Below is an auto-generated transcription. Because this is auto-generated there are likely some grammatical errors but it is still a useful tool to search text within this podcast episode.
Feel free to join our Chamber Chat Champions Facebook Group to discuss this episode and to share your own experiences and tips with other Chamber Champions.
Brandon Burton 0:00 This is the Chamber Chat Podcast, the show dedicated to chamber professionals to spark ideas and to get actionable tips and strategies to better serve your members and community.
Hello, Chamber Champions. Welcome to the Chamber Chat Podcast. I’m your host, Brandon Burton. And it’s my goal here on the podcast to introduce you to people and ideas to better help you serve your Chamber members and your community.
Jason Mock 0:39 Two years ago, we brought in Holman Brothers to help our organization go to that next level. And in those two years, our team has transformed the way that we think about sponsorships and non dues revenue. And I would really encourage you if you’re looking to take your chamber to the next level to bring on the Holman Brothers.
Brandon Burton 0:56 You can learn more about Holman Brothers Membership Sales Solutions by visiting holmanbros.com.
Doug & Bill Holman know how to diagnose and solve member recruiting issues faster and better than anyone else, and they want to put that knowledge to work for you and your chamber. Learn more at HolmanBros.com.
For this episode, I decided to do a top five lessons learned in 2022. Now as I record this, it is Christmas Eve 2022. And this episode we’ll be releasing on the Tuesday between Christmas and New Years. So purposely, I want to keep this episode a little shorter, just so you can still get some good value out of it and ideas. But I want you to be able to spend time with your family and get those things done around the house that you don’t normally have time to do because you’re your normal busy schedule. So before I get into those top five lessons learned now some of the lessons that I’ll share are ones that were directly related to podcast episodes that I’ve I’ve put out over this last year. And some are just lessons from observing the world and things going on in the environment. So keep that in mind as I go through the lessons. But before I get into those lessons, I wanted to share a personal lesson, I guess you can say that I’ve learned and that is that over, I guess almost four years now doing the podcast, I have reached a point where my time is being stretched very thin, a lot of responsibilities on my plate. And I’m at the point where I need to bring on some help somebody to help to edit and produce the podcast episodes, just to free up a little bit more of my time to where I can focus more intently on getting great guests on the podcast and other projects and special interests that I have to develop that are related to the show. So with that I’ve in you’re familiar as a chamber professional is you see a need for growth within your chamber. The next question is how do you go about providing the financial backing to justify it. And we just had a great episode last week, I believe it was last week where we had Susan Williams on. And she talked about staffing. So that episode came at a really good time for me, as I’m thinking about things that I need to do to staff up the podcast, and create a better experience for all of you as well. So continue to serve, you know, bigger and better going forward in the future. So as I was trying to figure out the best way of doing this, we do have some regular show sponsors. So I would love for you to support them and, you know, buy their product support their businesses, because that keeps their sponsorships coming to Chamber Chat Podcast. But I also, over the years have received messages and emails and ran into some of you at conferences, who have expressed the great value that that you find out of the podcast that lessons learned the way you’re able to stay and be able to stay engaged and continue to learn within the chamber space. So if you are one of those people, and you would like to find a way to support the podcast, a way to continue to see the growth of it. What I decided to do was I created a page on my website so chamberchatpodcast.com/support where you can become a sponsor yourself.
So when I created the podcast, the goal was to always have it be free. And that is still my goal to have this be a free resource, especially for those chambers that don’t have the resources to go to chamber conferences and be a part of their local or state association. I wanted to create a resource for them to be able to learn best practices and tips and strategies so they can better serve their business community. Ready. So this will always be free. What I posted on this page on my website, though the support page is different options if you would like to provide some financial support. So this suggestion, and these are just suggestions, so if you wanted to give a different amount, you can reach out and and contact me and we can set up a different structure. But just to make it easy. The suggested amounts, if you are a single listener, be $5 a month. And if you are comfortable doing that, I would appreciate that it would help to you know, if we, if we get several of you doing $5 A month that would definitely help to pay somebody to produce the podcasts for me. Hopefully, you are also sharing the podcast with your staff. So if you have different staff sizes, if you have a smaller staff, maybe two to five staff members, maybe you do $10 a month for your medium size in you know, five to 15 staff members, maybe $20 a month. And if you’re a larger staff more and there’s even a Superfan option. So if you want to check those out, see what makes the most sense for you. Maybe it comes out like as a single listener, maybe the $5 a month comes out of your personal credit card. If you’re doing it for your staff, maybe that becomes an office expense to help support and train sustain your your staff. So I’ll let you decide what what works best for you and your situation there. But with that aside, we’ll we’ll move on to the top five lessons that I’ve learned in 2022. And we’ll get into that as soon as I get back from this quick break.
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All right, we are back. So the top five lessons that I have from 2022. Again, these are these are no particular order necessarily. They’re just what stood out to me as I look back on the year. So one, the first lesson that I’ll highlight is the importance for chambers to be advocates, while also remaining as a sane center in their community. So Though we had an episode 162, Marc Cohen from the Greater Rochester Chamber was on and he talked about the role of chambers and advocacy and policy. And it was a great episode, I would highly recommend people go back and listen to that one. But also Episode 175, we had Bill Connors, on from Boise talking about being the same center at your chamber. So not being too extreme one way or the other, but really listening to what those needs are of your members. And then creating programs around that supporting candidates and policies that would enable strong business in your community. So there’s a lot of good that in those two episodes right there.
The second lesson that I wanted to highlight was the great value that comes out of collaborating and creating partnerships with others. So these may be collaborations or partnerships with other chambers. They may be another organization in your region, maybe a Convention Visitors Bureau, maybe an economic development, maybe your city itself. But what really came to mind is like created the CIO, or came up with this lesson learned. It was from a reflection, as I look back on some of the chamber, the year finalist interviews that I did this year. And a couple of those chambers, partnered with local banks through the COVID pandemic to help get funding to their members. And as we know, funding was extremely important at that time. And that was a very good strategic partnership for those chambers that took advantage of that. So keep your eyes open, keep them peeled for opportunities to create collaborations or partnerships that make sense to benefit your members.
The third lesson from 2022 that I wanted to highlight was actually an episode all in itself. So it was episode 188, with Jordan Clemons from Greater Louisville Inc. And he talked all about LinkedIn, for growing your chamber membership. And he has a great strategy. If you haven’t heard that episode, I would encourage you to listen or at least have your your membership staff listen to it, as he has a whole strategy of how he uses LinkedIn specifically, to put posts out that really highlight your community and drives a lot of engagement. And then he’s able to see who engages with those posts, learn more about them through their LinkedIn profile, and then reach out to them and create a dialogue that’s already a warm conversation because they’ve already interacted with his post. And by utilizing the strategy, he’s exceeded his sales goals year after year, and really done a great job for GLI. So getting that was episode 188. If you’d like to go back and listen to that one again.
The fourth lesson that I wanted to highlight was the importance of leaning into digital to create relevant and personal communication channels, or strategies. And we had a great, great episode with Sara Ray, and Episode 166, where she talked about just this, about creating relevant personalized communications, specifically through email. So when you look at your email response rate, your email engagement, you’re probably not as satisfied as you’d like to be, if you’re like any other chamber, but by creating relevant content. So as you look at what, why did this member join your chamber? What are they expecting? What are their expectations? What are they looking for what needs do they have to support their business. And then if you can customize your communication to these members based on their needs and desires, that will put your engagement through the roof, both on the digital front with email engagements or social posts, but also for having people show up to events that are relevant to them. That way, they’re not just tone, you know, tuning out everything that comes from the chamber because so much of it’s not relevant to them. Now they’re only getting things that are relevant to them so they pay more attention and engage at a much higher level.
The fifth lesson fifth and final lesson that I will highlight from 2022 is really a personal observation as I look at business environments, economy trends, I see a future where chambers Of Commerce can really benefit by embracing cryptocurrency and NFTs. So for those of you who may not be familiar, NFT stands for non fungible token, meaning there can only be one of that token. So think of it as maybe a coin or an image or some kind of a digital asset that has kind of like a stamp on it that says this is a one of one one of a kind token. And with that NFT’s initially kind of rolled out as expensive JPEGs. So, people would put out these digital images of cats or, you know, different cartoon type characters, and they would sell them for ridiculous amounts of money. It made zero sense to me, I can’t understand why anybody got behind that. But as I learned more about it, and heard about people creating NFT projects, they really focused on the community building aspect of NFT projects. And then my ears perked up. And I had somewhat of an aha moment. Right that anytime I hear the word community, I think Chambers of Commerce need to be involved. So when you look at building an NFT project, creating a community around it, how can a chamber of commerce utilize this? So here’s an example. I recently came out with a chamber podcasting guide to teach chambers how to create a podcast. About the same time I was creating that, that course that chamber podcasting course, I was learning more about NFT’s. And I thought, I wish the technology was developed enough that I could release this course as an NFT. So in other words, if I had access, I launched this course and I have 10 tokens, let’s say that are NFT’s non fungible tokens to access this course, then I can sell them to chambers, as a chamber takes a course learns how to podcast, then they don’t need the course anymore, because they know the material that’s in there, they could then turn around and resell that NFT to another chamber, who can then learn to podcast and that first chamber can get, you know, some or all or more of their investment back of what they initially paid. And within that NFT there are smart contracts that are involved. So within the smart contract, I could write in there a commission. So every time that NFT is resold, or every time that course is resold, I could get a 10% commission, let’s say, based on whatever the sale price was. So think about how would that apply to your chamber? Do you have programs? Do you have courses? Do you have tutorials, do you have different resources, that could be packaged as an NFT, that would allow for your members to market your product and services that would allow them to regain maybe their initial investment in that in that token, and continue to promote that to other businesses in your community. So that is a thought that I had had. But as I continue to think of chambers of commerce utilizing NFT’s many of you already have a tiered dues membership platform. So maybe you look at offering membership as NFTs. So if you have a different NFT for each level of your membership, and you have a certain number of NFT’s for each level, as a chamber member maybe levels up to a higher level of membership, they can sell their initial membership to another member and become an advocate for bringing other businesses into the chamber.
If a chamber were to move out of the community, they don’t have to just lose their chamber benefits but they could resell their membership to another business, there could be a whole other resale market. And with that, you can have the smart contract involved where you’re making revenue off of that every time that membership is resold. But my thought with this is you end up having your members become advocates who are out there are ambassadors we can say that are out there really promoting the value they get from the chamber especially as they go to resell their NFTs and level up their membership. So I don’t know that the technology is ready For Chamber’s to jump right into the NFT space, but something to keep in mind is as we look to the future, look to the kids look to the youth who are playing video games. They’re playing games like Minecraft, and Roblox and fortnight, you know, games like that you and I may look at them as games. I don’t play them. I don’t know much about them. My kids play them. And what I do know is that lots of commerce is being done within these meta verses. So dropped a couple of words there. So commerce when I hear commerce, I think Chamber of Commerce, how should a chamber be involved? There’s commerce happening in these digital platforms. And it is these games are levels of Metaverse where they’re buying and selling digital goods, whether it’s a skin or clothes, or a gun, or some sort of a weapon or a horse or whatever these things are they’re buying and selling and trading. Commerce is happening in the digital landscape. How can your chamber be involved? So have that in your mind? Because we hear these promises of the metaverse coming, which would be kind of an all inclusive digital landscape. I I don’t know I have some reservations about a full full blown metaverse. But there are definitely Metaverse landscapes that are out there. So pay attention to those see if there’s any way that makes sense for your chamber to be involved, especially as these youth aged up into the working class, the the the people that are being employed in your communities, what can your chamber do to be involved in that space? So with that, it may come back to NFT’s as NFTs even in these games. There can be NFT’s that are bought and sold that are a hat or some kind of a article of clothing that is an NFT but it can be utilized within the metaverse. So there’s a ton of opportunity here. So I guess moral of the story with this lesson number five of the future of chambers, embracing crypto and NFTs is learn about it. Be ready as the shift comes to your chamber can stay relevant. That is the biggest advice that I can give you right there. But with that, that summarizes the top five lessons that I have to share with you from 2022.
And again, I’m going to plug it if you would like to take a look at being a supporter of Chamber Chat Podcast. That website is chamberchatpodcast.com/support to see the different sponsorship levels that we have available there. So if you could check it out, I’d really appreciate it. Otherwise, we will look forward to see you again next week, and I wish you all a happy and safe New Year.
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Below is an auto-generated transcription of my conversation with Bryan Derreberry. Because this is auto-generated there are likely some grammatical errors but it is still a useful tool to search text within this podcast episode.
Feel free to join our Chamber Chat Champions Facebook Group to discuss this episode and to share your own experiences and tips with other Chamber Champions.
Brandon Burton 0:00 This is the Chamber Chat Podcast, the show dedicated to chamber professionals to spark ideas and to get actionable tips and strategies to better serve your members and community.
And now your host, he enjoys smoked meat from his Traeger, he’s my dad Brandon Burton.
Hello Chamber Champions. Welcome to Chamber Chat Podcast. I’m your host Brandon Burton, and it’s my goal to introduce you to people and ideas to better help you serve your Chamber members and your community.
Jason Mock 0:45 Two years ago, we brought in Holman Brothers to help our organization go to that next level. And in those two years, our team has transformed the way that we think about sponsorships and non dues revenue. And I would really encourage you if you’re looking to take your chamber to the next level to bring on the Holman Brothers.
Brandon Burton 1:02 You can learn more about Holman Brothers Membership Sales Solutions by visiting holmanbros.com.
Doug & Bill Holman know how to diagnose and solve member recruiting issues faster and better than anyone else, and they want to put that knowledge to work for you and your chamber. Learn more at HolmanBros.com.
Our guest for this episode is Bryan Derreberry. As President and CEO of the Charleston Metro Chamber of Commerce for 11 years, Bryan leads one of South Carolina’s largest chambers in its regional advancement work. Bryan has an established executive management track record, featuring more than 30 years in chamber leadership and advocacy roles. Prior to joining the Charleston Metro Chamber. Bryan was president and CEO of the Wichita Metro Chamber of Commerce in Wichita, Kansas, where he directed the state’s largest Metro Chamber for seven and a half years. He also served as president and CEO of the Catawba County, North Carolina and Middleton Ohio Chambers of Commerce respectively. Bryan began his chamber career as a state lobbyist for the Greater Cincinnati Chamber of Commerce, of course in Ohio. He holds holds a Bachelors of Arts degree in political science from Wittenberg University and is and has completed graduate coursework towards a combined MA and PhD in American politics, and international relations from the American University. Bryan, I’m excited to have you with us today here on chamber chat podcast. And I’d love for you to take a moment to say hello to all the chamber champions and share something interesting about yourself so you can get to know you a
Bryan Derreberry 2:31 little bit better. Well, Brandon, thank you for the opportunity. You know, it’s I love when you say chamber champions, because I I think about all my colleagues across the country and the amazingly important work they do and strengthening their business communities and advancing their regions. And I think one of the interesting parts of my background is my intention, when I started my career, was to go into lobbying full time, and had that chance with the Greater Cincinnati chamber. And at that time, that was the fourth largest chamber in America and represented that business community in Columbus, Ohio, four days a week and really treasured the opportunity. And somebody said to me, do you miss your lobbying days? And I think one of the things that people can learn about chamber executives, is that I said, I lobby as much now as I did when I did it full time, right? This looks different. I said it different audiences, different opportunities. A lot of times, it could be anything from a neighborhood association, embracing a new piece of infrastructure, or a group that’s not familiar with our chamber, we launched a major DNI effort three years ago. So we’re, we’re speaking out in numerous communities in our metro area, and sharing with them about the chamber for the first time. So it’s powerful to think about how every chamber exec in the country and many of their teammates day in and day out need great lobbying skills. So those degrees and that initial experience have really served me well.
Brandon Burton 4:15 Absolutely, yes. And I firmly believe that anyone listening to this it’s involved with the chamber, they are champions for their community and and when I tried thinking of a name for the audience, you know, that that seemed to fit well, so kind of rolls off your tongue but it has great meaning to so thanks for for recognizing that and you take a moment and tell us a little bit more about the the Charleston Metro Chamber to kind of the type of chamber Scope of Work size, staff budget, that sort of thing. Just to give us some perspective before we dive into our conversation.
Bryan Derreberry 4:52 You bet. We have 1600 members. A budget that said six and a half have million 30 full time staff members. And we have four primary platforms that we deliver our work through. Number one, like every chamber, a significant membership platform. Number two, a important government relations platform. We have three full time lobbyists on our team, one up in the state house in Colombia, and then two that work locally with our three counties and 30 municipalities. I think that’s a distinctive flavor for our organization, with regard to how important it is to get alignment, in all those communities, and I’ll talk a little bit later about, we use a partner ethos to lobby versus the bloody nose ethos that seems to be typical for the rest of our United States today. And that serves us very well. We have a large community advancement platform. And within that platform, we do diversity, equity and inclusion work. We do significant professional development programming work for our members. And also we do workforce and talent development. And then our marketing and communications platform is the fourth platform with regard to making sure not only that membership, can actively get engaged in what we do, but also the 830,000 people. And 165,000 employees represented by our membership, have an appreciation for what goes on within the chamber. So a very gifted group of folks, board of directors of 68, Executive Committee of 26. So very actively involving all the sectors in our metro area, and the volunteer leadership of our chamber. And I know one thing that chamber champions understand out there is that a lot of times we have to explain to people that we are a volunteer, directed organization. And they’ll come to us and say, Oh, you need to take a position on this issue. Well, we’ll go through our committee structure, and determine whether we take a position on the issue or not, it’s not my decision, or our government relations team, or our workforce development team to make a policy decision. It’s the responsibility of our volunteers. And I think after a number of years here, people now appreciate that, and they value that. So I think that’s another dynamic of our chamber is we very much want to put our members and key leadership roles in directing the chamber, we see ourselves as a regional advancement organization. So we look at that three county metro area and we look at big Rakesh used to work on already mentioned diversity, equity, inclusion, housing, attainability, mobility solutions, overall quality of business environment. So significant work that will advance our region over the next 25 to 50 years.
