently permit land use to allow for dense multifamily units, mixed use, that’s just not in our land use code. And so that’s put there by a group of people who are committed to making sure that we don’t have that here. So we can do what keep real estate prices high. Well, they’ve gone so high that we can afford now to welcome innovators, certainly persons of color, people who are new onto the property ladder in Winter Park, because within one year, our single family home price on average rose from $771,000 to 1 million. Wow. So that has long term consequences for our community. And we’re trying to create a and we have created an ESG embedded scorecard that looks at what are we doing with our governance models? Are we taking in people who are previously unseen? Are we making them seen in the models that we’re creating to make this a better double? Or at least triple bottom line community where we’re not just focused on? Are we all making a lot of money? But are we actually creating opportunities for the environment to thrive? Are we doing the right strategic planning to make sure that we’re taking a leadership role in the region on sustainability with respect to energy, we own our own power company. So we have a role to play there? Are we doing the kinds of things that take into account people who are previously not at the table? Again, we grow the pie by increasing population. And certainly when we increase the population of people who haven’t previously been engaging our economy, it’s a competitive advantage to pursue diverse persons to come and participate in our economy. And so that’s a strategic priority for us. And we’re working with our local government to embed these as priorities. But we can’t do that from the perspective of we’re right, and you’re wrong. So we’re trying to move past that binary system of winners and losers, where there’s always a turf war between growth and no growth, we really want to move past that we want to say, Look, these are our community’s problems. Here they are, and they’re data driven, we’re giving you the data so that you can see, these are in fact, our problems. You can’t, you can’t solve for a 6000 delta between jobs and people without creating solutions for that, that are strategic. And so that’s what this scorecard that we released last year, is designed to do is help us strategically plan for the future.

Brandon Burton 32:37
Yeah, with a city the size of yours being nine square miles, I picture it, it can very well be a master plan, community of sorts, you know, where you can go into it with intention, you have to get all the players involved on the same page to be able to present the data, say, here’s where we are, here’s the direction things are going. And here’s how we get from here to there. And to be able to facilitate and convene those people together to really take that lead as a as a chamber, and kind of chart the direction that your community needs to go to service, those needs that are there, like you had mentioned with the traffic and the workforce shortage shortages and things like that. But also looking at the housing and everything else that is tied to that. So I think it’s very forward thinking for you guys to take the lead on this. And since releasing this scorecard, what kind of feedback have you received? What kind of conversations have come out of this?

Betsy Gardner Eckbert 33:36
Well, I think it’s, it’s great, because it’s dovetailing with our centennial celebration, and we’ve been able to get a lot of engagement and a lot of community buy in from this. People are excited about it. I think it’s signaling a different kind of look from the chamber than anybody’s seen before. And we’re just really excited about the impact that it’s starting to have in our community.

Brandon Burton 33:59
Awesome, awesome. Well, as we start to wrap things up here, I like asking everyone I have on the show for listeners who are interested in taking their chamber up to the next level, what kind of tip or action item might you offer to help them accomplish that goal? Well, we’re

Betsy Gardner Eckbert 34:17
big believers in partnership. And we want to make sure that we’re always aligning with people who can make one plus one equal three, four or five instead of just two. And I think partnership is the key way to get that done.

Brandon Burton 34:30
I would agree partnerships that you can leverage a lot more of your your assets and everything by partnering together and seeing a much greater outcome than just the sum of the parts. As we look to the future of chambers of commerce, how do you see the future of chambers and their purpose going forward?

Betsy Gardner Eckbert 34:50
So I think it’s important for chambers to be problem solvers going forward. I think it’s important for us to move past the model of of kind of the coffee club. You know, we’ve got to be measuring our ROI and our outcomes. And I think that we’ve got to be anticipating the needs of our members and ideally getting there before they, they can even figure out that it’s a problem for them with a solution.

Brandon Burton 35:17
Yeah. And oftentimes that brings work with it. So you can’t be afraid to work if you’re

Betsy Gardner Eckbert 35:23
able to do that. We’ve got an incredible team here and very proud of so yeah,

Brandon Burton 35:27
absolutely. Well, Betsy, before we let you go, I wanted to give you an opportunity to share any contact information with listeners who might want to reach out and learn more about your relaunch program or how you went about the scorecard or anything else, you guys are doing their Winter Park, what would be the best way for them to reach out and connect,

Betsy Gardner Eckbert 35:44
I’m pretty easy to find at WinterPark.org. My email address is on the staff section, which is under the about tab. And also, I’m on LinkedIn. So I would love to link in with people. I’m very happy to speak to what we do here and help out in any way I can.

Brandon Burton 36:00
Very good. And we’ll get all of that in our show notes for this episode as well make it easy for people to find it. But Betsy, I am so glad we’re able to get you back on Chamber Chat Podcast, you guys are making an impact in your community doing some great work, I can tell the enthusiasm that you have for this work. And I appreciate you being with us today and sharing about these programs. And I wish you and your team Best of luck as chamber the year.

Betsy Gardner Eckbert 36:25
Thanks, Brandon, we really appreciate that have the opportunity to share what we’re doing here in Winter Park with the Chamber community. So thank you so much for the time today.

Brandon Burton 36:33
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Chamber Industry Research with Bob Rohrlack

Miles Burdine Chamber Chat Podcast promo image.

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

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

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

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

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

When it comes to publishing a Chamber Map directory or Community Guide, Community Matters has a trusted experience to help your chamber accomplish your goals. With different advertising sales models and publication styles, Community Matters will help you create a non-dues revenue machine!

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

Becki Womble 1:03
I’ve been using Community Matters for probably six or seven years now. And in a previous life, I sold commercial printing so I can highly recommend Community Matters because it’s a complete turnkey job for any busy chamber exec and it’s a wonderful, beautiful printed product whenever you’re finished. And I just I’m very sold on Community Matters. And with a printing background I just big endorsement from me.

Brandon Burton 1:44
To learn how Community Matters can support your chamber with your next publication. Please visit communitymattersinc.com/podcast To request your free media kit and request a proposal to find out what kind of non-dues revenue you can generate.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Exactly.

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

Are you looking for a year round affordable and timely shop local campaign for your chamber or CVB Look no further build a custom each shop play mobile app with App My Community by visiting appmycommunity.com/chamberchat. App My Community mobile apps are not just simple membership directory listings. They provide many more capabilities to engage with your community. Provide your residents with a robust events calendar partner with a local fare festival or Farmers Market provide a schedule map and other resources to promote the event. Run a Small Business Saturday campaign any time of the year using built in scavenger hunts allow your membership to communicate directly to their customers via push notifications. Your app my community mobile app will be a unique member benefit allow you to generate non dues revenue with sponsorship opportunities and best of all provide a valuable resource to your community please visit appmycommunity.com/chamberchat now to receive 10% off your first year of an App My Community mobile app.

App My Community creates mobile apps that allow you to engage directly with your community. Enhance chamber membership by providing a unique advertising and communication channel to residents and visitors. Not just a member directory, App My Community has the tools to be useful to residents on a daily basis. Learn more at appmycommunity.com/chamberchat.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Brandon Burton 34:28
It’s a great tip. So, Rob, I like asking everyone to have on the show as we look to the future of chambers of commerce, how do you see the future of chambers and their purpose going forward?

