Category: Strategic Planning

Looking 25 Years into the Future with Bryan Derreberry

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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.

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Introduction

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

And now your host, he enjoys smoked meat from his Traeger, he’s my dad Brandon Burton.

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

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Brandon Burton 1:02
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Our guest for this episode is Bryan Derreberry. As President and CEO of the Charleston Metro Chamber of Commerce for 11 years, Bryan leads one of South Carolina’s largest chambers in its regional advancement work. Bryan has an established executive management track record, featuring more than 30 years in chamber leadership and advocacy roles. Prior to joining the Charleston Metro Chamber. Bryan was president and CEO of the Wichita Metro Chamber of Commerce in Wichita, Kansas, where he directed the state’s largest Metro Chamber for seven and a half years. He also served as president and CEO of the Catawba County, North Carolina and Middleton Ohio Chambers of Commerce respectively. Bryan began his chamber career as a state lobbyist for the Greater Cincinnati Chamber of Commerce, of course in Ohio. He holds holds a Bachelors of Arts degree in political science from Wittenberg University and is and has completed graduate coursework towards a combined MA and PhD in American politics, and international relations from the American University. Bryan, I’m excited to have you with us today here on chamber chat podcast. And I’d love for you to take a moment to say hello to all the chamber champions and share something interesting about yourself so you can get to know you a

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Brandon Burton 44:58
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Conway Area Chamber-ACCE Chamber of the Year Finalist with Brad Lacy

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

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

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Introduction

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

Voiceover Talent 0:14
Now your host he prefers taking notes with a pen and paper, he’s my dad, Brandon Burton.

Brandon Burton 0:20
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.

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

Tony Felker 0:46
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 1:08
You can learn more about Holman Brothers Membership Sales Solutions by visiting holmanbros.com.

Successful membership salespeople are problem solvers. They ask better questions, uncover more problems and pinpoint how their chamber can help. It’s how they consistently drive better membership sales outcomes. Here’s the hurdle. Most membership salespeople don’t get enough coaching to recruit like this. Holman Brothers Next Level Coaching supplies the year round guidance that your membership rep needs to drive growth for your chamber. Visit holmanbros.com/nextlevel to learn more and request a free trial of Next Level Coaching.

Guest Introduction

This is a special episode and our 2022 ACCE Chamber the Year Finalist series, and our guests for this episode is Brad Lacy, the President and CEO of the Conway Area Chamber in Arkansas. Brad is a native of Ida Arkansas and began his economic development career in 1997 with the Arkansas Economic Development Commission as a community development consultant and later as a project manager where he worked to recruit companies to the state. Brad has served as president and CEO of the Conway Development Corporation or CDC, the city of Conway’s nonprofit economic development entities since 2000. In December of 2006, Brad became the president CEO of the Conway Area Chamber of Commerce. It marked the first time in nearly two decades at the chamber and CDC had been under the same leadership, the leadership of the same person. The combined management of both organizations brings the city larger staff to focus on economic development activities. In 2013. The Conway Area Chamber of Commerce was named chamber the year by ACCE and in 2018, was named runner up. Brad holds a bachelor’s degree in geography from the University of Central Arkansas, the Masters of Public Administration from the University of Arkansas Little Rock. He’s a graduate of the Community Development Institute at UCA, the Economic Development Institute at the University of Oklahoma and the US Chamber of Commerce Institute for organization management. Brad is a former member of the University of Central Arkansas Board of Trustees and has served two terms on the Board of Regents for the US Chamber West Institute of organization management. I’m excited to have Brad back with me on Chamber Chat Podcast, he was a guest way back in episode 103, where we talked about the way they go about their annual meeting. So if anybody wants to go back in the archive and check that out, it was a fantastic episode. But Brad, welcome back to Chamber Chat Podcast, go out and say hello to all the Chamber Champions and share something interesting about yourself so we can get to know you a little better.

Brad Lacy 4:01
Yeah, well, thanks for thanks for asking. I’m not sure I’m all that. Interesting. Maybe the most interesting things that I’ve been in the job over 20 years and have only been in one community that doesn’t seem to be very common these days in the chamber world. So that’s true. Yeah, maybe maybe that’s the interesting thing.

Brandon Burton 4:25
Good deal. Well, tell us maybe some background, this specs, if you will, on the Conway area, chamber size, location, budget, staff, that sort of thing, just to give us some perspective.

About the Conway Area Chamber

Brad Lacy 4:38
Yeah. So first, just a little on the city. So the city Conway is part of the Little Rock North Little Rock Conway MSA so we’re the Northern Gateway to the Little Rock MSA. The city has about 70,000 people. It is a little bit of several things. So it’s a College Town it has has three colleges and universities. A percentage of our population commutes into little rock to work every day. But most of our people stay here because it’s very much a business center too. So it’s not exactly a suburb, it’s not exactly a college town, it’s kind of a little of four or five things all mixed up, which makes us a little bit interesting. The Chamber itself has been around since 1891, and was formed to recruit the colleges here. So we’ve always had a real tied to the educational community here. And through the years, there have been a series of sister organizations that spin off from the chamber. So the other the biggest one being the CDC, as you mentioned in the intro, which is an economic development entity that spun off in 1959. And that was the that was the organization that initially hired me 23 years ago. And so today, what you have is really this collection of organizations that are tied through management agreements. And so the staff, which there’s a staff of 18, we manage, really, the assets and the work of those several organizations, budget is going to be anywhere from five to $7 million a year, which is a pretty big budget, especially for our community our size. But when you put all of those organizations together, that’s what that’s what it looks like. And on the economic development side, there’s a lot of property that’s involved. So land leases, building leases, land sales. And so that’s where a lot of that revenue comes from. But it’s an extremely diverse revenue stream, which is really by design and helps us sort of navigate changes in the economy or changes in one member, you know, leaving or whatever. So it’s pretty good model we think,

Brandon Burton 7:11
yeah. Sounds like from the wide scope of demographics even of what makes up Conway really creates a great personal identity as a as a community, it seems like for sure. And you mentioned 18 staff and I got to meet some of your staff at the Mako conference. And you’re surrounded by some great people so for sure you’ve got a good good people there around you. So that that always helps.

Visit ChamberNation.com to learn more.

Topic-Chamber of the Year Application Programs

So as we’re doing these chamber, the year finalist interviews, what I like to do is focus on the two programs that you submitted on your application for chamber the year. So maybe just from a high level what’s address what those two programs are and then we can go in a little bit deeper and have you share some of the more nitty gritty about each program.