Brandon Burton 8:09 Right. I love that the fact that you pointed out you know, if the issue gets presented to the chamber, you take it to your committees, your board. A while back, I had Matt Morrow from the Springfield, Missouri chamber on the podcast, and he talked a lot about the wisdom of crowds. And when especially when you have a board of that size, 68 and different committees and whatnot, as you bring a different different topics in there. They all come in from their different backgrounds and experience and be able to know what the vision is the direction the Chamber’s trying to go. And then from there, combined experience and wisdom, they’re gonna land on the best possible outcome and direction to take up on different issues and policies even so glad you pointed that out.
Bryan Derreberry 8:57 You know, Brandon, I would strongly agree with your assessment. I am. This is my 36th year in the profession and I, overall, those board meetings, executive committee meetings, government relations committee meetings, I’ve seen the wisdom of our leaders proven out time and again. And I think another thing that every chamber champion listening recognizes is that they may come up with a position that’s contrary to what I personally believe, on a policy issue, maybe even what our team believes. And at the end of the day, we step forward and implement that decision, because it is their organization. So I think if you’re young and you’re chamber champion development, it’s important to realize that and of course, we want passionate people in our profession. And we want people that are highly skilled and able to craft how an issue needs to be examined. But then you have to be responsible to the degree See that it may end up somewhere that you didn’t imagine it would go. In over all those years, I’ve never seen it a selection of an outcome or a policy position that wasn’t best for the business community. So my encouragement would be to trust, that leadership, trust working with them to find the right pathway forward for your community. And there’s an old saying, you and I both heard of Brandon, you know, if they write it, they’ll underwrite it. And they, if they develop it and fill, it’s their own, they will get up and give public testimony, they’ll provide funding for lobbying efforts. So that’s part of the beauty of this profession is that, you know, we do lead heterogeneous organizations. This is not the American Dental Association or the American Medical Association. So we’ll have everything from a sole proprietor to somebody leading Joint Base Charleston here with 26,000 employees, and all across that spectrum, people will bring input an interest, and that’ll craft a composite position, or a composite direction. That’s really powerful. Right? Takes a lot of patients.
Brandon Burton 11:16 That’s right, it does. It takes a lot of patients. So our topic for discussion today, I’m a big fan of helping people and even chambers to understand the potential the power within them to become something greater. And for our discussion today, we’re focusing on looking 25 years into the future, which I think is very important in that aspect as far as realizing what the potential is of your organization, to be able to see what direction you can go and what needs to happen. You know, those those baby steps so to speak between here and there, and we’ll dive into this discussion as soon as we get back from this quick break.
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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All right, Bryan, we’re back. And as I mentioned before the break, we’re talking about looking 25 years into the future as a chamber organization looking into the future. What at the end of this conversation, I’ll ask you how you see the future of chambers going forward. But in the meantime, before we get to that future and How do you see from here moving forward over the next 25 years,
Bryan Derreberry 15:04 Brandon and we do something that we feel is particularly powerful. About mid year we’ll begin a process called annual partnership calls. So we will go to somewhere between 180 to 250 of our members. And we sit down. And we ask a couple of questions that influence what that runway looks like over the next 25 years. The first question is, talk about the next three to five years of your company, and identify where you think there are excellent opportunities for your competitive growth, and then identify things that are impediments, speed bumps, and then we just, were quiet. And I think anytime you ask somebody about their company, and how they’re doing, where they’re going, what’s working, what’s challenging, you get really good, really good input. And the other the other question that really registers with them is that if there were one to two things in our metro area that you could change for the better, what would they be? So I’d love to tell you, we come back with a lot of disparate information and no agreement, we come back with a real clear picture as to what are the most significant opportunities, and what are the most pressing challenges. And when we look at those in combination, a lot of what we described on how we’re designed as an organization is influenced by the annual partnership calls in our area housing attainability is the number one regional issue. It will be a 25 year fix. To get the proper stock, the proper pricing, we’re in a real challenge with regard to our supply versus our demand. We’re growing by 33 net people a day, and we’re just having a hard time providing workforce housing that’s affordable. So we have a huge coalition working on that all three counties, public sector partners, private sector leaders, citizens, different associations. And we know right now we’re at 6000 houses behind for attainable housing in our metro market. That’s a couple of decades. So another one is mobility solutions, we’re getting ready in 2026 to undertake high speed bus lanes. So major mass transit project 21 Miles 2020 stops along the way. And for our metro, you know, if you’re in a, we were just in Boston for Metro leadership visit, they’ve been hopping on the tee for a while now. For us, that’s an important first step, there will be other lines to follow. But removing, even if we can remove eight to 10% of the traffic from our highways, that extends their longevity, it cuts down on congestion. So those are the kinds of issues that emerge. And it’s not us sitting in some room at the Chamber, figuring out where we go the next 25 years. It’s the people that want to be the employers, the citizens, the electeds, that continue to help our region thrive, identify where we’re going. And in that mix, there are many of our elected bodies, there are stakeholder partners. So we’re getting a really great level of input that’s formulating where we go. The other thing we just completed, we did an 18 month study. It’s called one region roadmap and used SP Friedman out of Chicago, Illinois to undertake our effort. And what it does, as a lot of communities don’t know what those big rock issues are, doesn’t take very long to figure those out. But this is going to be a 10 year plan, where every year we’ll identify five to seven priorities for the region to work on collectively. And there will be we’re using a local governing network,
which my political science professors from long ago would have really liked hearing. But what that is it means there’ll be a lead agent, we’re going to be the lead agent for housing attainability will involve other stakeholders throughout the community. And then we’ll begin to work on gaining annual metric identified success and creating more attainable housing. So equitable did Dual accesses another one, entrepreneurial development is another one. But this gives us a roadmap as a region for a decade. And at the heart of the one reaching roadmap is equitable access for all of our citizens to living, learning and earning opportunities. So I think you have to have a foundational piece that engages everyone. And that’s the piece, we want everybody to be able to have those attributes as we move through the decades ahead. So listen, well build a strategic plan that has lead agents that will be responsible for the work that’s being undertaken. And they get after it year in and year out, we have a large steering committee that will evaluate each of the lead agents on an annual basis to make sure they’re performing. So you know, it’s the classic thing brand. And if you if you fail to plan, you plan to fail, and we’re just really dedicated to that kind of work. And I would encourage chamber champions across the country that are listening, there’s a couple of key learnings in there. Number one, you want to bring as many people along as possible. So get out and talk to your members, talk to your elected officials, talk to the people that you’re going to need to do this with. We never say the chamber is going to do this work. We say along with our partners, we’re gonna tackle these annual priorities. The other thing is to make them concrete. That’s hard for a lot of communities. I’ve been in other communities that love to study and talk. But when you say annually, we’re going to achieve x, y, we’re gonna accomplish why. And then you report on it, then you have credibility, then it’s not a study that goes and sits on the shelf and collect stuff. So listen, well, engage others be concrete, and produce results. So we’re, we’re excited about one region roadmap, we kick it off in October. So when you and I talk this time next year, yeah, I’ll be able to, I’ll be able to tell you more about getting divorced in one region roadmap.
Brandon Burton 22:18 Yeah. So I know leading up to this discussion, you had shared with me, some of these topics that you guys are looking on. Maybe areas of focus, as you look to the future of Charleston, and and you talked about some of these, like the attainable housing and the you know, the infrastructure and mobility and things like that, as you have these different. We’ll call them topics areas of focus. How do you go about focusing on each one? I assume there’s some sort of a committee for each area of focus? Is that right? Have you said it’s one thing to create division, and we need to expand and put some focus and, and work over in these areas? But then how do you go from that, that vision to actually rolling it out to? Let’s take some action on these different steps? What does that look like there in Charleston?
Bryan Derreberry 23:12 You know, it’s interesting, and I think inherent in your in your question is a couple of things for chamber champions number one, regardless of the size of your chamber, and I have a deep passion for chambers that have staff under the number of 10. I think they work harder than any other chamber in the country, you’re going to need to hire some experts. We’ve been very intentional over the past 11 years, that we add people to our team that have significant expertise. So while they won’t do it on their own, they have a career track record in the areas whether it’s workforce development, government relations, diversity, equity and inclusion, attainable housing. They’re an expert. Because I think that you’ll be pleased as a chamber when you make that investment. And when you’re smaller, and maybe one or two major issues. So we’ve been very intentional about in that group of 30. Hiring people that have that level of expertise. The other thing that we’ve done is built a very strong committee structure. So however, those issues are moving through our organization, there are one or two or more committees that will be touching them. And we’ll be following through on what we commit to do organizationally to achieve results. The final thing is a talk a little bit about that local governing network and if anybody would like information on that we’re happy to share. You have to engage the whole region. So you look at something like the high speed bus lanes. Our Berkeley Charleston Dorchester Council of Governments is working with all the governments along that set of high speed bus lane routes. We’re working through our regional policy committee, which handles all of our local regional work. But there also is going to be a lead agent in that area that will pull together, how many ever stakeholders are required to implement. So a lot of it’s leveraging what I call critical mass. So you got some key folks at the top that have expertise, and then they’re bringing partners together to, in this instance, transportation, overlays for development on those 20 bus stops. So you know, there’s some sophistication that’s required when you do that kind of work. So, you know, my encouragement would get experts on your team, make sure the region understands the top issues, bring stakeholders together, that can move the issue. And then, again, metrics that make sure over 510 1520 years, you’re making progress, because in that timeframe, Brandon, you and I both know, you’re gonna have different mayors, you’re going to have different city councils, you’re going to have different county councils, you’re going to have a different state legislative delegation. So you have to be you chamber, and top stakeholders that are in it for the long run, you have to keep the plumb line very clear, and keep coming back to the issues. Because a lot of times public and private sector partners can get easily distracted. So that’s the other thing is that we look at all of our work as forever work. Okay, you’re forever doing housing affordability, you’re forever improving infrastructure. You’re forever maintaining your business climate. For us as a coastal community, you’re forever looking at resiliency. So part of that is developing a drumbeat internally to be in it for the long game. Yeah, every year, as you said, you want to have annual achievements. But you have to have those long game goals, talented team, great partners, focus and metrics to be able to move to we call them big rock issues. Because they don’t go away. You know, somebody said, you know, we have funding, we have something called Accelerate greater Charleston that funds. A lot of the professional staff that the technical professional staff is somebody said, Well, when are we going to stop doing accelerate greater Charleston? And we just smile, and we say never,
Brandon Burton 27:50 whenever you give up, you know, like,
Bryan Derreberry 27:53 you want to quit? Yeah, you know, and last one out, cut off the lights. And what I think what helps private sector companies, especially if they’re developing products, have said, you have an r&d arm, don’t you? And they Oh, yeah, we have research and development. Well, for chambers, your research and development is positioning the region for the future and putting the building blocks in place. I said, if your r&d went away, you’d be selling the same product over and over, you’re always looking to improve. And that begins to help people wrap their brains around. Okay, this is forever work. This is a long game. And the other beauty I just shared earlier, we went to Boston with 100 leaders, is get your leaders out to other metro markets that have like opportunities and challenges. So they can see the kind of work they’ve done. And then we come home and people say, hey, we saw how they did that in Boston, we can do that. Or they come home and say, wow, they had a big miss, we can really learn from that. So when we tackle a like issue, we don’t make the same mistakes. The other beauty of that trip is that you think all the leaders in your community know each other and kind of have a comparable set of aspirations. They don’t know. So when you get 100 people together that are having lunch and dinner and some staying up till college late hours, getting to know each other better. They come home aligned. You know, a lot of this is about not only what you’re tackling, but its alignment, and persistence. So that annual trip kind of says, Okay, we’ve gotten to x with high speed bus lanes. So we’re gonna go look at somebody that’s either built them all the way out, or maybe they have light rail. So again, it’s I call it staying 20% dissatisfied. Yeah, never, never 100% satisfied. that you have to continually prod the region to achieve at a higher level. Part of the challenge to Brandon is that, you know, I’ve been in places that are BB plus communities, it’s hard to get a BB plus to an A, it’s really easier to take a C or a D and pop it up to an A, because people feel the threat. They feel the need for collaboration and alignment. You know, when you’re a B plus, you’re kind of fat and happy. Right? Do we really need to be in a
Brandon Burton 30:33 you’re too comfortable? Any adjustments? Yeah.
Bryan Derreberry 30:37 And that’s when we say there are 396 other mshs in this nation, that one our employers and they want our talent. So yes, we need to be in a
Brandon Burton 30:45 Yeah, that’s I love that point. And that being the 20% just satisfied it. Yes. Always, always looking for that room to improve. I love that. salutely. So and I’m sure this answer will vary. But as there are different committees and whatnot on these different topics. You had mentioned doing these leadership visits to other cities, which I think is awesome. It’s a great way to look at a certain topic and how a city that you may aspire to be like and in certain aspects that I see great value in that. As far as the nitty gritty, the day to day. How often do some of these committees meet as a monthly? Is it weekly? Is it quarterly? Are they all different? Depending on what it is? How do you? How do you say that in your community?
Bryan Derreberry 31:32 There, at least monthly, if not twice a month. And we’re big believers, our board this year will have had 10 board meetings and 10 executive committee meetings. You know, I hear people say, Oh, we you know, chamber champions. I apologize if I’m stepping on toes. Oh, we do a quarterly. Okay, these kinds of issues. If you do a quarterly and somebody misses a quarterly meeting, they miss half a year. Yeah. Okay. We call that creating a drumbeat. Whether it’s committees that are working on policy, or programs or initiatives, or executive committee and board. If you lose the drumbeat within your organization on key issues, you’re not going to be able to move fast enough to make a difference. Well, they’re all busy people. And I’m gonna give you a great example. Brandon, we tried to go to every other month when I was in Wichita, and the board rebelled. That’s a cool message. Yeah, one I’m meet monthly. So I think sometimes, yeah, it’s a lot of work. We have an amazing executive ops team. And it’s a lot of work to do 20 meetings a year with, you know, large lead volunteer bodies. And it’s the work we signed up for.
Brandon Burton 32:58 Absolutely. And it’s that forever work as it’s that forever work.
Bryan Derreberry 33:03 And, you know, the the thing we talk about is, and I just met with our exec ops team yesterday, and they’re incredible. And we said, our goal is to create an experience for every volunteer that has never been met or matched in our metro area, from knowing about their family, their names, their interest, and taking care of them. So when it comes time for one of them to be an officer, or to lead a committee or to get more of their people engaged Hekia I’m going to deal with the Charleston Metro Chamber. And so that that kind of intentional focus. And that’s why we sold out that trip to Boston in record time. And we don’t want to take 200 people, you know, we’re kind of like 100 Yeah, you know, if you get over 100, you start to have a three ring circus, and they don’t bond the same way. Yeah. But that that internal clock for us? It’s kind of like a metronome. How are we honoring them and engaging them. So they think I’ve never had a volunteer experience like this. Because let’s face it, we are battling for their time, talent and treasure, there are 4600 non enough for profits, and just the greater Charleston area. You know, as your communities get bigger, that’s probably 15,000 20,000 25,000. So it’s pretty rarefied air to get top leaders. The other thing we do a little bit different because we are really committed to the ENI is that we don’t have to have the the gal or the guy in the corner office. A lot of organizations just say, Oh, I only want the CEO or the president. Right. Well, we’ll say is give me number three, or number four, that will be that CEO and president in 10 to 15 years Yeah, so we can have the level of gender ethnic, racial diversity on our board that reflects our community. It also makes us a lot more healthy from an organizational standpoint,
Brandon Burton 35:13 and possibly more time to give to the purpose and the cause that you’re working on to always go for the number one, they’re going to be some of the busiest people. Not that the number three or four is not busy, but they’re able to work it in a little bit more and build that future along with you. So you’ve hit on some really awesome points in our discussion here. If you were to try to condense down to maybe a tip or an action item for chamber champions listening that want to take their chamber up to the next level, what would you put out there and suggest for them to consider
Bryan Derreberry 35:53 my greatest tip would be pick one to three things in become an expert. And that that’s going to weave right back into what we’ve been talking about Brandon, you’ve got to be committed to do it long term. So let’s say you pick developing a pipeline from your high schools and middle schools for your top two or three business sectors just know front side that that’s going to be 15 to 25 years. Think what we learned during the pandemic, because it was probably a sharing experience for every chamber and business member Association in our nation is that it was the meaningful work that maintained our most significant investors. It wasn’t the business after hours, it wasn’t the networking events. It was they could look at the chamber. And the chamber in our metro area got together with the council of governments and other stakeholders. And we created a whole reopening strategy for our metro marketplace. We met every day at four o’clock, Monday through Thursday for almost six months to get the region opened again. I felt like I had a whole new family. And sometimes it got irritating. But I wouldn’t have traded that we build bonds between organizations and governments that we never had before. So that would be my tip be be substantive, be relevant. And we use a term I think it’s the you know, if you were to ask me the the Chamber’s magic power, our secret sauce, we use a term called seine center, sa N E. Your chamber, chamber champions can be the same center on these issues, you can bring parties together. And whether it’s workforce development, whether it’s diversity, equity, inclusion, whether it’s housing attainability, whether it’s infrastructure solutions, whether it’s recruitment and retention of either businesses or employees, you can be the organization that brings all the parties together, that need to be aligned to do the work. That to me is what a chamber really is. Our mission statement is initiate advocate and empower the region to produce a prosperous business environment. And it’s a little different than a lot of chambers. Because they flip business environment in a region, we know that our region has to have the ingredients that are aligned to make employers, employees and citizens successful. So look at the region as your laboratory, look at your county as your laboratory. If you’re a City Chamber, look at your city as a laboratory, and find those one to three things that really need to be worked on. That would be my greatest encouragement. And and when you do it, you’re gonna get real popular real fast. So you’re gonna have to learn how to say no, yeah. That’s right, because let’s say this camera does such a good job on developing those middle and high school talent pipelines for industry. We wanted to do this now. We wanted to do that. So I think the other thing is to when you do those annual partnership calls, as I mentioned to you, we didn’t come back with 50 Things came back with probably five to seven things that every employer is focused on. So you know, stick to those critical realities, and and go deep and do a great job. And then when it comes renewal time and recruitment time, somebody will say, Oh, yeah, that chamber. They really have the best interest of the business. Unity in our region in mind, they’re worth investing in. So that would be my do stuff that matters and do it. Well.