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

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

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

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

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Addressing Challenges Facing Businesses with Rick Wilson

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

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

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

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

Becki Womble 1:03
I’ve been using Community Matters for probably six or seven years now. And in a previous life, I sold commercial printing so I can highly recommend Community Matters because it’s a complete turnkey job for any busy chamber exec and it’s a wonderful, beautiful printed product whenever you’re finished. And I just I’m very sold on Community Matters. And with a printing background I just big endorsement from me.

Brandon Burton 1:44
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Our guest for this episode is Rick Wilson. Rick is the President and CEO of the San Diego Regional East County Chamber of Commerce, and has been since 2019. Rick comes from a 16 year career working at the YMCA organization in a variety of different roles from facility manager to executive manager. He’s an active Rotarian, and is involved at different levels with several local organizations and board of directors. But Rick, I’m excited to have you with us today here on Chamber Chat Podcast, I’d love to give you a moment to say hello to all the Chamber Champions that are out there listening and share something interesting about yourself so you can get to know you a little better.

Rick Wilson 2:37
Well, thank you, Brandon. And it’s exciting to be on the show here. And hello, everybody out there. All those interested in what goes on at chambers of commerce. And again, my name is Rick Wilson. I’m the President CEO for the San Diego Regional East County Chamber of Commerce. I’m very excited to be on here today to chat a little bit about what’s going on with chambers of commerce, especially here in Southern California and hopefully, some great storytelling on will help you guys moving forward on some of the things you’re looking to do as well. But a little interesting about me. Born and raised here in Southern California, I went to school for a little bit in Australia for about a year as well as in Virginia, of when I was in high school and then went to college at UC Santa Barbara. And then was lucky enough to come back to San Diego to work for the then San Diego Chargers. And that was a great experience for seven seasons traveling on the road working in coaching and working in the business department. But since then, I’ve moved on was at the YMCA, As Brandon mentioned, and now landed over here at the East County Chamber of Commerce for about the past four years and really excited to continue to help our business community.

Brandon Burton 3:38
That’s right. And you you came into the chamber world at just the right time get about a year of experience under your belt before they really put you to work, right?

Rick Wilson 3:47
Yes, sir.

You know, got hired in May of 2019. And about March of 2020. We all experienced the same thing and stay at home orders and the 100 year pandemic and there was no playbook for anybody on what to do during 100 year pandemic, especially for Chambers of Commerce. So we definitely rolled up our sleeves and dove into it and just went after it. Absolutely. But tell us a little bit about the San Diego East County Chamber just give us an idea of you know where you’re coming from. So things like the size of the chamber staff budget scope of work you’re involved with. And that’ll kind of set our table for discussion. Great. So yeah, the San Diego Regional East County Chamber of Commerce was founded back in August of 1912. So we are now in our 100 and 11th year of operations here at the chamber. So that’s quite a few generations that have really looked at our chamber as the go to resource in that community, whether it’s business related or not. And we definitely really love that and appreciate that and want to keep that up our staff size. We’re fully staffed. We have five employees. And we have two longtime volunteers one for about four years and one for about 11 years now. And that’s really helped us out our budgets, just over half a million just

over 500,000. And we’re looking to continue to grow our membership is right around 600 members. And so we’re looking coming out of the pandemic continuing to grow that we had a great program and a great plan going in 2019. And then as I mentioned earlier, the pandemic hit and for everybody, it just kind of changed the way we did business, but really excited about what the future holds. And as a chamber of commerce, we want to be that resource in our community to help everyone out.

Brandon Burton 5:26
So I know it’s in the name. So the San Diego Regional East County team, what all the do encompasses geographically?

Rick Wilson 5:35
Now, that’s a great question. So well, first off, I’ll start off by saying that as a chamber of commerce, we don’t really see boundaries or barriers. We’re a global economy. So we’ve gotten members in other states here in the United States, Northern California, and then obviously a lot in Los Angeles in Southern California, but we are in San Diego Regional East County Chamber of Commerce. So if we had borders, we would say we go as far east as Borrego Springs as far south as Spring Valley as far north as Poway and as far west as La Mesa. But we do things all over San Diego County, we partner with tons of chambers of commerce here in San Diego. And the whole goal of that is to bring our businesses together, it has nothing to do with poaching, membership or anything like that. We kind of believe that, you know, the rising tide lifts all ships so we can work together as chambers of commerce, we can help the business community even more, and that’s really what we’re looking for. So as a Regional Chamber, we’re not just regionally for each county, but we are regional throughout San Diego County doing everything we can to help.

Brandon Burton 6:33
Okay, I know that that makes a lot of sense. So I appreciate the the extra explanation of the name, right?

Rick Wilson 6:40
Yes, it is a little bit of a sentence. Yeah.

Brandon Burton 6:43
So as we get into our discussion for our topic, today, we settled on the idea of talking about how chambers can really be a resource and a help for businesses who are facing struggles and some of those struggles that businesses face. So we’ll dive deeper into this discussion as soon as they get back from this quick break.

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Donna Novitsky 8:43
Hi, everyone, Donna from Yiftee here with another fun fact about small businesses. Did you know that there are 77 million people working in small businesses in the US? That’s almost half of the entire civilian workforce. But I know that you already know the value of local businesses. That is why we created community cards. They bring revenue to your members’ businesses that today is leaving your community and going to national brands and e-commerce companies. In addition to consumers we see schools, hospitals, city governments and companies buying community cards in bulk instead of buying big box store and online gift cards. Community cards keep local dollars local. For more info come to a demo or email us at sales@yiftee.com. We look forward to meeting you back to you Brandon.

Brandon Burton 9:37
All right, Rick, we’re back. So leading into the break there we introduce the topic for our discussion today being addressing challenges that are facing businesses and specifically how a chamber of commerce can help with addressing some of these challenges and and I think it’s kind of an inherent thing for Chambers of Commerce to be involved with being problem solving. versus their community. But as we approach this discussion, what what are some of those things that are maybe top of mind for you when it comes to a chamber of commerce helping businesses that are facing certain struggles?

Rick Wilson 10:13
Absolutely. Well, first off, thank you, Brandon, the Chamber of Commerce exists because of so many businesses that exist in our society, right? We are in a capitalistic society. So Chamber of Commerce has are here to really help businesses small, medium, and large size. And some of the challenges that we’ve been seeing over the past year and a half, two years coming out of the pandemic, obviously, is workforce, getting employees, I would say, the middle of 2021, coming out of the pandemic wooden restrictions kind of lifted up was definitely a challenge. Definitely, in Southern California, we saw, restaurants half empty, and they’re not serving the other half, because they can’t get enough employees, cooks, waiters, you name it. And so a lot of stores or retail, or manufacturing, or anything that we can think of have struggled with getting workforce. So as a chamber of commerce, we are definitely working with the Workforce Partnership in San Diego here, working with the Economic Development Council, working with government, local agencies, to make sure that we are doing what we can to help get that workforce back into our society back into working, that really is the machine that makes everything go. And so Workforce Partnership is incredibly important workforce development work with, like I mentioned, all those agencies, that’s been really big for us, and we’ve not arrived, we are still looking to do that, I would say we’ve gone from getting bodies in there to now really needing to look at incredibly qualified people getting back to where we were pre pandemic. So looking for those qualified applicants now and really getting them placed into our workforce out here in East County and throughout San Diego County. So that’s, that’s one of the big topics that we’ve seen.