Brad Lacy 10:07
Sure. So the first one is a visioning committee wide visioning process called Conway 2035. We do a community wide visioning process every decade. Well, not really decade if you’re looking at the census, but every 10 years, so we did well, I guess it is, it does line up with the census. So actually, 2010 was the first year that we did that it was extremely important for us as a community. Because it really marked the first time that any entity had asked the community at large what they wanted to see for the city. And what happens is you get some agreement from larger groups of people on where not only the chamber, but city government. various nonprofits should be focusing their time and energy. And we did a lot of really great things in that decade between 2010 and 2020. So, and there was sort of a mid, mid, mid like 2015, we we convened sort of a smaller group of people to do a little bit of a correction to the plan to see, you know, what have we accomplished, were there some things that we needed to change, based off of things that were happening in the in the country. So 2020 Mark, really the year that we were supposed to renew that. So we had gotten everything ready, we had pulled our steering committee together, and we’re getting ready to meet with them. And it was a week, really after everything closed down. So that first program was really how did we do that? How do you how do you do a city wide visioning process when you can’t convene people? Because we did, we did it and we finished it. So the second one is our festival so we have a very oddly named festival, Toad Suck days. That is, that’s the name of it,

Brandon Burton 12:20
set that head on with the name. So that is what is Toad Suck days.

Brad Lacy 12:25
So my my EVP, Jamie Gates says that no southern city that’s worth anything, doesn’t have a festival named after a food or an animal. And so ours is named after toads, believe it or not, it’s a it’s a festival that volunteers started 41 years ago. And it really turned into something big. And as is the case in many communities, when things outgrow volunteers, they give them to the chamber. times you may not want them. This was one that you know, ended up being really good. It’s a very iconic festival in Arkansas, with a funny name. But throughout the history of the festival, we’ve raised $2 million for primarily educational nonprofits in the city, and some community development. So the festival is really the conduit through which we do a lot of charitable giving. But it also helps pay, you know, helps pay the bills because 100 to 125,000 people come to the festival. And there’s a lot of revenue that comes from that. So

Brandon Burton 13:48
sorry, I was maybe let’s just go deeper right now and untold sick days. So as you go about the planning of it each year, as its annual festival, do you know which nonprofits you’re targeting to support as you go about beginning it? Is their target goals going into it? How do you go about your planning and in strategy of

Brad Lacy 14:12
it? So historically, the money was earmarked for college scholarships for County students who were choosing to go to one of the three schools in Conway. So historically, that’s where all the money went. Internally, we decided to take a different course probably 10 years ago, with the creation of the Arkansas scholarship lottery. Voters approved a lottery in Arkansas. All of the proceeds from that are going to scholarships. So really, if you want to go to college here, you’re gonna get you’re gonna get some help, for the most part, and we didn’t really think that maybe our money now needed to go to scholarships. So we started investing heavily in pre K. And STEM education for elementary school students. So there’s some various various programs that we put money into, that really hit on those, those topics. Now, we also do a decent amount of money for downtown Conway, because that’s where we have the festival. So believe it or not, not everyone’s a fan of us closing the heart of the city down for three days. So, so we, we buy about 20, to $25,000 worth of hanging baskets that go up in downtown after the festival and the city partners with us on that, and takes care of them through summer and fall. And so our downtown is sort of known for those, those hanging baskets. So, you know, we can do between probably, in a slow year, maybe 60,000, upwards to 80, or $90,000, in charitable giving directly from the festival. Now, the other thing that has happened through the years is we will sort of approve what we call sanctioned events that are allowed to use the festival name. And so this is where other nonprofits benefit. So the Kiwanis Club, for instance, has done a 5k 10k for years where they raise money. And that’s the Toad Suck 5k 10k. There’s a literacy organization that does the tour to Toad, which is bike race. So there’s all these, there’s all these other things that are happening, as well as we have nonprofits, that we have a certain number of vendor spots available for free to nonprofits, to help raise money. So the festival is really much bigger than just what it does for us. In the community loves it and region, really so.

Brandon Burton 17:12
So with the charitable giving, is that structured through a foundation or just directly through the chamber? How does that look?

Brad Lacy 17:21
So the festival itself is a 501 C three, organization that is wholly owned by the chamber. All right.

Brandon Burton 17:34
So I know, in particular, with your chamber, that your application, you had some unique challenges, around DedSec day should particularly during the, you know, the COVID, shutdowns and whatnot. So tell us about how you guys address that and how you navigated through still being able to do the good work that you did and bring community together when you come together? How did you approach that?

Brad Lacy 18:01
So and by March, when things shut down, and when you look at the way that we raise money. Most of our big sponsors were in place by that because the festival happens the first weekend of May. Okay, so we had all these commitments from corporate sponsors to, you know, be a part of the 2020 Festival, and then you figure out, well, we’re six weeks away from festival that we’re not going to have. So what do we do? And I think our first, you know, maybe our first inclination was that we’re just not going to do anything and then give the money back or not kill these people or whatever. Because I think like many people, we were just in a state of shock, right? I mean, like, you know, I was thinking, how are we going to survive this? You know, how do you how do you survive when at least part of your revenue comes from being able to convene people and you can’t compete with people? That’s a real problem. But what we what we decided was that we could pivot and we could do a series of things we could sort of deconstruct the festival and offer people experiences which in fact, they needed and wanted because after, you know, a few weeks, your your cabin fever sets in, and, and so we sort of deconstructed the festival and figured out that we could do some of the best parts of it. Regardless if we had a traditional festival, so we came up with some new things. So really, one of the first ones was an airplane parade where we partnered with the Pilots Association, that is here. in Conway, and we asked them if they would do an airplane parade throughout the city. And this was several weeks into the lockdown, and super safe, everybody can just stand out in their yard. We, you know, promoted it heavily, not only on social media, but our local newspaper promoted it. And I mean, there were 1000s of people in their yards. And we had dozens of planes that participated in we had planes that came in to participate, you know, some fighter jets did some formation type things. And so, you know, we had some sponsors attached to it. So we actually made some money off of that, that we needed at the time. And so that really, I think, gave us some confidence that we could, that we could do this festival in pieces. And so another one was, we did a Nature and Science drive thru. People were, you know, hungry to do stuff with their children. So we partnered with Arkansas Game and Fish Commission, the Little Rock zoo, the Museum of Discovery, and maybe a couple of others to do these big exhibits. We put them in the middle of one of the university campuses. And then

we internally called it the drive thru zoo, that you know, the rule was you couldn’t get out of your car, but you could certainly drive through and you could see the penguins from the Little Rock zoo, you could go past the giant aquariums that Game and Fish broad. You could drive through these exhibits. And once again, people were hungry for it. They wanted to do things with their children. And we were going to do that from like three to six. Well, by four o’clock, the queue was so long wrapping through the campus that we had to start turning people away, because it was going to take us two hours to get everyone through the queue and see things. So we really started started building some confidence that we could provide some things that the community and really the region needed, would allow us to monetize it so that we could survive. And then we turned to television to we started buying blocks of time on network TV and the Little Rock market. And so we did a virtual concert one night where we asked friends that had really Arkansas based performers to perform for us and do a virtual concert at a particular time on the CBS affiliate and another great success. And so we just, we put a lot of different things together. That late spring and summer. That became the festival,

Brandon Burton 23:08
isn’t it, that’s about how long of a span that is.