Brandon Burton 40:09 I love that. So the question that I mentioned at the very beginning that that we would circle back to towards the end is how do you see the future of chambers and their purpose going forward?
Bryan Derreberry 40:21 I’m bullish, I think about what’s occurred over the window is what we’re in pandemic endemic, the past two, three quarters of a year, and I know for our chamber just to bring it home to right here, we look totally different than when we entered. We have a set of members, a set of stakeholders, a set of raving fans in the community, because of how we opened up our organization, for allowing us to assist anybody that needed help. And that that runs a little counter to the the typical Oh, we only help members. Well, when when your community is facing what we’ve all faced. During the pandemic, you help everybody you can help. And you make again, choices. So we look very different today, we look more open to diverse partners, diverse audiences. And we’re working on stuff a lot of chambers, you know, 20 years ago, maybe if you were in a major metro community, you were doing DNI, but I think chambers are going to be leaders for their regions, excuse me. And the years ahead, unlike any other time, I think that the credibility of the chamber when they tackle those issues, even if they’re not successful, and they’re going to be successful in the vast majority of instances. I think there’s a caring tone and tenor and a level of respect by leaders saying, Yeah, we need a rallying point. And I think I think it’s changed. And if your your chambers worth its salt, it’ll step into that opportunity and, and really make a big difference. SOT I’m very excited for the future. However, I do believe one of the things we continually learn is that it can’t, it can’t be all about the fun stuff. Right. And I mean, there are, somebody said to me, how many organizations in your community do networking events, somewhat goods? Probably all 46 months? not for profits? Yeah. So yes, do we have strong programming? We do. We do. But we’re probably one of the communities leaders for providing professional development programming. We have the six different leadership types of offerings. So we know right now, as you well know, in your market, Brandon, attracting and retaining talent is the number one business issue. So again, always making sure your chamber is plugged into what’s relevant, and then providing it with the highest level of expertise you can undertake. And if you’re small, don’t let that slow you down. You’ve got people in your membership. You’ve got volunteers and members that can come alongside of you, and build out the type of programming that you need. That’s one of the powers of small communities is that they can really rally that type of asset set and make it work. So I’m excited. I’m, you know, I think that chambers have always been amazingly relevant. We celebrate a little birthday next year. Yeah. Yeah. We’re gonna be 250 years old. Wow. That we’re the we’re the oldest continuing operating chamber in America. So founded three years before our nation became a country. I’d say we’re in it for the long game.
Brandon Burton 44:13 Yeah, doing that forever work. I love it. So I’d love for you to be able to share some, any contact information for listeners who might want to reach out and connect with you and learn sure but as you’re doing there in Charleston,
Bryan Derreberry 44:27 it’s it’s a really easy, bderreberry@charlestonchamber.org.
Brandon Burton 44:43 That is perfect. And I’ll get that in our show notes for this episode, too. So if somebody always,
Bryan Derreberry 44:48 always happy to talk this profession, and you know, I think your question Brandon on the future is that many chambers are at an inflection point. Mm. But there were ways that they used to do things and things that used to matter. And the inflection point is some of those still have value. The greater value though is marshaling the the leaders and assets of your community and aligning them and doing significant work. So we’re at that neat juncture, so many chambers have already crossed over. And if anybody wants to talk about the both the rewards and the pitfalls, because it’s hard when you enter into a new area of work. And also there are ways to enter in that you can have some immediate victories and set yourself up for long term success.
Brandon Burton 45:47 Yeah, I think that’s important to be able to have that encouragement going along that, that you are going in the right direction. So I love that. Bryan, I appreciate you spending time with us today on chamber chat podcast, providing, you know, great vision and insight for chamber champions listening. I’m sure everyone got a lot of value out of this. But thank you for being a part of the program today. I appreciate it.
Bryan Derreberry 46:13 Well, I love you championing our industry. I believe so greatly in the work that I see peer organizations and colleagues do across the country and America is great because of great chambers. So thank you for being an advocate.
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Below is an auto-generated transcription of my conversation with Don McCoy. 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.
Now, your host he would like to hear what your biggest obstacles are. Right now are your chamber. He’s my dad Brandon Burton. Hello, chamber champions. Welcome to the chamber chat podcast. I’m your host Brandon Burton, and it’s my goal here on the podcast to introduce you to people and ideas to better help you serve your Chamber members and your community.
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Guest Introduction
Our guest for this episode is Don McCoy. Don is the current president of the Fulshear Katie Area Chamber of Commerce in Texas and he has been since its inception in late 2013. Don has played a vital role in growing this local chamber from only a handful of businesses to becoming one of the fastest growing chambers in Texas with over 600 business members. Don is a seasoned marketing professional who brings over 40 years of experience to the table. He is an idea guy who excels at marketing, project management promotions, public relations and event planning. He has the proven ability to mastermind and lead creative teams energized clients and the ability to achieve objectives in an effective manner. In addition, Don is and has been an accomplished actor, director, producer, spokesperson, Master of Ceremonies and motivational speaker. He’s appeared in directed and produced several movie and television programs. He can be heard saying I’m really famous, but nobody knows it. Dan is a graduate of Stephen F. Austin State University with a major in management, marketing and a minor in Spanish. He speaks Spanish fluently and he’s lived and grew up in Venezuela, Mexico, Scotland, England and Iran. He’s also travelled extensively throughout and around the world. He currently lives in Cinco Ranch Katie, with his three legged Husky Wyatt. Don, I’m excited to have you with me on chamber chat podcast today, I’d love for you to take a moment to say hello to all the chamber champions and share something else interesting about yourself. That’s a great bio.
Don McCoy 3:24 Well, thank you very much, Brandon, it’s a real pleasure to be here. And i i Hello chamber champions out there, I hope today we can give you some nuggets of knowledge that might help you in any way, shape or form. I think you kind of hit all the highlights there i i guess probably some of the things in my background, everything you’ve ever done. And I will tell you this, regardless of where you came from, when you used to say you were an actor, it used to be a really what restaurant you work at, because it’s not necessarily a full time job. But you have seen me you just don’t realize maybe you have but meaning a lot of celebrities direct your lifetime and being in that type of business and even waiting tables. You know, sometimes you’re wondering why why am I doing this or, well, God has that plan. And, and I have found that everything I’ve experienced in my life up to this point, has led me to this job as a chamber, CEO and president. I use all those skills somehow, some way, whether I’m in front of people, I mean, I used to be the king of medieval times performing in front of 1000s of people nightly, and you get used to crowds and and as a chamber. Executive, you need to be able to have that way to ad lib skills to communicate with large, large groups of people or this the ideal person. And sometimes our job Brandon requires a little bit of acting skills, you know, you got to look interested you got to pretend you’re interested in what you’re hearing. and you know all the myriad of questions us chambers get all the time. And it’s important to that person they are they wouldn’t be asking but to yourself behind the scenes you made one. What do you call me about a category or tree for? Yeah, no, yeah. But I always say look at students use it over acting. And always provide a solution, whether I can get the cat out of your tree is inconsequential. But if I can get someone to call or someone that will definitely help you that you can mention my name, and it gets you through the gatekeeper a little bit, then you become a real key person, which we’ll talk about later have influence in your
Brandon Burton 5:38 community. Yeah, like that. I like that response. Before we get into our topic, tell us a little bit about the Fulshear. Katie area Chamber just to give some perspective where you’re coming from, you’d mentioned about 600 members in the bio, but tell us about the staff budget type of work you’re involved with and things like that.
Don McCoy 5:57 Right? Well, right off the bat. It’s, I’m glad my team is in here to hear you say staff, we don’t use the word staff we use. We’re all one team. But it was in late 2013, that this community had a number of businesses, but they felt they weren’t being representative. So representatives. So they wanted to start a chamber rather than being a business division of another chamber. And so I just happened to be at the right place the right time back visiting here at home and my brother had moved out here to Fulcher and Fulshear. Katie, it a lot of people will say we’re out. We’re west of Houston. But I like to tell everybody, Houston is east of us. And they’ll make themselves to start right. That’s right. And, and we weren’t just the Fulshear chamber, but Katie’s and other town, and we have just grown exponentially. This area is a very high growth area. And maybe that’s why our phone is starting to read even more and more. But there it is high net worth high growth. Look it up. It’s crazy. I mean, our town is, I think the second safest town in Texas, I have to do the shout out my brother happens to be the police department Captain here. So
Brandon Burton 7:09 he’s doing his job, then.
Don McCoy 7:11 Yeah. So we started out with just a handful of businesses. And then you know, we kind of picked the low of the low hanging fruit and me not knowing really, I knew what chambers did. But I wanted to make something that was truly different. That was tangible, that was a benefit to the members, and really bring something to the table. And so we did that, and we’ll talk about that a bit. But it started growing and going and it Swilly on personality, there was no cliques, people sit, this is sort of different, I go to the meetings, I feel different. Everyone is welcoming. And I’ve put in a thing called BFF. You know, the best friends forever, we had a we call it a B Fulshear. Friendly. And we kind of stole that a little bit. And then we say, you know by Fulcher and it just started to take off and people gravitated to it and nothing helps you better than word of mouth. And now we’re at 630. Members. And you know, I’m just was naive at the time, even up to this point and going, Okay, we want to reach a it’s not the amount of numbers, it’s the quality of members you have. And, you know, I understand the 630 is a large chamber. Okay, I mean, now that I’ve gone through IOM and everything, I get it, but in the beginning, I don’t know, I’m just trying to help people. And our budget runs anywhere about about 400k a year. So we’re still the least expensive chamber in the area when it comes to your dues. We are on the not tear does. We’re just you got one level, second level third level. Yeah. And, you know, at 325 a year to be to I tell people, we’re never cheap. I hate that word. But I tell folks, we’re the least expensive marketing dollar you could ever spend. And you’re in anything that you do to get your business noticed, noticed and recognized. Because you’d go out and spend money, companies on advertising and things like that. You’ve got to educate what a chamber really brings to the table. Besides being the representative at the table of government, we also offer a lot of tools to really help your business get a foothold and an inflationary times during COVID We were met with all those same challenges, and we continue to grow. So I think that’s a real testament to really focusing on what the needs of your members truly are rather than what yours are internally. He’s right
Brandon Burton 9:49 yeah, so I can tell you’re a marketing guy, you know, just the way you rephrase cheap to be in the least expensive marketing spend. Yeah, yeah. And it’s uh, yeah, There’s a lot of value in that. So that’s a, that’s great. But here’s
Don McCoy 10:03 what’s crazy, you know, Brandon, we we’ve started out with just me. And then I hired another person. And then we had a third person now just had a third person, retire the God bless her and she doesn’t have to. So now it’s back to two of us. And I never thought I mean, we’re finding how to be more efficient and reliant on the technologies that are available to us to manage a 600 plus chamber with two people, it becomes a bit of a challenge, but we’re doing it so don’t negate what the technology can help you.
Brandon Burton 10:36 Yeah. Now I can imagine and I like your introduction to the chamber world, you kind of had blinders on, you know, I don’t care so much what others are doing. I just want to go help people and I do it the best way I know how and it’s really taken off and served served you and your members very well. So that’s. So for our topic of discussion today, we settled on the topic of chamber nomics. So we’ll we’ll dive into what that means and everything as soon as we get back from our quick break.
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Don, we’re back. So chambernomics. Tell us okay, what is chambernomics mean to you as you, as you look at that word, it looks like a word that that’s been made up. So what does that mean to you? It looks like a blend of economics. So I
Topic-Chambernomics
Don McCoy 14:13 gotta give a shout. Rachel, who’s our VP of membership? She’s the one that we were just talking about, you know, training and Euro chamber 101. And a lot of chambers have, you know, when you join the chamber, here’s what you learn how about chamber and what it can do for you. And she came up with this chamber nomics. And I said, that’s, that’s beautiful. And so immediately, I went right to Google, I mean, the GoDaddy and I, it’s available, I bought it. So we own chambernomics.com. And, and then we coordinated that with our back office, software provider, chamber nation. And I now represent chamber nomics. And what that means to us is dedicated to we explore all kinds of issues and ideas relating to your Business, the economy, the community, it’s all written right there at the top. And I’m reading off of it. And, you know, it’s sort of I’m an idea guy, and it’s just an Idea Factory on how to what other things can I bring? Or can we make that or make our businesses really want to be in the chamber? And as we say, in chamber world, you know, those golden handcuffs? You’ve heard that before? Those are the things that if I leave, if I leave the chamber, I lose this. And then so it’s a real retention tool. Now we use chamber that is on a nationwide basis, the Chamber nomics is teaching them how we can you help their business get better. And there’s a lot of links in there that you can go look at and things like that, and chamber nadex.com. Now locally, I use chamber nomics as a as the name of our training. And so we do a chamber nomics class, the first and last Tuesday of every month at a different restaurant, and we eat first, and they happen to have a private room. And then we have video, and I get on, and I show everyone, hey, here’s how you upload your flyer for your upcoming event. Here’s your press release. And when you submit your press release, it goes out to all of our media contacts through our software. We just teach them all the different advertising tools and how to upload your video because sometimes, people learn in different ways. And people learn learn one on one, they also learn by watching a video of something on how it’s done, which a lot of people do and then people learn in a classroom setting. So the chamber nomics locally is our classroom setting. And, but our goal is to teach all of our members what our system does. Now, it’s really some people get a little scared of technology. And it’s not hard. And I say just kind of dive into it, bite it off a piece at a time. But if you do absolutely nothing with our back office system, we’re still creating tremendous search engine optimization for you and you’re getting ranked higher brand that go up. But if you stopped doing, you’re ready, but I’d say I had one number that came in the other day, it was called the Delaney. It’s an assisted living facility that’s in our chamber. And they had forgotten to change the management, but they had to say marketing person, and their traffic capture page that we make for them. It’s called a marketing landing page. In addition to their website, it complements it fell off, it went away. Well, she did a audit on her presence on social media. And they had dropped to the third page on Google without all the ads. And she said, what happened? And they said, Well, you used to have this traffic capture page that was doing a lot of work for you. And since it went away, you fell. Immediately, they popped back on and now they’re back on the first page on searches for assisted living in our area. So it just shows you there’s real power in a lot of online presence and digital presence and
Brandon Burton 18:00 talk to us more about the traffic capture page. So that’s built in with within this chamber nomics program or chamber nomics is really just telling them what all you have to offer kind of a platform of doing that,
Don McCoy 18:12 right. Yeah, chamber nomics is really telling them all we have to offer, but the traffic capture page is really a, you know, a, it’s a system that takes in, you know, you can go to a website and of any business and you get kind of lost because there’s a lot of information there and you don’t know quite where to go, okay. But the traffic capture page is something that is simple, easy, very quick. And if you want to go to their website, from there, you can get links to it. But it is search engine optimized, you can control what kind of photographs you put in there, you can put your catalog page in there, we offer a commission free checkout system, I’ll show you even our chamber, we even have a mobile app that’s very interesting that if you go scan a QR code, this kind of is our chamber. But this everybody gets one of these
Brandon Burton 19:08 I know it’s a little thin, every member gets their own app for their own app, their home address.
Don McCoy 19:13 And all of this takes you to your to your website about you, they can call you from here, they can message you from here, they can even share their business card, I can click this right here and let you scan that QR code and my information will drop into your phone. Nice. These are small, small little tools that are that are so available that you can do on your own or through our back office system. I got to sing their praises. But what happens with our system when you join our chamber, it takes us 10 days to put together your your your marketing system. And we build about 12 pages of stuff about your business. And we take it all off of your website and what we know about you and what you filled out in your app. application, and then you can go in and refine it. But if you don’t do anything, you’re still getting the benefit. So
Brandon Burton 20:07 cool. So what about it’s not as common these days, but every now and then I’ll come across a business that doesn’t have a website yet? Is there still a way of building out those pages to give those members a digital footprint?
Don McCoy 20:19 You know, thank you. Yes, absolutely. Because you would fill out the pertinent information, our team will go get photographs of that we’ve already paid for their, you know, their their commitment, or they
Brandon Burton 20:32 call the stock images.
Don McCoy 20:34 And we own some of the stock images, but we, we examine your business, and we build your traffic capture page. And what’s really cool, is, if you have a URL about your business, but you don’t have a website, you can have that URL point to the traffic capture page. Okay. And then a lot, a lot of our members just use that as their as their website, because it works.
Brandon Burton 21:00 Right. That’s great. So, you know, I think I think initially, maybe when, when Google and the stronger search engines started to roll out, I’m sure there’s some chambers out there that maybe felt a little bit threatened that people could just go to Google and find answers they’re looking for. And rather than seeing that as competition to the value proposition, you have you actually you guys are leaning into it, and saying, let’s provide a lot more information. So doing a lot of the legwork for your members, so they can show up better on search engines, and were like a bigger bang for their buck.