Brandon Burton 11:49
Yeah, so the workforce issue, I think it’s taken on a whole different approach, a whole different issue, you know, coming out of the pandemic. So before, I think, you know, we’d see jobs shift from one region to another, or different states, navy, whatever political climates or incentives there are for employers to be in certain places, but the pandemic when everything shut down, and people kind of got creative in different ways to bring in an income, and especially those in the service industry, if they weren’t, you know, super high income earners to begin with. And maybe they’d created their own side gig or side hustle that became something. I mean, it just really created a different need and that time of their own employment, but then it leaves a huge void today, right? So as we look at trying to help with the workforce issues, is that something you guys are seeing there in the San Diego area? How, how are you trying to approach it to fill that void? I’m sure others are looking at a similar situation.

Rick Wilson 12:56
It’s a really good point, we have seen coming out of the pandemic, a lot of people who were employees of organizations, nations looking to kind of go on their own. And so we’ve had a lot of people come into the chamber of commerce, and we’ve worked with the Economic Development Council to help them start a business are starting to realize to during the pandemic, that a brick and mortar isn’t the be all end all that you know, it really expose the fact that those who were not comfortable with people working from home, for the pandemic, really were forced to see this results. And as many saw, you’re getting the same production, if not more, with some of those people working from home, which has really, you know, allowed. The word I’d like to use this pivot, we talked about that a lot during the pandemic is businesses looking outside the box re looking at their business model. You know, what if I use an example of one of our local companies here was heavy, a barbecue place, heavy seven days a week in their restaurant pandemic happen, they changed their business model pretty quickly. And they jumped all over the fact that all of our hospitals, and all of our health care, were starting to feed their people on a 24 hour basis, because remember, during the pandemic, and people working 12 hour shifts, 15 hour shifts. And that pivoting of that model for that restaurant, just as little restaurant completely blew them out of the water. They’re doing better than they’ve ever done. They’ve looked at their model. Now they rent out their facility three days a week for parties and events. It’s less staff that they need to put on the front end with not sharing what’s going to come in and able to load up their staff or catering their chefs. So pivoting was really one of the biggest things that we worked on during the pandemic to try to think outside the box to help businesses think of something different and individual employees who were unemployed during the pandemic, who maybe didn’t fall into the wonderful PPP program, working with them if they wanted to start a business on how we could get this going, especially during the pandemic and we’ve seen some really great results with that.

Brandon Burton 14:50
Yeah, so yeah, I guess that’s that’s a whole nother aspect of the the workforce issues all the money printing and all the money that got put into the system and I Um, stimulus checks and things like that that made work optional for people for a time. Or give them that flexibility to explore the opportunities to so yeah. What are what are some of the other challenges that you see businesses facing that a chamber of commerce can help with,

Rick Wilson 15:18
especially coming into 2023, two of the big things that we’ve been seeing is obviously, the supply chain, we all hear about this challenge that’s been happening. And then obviously, inflation. So with inflation, you know, businesses looking at their total package, what they’re offering, you know, most that we know how to increase pricing, depending on what service it is that they have, or what industry they’re in, as our chamber of commerce worked really hard coming out of the pandemic, and in 2022, really made some great strides. We were able to as a decision this year with our board of directors to not raise our pricing for our membership, do the fact that everyone is it totally makes sense to do it. You know, this is the time that you can argue and say, Yes, but if you’ve been able to do some really great things and make some really great decisions that have benefited you financially, as an organization, we’d like to turn that around, and give that back to our members by being able to say for 2023, with the inflation going up, and pricing going up and everything being like it is we’ve been able to hold our pricing at membership for 2023, which we’re incredibly proud of. And we’ve been getting incredible feedback on that, knowing that in 2024, we will have to look at an increase, but we just we’re talking at the end of 2022. What can we do for our members as they go through supply chain issues, inflation workforce challenges. So we’re really proud of that. And if you know, organizations are able to do that, whether through grants, whether through donations, whether it’s due just smart strategic and what you’re doing with your events as a chamber, you know, that’s a great way to give back to your members without actually taking it out of your pocket.

Brandon Burton 16:56
Right. So I think those are two key things that the chambers can can work on. And I think that we see a need across the country with both supply chain and inflation. And I commend you guys for being able to take a look at your budget and say we don’t need to raise price. And I’m sure your members appreciate that. As far as addressing the needs of the members, I mean that that’s one way of addressing that the inflation, but are you guys providing any feedback or data or anything as far as inflation goes? Or to be able to provide resources with supply chain issues? At what’s the approach on those two things you guys are taken?

Rick Wilson 17:37
Yeah, partnerships are very big for us at this Chamber of Commerce, we feel like we are able to reach more and do more by partnering. So when you’re talking about data, yes, we work with several groups here, not only in East County, but throughout San Diego County to keep our eyes on what’s going on with the economy. And so with related to inflation, what kind of data can we push out what kind of suggestions, so we’re not the be all end all as a chamber, the more partnerships we have, the more research verses we’re able to give to our members and non members just in the entire business community. So really, partnerships are what’s big. And so working with those groups, we can give those resources out. One of our big partners, and I think for most chambers is the Economic Development Council. They work on a lot of similar items that we do. So we try not to duplicate what we’re doing, we try to work together to make sure that together, we’re pushing out those resources to the community. So we’re very proud of that. And also continuing to work with other chambers really makes that partnership with other outside agencies much easier. Because we’re all trying to do the same thing. We’re all trying to help the business community. And it’s not a competition, it’s really about if, if the business committee is doing great tax dollars are rolling in coming back to your city in your county, it just makes a better place where we all work, live and play. And that’s what we’re really our goal is to go towards, right.

Brandon Burton 18:56
So the thing that comes to mind, you know, oftentimes, chambers are very involved with important work, you know, and oftentimes, they’re not seeking the credit, you know, the the partnerships, it doesn’t matter who gets the credit, necessarily, as long as the work gets done and information gets out there and everything. But at the same time, it’s important for people to understand what a Chamber of Commerce does, right. So there’s that definition of what a chamber does. So I’m curious as you guys work to address the needs, the the issues that are facing businesses, obviously, it’s best to have, you know, success stories, you know, individuals who are telling others that word of mouth spreads. But are there other ways that you guys are trying to educate the community about the work that you guys are involved with, and specifically with sharing some of these success stories of helping businesses overcome obstacles?

Rick Wilson 19:52
And that’s a great question. I think that’s probably one of the number one challenges most chambers have is pushing out the information and the resources on what they do. I think most people will think they know what a chamber of commerce, I probably have exactly one of those before I got the job. And then when you dive in, you realize that, yes, it is about the business community, but in that respect of the business community, how are you going about helping them. And in my opinion, there’s multiple branches on this tree of how you get to that success. So like, we talked about partnerships are partnering with government partner with leaders in your community, partner with big organizations that are looking to give back to the business community. So there’s multiple ways that you can do that, obviously, during the pandemic, we had program grant programs that came out in the county, the states and the cities that we all live in work in. And that was kind of a band aid to help, you know, get to a certain point. But it really wasn’t a solution. It was really about talking with other groups and making sure that we’re working to be successful, and not just saying, we as an organization know what is happening, we need to get a vibe of what’s going out throughout our county. And that is the best way to get those results and get those two people or organizations or businesses that we work with. Could you follow up again, with the second question? There’s another part to that question?