Brad Lacy 23:11
So that was probably over three months that we did all of those things. And then you get to 2021. And things have loosened up a bit. But we still weren’t quite ready to go. First. As I say, you know, we were the first week of May. I didn’t want to be the first festival to you know, go forward. So it was the 40th anniversary of the festival. And so we decided we would again deconstruct the festival and do 40 days of Toad Suck. And so we brought the airplane parade back, we brought the Nature and Science drive through back except at this point, you didn’t have to drive through you could walk through because things were different than they were a year before. And we actually did our first real concert in person in a venue. We brought country music artists, Jimmy Allen to town and did a concert on UCaaS campus. And really, I think there there were several things there. One, it allowed us to continue to do charitable giving, which I wouldn’t have thought we could do. It allowed us to survive. Because we always take us you know 100 I think about $135,000 is what we end up charging back as a management fee from the chamber. So if you lose that chunk of money,

Brandon Burton 24:44
yeah, that makes an impact. You’re cutting salaries

Brad Lacy 24:47
or you’re cutting positions you’re doing something so you know, we did not want to do that and we did not want to use reserves and we did not do any of those things. We managed to survive and and that and ever lay anyone off. And then also just, it means so much this is kind of interesting, but it means a lot to the community to do the festival. Children love it. I mean, it’s really built around kids. And so to not do it, and not sort of recognize the legacy of it just seemed to be, you know, a terrible idea. And we should at least do our best to keep it going until we can have it for real. And, you know, the good news is, we had it for real this year. And it was crazy. I mean, it’s the best year we’ve ever had, we were very blessed. We had perfect weather, which we almost never have a full weekend at perfect weather. But we did this time. And everything was just more, you know, more revenue, more shirt sales more this more that. So there was definitely pent up demand for it.

Brandon Burton 26:03
That is awesome. Well, let’s circle back for a few minutes on your on the Conway 2035, the visioning program there. It is understand similar kind of circumstances when you need to be convening people together. First of all, I was glad to hear you say that you guys are revisiting like you get your 10 year vision, but then you’re revisiting it at the halfway point and kind of taking a barometer of seeing where you’re going because politically, things change, right technology changes, community demographics change. So there’s a lot of lot of reasons to kind of check the temperature, if you will. But take us through that in the next couple of minutes of how the the visioning program came together.

Brad Lacy 26:50
So in a normal year, what you do is is, well, the really the first part of it didn’t really matter, because the the important. First component of this is, is pulling together a diverse steering committee that represents sort of as many aspects of the community as you can get. So not only race, ethnicity, gender, and age, but things like how long have they lived here, like we always try to have one person on the committee who’s moved here in the last year or two, because they certainly have a different perspective about Conway than someone who’s lived here their whole life. But we have one of those people who’ve lived here their whole life, because their perspective is important, too. So we had we’d spent a lot of time and we had, I think, a 13 person steering committee that was just a cross section of the community. And we were getting ready to convene them when the pandemic hit. And obviously, we didn’t, well, by early June, I think we decided to at least get them together in person, and let them make the call on whether or not we were going to try to go through with this thing. And so we took we took a ballroom at UCA and had the I mean, it was like Vladimir Putin trying to meet with 20 people when you see those pictures of him with all this distance between Yeah, yeah, you know, so imagine putting 30 people in a gigantic Ballroom in a in a square table, where we add, you know, I don’t know, 40 feet between people are so dumb, it was crazy. But it was the only thing we could think of that would really be safe. So you know, we all meet wear masks, we put them at this table. And we just said, Look, should we move forward with this? Should we not we’re going to do what you want us to do. And if you tell us to go, we’re going to figure out how to do this. And to have one every one of them said we have to do this, like this is the most important thing we can do. We cannot we do not need to stay focused on what’s happening. Now. We need to come out of this stronger as a community, we need to give people hope. We need to ask people questions about what they want on the other side of this. And so Absolutely, we need to we need to do this. So the next part of this is the same regardless if it had been pre or pre pandemic or pandemic and that is we do a survey tool, just really through Survey Monkey, where we asked people to look at a list of like 40 to 45 topics, things like job creation trails. police fire. Anything almost that you could think of is pretty exhaustive list about things that might be important in a in a community. And we simply ask each resident who wants to fill it out to checkmark all the things that they think are important that we should focus on. So if you want to check 40 boxes, you can if you want to check to you can well, then we asked of these, what are your top three priorities? And then do you want to participate in writing plan? And if so, pick one section that you would want to help, right. So if you go back to 2010, we had 1400 people that participated at that level when filling the survey out. This time, we had over 1800 people that participated. And of the 1800, we had a few 100 that said they wanted to participate in writing plan. So here’s where you’re, you know, here’s, here’s where you hit the nitty gritty, like, how do you pull those people together? Because normally,

you would have four or five in person meetings, I mean, what we would normally do is take every volunteer that wanted to write the plan, meet in an auditorium and go over I mean, here’s how we’re going to do this, you know, and then we’re dividing them up, and they have their first meeting, and then they set subsequent meetings for the next three months. And they really craft this plan. Well, obviously, we can’t do that. So what do we do? So we reached out to the Winthrop Rockefeller Institute, which is a partner of ours that is in the neighboring community, and they do strategic they help communities with strategic plans really all over the place. And we just said, Look, we don’t know how to do this. Now. We need we need professional facilitators, because obviously, we’re going to have to use Zoom. And so that’s what we did. We hired Winrock to do that for us, and had a series of zoom meetings that took the place of the in person meetings. And it worked. I mean, it was, it was bizarre, because you were, you know, you somebody would be in their bed on this busier,