Don McCoy 21:36 It’s even during the pandemic talk about coming up with ideas. You know, we couldn’t go to trade shows for a while. I mean, there was none existing. So what did we do, we went and created a virtual tradeshow booth, which we still have an existence now. And you can it looks just like a table, you have a video insert in the bottom that people can watch, you can go and click here to schedule a calendar meeting or get on their zoom call. And you know, and a lot of our business say, Hey, if you’re interested to learn more about us and want to meet later, just go to my virtual tradeshow booth and, and fill out the information and watch what we do. And then we’ll get in touch with you that way. So it’s always sitting there working for you as a, as a tourist center of your business basically, right? That is awesome. And video and video is now the way to go to I mean, coming from a film and TV background. I mean, nowadays, video is so simple to put up. And then we make it even simpler in our back office, all you got to do is click here, your camera on your on your computer, and you can talk about your business. And that is and then throw into that those key words. And I will tell you just a hint. Any pictures you’re starting to put up right now, any videos, you always see that alt text at the bottom of that, you got to start filling that out. Because just a word of warning that there’s a lot of lawyers out there going after websites and things that if you’re not ADA compliant on your social media or on your website, meaning Language Hearing and alt text for your pictures, you can be sued. And that’s crazy. And so we offer that as well. We have a buttons all over our website where you can we can translate everything we do even on our mobile app, we can translate it to any language in the entire country and let you listen to it in that language.
Brandon Burton 23:33 Wow, that is impressive.
Don McCoy 23:36 It’s pretty cool. It really is
Brandon Burton 23:37 sent you mentioned earlier something about having the importance of having a strong digital footprint.
Don McCoy 23:43 Yeah, yeah, it sounds this. This is something that is really cool. And you guys can look it up anywhere. There’s a lot of companies out there that do what is called key person of influence. And this is something I’ve really latched on to here at our chamber. And what our goal is, is to make every member in our chamber a key person of influence in their industry, and have a true Omni presence on digital, Omni presence. And what this is, every industry has an inner circle, every industry has one, you know even the chamber world brand and has an inner circle. And and these are people of influence. These are people you look to and they whatever they say I mean, I don’t know if anybody knows Pat McCoy out of Idaho, but I fell in love with him at my first IOM a year. And I still stay in touch with him and I treat him as he owns chamber mentor.com Great Guy gotta follow his blog. And, you know, he influenced me, to me, he’s a key person. But what we’re going to start doing is we’re going to have a rather than a leadership type course, we are instituting how to become a key person of influence. And this is something we’re doing here in the Houston area and we hope to expand nationwide with you A couple of folks that I’ve gotten in tune with, but our first one is in November, and we’ve partnered up with the United States, Mexico Chamber of Commerce, us. If anybody wants to check it out and get more deep into it, we’re at kp O, I got VIP. And that means key person of influence that VIP keep KP Oli, and it’ll explain everything there. But you know, we’re always in a state and someone wants said the biggest room in the world is the room for improvement, you know. And so the other thing if you don’t, and this is about a $4,500 course, and it’s going to we’re going to do this, what this will do for you is it will, it’ll read people will regard you after this course, they’re going to regard you as a high value individual, I want to meet that person, I need that person to come talk to my business or whatever your business is, you could become the expert in ice cream, if you have an ice cream store, because when they go search ice cream, you’re everywhere. You’re Who is this guy, and then you’ll get VIP treatment anywhere in the world. I kid you not, my friend has his website called speaking Dubai. And he goes to Dubai all the time he gets invited, he’s going to curse out. And he’s the one that’s helping us put this together. And then you get opportunities out the wazoo presented to you all the time,
Brandon Burton 26:22 you get asked to come on podcasts and stuff like that.
Don McCoy 26:25 Exactly. Yeah, you’re right. And you know what this for me is a another digital asset that’ll be out there. And we even have a questions on our website that you know, am I getting what I what I’m worth? Am I getting paid for whatever you take this, I took this question or take me 10 minutes to do it. And I scored a zero. I thought I was pretty good. You know, hey, I’m in the movies. You can find me on IMDb, but But it’s pretty eye awakening. So we do pre event coaching and all this. And if you’re interested in more about it, I’d be happy to hook you up. But it’s, this is the way to go. And even on our website at Fulshear katie.com. I invite anybody to take a look at grow and protect and when you go to grow and protect, that’s an app that we now have. It cost our members a whopping $1 for an entire year to have access to over 250 lessons and courses that will help you be a better business person. I’m talking how to how to make your LinkedIn and world class. I mean really how to do it. And these are all like 15 minute lessons with a video attached to it. There you go. Yeah,
Brandon Burton 27:43 that’s right. Okay, got Frank’s card. He’s on my radar to be yes. So he’ll be on to talk more about grown protect.
Don McCoy 27:50 And I’ll leave it I’ll leave it there. But I’d say Frank is also part of our KPI KPI. He’s part of the key person of influence. And Frank before and he’s 77 years old, and doing what he did on cybersecurity. And this man is such a key person of influence in cybersecurity, he gets they call him out of Dubai say, would you come over and talk to our company, they fly into Dubai, he spends a week there and gets paid for it.
Brandon Burton 28:21 So so this is interesting. So there’s the aspect of helping your members become key people of influence. But how about for chamber executive? How about for somebody establishing their career in the chamber world? How? How should they go about being a key person of influence?
Don McCoy 28:40 I will tell you this is probably one of the most important things because in your in your, in your world, or your community. You need to be that person that everybody looks to for ideas and solutions. I mean, the mayor, the residents, I mean, you really can’t you should not be able to go to any restaurant without talking to somebody, I made a comment. I went to a gala last night. And it was for a local charity. And I went to go get a couple of drinks at the bar down there at the other end of the of the room. And I was bringing a friend back one. And by the time I got back the ice had almost melted. He says Where have you been? I said it took me 20 minutes to walk from the bar all the way across the room because I kept getting stopped by a number of people. But that’s awesome. You can work that. And so if you become even starting out if you’re going to IOM or if you’re going to be ACCE conference or the Texas chamber or any of these executive conferences, make sure you get pictures of yourself talking to the keynote speakers and and create a file on your desktop that has you just drop pictures in there. And then anytime you want to put those up on the internet or put them up on your Facebook and things like that Google loves that new information. So it is thing. And so you put your name with it and attach it to that event, tag yourself. And then you start to become the key person of influence. It’s not that hard, but you’d be surprised you as an executive are in the presence of greatness on a regular basis, whether it be with your look, your governor, your mayors, your representatives, you know, any number of people, even local business people that are well respected in your community. Go out, take them to lunch, get a picture with them, you know, everybody, let’s do a selfie. Okay. I mean, that’s what makes you look at this guy. Look, Brandon is probably got 1000 You probably got 1000 pictures of yourself with notables? Right. Yeah, lots
Brandon Burton 30:41 of them. Yeah.
Don McCoy 30:42 I mean, when I was in the film business, I always got a picture with me and Robert Duvall, Liam Neeson, me and Patrick Swayze. And that and you know, so when I go on auditions, you know, and Oliver Stone sees all the my resume and these pictures before the digital world, but it was actually in my in my portfolio. It was, Wow, you’ve been around, you know, a lot of people that I know. And so there’s a certain sense of confidence and people, it’s what we call pre suasion. If you’ve used that coin, I love the coin these words, and pre suasion as a way that before anyone needs you. They’re already persuaded to liking it, say, and to me, that that, that is half the battle because people judge you within about the first one minute of meeting you face to face. I met Brandon at what we run into each other, but we never really actually met till tccc. Yeah, yeah, and Rocco. And you know, and it’s busy, and we’re all doing our thing. But we connected we finally connected now, I think he’s a great guy, or I wouldn’t be here. Hopefully he likes me too. All right.
Brandon Burton 31:51 That’s right. But
Don McCoy 31:53 he knew about me already, somehow, some way I kind of already knew about him. So I was already pre slated to be interested in Brandon and the Chamber chat. And I asked, How can I get involved and help out. So that’s how this comes, comes to play. And then if you can teach yourself, your team that you work with, and let them they’ll be key people of influence, give them the power to make decisions on your behalf. Nothing can be even if they make a mistake you learn from and grow from it. But give your team that power to do it. And they’ll come in and say and be excited, guess what I did today? And you go, man, that’s fantastic. Oh, no, we got to correct that. But it’s okay. You know, it doesn’t hurt. So executives, start, start looking at this grow and protect, start learning how to be tell your story, tell your chamber story, tell your own story. Because a good friend of mine, Jack working at one day, you’ll get to meet him. He’s a fantastic sales guy. He wrote a book called Life as a sales call. He’s really a good book. And he likes to say that most businesses and chambers, were always concerned about ROI, return on investment. And that’s okay, that’s cool. It’s necessary. But what we got to really concentrate on is our O R. And that’s the return on relationships. And if you don’t have a relationship with everyone in your community, you’re always gonna suffer. So always think of that return on a relationship again, what am I gonna do about the cabinetry, okay, why are you even asking me that, but I’m very interested. And now guess what, I’m a hero to that person. And they will talk my they will sing my praises wherever they go. So I’ve got another salesman working for me out
Brandon Burton 33:44 there. That’s right. Yeah, I like how you came back around to the cabinetry. And your example of how we met at TCC. That’s, that’s perfect. Because I had heard about you, I knew some of the stuff you were doing your chamber, you’d heard about me, we made the connection. The one thing we didn’t do is get a picture. So next time we’re with each other, we gotta get a picture. And
Don McCoy 34:07 now I’m gonna sit here and I’m gonna screenshot talking right here. And this is what I’m doing right now on my in I’m doing it right here. A big smile. Brandon here. Yeah. I got it now.
Brandon Burton 34:25 Person one next time. So as we start to wrap up, though, I wanted to ask you if you have any tips or action items based on anything that we’ve covered today, for the chamber listening who’d like to take their organization up to the next level, what would you suggest? Well,
Action Item/Tip for Chamber Champions
Don McCoy 34:41 you know, I and I know a lot of the thing is, the status quo is all I mean, you’ve probably heard it a million times is Think outside the box. My team has got a sign on the front of my door hanging above my door. It says Don has another idea. and whether they’re good ideas or bad ideas, it doesn’t matter. Clear your cash every now and then of your ideas, because that’ll let new ones come in. But get them out there. And whether it’s it doesn’t have to be the whole ball of wax. But if it’s just something in that idea that might spark someone else to take it to another level, do it. Don’t be afraid to throw your ideas out there for fear of looking crazier, you know, but when you come from the acting world, you know, you act and you are foolish, sometimes on stage or whatever you do, and you just have to throw that caution to the wind. And people will start to respect you as an idea person. And I think it’s highly, highly important that you continue to improve yourself and find things like this key person of influence, or this grow and protect or just get on YouTube and start watching TED Talks. If you have a little issue, maybe talking to pub in the public. There’s tons of things in ideas and tips. back I’ll give you one right now. Small tip. You ready? Yes. My glasses, say this. But back when I was in film school, Adam Roark was one of my teachers. He was a real famous actor with Hells Angels if you’re older, but me and Lou Diamond Phillips, we’re in the same class together Alibaba guy, right? Yeah. And so he said, there he goes, You know what the difference between a good actor and a bad actor is, and we’re all sitting there going? Experience. He said, eyebrows. Eyebrows. What do you mean by eyebrows? The tip he gave us is watching TV ever go see a bad movie and an actor or even you’re talking to somebody their face never moves. They’re just remembering their lines. And I’m gonna tell you about my chamber, my chamber is best and you need to be part of my chamber. And then you just give that whole thing. But he said if you move, you’re good actors and good salespeople, and people who are passionate about what they do, their eyebrows will move just a little bit before they say anything. So hey, let me tell you about my chamber see it because what that is, so consciously, is telling the listener Hang on, I’m about to say something pretty important. So they automatically tune in to you, if you just move your eyebrows just ever so slightly. Some people do it naturally. Some people have to think about it. But if you watch people on podiums, nothing against our state representative yesterday, but he was the emcee of the gala. But he was sort of deadpan. But if your face is animated, and move your eyebrows just ever so slightly, you You are now persuaded somebody to listen to.
Brandon Burton 37:34 Right? I like that. Now everybody listening is thinking about their eyebrows and what they’re doing. And yeah, I think of the rock. Right? He does that one. Yeah. And it gets your attention. So
Don McCoy 37:46 there you go. And don’t and please don’t think that, Oh, I’m over exaggerating my eyebrows, it will come naturally trust Dan. But if you truly believe in what you’re doing, and find a good software, program, whatever works best for you. But be aware, there’s a lot of software’s out there that work for you, in chamber management, but as to help you manage your database. I like mine, because it not only helps me manage my database, but it also helps have tools for my members to use. And to me, that’s the most important part of it. And some of you may be Richard scalding from time to time he said he was at the event and everything. And he lives in Texas now. So I got him to move from California.
Brandon Burton 38:28 That’s right. And he’s he’s one of the sponsors of the show. So if you want to plug it, you know, Chamber Nation,
Don McCoy 38:34 well, I promise you, you’ll never meet a nicer guy and his wife and his whole team. He’s one of those guys that I brainstorm with. And I say, hey, if your software could do this, that would be awesome. And he goes, let me see what I can do. And sure enough, he came out with it. I mean, we it’s our plaque system. I won’t get into that. But that’s what is so cool about having somebody that you can, whether it works or not get the idea can make it happen. You know, in film and TV, I used to edit on beta Ubaid, remember beta tape, or film years ago, and I didn’t know how to work the editing machine. But I knew the guy that did and I said, I know you can do this. So I want you to make it look like this. Yeah, he doesn’t. So you always need your producer director and then you need the guy. Because as somebody once said, as patent lawyers said, CEOs like us right here, we are working 1015 20 years in the future. Okay, but you need a team that is working in the hearing now your see Oh, getting the job done here in the present. So try to keep that perspective to
Brandon Burton 39:45 like that. That is great. A great tip right there. Speaking of those lines, as we look to the future of chambers and their purpose going forward, how do you see chambers and their purpose going forward?
Future of Chambers
Don McCoy 39:57 Well, I’m gonna say they, a lot of us, a lot of them need to change and get with it. Okay? Come into the future and embrace the technology. Because it’ll it’ll, it’ll run right past us so fast, you won’t know what happened. The entire world is going to this is this is this is the world and, and, and if you can’t reach my chamber here or call me or find me or whatever, even Voice Search, I’m people voice search, I am now searchable by voice. And people are using that. But the future of chambers are to still represent your businesses at the table of government, don’t lose sight of that. And to be the community key, whether they call that the kid the last 10. Because if you become that important, and if the chamber went away in your community today, would your community fill it? Yeah, they should. So be that be that chamber of influence in that connector, and that catalyst and the champion for the community, but in the future, embrace all these new technologies coming along, because that’s going to set you up for tremendous success. And as some people retire out of the chamber world, and it happens all the time, technology can replace some of those things and make it easier for the new folks coming in. Because imagine, I don’t know what the average age of a CEO is, in chamber world, I really don’t, that’d be interesting to find out what but I mean, if you’re not up on technology, the next generation, the millennials, in the whatever’s there, whatever their names are, that are highly technical oriented with the Snapchats, and the whole things. They’re the ones that are going to take over in the chamber world, and they’re not gonna want to start at square one. That’s right. They want to see you already have a presence on Facebook, they want to see you have the tick tock, they want to see you have all this other stuff. And that’s going to attract really great talent to your team. That’ll make you even more successful. Don’t be afraid to be the idea person, the executive, but look for that talent that can come in here and work your social media to the enth degree and it’s nothing to them. And you’re sitting here going, what do I do? What is this? That’s where you got to go. Because it’s, it’s important. It really is at 63. I never thought I’d be well versed in but my mother is 83 and she can work Facebook like a charm. It’s unbelievable. So
Brandon Burton 42:30 awesome. I love there.
Don McCoy 42:31 Yeah, just get out there and do it. It’s easy. Yeah.
Brandon Burton 42:35 So Don, what would be the best way for any listeners to reach out and connect with you if they want to learn more about anything you’ve shared? Or how you’re doing things? Their culture? Absolutely.
Connect with Don McCoy
Don McCoy 42:45 My email and my, my phone number is at chambernomics.com. And that’s, you could always call the chamber here and ask for me. I’m very accessible. My phone number is is on the chambernomics website, you can find me on Facebook, Don McCoy facebook.com, forward slash Don McCoy. Go in there and make me your friend, LinkedIn, I try to use it all. I tell you, and if you try to message me on Facebook, what’s at email, and I wish if somebody out there can find the technology to write if you’re if you know that if I get a message on Messenger, WhatsApp, email, this this, and it funnels into one app. You’ll make a million dollars today, I kid you not. But just reach out, give us a call. I’ll call you back. And I’d be happy to walk you through or answer any questions you might have. I’m, I’m here to not only help our businesses, but to help you and which helps America live or not. I’m a big patriot. And this country is fantastic. And we still have the freedom to do business. And so let’s do it. That’s the commerce there’s another website for you called letsdocommerce.com.
Brandon Burton 44:06 Well, I will get your contact information in our show notes for this episode. But this has been a fun conversation. Hopefully it’s percolating some ideas and people listening and take something and run with it at your chambers back at home. But Don, thank you for thank you for being with us today and providing so much value. My pleasure,
Don McCoy 44:24 Brandon, keep doing the good work you’re doing you are a blessed individual, to the community and to our to our community here in the chamber world. And likewise, if there’s anything I can do for you, Brandon or anybody out there, thank you, God bless you all for what you’re doing. We know it’s a tough job, but, uh, keep up the good work and you’ll be blessed every day.
Brandon Burton 44:46
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Below is an auto-generated transcription of my conversation with Josh (JT) Torres and Isaac Lee. 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.
Unknown Speaker 0:14 And now, your host, he always enjoys getting new pair of running shoes. Here’s my dad Brandon Burton.
Brandon Burton 0:21 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.
Tony Felker 0:45 One of the key benefits that we’ve realized from Holman Brothers it’s actually happened many years after we started using them. We just completed our new strategic plan and understanding those subtle differences between transactional benefits and transformational benefits. The companies that knew what they expect has been a key part in our strategic plan. And we really want to thank Holman Brothers for that.