Brandon Burton 21:10
Yeah, that’s a good question. Mainly about just how you guys go about sharing the success that you guys create for businesses and beyond the word of mouth of businesses that have been impacted, telling others? How are you sharing the message of what a chamber does? And specifically with addressing the challenges that face businesses? And a great,

Rick Wilson 21:35
that’s a great question, and I appreciate you kind of falling back up with that. So for us, you know, when we look at, yes, social media, that’s where people live, right? So social media is incredibly important that we’re, we’re pushing out the word, a lot of people are using Twitter or Instagram to find out their information, we know a lot of our media, really still follow Twitter, that’s really kind of where they get their information. So we’re pushing out as much as we can on that we have a weekly newsletter that goes out to over 2500 businesses, but we only have 600 members. So we know the business community has their eye on what’s going on with us. And we want to help. And when people find themselves in an alignment with what we’re doing, then fantastic, they can join our chamber. But our goal is really to help the business community. And so looking at these opportunities, success stories. I mean, there’s lots of them, I think of stories that we constantly tell people and educate, reach out to the chamber when, when you have a question, we can probably help you. And a lot of it is businesses with permitting and cities in the areas that they’re in. Well, we’re working with all these cities. So we can call in sometimes it’s just as easy as the permit is ready. But someone didn’t press the button within that city organization, because they’re so busy themselves trying to get things done. And Souplantation was a huge organization here in San Diego that died in Southern California during the pandemic. And we have a business owner who’s bringing that back and working with the city to bring that back. And people are very excited about that. And I’ll just share one little simple story on that is, she also is running a different business in there until she can bring Souplantation back. So she didn’t want to take the big signs down there on a 30 foot pole, the ones on the buildings. And if you’re not running the business at the time, you need to do that. But there’s also a clause that you can also put a wonderful canvas over it. And so she went from oh my gosh, this is going to destroy my business to oh, I can just have put a canvas over it until we get Souplantation open again. So working with your chamber communicating with your chamber. That’s the biggest thing, the more we hear from our businesses, that voice of what’s going on, the more that we can push that towards government write letters to the state, work with local entities, you know, deregulation, you name it. But when we hear from our business, community, especially our members, that’s the biggest thing. So one of the big tips I would give to anyone listening out there is reach out to your chamber, your chamber is there to serve you. And I know that it’s very difficult, you’re running your own business, you don’t have a lot of time to be engaged. But I used I like to use the analogy of a gym membership, right, we all kind of have a New Year’s resolution, we get that gym membership, we put it in our front pocket, but we never go to the gym, not to say that you can achieve your goals. But it might be a little bit more difficult to achieve your goal. If you don’t go to the gym. Well, if you join the Chamber of Commerce, the chamber is going to do everything it can for you, it’s going to mark it for you, it’s going to reach out to you it’s gonna have touch points, it’s going to share resources. But if it’s not hearing from you, and it’s not engaging with you, it’s harder for that business to achieve its goals. So my suggestion always is try to be engaged, try to be involved in Do not hesitate reaching out to your chamber, they have more resources than you would think.

Brandon Burton 24:34
Yeah, that’s great advice for business owners. So maybe I will shift that it says a good tip for business owners. What tip or action item might you have for a chamber that’s listening that would be interested in taking their chamber up to the next level? So

Rick Wilson 24:51
they I love this question. This is one of my favorite answer is that chambers definitely in their areas is you know the the environment in the communities that they’re serving. He will be strategic on that. But for us, the bigger picture is we’re all inclusive. We care about everyone in the business community. So for us, it’s not about getting our membership to 1000 by next year. And what are we doing strategically to do that? If we’re pushing out that information, and really being all inclusive, when I say all inclusive means that you’re willing to partner with other chambers, you’re not we’re afraid about another chamber, oh, they’re talking to someone on the side and taking my member. That’s if that’s what’s happening, then that chamber is not really driving and doing what it’s supposed to what it’s supposed to be doing is collaborating, working and bringing all these resources to the business community. So the first thing I would suggest is, open your doors to all chambers, try to partner with mixers, any opportunity that you have. Look at that we have a meeting next week, we have our women in leadership luncheon that we’ve been running now for 21 years. And there’s a huge group here in San Diego called mana, which is Latino business women in that group has 400 Women in that association. Well, we want to see what opportunities there are for our very successful event that has over 600 people that attended every year, we want to partner with other groups to find out what might we be missing. So always be as a chamber be open to hearing other ideas, doesn’t mean that you’re going to move forward on every idea. But we’re that crazy chamber that believes if we throw 100 things on the wall, and one or two stick boy, we are going in the right direction. But if we don’t vet those opportunities, if we don’t look at that opportunity, then we’re going to kind of be the same chamber that we’ve always been. And we are a chamber that wants to be innovative. Were the first chamber of commerce in North America to have a personal assistant robot that Tammy robot that you’re starting to see in airports, restaurants and things like that. So we want to be leaders in our community, we want to be innovative, if and the only way to do that is to open our doors, and work with as many organizations, government agencies and chambers of commerce as we can so that we can all succeed. So in my vision, if the chambers in San Diego County, which is about 30, or 40. If they’re succeeding, then we’re all succeeding than the entire business community. So be open to working with other chambers of commerce. And there’s incredible ROI for that.

Brandon Burton 27:09
Awesome. So circle back, tell us about that personal assistant robot. Everybody’s all over AI these days, right? Yes. What can this robot do for you.

Rick Wilson 27:22
So interesting. Back in 2019, when I got the job, I met a gentleman who was a member of virtual reality for Main Street. So he kind of saw the technology, which is kind of already here. But he wanted to help chambers kind of grow with that. So we started a program called chamber innovators that did okay. But really, when the pandemic hit, chamber, innovators, all of a sudden became one of the number one programs in San Diego, we’re putting, excuse me, we’re putting it on virtually once a week. And we have people all over the nation with innovative business practices, innovation with technology. And so we had a lot of members throughout San Diego County that were members of other chambers jumping on this free program, and really started driving us in that technology innovation Avenue. Coming out of the pandemic, we had the opportunity to get one of these Tammy robots. And so if you walk into our office, the first thing is you’re greeted by the robot, it will welcome you. We bring it to all of our events. So it’s like anything else, you got a program and for whatever you wanted to do. But we had all our sponsors that are big EC honors event that we just had last week. And all the sponsors love that, that is robots talk, going around and talking about the sponsors. And, you know, it was definitely just a different way of looking at things. And as time goes on, we’re seeing airports restaurants using these not to replace employees, but to really use it as an additional tool to make the organization more efficient and better. And I’ll give an example. I was just at a restaurant three weeks ago, where when you walk up the person that greets you and says oh table for four great, they send the robot to take you to where which sends a message to the waiter that now your table for is ready and the robot sat you down. And the restaurant we weren’t at didn’t have the robot serving. But I have seen that. And so the personal robot assistant is really an assistant, it’s not a replacement of any employee that we have is to really build on what we’re doing and become more efficient in what we do. Plus technology’s kind of cool. So everybody does like it.

Brandon Burton 29:18
That’s right. Yeah, that reminds me, I was at a Chick fil A in in Texas, a small town in Texas. And we sit down and they had to have these robots that would bring the food to you. So they’re taken at the counter, put the tray on this robot and they would go right to your table. And it was pretty slick. I mean, everybody’s in there just watching the show, right? Technology is cool. But so does this robot. Does it collect any data, or is it just delivering data? How is it interacting?