Brandon Burton 32:28
because there’s a quiet place in the house, right? When you

Brad Lacy 32:31
always have them after work anyway, you’re always doing them, you know, six or seven, because that’s when people can meet. So you’re really getting this glimpse into people’s lives, you know, like someone’s cooking dinner and is, is talking about, you know, soccer park, or whatever. And so, so we did that throughout the remainder of 2020. And then they really put it all together for us. And then by April of 2021, we had a summit at their facility. They have a big meeting facility with hotel rooms and a restaurant and everything. And so we convened over 50 community leaders in April, and we were all still masks, I’ll never forget it. We still had masks on. And took that plan and kind of did the final what for on it. And then that steering committee ultimately put their blessing on it. And by the early fall of 2021, we had a community wide visioning plan again. And who would have thought I mean, who would have thought that that we can pull that together? It really sets the stage for all of us to do the work that we want to do. So now. We’re in the process of all the various economic development boards in our organization. Our boards have done kind of the dot exercise where they’ve gone through all of the goals and said this is what we should concentrate on. And so our FY our strategic plan comes directly from that. The city for instance, did a $35 million. One my I think it’s probably maybe $40 million community center with pickleball volleyball, indoor and outdoor aquatics and soccer Park proposal that went to voters in February. Well, that checks off more than half of the parks goals that were developed. So that went to voters in February and it passed with 80% of the vote. And so what we would tell people is working that process is the most important thing, because what happens in a lot of communities is, well, meaning people think that they know what everybody wants. And they just move forward with an idea. And then they end up getting hammered at the ballot box. And it’s not because the idea was bad. And it might not even be that people disagree with it, but you never asked them what they wanted,

Brandon Burton 35:32
right? Just is a huge, such a huge factor.

Brad Lacy 35:36
So with this, you know, 1800 people spoke. And it’s pretty clear what they want. Yeah. And so we’ll use that as a guide, you know, for the next several years,

Brandon Burton 35:50
when really to be able to get their input, when you’re in the midst of a pandemic, like that, I’m sure is what spurred so many more people to participate in the survey, because they had more opinions, because we’re fresh, and they you know, and they, I’m sure appreciated that you’re reaching out and asking for their opinion asking if they want to be involved with the process. So I think the timing, although it didn’t seem great, on the surface, probably couldn’t have been better to get that for sure. Feedback from your community.

Brad Lacy 36:17
Yep, for sure.

Brandon Burton 36:19
I think that transitions well into my next question for you is, how do you view the role of your chamber there in your community?

Brad Lacy 36:31
I think we are often the middle ground that people are looking for these days. You know, Conway is pretty purple town politically. There’s a section of it, that’s very blue, and there’s a section of it, that’s very red. And I think we tend to be this place where a lot of the different sides can come to agree on things. And so we do our best to stay there. I’ve never seen a liberal or conservative person who didn’t think that job creation was important, right? I’ve never seen a liberal or conservative person who didn’t think quality place and quality of life was important. So I think chambers have the opportunity to play this part of, of helping bring both ends to the middle. Now, the extremes you’re never going to bring, because they don’t want. They don’t want to come to the middle. But the reality is, I think most of us are not the extremes. And so I think what we do is we help remind the community as a whole. And you’ve seen this, I think with our annual meeting, the annual meeting is really about helping people remember what we can accomplish. When we work together, it’s helping people understand why we’re special, it’s seeing their friends and neighbors on screen who look different from each other, who think different from each other. But they’re still working toward this common goal of building a world class city in the middle of Arkansas. And so I think that that’s the role we play is, is just this middle ground. Let’s roll our sleeves up and get the work done. And stay out of the, you know, crappy stuff that seems to dominate the headlines

Brandon Burton 38:39
like that. And, you know, you mentioned where the the ultra conservative or liberal like they both can agree that job creations are important. And and it’s not the chambers are looking for topics to grasp on to that are not controversial. But it’s topics that matter. And that can move the needle in a community and both sides can see where you know, something like job creation, and that example can move the needle. And I think

Brad Lacy 39:04
if you do those things, well, if you have a history of doing those things, well, there are things that you can get into. So for instance, and I don’t think this should be controversial, but I think it is, you know, the DBI diversity, belonging, equity and inclusion. I mean, you heard us present on that. And that would that would be controversial for some people. But we felt very strongly that we need to plant a flag there. And, and we have and we did and have, did we take on a little bit of water with some people in the community? Yeah, probably. But for the majority. I don’t think so. I think that they want us to speak on things like that. Because if it’s important to the business community that it’s important to us.

Brandon Burton 40:04
Absolutely. So Brad, I wanted to ask you if there if you might have a tip or an action item for listeners to help take their organizations up to the next level?

Action Item/Tip for Chamber Champions

Brad Lacy 40:16
Well, I think being ambitious is the biggest one, the main expecting more. I think that that probably guides us more than anything is that we expect more from ourselves. And we always think that we can get better. And we compare ourselves to the best. Which is part of the reason you do things like chamber of the year, you need to compare yourself to the best people out there. And you’ll always learn something from that, you know,

Brandon Burton 40:50
even just a benchmarking survey itself, that whole process, yeah,

Brad Lacy 40:54
right. And we do that as a community really, like we compare ourselves to other cities that we think we can learn something from, and we do that in a really formal way. So I just think being ambitious is is big. I think it’s so easy to just get caught up in the day to day activities of of what you do, and you just lose sight of trying to have some vision and and be the force that helps push your community in that direction.

Brandon Burton 41:28
I like that answer. So I’d like for a so many of your responses just flow right into the next question. So good. I like asking, yeah, how do you see the future of chambers and their purpose going forward?

Future of Chambers

Brad Lacy 41:43
I think they’re incredibly important. And I think as important as they’ve ever been simply because of what I said before on this, this middle ground, that chambers should be able to be for people. Because of the interesting nature of our work, I mean, we represent the business community. Well, what the business community has to say, should be very important to whatever community they’re in, because if the business community disappears or go somewhere else, then you don’t have a community anymore. And, and so I don’t think that you have to be apologetic for having an opinion. If your membership is backing you up on it. I mean, that’s what you’re there for. However, I do think that the majority of things that we work on should be something that the majority of the people in your community can gravitate toward. You, you know, I’ve often said, in the 23 years that I’ve worked here, I have boards that have some of the most liberal and some of the most conservative people in the community on them. I have never in 23 years heard them argue or fight about national hot button political issues. I’ve never heard them talk about Barack Obama or Donald Trump or Joe Biden. I’ve never heard them talk about abortion, or any other all of the issues like I’ve never heard that. And the reality is, we don’t do that. That’s not what grows, the city of Conway, and so confer a common goal. That’s right. I mean, the stuff that we worked on is something that almost always, both sides can agree on. And and when you when you win together, it makes those harder times a little bit easier, because you end up knowing this person. And when you know somebody, even if they think differently than you. You can’t vilify them because you know, that you, you know, you’ve had lunch with them, you know, their families, you just you just think about the world a little bit differently. And so I really think chambers have this ability to can, again, it’s what we’re best at convening people, why we convene people better if we’re doing our job, we convene people better than any other group or organization in our community. And there is a power in that. There’s a responsibility in that. And so I think the future’s bright for chambers.