Brandon Burton 1:06 You can learn more about Holman Brothers Membership Sales Solutions by visiting holmanbros.com.
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Guest Introduction
For today’s episode, we are we have two guests with us we have Josh Torres or j t as we’ll refer to him and Isaac Lee and in JT and Isaac are the co founders of chamber life. Josh is a seasoned entrepreneur with multiple businesses with multiple successful business ventures with a current focus and responsibility as co founder for the strategy sales, operation and alignment of the North America chamber life business. His style is innovative, creative and putting people first to benefit from the technology to ensure a better quality of productivity and success for chamber teams. He is enthusiastic, optimistic and future oriented individual with a high energy level, having a creative capacity to recognize and pursue opportunities naturally capable of setting up the internal systems procedures and processes necessary to operate a business with a focus on cash flow, sales and revenue at all times. Driven to be proactive in his approaches to everything with the vision to lead and inspire others. He has led chambers and associations for over 19 years and is married his wife Cindy and they have five children residing in Northwest Ohio. Isaac has a background in running chambers of commerce as well as economic development organizations. He has over 15 years of experience in these two industries. In addition to being a co founder of chamber life, Isaac is the executive director for stupid county EDC in the northeast corner of Indiana. Isaac has also served as a board member and consultant to the Chamber of Commerce executives of Ohio, where he has worked with hundreds of chambers and economic development organizations across the state of Ohio and Indiana, identifying the best practices as well as comprehensive policies to help move organizations forward in their communities. In 2012, Isaac was awarded the 20 under 40 award in the Toledo market in Ohio, and in 2013, Isaac was voted by his peers for the 2012 Professional of the Year Award through the Chamber of Commerce executives of Ohio. In 2019, Isaac was awarded the 40 under 40 Award by the Greater Fort Wayne Business Journal. In 2020. He was selected as one of the nation’s top 50 economic development professionals by consultant Connect. Isaac received his MBA from Defiance College and received his bachelor’s in marketing and human resources from the University of Toledo Isaac has been married his wife Kristin for almost 19 years and they have four children. But Isaac and JT I’m glad to have you with me today on chamber chat podcast. Why don’t you both take a moment to say hello to all the chamber champions listening and and share something interesting about yourself so we can get to know you a little better.
Josh (JT) Torres 4:12 Hey, chamber peeps, JT here. So excited to be on the show today. love working with all of you, in the state of Ohio and across the country. Super stoked to be here. One thing about me that I pride myself in I have a serious addiction with fitness and working out. And really every day regiment. So that’s something that I spend a lot about two hours in the morning doing before I start my day.
Brandon Burton 4:40 Very good. I should show you my my office space here. Doubles is my gym. So maybe afterwards. I’ll give you
Isaac Lee 4:48 a little time. And Brandon and guests thank you again for allowing us to take this opportunity to talk to folks. We’ve been in your shoes so we love speaking the chamberlain And we’re just talking about it. What’s what our best practices are? A unique thing about me, and I’m not too proud to say it right now. But I am a Notre Dame fan. And yes, I know we lost him. Wonderful last week. I’ve heard it all. But I’m a diehard Irish fan. So I’ll be hanging on.
Brandon Burton 5:17 It’s a rough start to the season, but you can’t be where you are without being a Notre Dame fan. Right? That’s true. Like I said, I’m glad to have you both with me today. As we dive in, usually, at this point, if I’m interviewing a chamber staff, or chamber executive, I haven’t talked a little bit about their chamber, but as cofounders of chamber life, tell us what is chamber life? What do you guys do? And as you service chambers of commerce, and just give everyone a bit little better idea of what chamber life is?
Isaac Lee 5:50 Absolutely. Josh, do you want to start it?
Josh (JT) Torres 5:52 Yeah, go ahead. I will. Absolutely. So you know, chamber life really takes two things that are most important to the business and chambers and I say business because we’re a business as a chamber organization, not a not a nonprofit, we were really want to run this as a business as chamber printers, as I like to call them. So you know, we came up with chamber life has a way to automate your task with recruitment and retention, that will do in dry, hopefully higher retention and conversion rates for your prospects that will ultimately lead to higher engagement, and making sure that all of your members are touched multiple times a year with with automated tasks that are assigned with our within our software. So we’re we’re excited about chamber life and the ability to take a pain in the market that’s been been there for many, many years, and automate that process for many.
Brandon Burton 6:42 Very good Isaac, do you have anything you’d like to add on, on what chamber life’s about?
Isaac Lee 6:47 I think it like several entrepreneurs, or founders of technologies or software. This was born out of frustration of Josh and I being in the industry and having the same struggles that many of your listeners are having, in terms of these packages, these platforms working for us, not just with us. And there was an opportunity to really automate some of these tasks that are very extremely important into our role of being a relationship based organization. So we often use the term it was built by you for you. When we talk about chamber life it because it’s truly sincere.
Brandon Burton 7:26 Very good. I appreciate that. That helps give a snapshot of what it is you guys do so and coming from from two guys that have experienced in chamber world and like you said, being built up built by you for you, because you are one of them. Thank you. So we’ve decided, as we go about this episode today to focus our discussion around that R word that JT had mentioned of retention. So we’ll be talking about membership retention, and maybe some approaches to take as when it comes to membership retention that maybe you haven’t tried before. Maybe it’s just maybe a different approach different perspective. But we’ll dive into that discussion as soon as we get back from this quick break.
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Alright, guys, we are back. As I mentioned before the break, we’re talking about membership retention, as we think of chambers out there the frustration like Isaac mentioned of how do you get these people to come back year after year see the value that they get for their membership. As you look at retention in membership, maybe JT what what comes to mind as as things that a chamber should maybe have a focus on or pay attention to when it comes to retention.
Topic-Retention
Josh (JT) Torres 11:33 So I think one of the things that you know, for many years we’ve focused on is the R word retention. But I really feel that moving ahead, you know, for the future of chambers, we need to focus on two things culture and the experience, there’s two things to culture that as chambers, we really need to make sure that we are focused on the internal culture, which is inside your boardroom, inside your inside your office walls, and then the external culture, outside your membership outside and your community culture is a big deal. And if we’re not managing and leading culture, that can really affect the our ability to retain, that culture can affect your brand, your brand, awareness, your promotion of your brand, and then really be able to tell the story of what are people saying about your organization. So culture is a big deal. The other thing is, by driving culture, we drive experience, what type of member experience are you having, at the after hours at the luncheon at the golf outing, even within your own board meetings with a new member orientation? Is that experience superior? That drives a culture of inclusivity welcoming and making sure that we’re always going to be there to take care of our members?
Brandon Burton 12:47 Like that. Isaac, do you have any thoughts as far as what a chamber should be thinking of when it comes to retention?
Isaac Lee 12:54 Yeah, and actually, it’s going back a little bit in our history to how a lot of our chambers were formed. It’s relationship based transactions, and I struggle saying the word transactions, but it truly is that think about the life of 200 members or an organization, a chamber the size of 200 members, that’s 200 relationships, and not all relationships are the same. So you really need to understand what each one of those relationships are looking for. Some are very needy want to be at all your events, some are just hey, I’m here for the benefits and everything else is a cherry on top, understand what that relationship is, and drive that home each and every year. Everything else that you try to do with that member to get them out of their space, might not achieve the same goal or return on investment in terms of your time your spending. So really understand what your members are, what they’re trying to do with the relationship that you have with them. And really concentrate on that.
Brandon Burton 13:54 Like that, if you’re saying relationships. And what I hear out of that is expectations. Like as you develop these relationships, you’re better understanding what the expectation is for each of these members. And oftentimes, if you’ve got a 200 member base, you’ve got probably close to 200 different expectations of what they’re looking for from you as a chamber. So without building those relationships and understanding what that expectation is, it makes it hard to create the culture and experience it’s a value to them, to keep them around for a long time and in for them to recognize the value they provide. As we circle back JT, I wanted to talk a little bit more about the culture. How do you decide what direction as a chamber? What direction do you go with creating culture and what your culture looks and feels like?
Josh (JT) Torres 14:49 So that’s a great question. So two things you really need to understand your membership and make sure that the is your board of directors set up to really good view Have what who your members are? Who sits on that board table? Is there a board matrix that represents as best as you can your total membership? That’s one thing. And the second thing is in the office, what type of training and professional development are we doing to help drive culture drive engagement, and make sure we have very much chamber execs that are excited to come to work, they know what they’re doing. They have the tools and the resources to be successful. And then that culture with in that office, you know, who was the best fit to drive membership retention, or do sales or do events, those types of things, many of our, our peers in the industry are solo chamber printers, they’re by themselves in the office full time or part time. And we have many out there that listen, that are volunteer run, that are trying someday to become revenue driven to the point where they can have a paid position. So really understanding Do we have the right fit? The right personas at the board representing the community? And then internally, do we have the right fit of individuals with the personas that can drive engagement and innovation inside the office?
Brandon Burton 16:07 So without being too abstract, I mean, is there a couple examples of culture like what comes to my mind it obviously every chamber is different. But just to throw some examples out there. If you create a culture of at our chamber, we show up and support new businesses with a ribbon cutting, or at our chamber, we do an annual, you know, luncheon for the first responders will say, we have a great respect in our community for first responders, and that becomes part of the culture. Is there some examples you can think of that, and I am hesitant, because I don’t want a chamber to listen and say, Oh, I have to do that. Right. It has to be catered for your community. But what would be some real examples of that being too abstract as to what culture could look like?
Josh (JT) Torres 17:02 So one, one example that we share in our association work and we’ve we still unfortunately have in our industry is the lack of welcoming at some that sometimes our luncheon or after hours, just by creatures of habit. And just in most instances by accident, when you have a new prospect that’s trying to join the chamber, or they’re a brand new member, and they come to an event, they don’t know anyone. And then they’re not maybe assign an ambassador or assign a board member to look after them with their on the registration list. That right there is a sense of how you can create an experience based upon the welcoming culture, they walk into a room and an after hours, two things happen, you know, they’ve got to be introduced. And then they’ve got to be able to follow through. So by driving engagement at those events, and making sure you’re inclusive and welcoming to that member, will give them a positive culture experience that will then hopefully drive more of that retention piece for them.
Brandon Burton 17:58 Isaac, do you have any thoughts that come up as far as what culture could look like some examples?
Isaac Lee 18:03 Yeah, so Josh is looking external to the organization, we just did a training last week internal to chambers of commerce, specifically for boards. And I’ll take that angle, we have a culture of your board, there’s usually three different expectations. At some core, there’s these expectations, it’s either the board members offering their time t talent is another T or treasurer. And we’re trying to teach that our staff and our board should understand what the culture is or what the nature is of that board member to have a good mix, it’s very difficult to have somebody who’s only there to offer their treasure, be the one to volunteer at all their events, meaning nations a treasure, but the ones that’s offering up their treasure, there may they may not offer up their time. That’s not what their skill set is. And we shouldn’t expect them to do otherwise, unless it also matches with what their motives are of the treasurer. So it’s the culture that we set within our board or organizations can also matter and have a deep impact on the success of our organization.
Brandon Burton 19:06 Like that. I like that response a lot. As we look at experience, creating a positive experience that helps you have that culture that is going to drive the experience. Isaac, may we start with you on this, you know, going down this path with creating that experience for members or bore me go either direction you want with that, but how do you go about creating that experience?
Isaac Lee 19:33 So one of the things that I recall for myself, when I was at the Defiance area Chamber, I had an experience where I was really paying attention to the relationship of my member and I found out that this local business of mine, there was a husband who was running the organization and assumed because of his title he was he was the go to. It wasn’t the case. Actually, it was a family owned business. And the wife did the books, but in a relationship Yep, it was unique in the sense that I was at an event. With them asking for sponsorships, I had been unsuccessful. But I listened to a conversation between these two individuals about this party that they were getting ready to have in the coming week. And the party was not about a family member was actually about a dog. very daring dog to this family. A couple of weeks later, I had seen the wife and the husband at another event, and something drew me upon the fact I should ask about how the party went. I did. This coincided with an ask of about $3,000, that up until that point, I asked about the dog, I was not successful. So when you think about, you know what it means to really drive home with a relationship, it wasn’t anything else that I offered at the Chamber of Commerce as an executive director, other than the willingness to care and ask about a family pet.
Brandon Burton 20:55 I like that that’s a, that’s huge, just being able to get on a relationship level with them, where I like to say you’re building a relationship of trust, you’re not just coming after them for money for the sponsorship, you’re showing the care and interest in them. So that definitely creates a better experience.
Isaac Lee 21:13 Now there’s follow up there to Brandon. Right. So after that, when I was there, guess who got a birthday card?
Brandon Burton 21:20 The dog? Yes. Awesome. So Jay, to me, from your perspective of creating experience.
Josh (JT) Torres 21:32 So no birthday cards to dogs? I’ll say that I haven’t had that in my tenure. But I really think what drives an incredible experience is when you identify the pain that a said business is having. And identify, again, that chamber provides, you know, chambers have fantastic where, with networking? Well, sometimes we need to up our ante and really understand what’s it What’s that business experiencing? You know, and how do we give them a feature not a benefit, let’s talk features, not benefits. Let’s talk about what feature the chamber we can provide to them to have the ultimate experience. And most quite honestly, if you can solve that pain with a game that may be networking that may be some of the great affinity programs that are out there that may be program and educational work that you provide to them. That may be work that you’re doing in advocacy, workforce development, talent, attraction DNI, whatever that pain is, if you have a game, which I’d like to call a feature, that definitely drives the experience, because then they realize, ah, someone is going to be able to help me. And somebody’s going to be able to guide me through navigating my challenge.
Brandon Burton 22:43 I love that I heard a quote A while ago, and I wish I could remember who it was. But it said something to the effect that if you can identify the pain for your customer, or will say your member better than they can describe it, that they’ll automatically assume that you have the answer that you have to solution. So if you can go about identifying what these pains are, then they’re going to come to you for the feature for the the gain for that benefit that you have to offer to them, and create a positive experience going forward. So I had a while back, I had read a book called you’re invited. And the whole book is about creating experiences for people were added, I can go down a deep rabbit hole with what the books all about. But one of the takeaways that I got from it and relating it to the chamber world is chambers are known for their networking events. Right? Right. And when you open up a networking event for any business, in your membership, people come they’re super uncomfortable, they might grab a drink, once they’re done, they’re out of there, you know, if they don’t have their buddy there that, you know, meet up with that networking can be super uncomfortable. But if you had a carefully curated mixer, say for example, for real estate, and you had title companies and you had banks and you had real estate agents, and they all have a common interest with each other, then all of a sudden, they have a reason to talk to each other, you know, the, the realtor may not have the need to talk to the vet when they don’t have a pet, you know, necessarily so it just creates some more, you know, natural experiences to build upon. And that really struck me as far as creating experience within a chamber is even just looking at it from the point of view of networking events that I’d like to have anybody I have on the show. Think of any any tips or action items as we we’ve got you both on and you both have great experience in the chamber world. So I see this as being like a bonus episode, a two for one. But what kind of tips or action items would you share for the chamber champion listening who wants to take their chamber up to the next level, Isaac, but we’ll go with you first.
Action Item/Tip for Chamber Champions
Isaac Lee 25:07 So I think one of the things Josh and I have been talking about and is at the core of chamber life. And what we do in terms of some of the automation is looking at the 90 days prior to an invoice as a great deal of opportunity. Far too often we catch them after they’ve started the invoicing and asking them for money, we need to really work on the relationship, 90 days prior to that invoice being created. That way when they get the invoice, the ability for that company to remember why you’re providing or what you’re providing and why it’s important. It’s a quick recall, it’s a quick payment, you’re not being judged against another invoice, especially for smaller businesses who might be on a shoestring budget, they’re going to recall it a lot quicker so that 90 days prior to an invoice is extremely important in a relationship.
Brandon Burton 25:59 I think that is so valuable. Have you seen metrics of you know, chambers that do implement the 90 days before versus ones that don’t? And what that retention rate looks like?
Isaac Lee 26:08 Yes, so chamber champions out there will probably relate to this, we’ve seen a pretty long, extensive accounts receivable report 90 plus days, right? Yeah, we’ve been able to show some pretty good track record records of reducing that by half, again, you’re still gonna have some folks that just don’t pay or corporations that just take longer 30 to 45 days, we understand that. But those that should be paying right on time, we’ve seen a drastic increase in how fast a chamber will receive its cash. Lauren is a GAO report and allowing us to spend more time elsewhere.
Brandon Burton 26:44 But what I like about that is when you’re building that relationship, or putting more attention into that relationship will say 90 days before the invoice is created, you’re doing the work to meet those expectations for that member before that time comes versus once the invoice is created. And then you’re trying to collect payment trying to see you know, resolve problems. And it’s a whole different skill set on how you approach and handle the the situation. So being able to stay more congruent with what your values are. And mission is as a chamber. That’s that is huge to have more focus on that that relationship 90 days prior. JT, how about you a tip or action item.
Josh (JT) Torres 27:29 So I call it the SW factor SW skilling will. So I think in the world today, we’ve got people that have the skill, and we got people that have the will, if they don’t have one or the other, what do we do to help them. So specifically with chamber staff and the teams that we work with across the state, and across the country with with some of the work we do, we’ve got brand new executives coming in to have the will, but we really want to make sure they have the skill. So it’s really near and dear to Isaac and I to make sure that we set up chambers for success, we just set up executives for success for career pathways for chamber, chamber management, and leadership, quite honestly. And then look at our boards of directors that continue to turn over there’s board burnout, no different than there’s executive burnout. And we find a lot of the times that we have board members that are willing to serve, but they don’t have the skill. They don’t understand what’s expected of them at that board of directors table, they don’t understand what’s expected of their skills, the skills that we can leverage of theirs, to really understand how to govern the Chamber of Commerce, and then you’ve got your members, they’ve got the will. But do they have the skills specifically to network? You know, I think chambers have a huge opportunity to do education attainment in networking. You know, we bring all these people to these events to network, some of are very uncomfortable. But then if networking is one of our number one spaces in some of in chambers, what are we doing to educate that member on how to specifically have the skill to to actually network understand the follow up afterwards, that drives more value for their experience?