Rick Wilson 29:50
Yeah, so so far, we have one of the first models that came out, t Mi, Tammy. And so there’s all kinds of new ones like I’ll just segue real quick into there. There’s ones that it’s, uh, the, the stamp, I guess you could call it is a refrigerator. So if you had one at home, you would still need to stock it. But you could call on your robot anytime to bring you a beverage or anything like that. And for us, it’s not collecting data, it’s you program it to do anything and everything that you want. I do believe that that is the future. And I’m sure some of the newer models that have come out do have that it’s an evolution. But the first model that we got out really has one little platform that we put some waters on, it greets our members when they come in or non members. It shows them a few things in our lobby or business cards, you know, materials of our members, sit them down in our conference room and let them know someone will be with them right away. Then it goes to each one of our offices until we say hello. Oh Rick’s not in hope someone else is not in this person’s in and lets them know that someone’s there. So it is helping us being more efficient. But right now, we’re not using it as a data collection. We’re putting information into it, depending on what day it is what event it is that we have going on. But mostly Monday through Friday. It’s a it’s a welcome robot that welcomes people when they come in. And what I wanted to have happen is happen, people who walk in, they walk out and word of mouth is Have you been to these County Chamber recently, they’ve got a robot in there. And so that’s kind of one of those spread of word where people just want to come in the postal workers now don’t just drop off the mail, they want to come in everyday because they want to be greeted by the robot.

Brandon Burton 31:26
That is great. Any any of these things that can draw that attention and positive positive comments? That’s great. So I like asking is another good segue I like asking everyone I have on the show, how do you see the future of chambers and their purpose going forward?

Rick Wilson 31:45
That’s a really great question. I’ll just say this, if chambers aren’t innovating and thinking outside the box, they could get left behind. If you’re doing it the way it was 1015 20 years ago, exactly the same, you might get left behind with all the innovation that’s coming out. So my suggestion is that what we’re doing is looking at all the tried and true practices that still do work, yet open to all kinds of opportunities to look at what the future has, as technology gets better. As as partnerships grow as bigger, or organizations are looking to partner with smaller organizations Chamber of Commerce are ripe for that. So continue to look for partnership opportunities, continue to try to partner with chambers of commerce, and be open to innovation and new ideas that really is what’s going to continue to take chambers to the next level. Because we are not going to be the same in our community, especially after the pandemic. So looking at business models, really looking at the way we do things, the way the business community operates, be flexible and right along with them to help them achieve their goals.

Brandon Burton 32:54
I like that. And I think look into the future. Some of those things that are on the horizon right now, obviously, is artificial intelligence. Already, a lot of buzz around that. But also look at things like blockchain and NF T’s and the business models that go along with that, because it’s going to change the way a lot of businesses operate. And if as a chamber, we need to know, you know, how do these things work?

Rick Wilson 33:20
Correct. And to your point, AI, as well as augmented reality is starting to become really big. If you went to our website, you’ll see, about two years ago, we had created a virtual Chamber of Commerce. So you could go to our chamber of commerce, virtually, you could go into different rooms, different lobby areas and get services and get stuff that would traditionally be on our website. And now we’re starting to see an augmented reality avatars that are walking around you create your own avatar, and building Chambers of Commerce is our businesses or, gosh, what do I even say like, imagine a conference but you’re you’re you’re you’re in downtown San Diego at the wonderful conference center, where you’re doing it 100% virtually don’t have to actually fly out and get a hotel, you can be a part of that. And we’re starting to see that becoming reality. During the pandemic, we did a couple job fairs like that, that were incredibly successful, where we weren’t sure how people would react to having a little avatar and go into different rooms and sitting down and having interviews virtually. And we didn’t know how it worked. But we had about 350 participants in that and it was incredible. And so I think it’s the more that you do the stuff in technology, artificial intelligence, augmented reality, you name it, the more comfortable you get into I am someone who’s not a techie. And so for me, it’s like I get the concept. I want to be innovative, but I’m not your leader. That’s gonna say this is how you do it. Here’s, here’s all the logistics. But I tell you surround yourself with people that do you know what’s going on that are leaders in that industry, and they can hold your hand and take you with them to because for us, we’re one of the chambers in San Diego they’re looked at as Wow, look at all this innovation but it’s Because of the partners that I have, is why we’re there. It’s not because of myself, I wouldn’t know the first thing about that stuff except saying that looks super cool on the screen. That’s

Brandon Burton 35:10
great. So Rick, I like to give you an opportunity to share any contact information for listeners who would like to reach out and learn more about how you guys are doing things at your chamber, and maybe addressing some of these challenges that businesses face, what would be the best way for someone to reach out and connect?

Rick Wilson 35:28
Yeah, so I’m pretty transparent on everything. I’ll give you my email address, which is rickw@eastcountychamber.org. Our website is eastcountychamber.org, you can contact us here at the office 619-440-6161. And I want to be here for any chamber, I’ve learned a lot from other chambers, people who have been CEOs for 2025 years and Chamber of Commerce’s throughout the United States. And I want to be that reference and resource as well. And I’m sure whoever contacts me, I’m going to learn from them as well. We continue to learn from each other continue to evolve and grow our chambers of commerce, they’ve come a long way from 100 years ago. And as businesses pivot, and as they look at new ways of doing things, looking at their business models, we as a chamber need to be flexible as well and coming right along with them, hearing their voice and sharing that with our local government.

Brandon Burton 36:21
Absolutely. And that’s why we do this. That’s why we encourage people to reach out and connect and build that network and learn from each other. So thank you, Rick, for joining us today on chamber tap podcast for sharing your experiences. And it’s been a fun conversation and something that hopefully in re energizes those that are listening to do that important work at their chamber, and especially when it comes to facing those difficult challenges that their business members are facing. So thanks a lot for for being with us today.

Rick Wilson 36:51
Well, thank you so much, Brandon, for the opportunity to be on chamber chat. What a great opportunity to share resources, but also let everyone know that we are here to help and we want to learn as well. So if you have something incredible and innovative that you’re doing, I would love to learn about that as well. But thank you so much, Brandon. Great to be on chamber chat.

Brandon Burton 37:08
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Killing Sacred Cows with Wayne Michell

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

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

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

When it comes to publishing a Chamber Map directory or Community Guide, Community Matters has a trusted experience to help your chamber accomplish your goals. With different advertising sales models and publication styles, Community Matters will help you create a non-dues revenue machine!

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

Becki Womble 1:03
I’ve been using Community Matters for probably six or seven years now. And in a previous life, I sold commercial printing so I can highly recommend Community Matters because it’s a complete turnkey job for any busy chamber exec and it’s a wonderful, beautiful printed product whenever you’re finished. And I just I’m very sold on Community Matters. And with a printing background I just big endorsement from me.

Brandon Burton 1:44
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Our guests for this episode is Wayne Michell and July of 2016, Wayne was named president and CEO of the Nacogdoches Chamber of Commerce in Nacogdoches, Texas. He has worked with businesses and organizations over the past 45 years in various roles. Wayne is a graduate of the US Chamber of Commerce Institute for organization management and has served on the institute faculty for over 22 years. He’s taught chamber executives and nonprofit leaders from Maine to California. Wayne has worked for associations on the local, state and national level. He’s a past president and CEO of the Kennebec Valley Chamber of Commerce, former director of state services for the United State JCS, Executive Vice President of the Maine paper industry information office, former Executive Vice President for the Maine publicity Bureau, past president of the Maine JCS, past president of the Maine association of Chamber of Commerce executives, former CEO of the Augusta Board of Trade and former member of the Board of Directors for the Texas Association of chamber executives. In 1991, Wayne founded Broadcom, Broadcom provided a variety of services to state and national corporations and nonprofits. Wayne has been a registered lobbyist in Maine and Washington, DC. But Wayne, I’m excited to have you with us today here on chamber chat podcast, I’d love to give you an opportunity to say hello to all the chamber champions that are out there listening and share something interesting about yourself so we can get to know you a little better.