Brandon Burton 44:45
Absolutely. So Brad, this has been great having you back on the podcast. I’ve really enjoyed it. I wanted to give you an opportunity to put any contact information out there. So if anyone wanted to reach out and connect and learn more about how you’re doing things there and Conway, how should they have? Should they reach out and connect with you?

Connect with Brad Lacy

Brad Lacy 45:03
Sure, I mean, emails probably the easiest. And then if we want to move into a phone conversation or bring some other staff members in, we’d be happy to and that’s just brad@conwayarkansas.org in Arkansas spelled out completely.

Brandon Burton 45:18
That’s perfect. Now I’ll get it in the show notes for this episode as well. So people can go there and find it and shoot you an email and learn more about Toad sick days, you know? Absolutely. Well, Brad, I really do appreciate you coming on here with me and I wish you and the Conway area Chamber Best of luck, this chamber the air.

Brad Lacy 45:37
Thank you, we appreciate it.

Brandon Burton 45:38
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Stop the Non-Profit Board Blame Game with Hardy Smith

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

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

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Introduction

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

Voiceover Talent 0:14
Now your host he tries to meditate, meditate daily. He’s my dad, Brandon Burton.

Brandon Burton 0:19
Hello Chamber Champions. You’re joining us on Chamber Chat Podcast where I’m your host, Brandon Burton, and it is my goal to introduce you to people and ideas to better help you serve your Chamber members and your community.

Our title sponsor is home and brothers membership sales solutions. Let’s hear from Tony Felker, President and CEO of The Frisco Chamber to learn how the Holman Brothers have provided value for him.

Tony Felker 0:45
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Brandon Burton 1:07
You can learn more about Holman Brothers Membership Sales Solutions by visiting HolmanBros.com.

Guest Introduction

Our guest for this episode is Hardy Smith. Hardy is a consultant and speaker who works with leaders who want to stop frustration with their volunteer boards. Through board retreats workshops, keynotes, and planning sessions Hardy provides solutions to board engagement challenges. Hardy’s extensive experience with diverse organizations provides the basis for his comprehensive book stop the nonprofit board blame game. His result oriented approach and ability to solve complex problems were developed during his longtime career in the high performance world of NASCAR racing. That experience included strategic planning for some of the country’s largest sports and entertainment facilities and spectator events. Hardy has also had more than a decade of senior leadership experience with local government which further refined his skills in improving organizational performance. Hardy has a wide range of personal and professional involvement with nonprofits, associations, chambers of commerce, and community groups nationwide. He has held numerous local, state and national volunteer leadership positions that have further contributed to his in depth understanding of nonprofit needs. Hart is a member of the National Speakers Association, Association of Fundraising Professionals BoardSource, Florida Society of Association Executives, ASAP and ACC. Hardy is also a faculty member of the US Chamber of Commerce Institute for organization management. Hardy, I feel blessed to have you with me today on Chamber Chat Podcast, I’d love for you to take a moment to say hello to all the Chamber Champions that are listening and share something else interesting about yourself so you can get to know you a little better.

Hardy Smith 2:58
Brandon, thank you so very much for having me on the chamber podcast today. And in the opportunity to visit with your Chamber Champions and really like chamber Tammy, what a label to assign just a tremendous group of people that all all too often are highly stressed, overworked, undervalued, and it kind of a bless their heart kind of a world. And hopefully we’ll have some, some help today to help alleviate some of those challenges.

Brandon Burton 3:37
That’s right. I believe we will, I mean, as I had the opportunity to read through so I’ll introduce may be a little premature, but we’re going to focus our topic today on Hardy’s new book, Stop the Nonprofit Board Blame Game. And I really do think after having the opportunity to read through the book, this is a great resource it’s going to help alleviate some of those sources of frustration. So we’ll get into that in just a minute. But Hardy Why don’t you take a little bit of time to tell us a little bit more about your your efforts especially in working with Chambers as it comes to you know, consulting and board retreats and things like that just so I think everybody in chamber world is familiar with your name at least I mean, they they see on social media, whatnot. But just give us a little snapshot of what you offer for chambers, your consultant work.

About Hardy Smith

Hardy Smith 4:30
Well thank you, Brandon, in in my production and of course, understanding Lear is a longtime personal and professional background and relationships and engagements with chamber groups all across the country. And I really, really appreciate those opportunities. When you know after a while and you know when you’re in this in this working with chambers, again, it’s very evident that the There’s a tremendous challenge their challenge. And it’s it’s the the frustration associated with working with boards who are either not engaged enough or perhaps in too many cases engaged too much, right? Well, my career in NASCAR racing was the head of a problem solver. My task was to identify problems really, before they existed and come up with the solutions to make sure the problems didn’t happen. Or if a problem did happen, make darn well sure I came up with a solution, it was gonna get the fix. So as I work with, with chambers across the country, and seeing the situation with with boards, the disengagement over engagement, seeing the the impact, emotional, physical, mental impact that it’s having on chamber professionals, and also the impact of the lack of productivity of chambers being able to meet the true potential that they have in their given community. And so that’s, for me, that’s a problem that needs a solution. And I see, you know, in the sector, there’s a whole lot of advice. There’s a whole lot of training sessions, and there’s a whole lot of consultants, and there’s a whole lot of speakers, and a whole lot of books and articles and blogs and podcasts that talk about this topic. But what’s happening, the problem still there. So in my kind of NASCAR mentality of, you know, taking the car apart at the end of a race, not by not bolt by bolt, and then putting it all back together again, to try to figure out why in the world did the car do what it did on that particular event? That was that was my mindset, and to look for solution, so to to get solutions that are going to be implementable and workable. Um, what I did differently, to help the sector and our nonprofit, and chamber professionals, Brandon is I reached out to board members. So not from a staff perspective, the book represents the board member perspective of, wow, why don’t you do what you’re supposed to do? And the answers they shared with me are extremely revealing. And those answers and responses lead to solutions that matched up and of course, the how tos for implementing the solutions matched up with these Org members themselves shared with me of why the good members become disengaged, why members don’t do what they’re supposed to do. And also very revealing as far as Wow, chamber professionals, have you considered you might be contributing to the problems that you’re having with board members. Problem contributor. So the book gets into that.