Brandon Burton 28:57 I think that’s a valuable resource right there teaching how to network. Again, like I mentioned, can be super uncomfortable and and and it can be perceived you go to that experience. And it doesn’t go well as being a total waste of time. And what value does the chamber have for me, if that’s what their main selling proposition is? So being able to set them up for success, I think is huge. And goes right back to retention as well. 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 chambers and their purpose going forward? JT, let’s we’ll go with you first this time.
Future of Chambers
Josh (JT) Torres 29:38 So I think the great business startup is happening and we see individuals that have had the skill for many years working for others start working for themselves. So I think entrepreneurialism and driving freelance and the gig economy I think is here to stay. I think chambers need to embrace and, and really empower entrepreneurship in their communities and be at the table with centers that provide that or find a way to quite honestly crowdfund a entrepreneurial community or create that ecosystem or be part of that ecosystem. I think that’s a big deal. Second to that I want and hope that chambers across North America, we, you know, again, we work in different parts of the country, even into Canada. And in the south Caribbean, there are there is absolutely an opportunity in the next five to 10 years and chambers for us to be driving global economy, just your chambers, having more of that virtual reality, the AI with chambers across the globe, having meetups with chambers in England, having meetups with chambers in Hawaii, Maine, chambers in Canada, and having live online networking opportunities that drive more of the global economy and get people really introduced to other parts of the world. I think chambers are positioned to do that fantastically.
Brandon Burton 30:57 I’m glad you touched on that the AI and the virtual experience, because we gained a little bit of that through COVID, learning how to use Zoom and do that sort of thing. But I think as we look to the future, for me, I actually am just releasing a blog post about this right now too. But as we look to the future, I like to look at, you know, the kids that are being raised right now, what are they into what’s their level of engagement, and they’re all playing these, you know, immersive, we would call them the video game, right? Whether it’s fortnight or Roblox or you know, any of these immersive type of games. And it’s not a start and a finish, like they’re living a life within this game. And they’re actually doing commerce within these games. So as a chamber of commerce looking to the future, they really should be looking at what that future generation is doing. And figure out how to get involved with that, you know, virtual commerce that’s that is going on, because it is very real. Isaac, what about you? How do you see the future and purpose of chambers,
Isaac Lee 32:05 I see the future that if you don’t change, you will become irrelevant. And what I mean by that is, most chambers have ran events the same way for a very long time. And there’s not anything wrong with that. But because of demographics, because of generational changes, and the things that the younger population are looking to get out of that relationship. Some of our older events have a tendency to fall by the wayside, declining revenues, declining attendance, they don’t offer the opportunity for them to be virtual, or engaged virtually pre and post the event. So really look at the things that you value within your organization, the events that you do, and find ways to introduce the opportunity to allow those to happen pre and post in a virtual environment, getting all populations involved, both young and old. From all of them different demographics and diversities to make sure that we’re preparing ourselves for what what comes ahead in terms of the way the population looks, it’s going to change, it’s changing now,
Brandon Burton 33:10 right underneath our nose, like that. And obviously, there’s a lot of events that chambers put on. But if you focus on maybe that big event that you do each year, or maybe it’s a couple of events, as you’re sharing that Isaac, I was thinking at ACC conferences here, they had the app people were engaging, you know, week leading up to it. And even a few days after the conference, you know, continuing to have those discussions and network virtually but then when you’re there in person, it was that much better. So great example I wanted to give you both an opportunity to share any contact information for people who’d like to reach out and connect with you and why don’t you share who would be the ideal type of chamber to work with chamber life and who could you best service
Connect with Isaac Lee & JT
Isaac Lee 33:59 Ooh, Josh, you want to go you want me to
Josh (JT) Torres 34:03 so I would say are the best benefit that we can provide for executives is a small to midsize chamber that is really our, our, our sweet spot. We provide a in addition to our automated productivity tool chamber life, we provide chamber moguls, which is a very much accelerated approach to leadership training, not management training for chambers. So we’re really in the business to take managers test and to make them leaders. So our software of course, does that one component piece where we automate the technology to give you more time to go out and build your business your chamber. So I think that that is definitely a our audience, our core audience.
Brandon Burton 34:51 Very good. Brandon, I add on that Isaac,
Isaac Lee 34:54 I was just gonna say I would add to it. In addition to the small and medium sized chambers, there’s really three things that we know our end users who excel in the system are doing, or have done in the past. If you write on post it notes and have them in your office, if you have a journal, and these are not all encompassing, by the way, if you have a journal and you use it actively, or if you have reminders in either Outlook or or Google or any other email services system, chamber life can help you with your organization.
Brandon Burton 35:26 So I think he just hit on everybody there between posted notes, journals, and the those reminders so. So contact information, what would be the best way for these especially small and midsize chambers to reach out and connect with you guys.
Josh (JT) Torres 35:42 So they can go to our website, YourChamberLife.com. And they’ll be able to get our information on there, they’ll be able to book a demo to either speak with us further about these types of opportunities, or take a test drive of our software.
Brandon Burton 36:01 Very good. I will get that in our show notes for this episode. So people can find that easily if they forget to add your to the beginning of that or whatever. So they can just go to the shownotes and find that. But Isaac, JT, I appreciate you guys taking some time to be with me today here on chamber chat podcast and and addressing an important issue of retention. I mean, that’s it’s kind of that stress that’s on top of every chambers. How do we keep these members that keep showing our value and relevancy? So, thank you for sharing your insight and experience with us and I’ve appreciate it.
Isaac Lee 36:38 Thank you, Brandon. We appreciate it. Tim.
Josh (JT) Torres 36:40 Thanks, everyone.
Brandon Burton 44:58 If you are a chamber professional, please subscribe to Chamber Chat Podcast in Apple podcast, Google podcasts or Spotify. When you subscribe to Chamber Chat Podcast new episodes will show up in your podcast app each week as they are released. If you’re finding value in this podcast, please leave us a rating and a review in iTunes. But most importantly, please share Chamber Chat Podcast with your colleagues that are in the industry.
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Below is an auto-generated transcription of my conversation with Bret Schanzenbach. Because this is auto-generated there are likely some grammatical errors but it is still a useful tool to search text within this podcast episode.
Feel free to join our Chamber Chat Champions Facebook Group to discuss this episode and to share your own experiences and tips with other Chamber Champions.
Brandon Burton 0:00 This is the Chamber Chat Podcast, the show dedicated to chamber professionals to spark ideas and to get actionable tips and strategies to better serve your members and community.
And now, your host. He worked for staples. Well in high school, he’s my dad Brandon Burton.
Hello, Chamber Champions. Welcome to Chamber Chat Podcast. I’m your host, Brandon Burton, and it’s my goal to introduce you to people and ideas to better help you serve your Chamber members and your community.
Well, Doug and Bill at the Holman Brothers have been a key ally in growth for my professional career working at three different chambers, a local chamber, a regional chamber, now a statewide chamber. And they’ve been the ideal solution, whether it’s a comprehensive training program, whether it’s working on individual sales growth, quarterly check-ins with the team, the ability to grow members has meaning more assets for the organization, more assets means we can do more things to serve our members. They’ve really been the perfect solution for us, a trusted resource partner and a growth partner for us all along the way. So hats off to Doug and Bill for their great success. They’ll be a great partner for you as they are for us.
Brandon Burton 2:03
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Guest Introduction
You’re joining us today for episode 191 of Chamber Chat Podcast. We are getting up there in the episode numbers. But for this episode, we have Brett Johnson back with us and Brett is he’s served as the president and CEO of the Carlsbad Chamber of Commerce in California since January 2019. Brett is a native Californian and resident of San Diego’s North County since 1971. He came to the Carlsbad position from the VISTA Chamber of Commerce where he served as CEO for nine years is corporate background before the chamber was in residential real estate and the software industry. In 1992. He helped start the technical difference Inc, a human resource software company. before venturing into the corporate world. Brett spent seven years as a youth minister, Brett graduated from the Franciscan University of Steubenville in Steubenville, Ohio, earning a BA in psychology and a BA in theology. He earned his master’s in theological studies from the University of Dallas in 2001. He and his wife Jolene reside in Vista, California, and they’ve been blessed with six children and two grandchildren so far. Brett, I’m looking forward to having you with me on the podcast today. And and I want to give you an opportunity to say hello to all the Chamber Champions that are out there listening and share something interesting about yourself so you can get to know you a little better.
Bret Schanzenbach 3:07 Morning, Brandon, thank you so much for having me as a guest today. I’m excited to be here and have conversation. Something interesting. I mean, you read my bio, so that stole most of the stuff that’s actually interesting about me, I guess I would say one thing that’s interesting is, you know, like a lot of people like backed into the chamber career, I don’t know if anybody truly like goes to college and thinks, oh, I want to be a chamber executive when I grow up, you know, so, and the way I backed into my chamber career was through the real estate industry, I did real estate for eight years and found out that I hated it. And, you know, as you mentioned, my wife and I have six kids and you know, real estate, you have to obviously work on your client’s terms. And so they usually are available on nights, weekends, holidays, you know, things like that. And after a while, I just really did not enjoy that industry. And, but that’s the industry that got me super engaged with my local chamber. When I was a realtor, I had joined my chamber, joined a committee got invited to the board of directors and because of all that, you know, it’s how I got really familiar with the impact chambers could have in a in a community. And when the guy who was the executive of my local board there that I was part of, he decided to move back to the Midwest with his wife. You know, I’m like, Oh, this is great opportunity to get out of this because I’m so done with real estate and I didn’t really know exactly what I was getting into but you know, I so but I backed in. I had I remember having a conversation with him one day when we were talking about him leaving and me possibly applying for the job. And I said Um, I don’t actually know what you do on a day to day basis. What do you
Brandon Burton 5:07 board member? Yeah, what you do?
Bret Schanzenbach 5:10 So, but I threw my hat in the ring. And now I’ve been in the industry for 14 and a half years, I think it is or, or I’m in my 14th year, however that works and love it.
Brandon Burton 5:24 As I say, hopefully it’s going better for you than real estate. So yeah, I really do love it. And maybe that needs to be the question I ask people is how did you find your way into the chamber world? Because everybody has a unique story about how they are? Yeah,
Bret Schanzenbach 5:38 that is so true. You know, one of my neighboring chamber execs. He is one of those guys that came right out of college and got a job at his local chamber and moved his way up and all that jazz. But that is so rare. It’s mostly people who have come from all kinds of different. You do find a lot of people who served at a chamber before they became an exec. But the stories are so different.
Brandon Burton 6:02 Right? Yeah, I always find it fascinating. So thank you for sharing your journey. Absolutely. So tell us a little bit about the Carlsbad chamber just to give us an idea of size staff budget, kind of scope of work to give us an idea of what you guys do there.
Bret Schanzenbach 6:20 Sure. So we are located as you mentioned, in North San Diego County. We’re about 3530 35 miles from the city of San Diego itself. And we our community itself, is about 115,000 people in in our suburb here. But for our part of San Diego County, we’re kind of the economic hub. We have a robust tourism industry, but we also have robust industry in general, which is a nice combination, and at least in San Diego County is pretty rare besides the city of San Diego. We are we’re the number two generator and tourism dollars in our county behind the city of San Diego itself. And and I think we have the third largest industrial park in San Diego County. So both we have this great mix of both, you know, like biotech and high tech and that kind of stuff. And then the tourism side. So that’s great. Our chamber itself, we have right around 1000 members, little over 1000 members. San Diego County has 43 chambers of commerce, and we’re the second largest with the city of San Diego, the Regional Chamber in San Diego being the largest. So we’re the second largest chamber in the county, we have about a $1.3 million budget staff of nine. We do not our community has we have separate visitor Bureau, we have a separate Downtown Association. Our city has its own economic development department. So we don’t have any of those other add ons that some chambers do. But we obviously we work very closely with all of those entities matter of fact, we meet regularly have a great rapport with them. But but we don’t fulfill those, you know, those specific roles, like getting funding to be say a visitor center or a manage the downtown or any of those things. So So yeah, that’s a little bit about us. I have a very large board of directors. That was kind of the biggest, one of the biggest changes coming from my previous chamber where we we had what I thought was a big board at the time, like of 17. And, you know, I have 35 voting members and, you know, for other like, advisory members and then other emeritus members, we have a large board here.
Brandon Burton 8:56 Yeah, they work for a lot of people. That definitely helps paint the picture for sure kind of where you guys sit and the type of work I’m involved with.
Bret Schanzenbach 9:06 I do work for a lot of people. It’s very true.
Brandon Burton 9:11 Well, I’m excited to get into our topic for our discussion. Today we’re we’re going to be focusing our discussion around presenting employment opportunities to youth in the classroom. And we’ll dive more into this discussion as soon as we get back from this quick break.
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All right, Bret, we’re back. As I mentioned before the break, we’re talking about presenting employment opportunities to the classroom today. I know our our scheduling of recording this is being worked around both you and I both volunteering at at church youth camps and so forth. So I know for me, and I may be speaking for you as well, that the rising generation is important to me. And and I think for chambers in general to look at that future employment pipeline and creating a vibrant economy in your community. So I’m excited to have you tell us what the Carlsbad chamber has been doing to introduce these these students, these youth to what a future can look like in your community through the various employment opportunities.
Topic-Presenting Employment Opportunities to the Classroom
Bret Schanzenbach 13:05 Yeah, thank you for that lead in it is a very important topic for all chambers. And I feel like as we go to our conferences, and you know, you attend webinars, and you see this topic comes up more and more and more, because it’s a it’s not just a local issue. It’s a nationwide issue. And if I could, before I explain what we’re currently at, I want to paint a little bit of a picture of what we used to do. That led up to our current initiative and our chamber, like probably many others who are listening in, we’re very engaged at one point or another in trying to bring together the world of work and the classroom, you know, to bring those together as you as you alluded to, and what we had been doing before, we had this program called talent, cities, and we brought eighth graders out on field trips to actual businesses, like different manufacturing type businesses, et cetera, et cetera. And instead of just doing like a tour of the business, we specifically crafted a tour where they would stop strategically at different places at the company that they were visiting, and they would get a little interview with somebody. So a couple of those stops would be like, on a shop floor, for instance. And then a couple of stops would be more like in research and development and marketing and sales, things like that. So there’s always this mix, kind of a, the blue collar, the white collar type things, but we at each stop, they would hear from a staff member and employee who would talk about who they were, what they did, what they liked about it, what was challenging about it, and how they got to this point in their career. And our goal with that bringing those kids out on site was to just broaden their perspective. Have a little bit because what mostly we found is that most students know what their mom and their dad do if they have both parents. And sometimes they don’t even know what their parents do. Because sometimes what their parents do, they just, they just have no way of actually knowing what they do. But beyond that, they just know the big hero jobs like teacher, firefighter, policeman, military, you know, stuff like that. So our goal was to try to broaden their perspectives just a little on what kinds of jobs and career opportunities could be available to them. And when we started that program that we called Talent cities, it was we felt that was successful, like we would actually pull the kids before they would go through with this kind of a tour, field trip, etc. And then we would survey them again, after and we got some great comments, like one that really stuck out in my mind, one of the kids said, you know, I never thought I could use my love of art in, you know, a work setting or a job or a career or whatever. So things like that. That was exactly what we were hoping to do is help them to see a little bit bigger than they had had a chance to up to that point in their life. But we ran into challenges. So that program, when I was at the VISTA chamber, we ran 1,000/8 graders through in like an 18 month period of time. And at least out here in Southern California field trips are challenging for school districts, and all those logistics that they have to go through to make a field trip happen are not simple. And then secondly, I found that I was constantly going back to the same four or five different companies saying, Hey, I got another group of 38th graders or 20, you know, whatever, for you guys to host. And so, you know, it becomes challenging for businesses to interrupt their flow to do that on a regular basis. So all that being said, That was that was the precursor, when COVID hit, obviously, the whole world pivoted towards virtual learning, virtual interaction, et cetera, et cetera. And at the same time, our local hospital out here was working on some initiatives to help their career readiness workforce pipeline get developed. And so they were interested in, in creating some videos to help broaden people’s awareness of career opportunities within healthcare. Most people when they think of healthcare, all they think of as a nurse and a doctor. And obviously, when you have a big hospital, there’s usually something like, I think our hospital has, like 2200 employees. So there’s all kinds of careers, that all the way from marketing, you know, down to techs and an
Brandon Burton 18:00 average janitors, you know, everything Yeah,
Bret Schanzenbach 18:03 you got it, you got it. So there’s, there’s so much diversity within just a company like that. So they approached us and and so what we ended up putting together and one of the things I love about this is, this was a collaboration with three different chambers of commerce here in my area. So we the Carlsbad chamber, our two neighbors directly nearest the Oceanside chamber and the VISTA chamber, the hospital that I just mentioned, and then our regional EDC edge, our Regional Economic Development Council for our area, the five of us together collaborated on this project. And we went out to our local county representative and said, Hey, we have this idea. And so luckily, he bought into the idea that I’m going to share and funded it because this stuff doesn’t happen without some money behind it. But we created a web portal. And it’s called SoCal. And that’s an acronym that I always forget, but it stands for student opportunities for career awareness and learning. SoCal, and the website is called SoCal workforce.org, SoCal workforce.org. And so we created this web portal. And what we did as we were starting to conceive it, and one of the pieces that was really important to us as we wanted to do this in conjunction with our schools, we didn’t, we didn’t want to do this in some silo by ourselves and just do what we thought made sense. So we worked with the three school districts in the three communities that I just mentioned, Carlsbad, Oceanside and VISTA. And we said, hey, here’s this idea we have, we want to make this evergreen portal of jobs and careers, a video library, if you will, that you can use in the cloud. last room to expose students to the real world of work. And they love the idea, we met with them like two or three times during the process of developing it. And, and when we unveiled it in January of this year 2022, they were ecstatic. And so what the web portal has, when you go there, and it’s open to anybody, so it could be like a teacher who’s navigating this or an individual student, or like, anybody who’s in a, looking to change directions in life, right? Anybody can use this, this website, but you can look up job or career opportunities, three different ways, by industry, by company name, or by a job itself. So like industry, you could look and say, oh, what kinds of things exist in my area in healthcare and tech, in, you know, in public safety, or whatever the case might be? Or, Hey, I’ve heard of, in our area that, you know, there’s some big name companies like ViaSat, or Nordson, or, you know, whatever the company is, I’ve heard of that company, what jobs might be, what careers do they even have, I don’t even know what they do. Or you could just go the path of, you know, like, I want to know more about being an engineer or want to know more about being a this or that. So whatever way you navigate, you eventually get down to these three minute videos. And what we did is we shot all the videos on location. At the site where the worker works, we wanted it really, in their workspace in their flow, like all the B roll, we didn’t use any third party just B roll that you can just purchase, you know, anywhere, everything is shot at the actual site where these people work. And we interview these these various workers. And it’s the same kind of interview that I mentioned earlier, who they are, what they do, what do they like about it? What’s challenging about it?