Wayne Michell 3:38
Well, first of all, thank you Brandon for the invite to participate here today. And it brings back my institute faculty days and the opportunity to share all of the things that that I’ve learned good or bad in my 40 plus years of experience. After you read that resume, you can come to the conclusion quickly I can’t hold the job

around so frequently but all kidding aside, this is this industry is nonprofit world we live in a chamber world and not in the association world for me has been has been absolutely wonderful. I I have enjoyed my 40 plus year career in this in this field here. I think the you asked me to share an interesting statistic and that is that I spent most of my youth overseas in there in Taiwan or in Germany growing up so when my family finally settled in my in my late in my late school years high school years back here in the United States. It it was great to be re acclimated to the American way of life after living in in in China and and enjoying it for those many years and and you have enormous appreciation for this country and the and and many blessings that offer so. But I don’t regret a moment the opportunity I had to grow up overseas.

Brandon Burton 5:13
Right now both my parents were military brat, so living all over from Spain to Turkey to Japan and all over the place. So I can appreciate that and probably see a lot of similarities between our backgrounds there. But why don’t you take a moment and share with us a little bit more about the Nacogdoches county chamber just to give us an idea of maybe sizes, size of the chamber staff budget, scope of work, things you guys are involved with, just to help set the table for our discussion today?

Wayne Michell 5:47
Well, first of all, it’s great to be here Nacogdoches County, and especially the city of Nacogdoches, which is which is heralded as the oldest town in Texas 300 plus years old. The Chamber itself is over 100 years old as well. So we have a long and proud history here in Nacogdoches, we’re currently just a hair above 600 members. And we have a very diverse membership base everything from manufacturing, to retailing to, to distribution, you name it, we probably are engaged with it here. What I love most about an academician is is is the is the collaboration between the various organizations in town, we play so well together. And I think that helps us become more effective in accomplishing the objectives we have in serving our community here today, at my staff is typically about five. Right now we’re down one person, but will remedy that in the next few weeks, I suspect. And I’m proud to say that my Executive Vice President Kelly, Augustine is an institute graduate, as am I. So we’ve got the institute experience behind us. And we’ll be sending to other staff members to either the TC AC Institute program or the US Chamber program in the next year. So we take professional development very seriously. And we are a four star accredited chamber, which we’re also proud of, and we’ll be moving into the accreditation process in the next in the next couple of months are re accreditation for hopefully obtaining the fifth star.

Brandon Burton 7:28
Awesome. That is great. You guys are rolling and glad to see you’re sending to more staff to institute here in the near future as fantastic. So for our discussion, for our topic for discussion today. Rather, we decided to focus our discussion around something that either has been addressed or has been talked about, or has, at least the idea has been kicked around in a lot of people’s minds in the chamber world. And that is the idea of killing sacred cows. I think a lot of times the idea is there and the need is there to kill these sacred cows but there’s a lot of fear around it. But we’ll we’ll dive into that discussion much deeper as soon as they get back from this quick break.

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Brandon Burton 10:58
All right, Wayne, we’re back. As I mentioned before the break as we talk about sacred burning sacred cows, or killing sacred cows, doesn’t matter. I’m not prejudiced one way or another how we kill them, but we got to kill them, whether it’s by fire something else. But there is a lot of fear around getting rid of programs and, and things that your chamber is really identified with, you know, a lot of I think that’s the problem is a lot of times these programs and scope of work become something that really becomes the identity of the chamber, sort of get rid of those programs. I think a lot of people have a hard time wrapping their mind around it. But how have you come to terms with being able to kill sacred cows and be able to move forward with more important work?

Wayne Michell 11:48
Well, first of all, I think I don’t know of a man or woman in the chamber business. Certainly a CEO that hasn’t inherited or, or had created a sacred cow with no organization. And I always define a sacred cow as a program or project that has run its course, it’s no longer needed by the membership. And I’ll give you a couple of Wayne isms as we go through this chat this morning, Brandon. But it is often difficult for chambers to move away from traditional projects and programs. But there’s a necessity to do it, especially in this changing economic environment. I often say that one of the things, one of the things we need to ask ourselves, every year about everything that we’re engaged in is the relevance of what we’re doing. And whether or not it’s the most important utilization of chamber resources. And I’ve always said that the resources break down into three different areas, staff time, volunteer time, and financial resources. If you don’t have the money, the staff or the volunteers to do something, you probably ought not to be doing it. And every year, something comes along, that we need to be engaged in a surprise in our community, the loss of a major industry, a catastrophe locally. All sorts of different things that happen that requires us to at least refocus our energies and our resources in order to preserve our economic base, and our and make our communities hopefully more attractive for investment. So I think it I think you can’t attack the sacred cow without some degree of risk as a CEO, and how you do it safely, I think is the key to success on this. So I I’ve got some thoughts or so how you approach it, or why it’s difficult to, to to eliminate those things. I mean, sacred cows typically have members and commute in, both in the within the chamber and within the community that are emotionally committed to the project. They may be founders of the program. I, the things I created as a chamber CEO will be included at some point in my obituary, either the first second or third paragraph. And yes, it I can say I’m objective, but the truth of the matter is, it is tough. When somebody takes a look at your program, sometimes the sacred cows create income, sometimes the community so, so committed to it and and, and expects it every year that it’s tough to walk away from. So those are the you know, those are least the approaches to sacred cows. Brendan,

Brandon Burton 14:44
so you had mentioned that as an executive, there’s always some level of risk when you talk about killing a sacred cow. At what point and I liked how you identified it as saying that the sacred cows a program project that has run its course, but at what point does see where this program project has run its course. And now it’s worth the risk of taking it on because of all those other factors of people being emotionally connected, or there’s it’s an income generator, there’s certain expectations in your community. So how do you balance that? Where you say, yep, now’s the time, we need to tackle this, this program or project that has run its course?

Wayne Michell 15:23
Well, I will tell you this brand, and I’ve tried to make their decision rather than my decision or my recommendation idea. And I do that by approaching it by saying, I think there are questions we need to ask ourselves. You heard me say at the beginning of this, this chap that in I have a few Wayne is one one. Wayne ism is a to many chambers that perform programs and projects based on tradition, and not based on the needs of the membership. If you can’t, if you can’t make a direct link between what you’re doing and what they need, then you probably ought not to be doing it. The second Wayne isn’t my answer is that every chamber has sacred cows. And at least once a year, someone needs to stick a fork in it, to see if it’s still relevant to the needs of the membership. See, if it’s when I say someone, I want my board and a retreat to look at every program or project and ask Is this still the most important utilization of chamber resources? And, and, and the third Wayne ism, I’d say it would be just because you’re making money on a program or project doesn’t mean you shouldn’t be doing it. Money ought not to be the motivating factor. It shouldn’t be again, based on ROI, what return on investment, do we provide our members, I was engaged in a program a while back where we spent over $30,000 of the organization’s resources to execute. And on the way back from where we where we implemented that project. I had a long drive. And the question I kept saying, Well, what were the deliverables out of this project? What did that 30,000 Give my members? And you know, what? I, we reinvented that project, and we in order to be able to answer that question more comfortably. But we need every year to come to that conclusion. You ask how we do it safely? Right. From from a staff standpoint? Well, in my opinion, what we need to do is, it’ll Fiberon anything in the last in the last 30 years of my career. I think the first 10 years of my nonprofit career, I flew by the seat of my pants. I you know, I went on hunches and guesses and estimations. And I think the last 30 years, I have a great appreciation on the value of data. And on every program or project. I want to collect data, which starts with surveys. And I distill that down on every project project to three questions. If we do a trade show and somebody buys a booth at that trade show, we need to ask that woman or man, What value did this program have to your company or your business? And I have three questions great value, some value or little or no, in the vast consensus is little or no, then we’re going to we’re going to visit that project and determine whether we should be continuing now. We need to ask that question on not everything we do in our organizations, and not make some assumption is that people and when I collect that data I liked, I like to put it in a form where I can present it to my board. I give them an honest assessment of what the project did at the end. But then I let them know what the customers our members feel about that program or project. I had one Expo I remember my early years of chamber business we knit and probably 40,000, which would probably be 100,000. In today’s dollars, which shows you how long ago it was. Yeah. So it was a successful project. And I’m talking about knitting after staff time and everything else is calculated. Yeah. At the end of the program, I surveyed the 150 booths. And 70% of them said little or no value in the survey result. And so when I followed up and said, if you have little or no value to them, Why did you participate? And they said to support the chamber. That’s the wrong reason for them to be there. Right. I love their commitment and but we killed that project and next year based on the data and the feedback we had,