Brandon Burton 8:19
That’s absolutely right. And I look forward to diving a little deeper into your book as soon as we get back from this quick break.

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Topic-Stop the Non-Profit Board Blame Game

All right, Hardy, we’re back. And as you were, you’d mentioned right before our break about how you had reached out to nonprofit board members and got their perspective. And I love that you went out and did that, because it really does. It brings a different perspective to the whole approach. And as I was reading through the book, and preparing for this discussion with you, the thought occurred to me that and I would love to do a poll myself amongst chamber executives, to see how many chamber executives had experience working with the board before they started working the chamber. And if you look at that, and I’m going to guess there’s going to be some that had some experience, maybe they served on a board, you know, with another organization, but as far as being the executive director, and in that role, I think your book, really, it becomes kind of a manual to say, here’s how you manage a board, here’s the things you need to look for. But I like the you you went to these board members with a survey? I’m curious to hear from your perspective, what are some of the more revealing responses that you got as a result of that survey that?

Hardy Smith 11:56
Well, one of the one of the key things and anyone who’s involved in a long time relationship with another individual, it could be personal, like it’d be business understands that the number one key is effective communication. And so underlying, use bold red, and for the word effective. So it’s not just communication. So what the board members in the survey shared with me that communication related issues, poor communication, communication, that’s not timely, in a way that they’re left surprised by a particular issue. In some cases, communication doesn’t happen at all. So a whole lot of issues surrounding communication, is the number one contributor to board disengagement. Or, again, in a way, that’s not appropriate. And to go a little bit deeper there, if you’d like, you know, when does, when does effective communication begin? Well, it begins in the recruitment process. And so why the occasion is being shared with a prospective board member of what the expectations are, and what’s the most impart of effective communication? Is being a good listener? Yeah. So when you’re having the conversation with your board prospects prospect? Are you listening to see if they’re understanding the expectations? And are you listening not for what you want to hear, but for what you need to hear? And that’s their acceptance of fulfilling the expectations at hand. So that’s, that’s one issue. Another issue is simply that, you know, for our Chamber Champions on the podcast today, I just asked you to visualize your boardroom and look at all the faces around the board table. And for every single individual person, you’ve got every single individual represents a different communication style, a different communication preference. Every single individual has a personal preference for how they want to receive information, and also how they digest it or process that so let me explain real quickly. You’re here for the board meetings. I’m i It’s unfortunate that so many board excuse me, chamber execs. I’ve shared with me, Brandon about just oh my gosh, I’ve got a board meeting next week and I’m already in a panic. I’m losing sleep on this like a week ahead. And is it they’re the same, they’re just in a hot mess a week after. So it’s like two weeks a time, they will last out of a four week month. They’re just mentally and emotionally destroyed because of preparing for the board meetings. So not a great room, get the chambers and they’re not going to be read, but they still have to, they feel obligated to prepare the reports. So instead of going through this upside down exercise of preparing information that no one is going to pay attention to, how about maybe asking your individual board members how they prefer to receive the information. And they have multiple communication platforms, some may want a full on written report with all kinds of data and pictures and charts. And okay, some may want an executive summary, some may just want a tweet, you know, is an exaggeration, but you’ve got to understand the individual communication preferences, timing, you know, if you want someone to really read your your reports, you know, having it at the board seat for the board meeting, not in advance, so a busy board member has a chance to actually review it in advance, you know, you’re just you’re just shooting yourself in the foot. So communication issues are huge, huge. As far as creating dysfunctional relationships,

Brandon Burton 16:32
um, from what I can tell, you know, through the the communication, that the how and when of communication to make it effective, it’s also critical to be able to help set expectations. So when you’re talking about the chamber executive prepares the report, they have an expectation of, I’m preparing this, I would like for my board to read it, or at least look at it and give it to pay some attention. So through the communication is the opportunity to, to put forth some of those expectations as well. But I know the expectations go both ways, right, as we read in the book.

Hardy Smith 17:10
Absolutely. And, and so you, you know, and this is an very important part. You just can’t assume anything. And that’s where I think so many chamber professionals are champions, unfortunately get themselves into trouble. There’s a whole lot of assuming, and so far is as far as expectations go. Okay, well, let’s the chamber is the chamber board, and everyone just knows what’s expected? Well, you know, there’s, there’s your expectations as the chamber executive, and probably about 100% of the time, the individual board members individually and collectively have expectations. So is there any conversation happening at all, about merging the two sets of expectations or three sets? So yours? There’s individually and there’s as collectively? So that’s so critically important? You know, if, if, in again, in a relationship, are you asking, are you telling and I and I, I know from my 48 year marriage with de my wife, Debbie, and that that, you know, there’s a big difference between asking and telling, I’ve learned to finally ask me a while to get it. But I finally learned to ask so. So the point here is, is you can’t walk into a boardroom and say, here’s what I or the chamber needs for you to do. You’ve got to ask, here’s what we would like for you to consider. Are you willing to take on this task? And then even from even from a planning session, you know, you jumping ahead just a little bit, maybe, but in planning sessions, quite often, chambers and for a lot of reasons, decide not to bring in someone, perhaps, like URI is outside facilitators to facilitate a strategic plan. Development. Now, the Chamber executive, you know, gets their their favorite drink of choice, and spends a few hours writing up the plan presents the plan. If the board meeting the board, of course, passes the plan, no discussion, and there you go. And then the board executive is so frustrated, because no action is being taken on the plan. Well, why is that and it gets into expectations, and being having clarity around expectations, and again, the communication aspect. One of my great friends, who who I quoted a couple of times in the book is Dr. Jack Hawkins, who is the Chance to our toy University in Alabama. And he said Hardy, if they help bake the cake, they own the cake. So when you have a strategic planning session, you’ve got an opportunity where the board is actually involved, then they have a chance to evaluate our identify goals, objectives, the How to actions, expectations, their role and the expectations and implementing, you know, the activities at hand, and deciding what they’re going to do and what they’re not going to do. So the board role might be hands on personal engagement. They’re actually involved in implementation, or their role could be supporting the implementation of a strategic plan by staff. But you get clarity. And then so you’ve got a merging of bought and accept a sense of the direction of for expectations. Does that make sense?

Brandon Burton 21:09
It absolutely does, it makes a ton of sense. And as you started touching on the strategic planning and helping these board members to make the cake, as you say, it leads me to one of the other points I wanted to make sure that we could discuss it really stood out to me the chapter about creating a collaborative board. And there was a line specifically that talked about how the Board should be able to take ownership of a specific problem in their, their organization, their community, whatever it may be, and take ownership as they’re the ones who are tasked to solve that problem. You might speak in more to that and creating that collaborative environment.