How do they get to this point in their career, if they were adding a staff member to their team, what would they be looking for. And so in these three minute videos, you get a really good snapshot of a real life, you know, place of work, job, career, etc. And, on our portal, another piece that I really like, because we were trying to think of it from the student perspective is, when you get down to the actual job, before you watch the video, there’s a description there, hey, here’s a little bit about the job. Here’s what the average person in San Diego County makes, who, who performs this job, here’s the job outlook for the next five to 10 years for that profession, in our area. And then if, you know, educational resources are like if you need a degree or a certificate or something to do that job, here’s a couple of links of local institutions who offer those certificates or degrees, etc. And so then with all that background, and they can watch the three minute you know, video and and get to know, that particular job, career, etc. And school districts, when we rolled it out in January, we’re over the moon, they love it. Now, it’s not that a school district can’t like if they wanted to bring, oh, let’s let’s look at a day in the life of the engineer. They can they have resources, they can find that that’s out there. But what our school districts really loved about this project was that it’s so localized. So these are companies that they’re, the students may have heard of, these are places that they’ve driven by, I mean, these are right here in their backyard. And it just the teachers were so excited about making it tangible to their students.
Brandon Burton 24:02 So I’m gonna circle back towards some of the beginning of your comments, and you mentioned that students often will only know what their parents have done it Yeah, just funny. When I was in third grade, I drew some attention from the school when I told them that my dad sold drugs because a pharmaceutical sales rep but I would hear him come home talking about the new drug that he’s marketing. So you know, naturally when we talk about what is your dad do for a living my dad sold drugs so that prompted a parent teacher conference and Oh, no that so that was interesting. But so with these, this web portal and video library I love this idea that I love being able to have the different angles being able to filter by industry company and job type. Are you primarily focusing on the bigger companies because they have so many different levels, different types of positions? Or do you have some of the smaller entrepreneurs even that are highlighting what a day in the life of their work is? Like?
Bret Schanzenbach 25:11 Yeah, good question. Um, it is it is intended to be a mix of both. But initially, it was, when we were at the conception phase and trying to get it off the ground, it was a little bit easier to go to some of the bigger companies who have a diversity of roles already, and say, hey, you know, we want to shoot three different, you know, jobs through different roles at your company. But, but we have both some, so we have some large companies, but we also have some, I would say, medium sized companies. And, and when we launched in January, our goal was to get, I think our goal was to have 60 videos on the portal at launch. And we ended up we met that goal. And currently there’s, there’s 80, I’m trying to think through the numbers. Yeah, currently, there’s 80. And our goal by the end of this calendar year is to get to 100. And then obviously, continue to grow it but but yeah, the so we’re trying to diverse, like to your point, we’re trying to diversify as we grow, and get a more industries be more diversity of size of companies and things. The county supervisor who really bought into this initially, he wanted us to have a healthy mix of things that did not require going to get a four year degree. Sure. And as you probably know, there’s, you know, obviously, there’s the big push in the schools for STEM, and, you know, that kind of stuff. So we wanted to have, obviously, that kind of stuff, too. So we worked really hard. So there’s like some, there’s some construction jobs, you know, what I mean, there’s welders and you know, that kind of stuff in the midst of off. So there’s engineers and you know, etc. So we’re worked hard to try to have that kind of diversity in there.
Brandon Burton 27:07 Yeah. And I can see this library just growing over time with expanding the different companies. But there’s always going to be the need for an accountant and a lawyer and a doctor in some of those staples. But then you see new careers popping up to you know, from I’m thinking when the smartphones came out, and you had app developers, and that wasn’t like you had software designers, but now specifically apps and now. So we see technology shifting with, you know, the metaverse and things like that. And, you know, what is the career going to look like 10 years from now, it might look very different. But exposing these students to those opportunities might help them avoid, you know, eight years in the real estate industry if they don’t like that, right.
Bret Schanzenbach 27:53 Yeah, no, you’re but you’re you’re spot on it. I mean, there’s people who have careers right now that five years ago, those things didn’t even exist. So you know, so theoretically, somebody entering college today, you know, might end up in a career a few years from now, that doesn’t even exist as they start college at least. And Title and name like you, like an app developer. At one point, there was no such thing, right? Or what exactly is an influencer again, but making a lot of money at it. I don’t know what that means. You know, so that is a challenge to, but the other thing that we’re doing is one of the challenges we had when, you know, when I was sharing that example, at my previous chamber, where we were working hard to bring the, the classroom world into the real world of work. We were doing it within our given community, you know, I was the VISTA chamber, and these were Vista businesses, and this was the Vista school district and, but at least in our area, and I know, every region could be, you know, have some differences here. But in our area where we are a suburban, you know, area, it doesn’t make sense to do it. siloed but community by community, which is why this regional approach we felt made a lot more sense. Like, I live in community a I work in community b I go to school and community see my churches in community D. I mean, that’s, that’s actually true for me what I just said, you know, so it was really important for us to take a broader perspective, here in Carlsbad. There. 80,000 people come to work every day, but only 20,000 of those actually live in Carlsbad. So that’s a lot of people coming to work from neighboring communities. And so we had that mindset. So now what where we’re at is, since we launched in January, we’ve now added three more communities to our portfolio, San Marcos Escondido Encinitas have all joined us and their school districts as well. So we’re growing it growing the footprint of it geographically. And then as you already were talking about the companies, the jobs, the those kind of operates, the industries are growing as well. And so we eventually see it hopefully being county wide, but that’s going to take a little while, but county wide, and, you know, just continuing to expand the diversity of opportunities to,
Brandon Burton 30:27 I think it goes to show, maybe the definition of community is changing to some degree, you know, between online communities got your physical communities, you’ve got cities that were established before transportation was as robust as it is now, and, and the world just keeps getting smaller and smaller. So as we silo and say, We are the Carlsbad community, you’re really discounting a lot of opportunity from the neighboring areas that, you know, your residents or employers employees are interacting in those cities anyway. So maybe just kind of a reset on what community actually means.
Bret Schanzenbach 31:02 Yeah, I think that’s a good point. You know, we’re, we’re very fluid in this area, and I believe, probably in a lot of areas, and as you pointed out, transportation being, you know, robust, but this, this portal has been, you know, a great collaboration, and I think, in our industry, you know, that’s really important, you know, in the chamber industry to collaborate together, look for me, you know, how can we create win wins, you know, and it, it’s a, it’s been a really great thing for us to collectively work together on and create value for all of our memberships in this in this region. And our, you know, our bigger members who have a tendency to be members of multiple chambers, they love seeing this to, you know, they love seeing our chambers all work together on on big, more enterprise level projects. So, so that’s been a positive, I think our biggest challenge, you know, as we, we initially got that grant, which was super helpful, but, you know, to grow it, there has to be funding so, videography, high quality videography, and editing doesn’t come free. And, and we have done it at a very high level. So we’re at the point where, okay, we’re looking for some more grants and streams of funding. But we’re also going straight to the companies and say, Hey, if you want your company, you know, featured here, we have a path for that. So we’ve created corporate pricing for those that want to be added. It was interesting when we launched some industries that we hadn’t really thought of jumped up and said, Oh, we want to be featured. And so you know, a municipality, their, their water division, they’re like, We need to promote career opportunities in this field. You know, people don’t think about this. And so they jumped on board and sponsored, you know, right away and got some video shot at, at their, whatever water division at their municipality. So there’s, you know, there’s different pockets that we hadn’t really anticipated. And right now I’m working. You know, I mentioned at the outset that we have a strong tourism in Carlsbad. But at the moment, there is no tourism or hospitality listed on our portal at all. So I’m currently in dialogue with them, they they’re really hurting for workforce right now, after the pandemic, it’s been a challenge getting getting staffed back up to the levels, both at restaurants and hotels, and but we just hosted a panel discussion on tourism about two weeks ago, and they were all talking about how they need to, you know, promote careers within tourism. So, so we had a discussion this week about how they could get into our portal. So we’re putting a proposal together for them to to get some video shot at their place. So, you know, I love that, that we have this tool to be able to help serve those who have that need right now.
Brandon Burton 34:05 Yeah, I love that. And thank you for touching on the funding part of it too, because I was going to ask that next about day, how do you make all this happen? And yeah, variety of sources and, and being creative as you go along to and looking for those new opportunities.
Bret Schanzenbach 34:19 Very true. I mean, obviously, there we all in our communities know of some, some go to little, you know, channels where we go after funding for this or that, but eventually, you know, we need business to step up. You know, we were looking regionally at funding sources. You know, our local congressman really liked the idea what so one of the things that’s been that’s come up though, is multiple people have said, hey, it would be great. If your portal could be like a one stop shop for internships, companies who want to host interns, you know, people who want to have an internship and it could be a one stop shop and You know, we’re dealing with all these different jurisdictions now different school districts, and you know, all this stuff. And they all have their own
Brandon Burton 35:08 parameters. And yeah,
Bret Schanzenbach 35:10 exactly. So it’s like, oh, boy, how do we do this? So that’s probably like version three of the portal. Not even version two. But so those are things we’re aspiring to, though and are on our radar to continue to evolve, how this portal can continue to serve the needs of our community now that it’s launched, and it’s getting on people’s radar.
Brandon Burton 35:33 Yeah, I really liked that. But as we start to wrap things up here, I wanted to ask you, for anybody listening? What tip or action item might you share with them to any chamber that’s looking to take their organization up to the next level?
Action Item/Tip for Chamber Champions
Bret Schanzenbach 35:51 Yeah, that’s, um, you know, it’s a great question we talked about here. And, and other people have heard in the industry, that we can’t, we can’t be our grandfather’s chamber. You know, the chamber, the days when you think of kind of like, there was a time where businesses join the chamber, and you can pick a variety of reasons, the chamber was the go to place for networking, that was probably the easiest chamber was the go to place for advocacy, you know, you know, things like that. And we don’t have the market cornered on any of those things anymore. I mean, there’s a million ways to network from meet up and you know, online tools to lead clubs and all that kind of stuff. There’s so many ways to network, besides even just social networking. And then advocacy, every industry has its own, you know, vehicle, you know, their own Association, that advocates just for their specific niche needs, and really watches their back. And I still think chambers are excellent at broad scale advocacy, and networking, and all that kind of stuff. But we don’t have the market cornered on any of those things that used to be kind of synonymous with why you need to join a chamber. So we’re constantly asking, asking ourselves, you know, what is our you know, value proposition? What are we bringing to the table that nobody else is bringing to the table, which is part and parcel with this, this discussion we just had today, this is one piece of it for us, you know. So we’re, we’re involved in workforce development in about five or six different fingers or different ways. This SoCal project was just one of them. But that’s, for us, it was like, nobody, when I left broad scape, broad scale, nobody’s involved in this, nobody can bring to the table what we can and workforce development, the relationship with the companies and the relationship with a schools which already we have, you know, we can we can be this bridge that nobody else can serve. So we’ve, that’s one of the stakes we put in the ground, this is going to be a value proposition that we have for our membership. But looking at those things, what do you bring to the table that not nobody else is, you know, Rotary can’t bring to the table or, you know, some nonprofit in your community can’t bring to the table or some Meetup group can’t bring to the table, you know, what, what is it that’s unique. And so we look for those things we and we have, you know, we’re constantly developing new initiatives, which is a little daunting, to be honest, we have to be careful, we don’t get out of a mission and, and go off on some tangent, but, but, and I think, and one other thing I want to, I want to point out 25 years ago, when people thought of economic development, they primarily thought of, let’s try to get Company X or company wide to come to our city. And they’ll bring good jobs, and that’ll be good for the community. And we even saw it like five or six years ago, like the whole country was tripping over themselves to try and get the next you know, Amazon headquarters, you know, and it was almost comical, but and there’s I’m not saying that’s not valid, but even before COVID We knew and now since COVID We really know that people can be from work from anywhere. Yeah, you know, they don’t you it doesn’t matter where their job is. It’s where do they want to be and so we have to create a community that attracts people that want to be there not because their company’s there. So what does that mean? Well, what attracts people you got to have, you know, low crime rate, great schools, affordable housing, amenities and parks and stuff that people want, you know, a good entrepreneurial environment, you know, business friendly, me all these factors together. There are what make places desirable for people to locate. And, and, and be. So we have to be about all of it. You know, we can’t just be siloed in, we’re a business organization, we are going to work with business. That’s long gone. And so we’re constantly looking at how can we make a positive impact in all those areas, so that we can make our community a great place to, you know, live workplace shop, dying vacation visit, you know, all of that. And so it’s it’s exciting, but it’s daunting. It’s a, the the ways you can engage that are never ending, which wakes me up and gets me excited. And also overwhelms me sometimes at two o’clock in the morning. But that’s what I love about the industry.
Brandon Burton 40:51 Now, and I think something you touched on is, it’s the shift of placemaking. Like it used to be, you’re attracting business, and now it’s attracting those employees, attracting those people that want to live in your community. And I think your response, it may answer my next question, but I like asking everybody I have on the show, as we look to the future chambers of commerce, how do you see their purpose going forward?
Future of Chambers
Bret Schanzenbach 41:16 Yeah, I think that the role that we serve as a hub within the community is so vital and important, and valuable, so valuable, you know, we can pull together stakeholders from so many different things from from public safety, and government, to education and nonprofits and business and we can put them in the same room. And, and sometimes you don’t maybe only need two or three of those fingers for what your initiative is, but, but you can, we can pull together things that nobody else can and, and so we have to, we have to embrace that role. And you know, find the issues within our communities that are meaningful, and, and go after them and be the solution. We don’t have to have all the answers, but be the one that convenes everybody to help create the positive movement for the community. And I think if we wholeheartedly embrace that role will continue to be relevant, and will continue to have a reason to exist. But you know, if we just kind of bury our head, and like, we’re the business community, I think that’s too narrow. And I feel like most chambers have evolved beyond that. But, but I see going forward, just we have to take that up, you know, wholeheartedly and run with that mentality to be community leaders, not just business leaders.
Brandon Burton 42:42 Right. And being that that embracing being a convener is is so important, and you guys are setting a great example with the SoCal program. Because that’s exactly what you’re doing is you’re bringing those those right people to the table to help provide opportunities for the the youth coming up that are going to be the future workforce. Yeah. So Brad, I wanted to give you an opportunity to share any contact information for listeners who might want to reach out and connect with you and learn more about the SoCal program or how you go through all the things in Carlsbad, what’s the best way for someone to reach out and connect?
Connect with Bret Schanzenbach
Bret Schanzenbach 43:18 Sure. I have the easiest email in the world. So one of my emails is ceo@carlsbad.org. And you can email me the if somebody wanted to check out that website I mentioned socalworkforce.org. And you can see more. I’m on LinkedIn, I’m on all those different. I don’t know social media thing is, you know, I respond I actually check messages on LinkedIn. If anybody messages me on the other ones, I don’t check those but but you can connect with people all the time on LinkedIn, especially chamber pros. I love connecting with other chamber professionals. Because I value them and you know, there’s none of us has all the answers in this world of of what we do in the chamber. So I love learning and meeting other people and hearing what’s working in their communities and seeing if there’s any tidbits I can bring back to my community. So yeah, hit me up on LinkedIn. Email me ceo@carlsbad.org. And yeah, love to connect.
Brandon Burton 44:28 Very good. I’ll make sure if we get all that in our show notes for this episode, which will be found at chamber chat. podcast.com/episode 191. But Brad, this has been great having you on the podcast. I appreciate you taking the time to be with us and sharing this great example of what you guys and you know, in collaboration with your neighboring Chambers as well are doing and it’s a great template that others can look to and build upon themselves.
Bret Schanzenbach 44:55 Well, thank you so much for the invitation, Brandon, I really enjoyed it.
Brandon Burton 44:58 If you are a chamber professional, please subscribe to Chamber Chat Podcast in Apple podcast, Google podcasts or Spotify. When you subscribe to Chamber Chat Podcast new episodes will show up in your podcast app each week as they are released. If you’re finding value in this podcast, please leave us a rating and a review in iTunes. But most importantly, please share Chamber Chat Podcast with your colleagues that are in the industry.
Have you ever thought about creating a podcast for your chamber? We always hear about how chambers need to be storytellers. What better way is there to tell the stories of your members and the work of your chamber than through a podcast?