Brandon Burton 19:55
and we’re making good money though. You know what

Wayne Michell 19:59
Have we had to we had is that what we’re in business for just to make money, we’re in business to serve our communities and our customers, our members first. And so when my board saw that, the vast majority viewed that thing not as an investment, but as as a contribution. They wisely said, it’s time to move on. Money is not the motivating factor for doing an expo, we thought it was our business development. It had it had run its course,

Brandon Burton 20:29
Brendon? Yeah, I can see where somebody could say this is a successful program. Is it successful Expo? Because we made X amount of money? Yeah, X amount of dollars. And they may not want to ask those questions, because they don’t want to hear the answer. That was little to no value. So I think it’s a great idea of asking or providing these surveys for every program and project just across them, it’s, you don’t apply a filter on it ahead of time to decide whether or not to do the survey. It’s just part of everything you do.

Wayne Michell 21:02
Absolutely. And today, with, with the tools of technology that we have available to us, there’s no excuse for us not testing the value of our programs, each and every one of them. I think that that’s that’s a key. And here’s where this becomes complicated for those of us in the staff and volunteer leadership, when the woman or man created that that trade show is still around, active in the chamber meeting, you know, with us in the community, it becomes you know, let me tell you, you’re going to hear, you need to be prepared to hear from those folks. And to make your case when you try to do eliminate that, that program that they have an enormous emotional commitment to. Sometimes I’m successful in that, but I believe that sales job to the volunteer leadership, if they agree, the program needs to be either massively revised, or eliminated, guess what? Then they need, they need to be leading the charge, not the CEO of the chamber, and not the staff, the staff. So the staffs obligation is to collect the data and, and to present the results. Right. And I

Brandon Burton 22:12
think it may be a good idea, even with some of those community players who may be the founder, those who are emotionally involved with it to as you have those discussions, or have you, your volunteers have those discussions, to help them really find what their real identity is in the community. And maybe it aligns with some of those chamber things, being able to convene people maybe to be in a champion for business, rather than the identity being that particular event that they found it or, you know, I think there’s so much emotion to it, when it becomes your identity, that there might be other ways of approaching that to show where their value really lies, and maybe get them to buy in on the next thing, you know, that will maybe they have other ideas that could be a value

Wayne Michell 23:00
you’re spot on. I mean, I was always fun to sing when I was teaching it Institute. And it’s and I learned this, you know, I add a 30 year absence from the chamber management world I, I started out, you know, running a chamber in Augusta, Maine at the Kennebec Valley Chamber in the mid 80s. And then reenter the chamber world in the in the in 2016. And what I learned in the first six months of being here at NEC noches at this chamber is I could not run my chamber today, inaccurate notice the way I ran my chamber in the mid 80s, and be relevant. And if if I attempted to do that, we wouldn’t be a dismal failure today. And we we as change as CEO is better be prepared to change as, as the needs of the community change to stay relevant. And that means you need to have capacity, you need to have staff money and volunteers to do something, you can’t do 1000 things with a chamber, everybody, I don’t care what the size of your chamber is, we all have limitations. And they just they break down those three areas. So I’d rather get rid of something that’s no longer needed, and put something that has greater value and return on investment to our communities in its place. But it’s tough to do that because people are wedded to tradition. And that’s where, you know, it does put us at risk profession when we raise, raise questions like that because somebody’s gonna say, Wait a second, that’s my baby. Yes, what your baby’s grown up, and it’s about ready to and there were other ways to do it too. You can spin off a project or program to another organization. If the community doesn’t like is running the course. Great. Let somebody else do it. Yeah. And find another host for that program. If you can’t find another host I think that should speak volumes about the relevance of that project.

Brandon Burton 25:03
That is very true. Yeah, spin it off to another host and see that feedback as it comes in. But another thought I had is some of these programs, some of these community events, they, like you said, they’re steeped in tradition, because we tag on, you know, 37th, annual, you know, festival or parade or whatever it is. So it becomes an expectation, which at the beginning might have been a good idea marketing wise to have that going and have that expectation for each year. But when it comes to the end of its course, that can really come back to haunt you, when you’ve you know, tacked on the what year it is, you’re doing this festival? So be careful of that. I guess.

Wayne Michell 25:45
You’re absolutely right. I mean, it does add a level of difficulty and in moving along on those things. And I, you know, I look, I’m on the latter stages of my chamber career here, probably. But I will say this, nothing, nothing bothers me more than boring programs. Even if you don’t eliminate the darn thing, at least every I don’t like go into programs are the same every day, if I’m bored, imagine how my members feel about it. Right? So at the very least if you if you challenge the relevance, or stick a fork into a program and say, okay, is this still necessary, at least at the very least change the darn thing? So that you know, so that there’s something new, exciting I, I challenge my staff colleagues and my and my volunteer leaders, my committee chairs, is that look, don’t do it the same way. We did it last year. But we got a plan, we got a strategy. You know what? I understand that, but it’s the same plan you had three years ago, right? If you can’t have new and improved and show me something different than what you know, they have run its course.

Brandon Burton 26:55
That’s right. That’s great. And hopefully this is this conversation is getting the wheels spinning in the minds of people listening and in really evaluating what what are some of those sacred cows that their organization? How can they start having these conversations with those stakeholders and with those volunteers to and their board members to be asking those questions? Is this still relevant? Is this still the best use of your time and resources as a chamber? I think that that question right, there is so key to just continue being relevant as a chamber. But I wanted to ask as we start wrapping things up, what might be a tip or an action item that you would suggest for chamber who is listening who would like to take their chamber up to the next level?