Hardy Smith 21:51
Well, yes, what the one of the things that I’ve discovered just over time, is, is rather than really talk about strategic, okay, we’re going to have a strategic planning activity, you know, could be a process or couldn’t be an activity, there’s a little bit of a difference there. But I’ve started using the terminology, Brandon critical conversation. So the things that they need to talk about, everyone knows they should be talked about and addressed. And resolved is the important situation, rather than not addressing them at all, to be able to have a critical conversation. I use in the book, a fantastic lesson that I in case study I picked up from the book, creativity, Inc. Now, I know that one of your recent guests on the on the podcast was Pat Patrick. And he talked about how he and my friend Dave Kilby really are great readers and are always just dropping in these books. I’m just wanting to kind of help kind of support that. So creativity, Inc, by Ed Catmull. Now, creativity, Inc, is about the success of Pixar. And Ed Catmull was or still is, the leader of Pixar helped create Pixar. And he’s also now got a lead dual role with Disney Animation. Bottom line here is he says the secret sauce, I used to just think that Pixar was okay, they did Toy Story and a bunch of other cool movies that are that are great to watch and a lot of fun, right? But Pixar animation is way more than just that the the movies are just as kind of a side hustle. But what ad was able to do when he saw such dysfunction, because among the creative, so just substitute the word creatives for board members, his creatives, the producers, the writers, the Imagineers, the graphic artists, the cartoonist, all of those individuals, the technical people, you know, highly protective of turf, didn’t like change, couldn’t get a just couldn’t come together to agree on a price. So as a result, movies were just financial bust because they were spending millions and millions and millions of dollars way over budget taking way too much time to get done. So the fix was to create a collaborative culture. And so that everyone figure it out if they helped each other and solve each other’s problems. They can actually get something done. It’d be much more successful doing that. Now, what are some of the secret nuggets that that creativity by Ed Catmull shared? He said the secret to all that You have to have a safe place. So picture your board boardroom. Is your board room a safe place? Do new board members feel like? It’s okay to ask a question. Is it okay to challenge it? Do all board members feel safe and comfortable in challenging a concept? Maybe there’s a new program you want to offer? Maybe there’s a new expense to be considered. Maybe there’s a staff change? You know, whatever it is, do your board members feel comfortable in participating and actively and openly engaged meeting? Do your board meetings matter? And just let that sink in? Do your board meetings? Are they do they start at a time certain and ended a time certain? And to hack with any kind of robust conversation or engagement? Nope, it’s item 1-234-567-8910. And we’re done. See you next time. Are your board meetings, think about your who you own your board, typically, the most active and most engaged and most influential leaders in a community? Right? I mean, that’s kind of the the blueprint that I see that every single chamber wants?

Well, probably every single one of your board members has how many other activities they could have on their calendar, at the same time of your regular board meeting many probably blocks, right? Well, they’re making a choice, they’re making a choice? are they choosing to come prepared to your board meeting? Or are they looking forward to coming to your board meeting, because they know the board meeting itself is going to be stimulating the Listen, this is so critical. Chamber Champions, just just pay attention right now, go old school, get a pen and write this down on a piece of paper for having, say, chamber board members or volunteers, you’ve got to understand that volunteers get involved. Because they want to have an impact. They want to make a difference, it doesn’t matter if it’s a chamber board. Or if it’s a local nonprofit, dealing with a cause it’s special to them. Let me repeat that board members sign up, say yes to being recruited to serve on your board, because they feel like they’re gonna have a chance to make a difference and have an impact underscored that again. So if they’re coming to meetings, and they don’t think that’s gonna happen, you know, they have zero expectation for their fact is coming in, they’re wasting their time, and you want to get a disengaged board member, just show them that their time at a board meeting is wasted. That’s that I mean, that’s just like a circle with a big X right through the middle of it. You know, don’t waste time. So make your meetings matter we reorganize, reorganize your agenda. If you need to allow an extra extra few minutes to allow for discussion, allow for discussion. Don’t worry about meetings, wanting to hurry up and get back to work or excuse me, board members wanting to hurry up and get back to work. If the meeting is worth their time. If they feel like their opinion. They have a chance to share their opinion, get their questions answered. And it’s all their opinion is being considered. It might not be approved or agreed upon, but it’s being considered. They feel like and they feel like they’re having an impact. It will be worth time to stay. And you know what, it will be worth their time to come a little bit early. So they’re not just sliding in at the last minute. It 30 seconds before the start of the meeting. It might come a little early for Hey, how about an extra cup of coffee? And oh, by the way, what happens if board meetings, board members random are coming a little bit early, before meeting staying a little bit after a meeting is over? What important thing happens? What happens?

Brandon Burton 29:31
You build more of a team unity amongst the board?

Hardy Smith 29:35
Absolutely. There’s time for social interaction. And the board they may all know each other then they all do business with each other. Their their their kids all go to school they all play on the same team have the same teachers worship in the same place right. But in the board setting. They have so important they have a chance for socialization That Reince forces, okay, this is gonna be a safe place. I’m with people I have a positive relationship with, I enjoy being around, make meetings matter, and you will have a board that is fully engaged in a very positive way.

Brandon Burton 30:22
I love that great advice. There is another thing I wanted to have you touch on before we start to wrap up. And that is, you know, in the chamber world today, there’s a lot of focus on diversity, equity and inclusion. And a lot of times, chambers will look to their board and say we need to have people of a certain type represented on the board to show that we serve you know, all these different types of people and groups of people and, and whatnot. Sure, share with us your thoughts about going about to create diversity on the board, maybe some do’s and don’ts are things to be aware of. Before we start wrapping things up,

Hardy Smith 31:08
absolutely. Such an important question, such an important priority in today’s in today’s world. And let me let me share, I am not an expert on diversity. I’m a little bit better about inclusion. Big, big difference there. But you’ve got to have the D plus the I what I did and recognizing the problem that needs help. You know, here’s some important research, unfortunately. Well, fortunately, on the positive good news, bad news. So the good news his chambers included. But the good news is most nonprofits in this country do have a state positive statement about wanting to have increased diversity within their organization, specifically within their boards. That’s the good news. The bad news is the research shows very few organizations have actually made any progress taking any action at all, which is even worse. The reason why and not to not define blame here not to point fingers of fault. It’s because so many people have well intentioned individuals don’t know how. What I did was in the book, I relied on two highly qualified experts on diversity and inclusion. And Dr. Shirley Davis, world renowned expert, I interviewed and have some tremendous how to advice. And also Jim Taylor, who is the vice president for leadership development, with BoardSource. Now I will share with you both individuals are persons of color. And they are willing to share their personal experiences on being recruited strictly for board service, strictly because they’re persons of color. And that’s it, no consideration of qualifications of which they’re tremendously qualified. And that presents a huge mistake. So that’s an entire topic all in its own Brandon, I would highly recommend paying close attention to that particular I’ve devoted an entire chapter on how to achieve diversity and inclusion in the book. Thank you for asking about that.