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As I interview guests on Chamber Chat Podcast, I always ask the same question at the end of each episode. That question is “how do you see the future of chambers of commerce and their purpose going forward?”. I get a lot of great answers to this question as it forces us to take a glimpse into the future. Of course nobody really knows what the future holds, but it is a good idea as hall of fame hockey player, Wayne Gretzky says to skate to where the puck is going.
In an effort to gain a better understanding of where the future is going, I believe it is a good idea to look at the habits, trends, and even addictions of the next generations. One of the biggest trends or addictions that I notice is the widespread adoption of immersive role playing “games”. I put games in quotation marks because as it may appear to be a game to older generations, the ones who are immersed in these platforms are living another life within that ecosystem.
Traditional Video Games vs. Metaverse Games
When I was growing up, my friends and I would get together to play Nintendo games. We would play games like Super Mario Bros., Tecmo Super Bowl, and later Street Fighter II. Each new gaming system would bring along greater capacity for more realistic graphics. To play these games, we would insert a game cartridge into the gaming system. We would play until the game was over, we were out of lifes, or until an upset sibling turned the system off. The games of today are very different. Today, these games are connected through the internet to other gaming devices and many of these games can be played on a variety of platforms (TV screen, PC, smartphone, etc.).
Another differentiating factor is that these games don’t necessarily end. A player has their avatar or character in a virtual world where they “live”. These avatars have homes, cars, clothes, among other possessions that they can collect, purchase, or trade throughout their virtual experience. Did you notice that I said purchase? Yes, these avatars are purchasing goods and services within the virtual world. They are doing commerce.
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Metaverse Now
When we hear or talk about the Metaverse, it is really an abstract concept of virtual worlds. We tend to think about how this might look in the future while ignoring that this is happening NOW! The next generations are already plugged into the Metaverse and doing commerce there.
What grabbed my attention around this topic is the annual sales from the top three virtual or Metaverse platforms in comparison to one of the top real goods online retailers. The combined annual sales of Roblox ($2.206B), Fortnite ($5.8B), and Minecraft ($380M) is $8.386B while Etsy, one of the top online retailers for real goods, has a total annual sales of $2.414B. These three Metaverse games are out performing Etsy by 4X! Is that worth taking note of?
Some of the world’s biggest companies and brands are starting to create digital products specifically for the Metaverse. Nike has even launched virtual shoes. Many of these brands are tying their digital products to an NFT which is also connected to a physical product.
Doing Digital Commerce
So, again, as we look to the future, if we look at those people who will be doing business and commerce in the future, what can we learn? We learn that they are already comfortable with conducting business through a screen, a headset, and even an avatar. We learn that their world is much smaller than the world a traditional business person might be used to. When we are not limited by geography a whole new world of possibilities opens up.
As a chamber leader, I would suggest you spend some time with your children or grandchildren to learn more about what their virtual worlds look like. Find out what they enjoy about their virtual experiences. I believe that soon enough, we will no longer call these virtual worlds or virtual experiences, they will just be integrated into our everyday lives.
Directories, magazines, maps, and digital… Consider Community Matters, Inc. for your next chamber publication.
It may be worth your time to bring on an intern who can help to make the connection between traditional business and virtual commerce. Once your chamber members see that the puck is going in this direction, they will need to lean on their chamber to get up to speed quickly. Now is the time for you to learn so you can help your member businesses pivot as the ecosystem matures. There is space for every chamber of commerce in the Metaverse world. There will also be a huge upside for those who partake in the first mover advantage.
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No matter the size of your chamber, there never seems to be enough time in the day to get everything done. As a result, we tend to prioritize the most urgent tasks to be done first. This constant triage of tasks inevitably leads to certain tasks falling lower and lower on the proverbial to-do list. We may not notice the cost of procrastinating some tasks until it is too late. One of these tasks that can easily fall by the wayside is new member onboarding. This article will explain the benefits of creating an automation series to onboard new members.
Traditionally, many chambers of commerce will assign a chamber ambassador to help orient a new member on everything the chamber has to offer. I know you probably have fantastic ambassadors. Ambassadors tend to be those who are hyper-involved and want to be a part of everything the chamber is doing. This is great. These ambassadors also have businesses and families to run, and life to live. Your ambassadors are also human and subject to human error. Inevitably something will slip through the cracks, not on purpose, but missed nonetheless.
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Email Onboarding
By creating an automated email onboarding campaign, you can drip feed relevant information to new members while also making sure all of the basics are covered. By setting up the expectation with your new members to be on the lookout for emails, maybe on a weekly basis to help them get the most out of their membership, then you have their attention.
As new members join your chamber, it is always a good practice to learn more about the reason(s) they decided to join and what their expectations are. Are they a transactional member or a transformational member? Should they be connected with your young professionals group or a senior service alliance? By gaining this knowledge, you can create an experience for them where you are connecting them with appropriate events, committees, and people. This information will also help you decide what information you send them in your onboarding email series.
Relevant Communication
Sara Ray from the Douglas County Chamber was a guest on the podcast a couple months ago and she dove in deep about creating relevant and personalized communication. If you are at all interested in this topic, I would highly recommend you going back to listen to that episode.
As much as you may disagree, not every member needs to get an email about your next luncheon or mixer. You should segment your email audience to only deliver the most relevant information to each recipient. Mass email campaigns run the risk of finding their way into junk or spam folders if there is not enough engagement by the recipients.
There are many software options out there for sending automated emails. If you are like many other chambers, then you are likely using Constant Contact, or possibly MailChimp. These have been the most common options that I have seen. Setting up an automated email onboarding series will require some dedicated attention to get started, but that brainpower and attention should only need to focus on this task one time versus creating a custom response every time a new member has a question. Your goal should be to put yourself in the new member’s shoes and provide answers to the questions that they have before they ever ask the question. I had once heard a quote that said something like “if you can define the problem better than your customer, then they will assume you have the answer”. Defining your member’s problems or needs before they ask will also build credibility that your chamber understands what their expectations are.
Directories, magazines, maps, and digital… Consider Community Matters, Inc. for your next chamber publication.
Learn to Automate for ROI
I am not the expert in creating email automation campaigns, but Sara Ray and the Douglas County Chamber have a great template. Google will also provide some great tips and resources to get you started. There are also online trainings available across the web that can help to shortcut your learning curve drastically.
“Associations with onboarding, orientation, or welcoming plans boost their new member renewal rates. Local/State associations show the biggest difference in new member renewal rates, jumping from 75% to 82% after similar program implementation.”
2017 New Member Engagement Study by Dynamic Benchmarking & Kaiser Insights LLC
Depending on the size of your chamber, a 7% increase in your membership renewal rate could be a substantial amount of revenue, not only from the increase in membership dues but also the non-dues value that comes from retaining these members for a longer period of time.
We now live in a time where AI learns our habits. Predictive text assists our typing by showing us the word or phrase that we were going to type letter by letter with a simple keystroke or tap on our screen. We have a curated viewing experience on platforms like Netflix. Our attention spans no longer allow for the extra clutter. No matter what platform you decide to use, it is important to your relevance to only send emails to your members that they will care about. This will result in building a more meaningful relationship with each of your members while freeing up some of your bandwidth.
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When it comes to driving the course for your chamber, you need to have clear direction. Can you imagine going for a drive without knowing your final destination or how to get there? You would end up wasting a lot of time and resources going in the wrong direction while you try to guess where you should be headed. I heard a quote a while back that said “you can work at 100 mph but if you are not clear on your destination, you will end up 100 miles away from your goal.” This is true when making business decisions or operating your chamber. You need to have a clear vision of where your organization should be headed.
Proof of Concept
About a year after starting Chamber Chat Podcast, I started having some chambers reach out to me about how to get started with their own podcast. At first I was answering their questions one by one. Then I thought it would be a good idea to launch an online course to take chambers through the steps to get started. But, before I invested a lot of time into creating a course, I created a simple downloadable Chamber Podcasting Guide PDF that I gave away for free to interested chambers.. This allowed me to test the market to see if there were more chambers who wanted to start a podcast. After I had about 150 downloads of this Chamber Podcasting Guide, then I proceeded to create the course and guess who I marketed it to first? That’s right, those people who had already expressed an interest in podcasting. This was almost a guarantee that I would get sales for the course.
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When making decisions at your chamber, you should be collecting data along the way. Collecting and evaluating data will allow you to create more relevant content, programming, and opportunities for involvement by catering to what is important to your member businesses. Having a clear vision is important, but it also must align with your mission. If you are collecting interest for programs that are outside of the scope of your mission, you might be better served by partnering with another organization or handing the program off all together.
Ways to Collect Data
Let’s brainstorm on some ways to gather data and member feedback to help you make better decisions.
Understand what makes popular social media posts trend.
What are your most attended programs? What is the content about?
Ask new members why they are joining the chamber and what their expectations are.
Provide surveys after each event to collect feedback.
Ask your members what they value most about their membership with your chamber.
Record common questions that members ask your chamber.
Post polls on social media for future programming.
Survey people who attend community events.
A note about surveys…it is important to be clear about the desired purpose for the event or program you are providing the survey for. If the person being surveyed doesn’t understand what the intent for a program or event is, then their responses can lead you in the wrong direction. You should clearly state the reason you put on your community festival for example, the impact it makes throughout the community, and then ask your questions. This gives more context rather than having a person complaining about the festival because it was too hot that day.
I recently came across a chamber who surveyed their members about whether or not they should continue producing a community guide/directory or a map. The feedback came back that the members did not want the chamber to produce either publication any more. This chamber failed to mention the added value to each member of having their name listed in the directory and distributed throughout their community. They also did not inform their members about the non-dues revenue the chamber receives for their budget from these publications and how having a tangible publication can help with branding your community to newcomers and visitors. The expectations and reasoning was not properly laid out and for that reason, the members voted the way they did. With more accurate information, the vote likely would have been much different.
Directories, magazines, maps, and digital… Consider Community Matters, Inc. for your next chamber publication.
Interview with Aaron Nelson-Data Driven Decisions
In June of 2021, I had Aaron Nelson from the Greater Chapel Hill-Carrboro Chamber on the podcast to discuss how he approaches data driven decision making. He talked about how they go about collecting data after every event. They gather data about the venue, the speakers, the food, just about every aspect of each event that you can think of. This creates a very clear path going forward for their future events with the understanding that each event is a continual iteration.
What to do with Data?
One of the tricky aspects about collecting data and gathering member feedback is what to do with it. If you have a quality platform for your membership software, then this should be your hub for storing all of this data and feedback. I am partial to the Chamber Nation platform as it is a robust platform with a ton of added value that you don’t find anywhere else. It is also very affordable for even smaller chambers to adopt this platform. Many chambers even turn the Chamber Nation platform into a non-dues revenue generator within a few months. As you collect data and input it into the Chamber Nation platform, you are also able to produce monthly activity reports for each member so they can see the ROI of their membership. This is providing data to your members to help them make better decisions!
The key is to continually collect and record the data and feedback from your various sources so you can learn what is important to your members. Once you know what is important to them, you will have better engagement with your programming because you are providing more targeted value to your members.
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I am going to start this article with a disclaimer that I realize you may have personal thoughts, concerns, or prejudices towards NTFs and cryptocurrencies. I also understand that some of these terms may be completely foriegn to you. In this article, I will try to explain some of these trending technologies in terms that are easy to understand. I also want to encourage you to read this article with an open mind to maybe gain a better view of the direction the business world may be heading.
Over the past five year or so, I have been learning more about Bitcoin, crypto currencies, and more recently NFTs or non-fungible tokens. As I started this education, I have learned a lot and my thoughts on these technologies have evolved over time and will likely continue to evolve along with these associated ecosystems. I will also mention that the ideas that I will share in this article are very much to help you prepare for the future, not that you have to run and do anything about it today.
My Introduction to Bitcoin
So, let me backup my story to around 2010 when Bitcoin first hit my radar. I remember sitting in my car in Seguin, TX listening to the radio and the radio host was talking about how someone had just bought a Papa John’s pizza, just a large pizza for 10,000 Bitcoin. That was a news headline that day because it is the first time that we saw a real utility for Bitcoin. Still at the time, the guy at the pizza shop probably paid for the pizza out of his pocket and kept the Bitcoin because nobody really understood what Bitcoin was or what it could do. Fast forward to today’s price for Bitcoin, that was about a $300,000,000 pizza! Compare that to the previous high for Bitcoin, that price tag would have been $690,000,000! I guess that’s why they say hindsight is 20/20.
My next exposure to Bitcoin I believe was around 2014 when I was listening to a podcast about investing and the current price of Bitcoin was mentioned to be around $4,000. I was in shock. I could not believe anyone would pay that much for a digital coin that didn’t have any real utility. This did peak my interest though so I started to learn more about Bitcoin and why people would pay so much to own it.
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The more I learned, the more it intrigued me. I learned that the creator of Bitcoin is anonymous and once Bitcoin was launched, he/she/they disappeared. This means that Bitcoin is a decentralized monetary system. There is no company headquarters. There is no person to be subpoenaed if someone has a grievance. Instead, there are 1) Bitcoin miners who are competing with other miners by completing complicated mathematical problems to then be rewarded with Bitcoin, 2) individual nodes on the Bitcoin network which validate transactions on the open blockchain ledger. I also learned that in the code for Bitcoin, there will only ever be 21 million in circulation. This is done through programming and the rewards to miners. So there is a fixed supply, and nobody has the authority or ability to create more.
Because of these traits, Bitcoin is often referred to as digital gold as a store of value or a hedge against inflation. However, unlike gold, Bitcoin is easily sent to the other side of the world almost instantaneously. Bitcoin also established what is known as the blockchain which is the technology that all other crypto currencies operate with.
Many other crypto currencies have since spun off from the initial creation of Bitcoin, each with different purposes and utilities. One of the most popular is Etherium which is known for it’s smart contract feature. However there are others such as Solana.
I mention these other crypto currencies because they are often used to transact NFTs.
What is an NFT?
An NFT is a non-fungible token. This means that it is a digital token with unique characteristics that cannot be duplicated, thus giving unique rights of ownership. If you think of a dollar bill, they are essentially all the same. If I asked you to hand me a dollar bill, I don’t care if it is the one in the front of your wallet, or the one in the back, or the one in your pocket, or from your junk drawer, they are all the same and carry the same value. An NFT, there is only one of a kind, each with a unique value.
In an effort to show utility for NFTs, the early adoption was with digital art. A creator or artist can publish or “mint” their art as an NFT and whoever purchases the NFT would be the authentic owner of that art. For me, there were too many holes with this example for me to grasp onto and I quickly dismissed the value of an NFT utility. Then I heard of some examples that caught my interest much like Bitcoin did back in 2014. Think of the title of your home, there is only one, and you are the owner of it. That could easily become an NFT and rather than purchasing title insurance, the owner of the NFT is verified on the blockchain network. I know, as I explain this, that seems like it is really far in the future, and maybe it is but it is coming. The same is true for a drivers license or any government issued ID. They could be issued as an NFT that you keep in your crypto wallet.
As I continued to digest what I was learning about NFTs, I was looking for other ways an NFT could be applied. I heard of Gary Vaynerchuk. Gary is a podcaster, wine seller, and social media influencer. During the pandemic, Gary started an NFT project called VeeFriends. The way it works is Gary minted over 10,000 doodles of different animals such as Passionate Parrot. Each NFT in addition to the art (which was not very special) you also gained access to Gary. Some of the NFTs also gave you 30 minutes of business consulting with Gary, dinner with Gary, or a game of chess with Gary. Gary also promised to hold an annual conference for the holders of his NFT and the NFT serves as your ticket to the conference.
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Since launching VeeFriends, Gary has continued to “airdrop” more assets and value to his NFT holders. There is also a healthy aftermarket for NFTs and because they are bought and sold within the Etherium smart contract network, Gary earns a 10% royalty on every resale of his NFTs.
How NFTs Can Be Utilized
When I heard about VeeFriends, my mind began to wonder and to explore other NFT uses. I was working on a Chamber Podcast Course at the time I learned about VeeFriends. I had the thought of launching my course as an NFT essentially to give access to the course. My thought was if I only had 10 NFTs for my course, once a chamber took the course and learned how to podcast, they no longer have a need for it. Why not allow them to resell the course to another chamber. This would allow for the first chamber to recover their investment after they got the value they needed, and then they would have motivation to resell and essentially market the course to other chambers and I could get a royalty for the ongoing resells of the course. Great idea right? I think it was a great idea, a couple years too early…
That led me to think about chambers in general. As a membership organization, it is all about providing access to information, events, opportunities, products, etc. Why not bundle these offerings into a tiered dues type of NFT project? Because they are based on smart contracts, if a business were to move, they could sell their membership and you would get a commission or royalty. Your ambassadors could purchase multiple NFTs and sell them to other businesses. The NFT would be their ticket to your annual meeting, luncheons, trainings, etc. Businesses could purchase multiple NFTs for other staff members. You could set the terms within the smart contract for how long the NFT was good for, 1 year, 2 years, etc. I hope this is giving you some ideas.
As the idea of NFTs for membership continues to evolve, we could see a time where a DAO could be set up. A DAO is a decentralized autonomous organization. Essentially, this DAO could function as a board of directors. The options are limitless. However, timing is everything. At this stage, I believe education is key. Do what you can to learn about crypto currency, Bitcoin, and NFTs. Play with some “live ammo” or in other words make some small purchases to see how these things work so you know how to educate your members as the time comes.
Again, the purpose of this article is not for you to stop the way you are doing things and to make a hard pivot, but rather as Wayne Gretsky says skate to where the puck is headed rather than where it is.
If you would like to start playing in the crypto world, I do have an affiliate link for Coinbase which would give you and I both $10 worth of Bitcoin if you use the link provided.
Please join our email list to receive new blog posts are they are released. You will stay in the loop with any announcements related to the podcast or the Chamber world in general.
Be sure you are subscribed to Chamber Chat Podcast in your favorite podcast app. Subscribers are the first to get episodes as new ones come out each week.