Wayne Michell 27:40
Well, first of all, find out what other folks are doing. And I don’t just mean in your region I’m talking about nationwide. The advantage I had in being a chamber consultant for 25 years, is that I had the opportunity to facilitate hundreds, literally hundreds of board retreats. And I always left almost every chamber that I was working with, with with a new idea or something. So in this day and age is it with with the with the technology and social media, things that we have available to us look at what folks are doing, I visit websites, I visit, I look at programs of work, I look at staff structure, and and and constantly reevaluate what we’re doing based on what the industry norms, are there extraordinary women and men out there that are leading these organizations. And let me tell you something. If you think after being on an institute faculty for 22 years, I learned at all, you’re sorely mistaken, every day, it seems like I learned something new about this industry in this job. And I think that’s what keeps us relevant. The learning process doesn’t stop at any point in his business. COVID showed us all that we had to reinvent the way we we serviced our members, and how we communicate with our members and how and how we added value to our membership. So that’s, that’s my tip is please, programs like what you’re offering here, Brendan, are essential. They’re absolutely essential to to us. And I’ll be honest with you, I heard myself saying things in this discussion with you. And it was a little voice in the back of my head that said, hey, Michel, if you’re so damn smart, I’m coming. You’re not doing that. There’s an element of that. And I think that I think that that’s, you know, in the history of candor, I haven’t learned it all yet. And, and I’ve been doing this job for the better part of 40 years. Yeah,

Brandon Burton 29:51
alright, you’ve learned it, but you haven’t learned the lesson yet. Right?

Wayne Michell 29:54
Maybe Yeah,

Brandon Burton 29:56
yeah. I love it. I love the honesty and candor there That’s great. So I like to ask anything you kind of touched on it a little bit there. But as we look to the future of chambers of commerce, how do you see the future of chambers and their purpose going forward?

Wayne Michell 30:15
Well, first of all, you know, when I first joined this, we were primarily if there was, wasn’t a lot of hard edges on Chambers of Commerce doing a job, we were a social organization, communities used to collaborate and, and that networking, I’ve seen chambers today play a much more serious and much more critical role in representing their communities. And that’s going to be an area of advocacy, we’re going to see chambers in the future, we’ll be less loved by folks other than our members. Because if we’re doing our job, people are going to be angry at us. But I, my constituents, I know where my bread is buttered as a chamber CEO in 2023. And that’s with representing the, the men and women that are paying my bills and are trying to do business in a regulated world. And our job is to be that wall, between the regulation and the business owner. And to try it, you know, and that, you know, the US Chamber of Commerce does an absolutely incredible job on the federal level. Here in Texas, we’re blessed to have Glen hammer and the Texas Association for Business, doing a great job on the state level. But those of us on the local level, guess what we are the most important lobbyist of the business community has. And if we fail to communicate with regulators and legislators, our businesses are going to be underserved. So to answer your question, where we’re going to change, and this, this applies to chambers at all sizes, is that we’re going to have to become more aggressive and more effective in a advocacy area, to represent the business community and be more effectively. And that and that will make us less loved by those folks other than the ones that are paying or paying our salaries. But guess what? They need representation. And today, it’s a difficult word to do business. I mean, that’s the bottom line.

Brandon Burton 32:07
Well, really any say be in less love. But really, I mean, most people work for somebody, if they’re not working for themselves, if they’re working for themselves, they shouldn’t be a member of the chamber, they should be investing in the work the Chamber’s doing, but if they’re an employee of that person, they should still want pro business, you know, policy and candidates and you know, everything in the in the community going for pro business. So I, I don’t know, I might push back that there might not be as as little love as you think, you know, there might be more love for chambers of actually stepping up and doing meaningful work.

Wayne Michell 32:41
So it’s funny, I think back years ago, I have a project, I had an issue that we had taken a very public stand on in the chamber. And it was a front page article. And I remember walking through the local supermarket with my cart, and having a woman blast me for the position that we took on that issue. And I I was I was tactful, and and so I went back to my office, and my board chairman, my board chairman called me just out of the blue and, and he detected I wasn’t very happy at that moment. He said, What’s up waiting? And I said, Well, Bill, I said, I just got blasted in the supermarket. And I said, I’m just recovering from it. I said the woman was angry with the position that you folks asked me to share. And he said, and you’re you’re, you’re doing what nice, and I’m just sitting here trying to rehabilitate, he said, I’ll be right down, and the other one was corroding drove to my office. You can’t imagine you shut the door. And he looked at me and he said, What do you want out of this deal? And I said, just and I use the words, I said, Look, I want to be loved, you know? And he looked at me and he said, Let me tell you, based on the position you took on our behalf, your love by the people that are sending you check, move on. And you know what? He’s absolutely right. If I do my job from time to time, somebody shouldn’t be angry at me. But that doesn’t mean that you know, I kiddingly say just because they’re wrong, doesn’t mean I don’t love them. And I suspect from time to time, I may be wrong, and hopefully they’ll love me, in that case, too. But that’s where the engine is. Look, we didn’t do any of that in the hardly any of that in the 70s and 80s. Let me tell you this job today, there, you’re making decisions on a routine basis now that if you’re doing your job well, we’ll just got give me 100% consensus on everything. It goes with the territory. But I will tell you this. I think I’ve evolved because I’ll be honest, we I kind of enjoy it today. Yeah, I mean, I wouldn’t be saying I just want to be loved anymore. I just want to be right.

Brandon Burton 34:54
Right, right. Yeah. No, I think you’re right. If you’re not if you’re not Making a stance, you know, if you are making a stance, you will have people that are upset. So if you’re not making people upset, that means you’re not making a strong enough stance. So, Wayne, I’ve appreciated the insights and experience that you shared with us so far, I wanted to give you an opportunity to share any contact information for listeners who’d like to reach out and connect with you and learn more from you throughout your career, and specifically how you tackle killing sacred cows, what would be the best way for them to reach out and connect with you?

Wayne Michell 35:32
Well, they’re certainly welcome to contact me here at the chamber at my email addresses president@nactx.com. And that’s probably the best way Brandon to get a hold of me. Know, give me a chance to but I have a question or a comment. Listen, I suspect there’ll be a few out there that probably disagree with some of the things that I’ve said, but I’m willing to, I’m willing to to, to accept that. And maybe, maybe they’re right, and I’m wrong. So if they’ve got a counter point of view, I certainly would welcome that. But at the same time, this can be a lonely business, if anybody ever wanted to anybody who ever wants to chat on the telephone, they’re welcome. I suspect your chat, you’ll you’ll share my telephone number here at the chamber. And they’re certainly welcome to call me and and we can we can talk about on one on one basis. Like I said, it can be a lonely business, because there’s not a lot of folks that do what we do in our region. So

Brandon Burton 36:36
that’s right. Yeah, yeah. And I will put that in your phone number and email in the show notes for this episode. So people can look that up. And there’s truth in that there’s a loneliness and leadership for sure you’re making stances that other people don’t totally understand or agree with. But absolutely, it’s important to have that network of people to lean upon and to learn from and and, yeah, this is, it’s been a great discussion. I really do appreciate you spending time with us today on the podcasts. And I think this I think it should motivate some people that are listening to really take a deep look at their organization, see what changes there are that that might need to be addressed. So thank you for that. Right.

Wayne Michell 37:20
Thank you, Ron. And thanks for the opportunity to join you today. This has been fun.

Brandon Burton 37:25

Brandon Burton 29:48
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Chamber Industry Success with Anissa Starnes

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

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

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Becki Womble 1:01
I’ve been using Community Matters for probably six or seven years now. And in a previous life, I sold commercial printing so I can highly recommend Community Matters because it’s a complete turnkey job for any busy chamber exec and it’s a wonderful, beautiful printed product whenever you’re finished. And I just I’m very sold on Community Matters. And with a printing background I just big endorsement from me.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Brandon Burton 19:33
glad to do. Yeah,

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

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

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

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

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

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

Anissa Starnes 25:38
So absolutely.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Brandon Burton 40:50
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