Brandon Burton 33:36
Absolutely. I think it’s such an important topic. And before we all just, you know, go crazy and wild trying to recruit a variety of diversity on our boards. Let’s make sure we’re we’re doing it in a thoughtful way a meaningful way that’s really going to keep all of the board members engaged especially those you’re trying to bring on a maybe diverse backgrounds. But Hardy before we wrap up here I wanted to ask you what might be one tip or action items that a chamber champion could take to help elevate their organization up to the next level.

Action Item/Tip for Chamber Champions

Hardy Smith 34:11
Brandon this is this is probably probably one of my favorite tips. So Chamber Champions, here you go. Here’s the secret sauce. This is what you’ve been waiting for Pay Attention please be intentional about board relationships. And start that intentionality with recruiting board members with purpose and process established and we’ve talked about this establish clarity on expectations, yours and theirs and make sure your your Magic Cup and the matching up in the middle for the the sweet spot and that those are the expectations that are going to get there are going to happen. And don’t assume don’t assume that the direction of your board one year is the same is it’s going to be the next year or in future years. So be intentional about board relationships.

Brandon Burton 35:09
That is a great tip hopefully everybody if you didn’t have a chance to write it down hit the backup button on your your podcast player and listen again, it committed to memory. Hardy what would be? Well, I like to ask everyone I have on the podcast this question as we all like to look to the future and try to be prepared. How do you see the future of chambers and their purpose going forward?

Future of Chambers

Hardy Smith 35:32
Wow, what a you know, that’s that you could just say what a loaded question but yeah, you know, being clairvoyant. Okay. All here. Here’s what I see. Chambers, like all organizations are challenged with staying relevant. Another book reference for you, a good speaker, colleague, consultant, colleague of mine is Mary bars, who wrote 10 years ago, race for relevance. She’s just done an update 10 year anniversary edition of rate relevance, and it’s about associations. Huge, huge reference throughout the book to chambers of commerce, and nonprofits as well. But chambers, again, like all over innovations, have got to be able to adapt to find new ways to implement the three key concept that chambers use, you know, a being that converter, catalyst and champion. So the way that you approached that concept 50 years ago, or 100 years ago, if you’ve paid attention to Chris meads, excellent book, Magicians of Mainstreet fabulous, fabulous book about about the history of chambers of Commerce’s across the United States, you’ll know that change and challenge has been a part of chamber world from the very beginning. So what we’re experiencing now what we’re likely to, or what we will experience going forward into the future. It’s no different. It’s just coming from a different place. So there’s always going to be change and challenge. And chambers have got to be able to adapt my solution, my How To, to be able to get the tool for adapting is benefit from a fully engaged board that’s used as a high value asset. And stop the nonprofit board blame game, we’ll show you how to do that.

Brandon Burton 37:48
I love that view. Your board is a high valuable asset that they really are. So don’t don’t take advantage of it. But Hardy I am so happy to have you on the podcast. Today I’d like to give you an opportunity to share any contact information with the with Chamber Champions listening, let them know where they can find the book. Anything you want to put out there as we wrap up.

Connect with Hardy Smith

Hardy Smith 38:11
Well, thank you so much, Brandon and Chamber Champions. Thank you for listening to this podcast. Thank you for listening to all of the Chamber Chat Podcast, you know what a great source of information that you have. And thank you for what you do in your communities across the country. I’m easy to find HardySmith.com is my website. Okay, find a book on the links to Amazon and Barnes and Noble and all those links are there in the website at Hardy smith.com I’d certainly welcome hearing from Chamber Champions who have maybe a particular issue they’d like to have some pop and advice on email me Hardy@HardySmith.com. I certainly welcome connecting on LinkedIn and Twitter as well. So that I look forward to continuing the conversation with chamber professionals. Thank you.

Brandon Burton 39:11
Absolutely. And I’ll I’ll get all the contact information with links to your social media and book links and everything in our show notes for this episode, which will be found at chamberchatpodcast.com/episode 163. But Hardy has been a pleasure having you with us today on Chamber Chat Podcast bringing a lot of value and really I’d love for everybody to pick up a copy of his book and read it because it really will save you a lot of frustration. And thanks a lot Hardy.

Hardy Smith 39:41
Thank you, Brandon. Thank you.

Brandon Burton 39:42
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Lessons Learned to Start 2022

Estimated reading time: 10 minutes, 30 seconds.

As we are starting a new year, we are still in the midst of this worldwide COVID pandemic. I thought it would be helpful to share some tips in the written form to help you shortcut the work at your Chamber by sharing some lessons learned over the past 3 years of producing the Chamber Chat Podcast.

What Have We Learned?

Many Chambers are operating with fewer staff at the moment. Many have shifted what their working environment looks like by allowing for more work from home opportunities. Depending on where you are located, there may still be restrictions on the number of people who can gather at events. Each of these challenges present unique obstacles but I believe they also provide opportunities for growth.

Robert Kiyosaki, author of Rich Dad, Poor Dad, states that “Inside every problem lies an opportunity”.

Chambers have had to take a strong look at their value propositions and mission statements. As Chambers have done this, they have found ways to prove and show their relevance more than ever.

I have now been working in the Chamber world for over 15 years in the Chamber publishing space and 3 years with Chamber Chat Podcast. Over this time, I have learned a lot about what Chambers do, how they operate, the impact Chambers have in their communities, and I have also learned that many people in any given community don’t even know that their local Chamber exists or have any clue as to what a Chamber of Commerce does. I am working on a new project that will address this, so stay tuned for more details to come on this front soon.

2019 Lesson Highlights

At the end of each year while producing Chamber Chat Podcast, I have recorded a summary episode that highlights some of the key lessons that I learned that year that relates to the Chamber industry.

In 2019, some of the key lessons were:

A Chamber can and should be much more than a networking business community.
The importance of great community partnerships.
The need for talent & workforce development.
The importance of staying true to your strategic plan.
The future is bright for Chambers that stay relevant.

You can access this episode and it’s show notes and the other lessons learned at chamberchatpodcast.com/episode50.

2020 Lesson Highlights

In 2020, as the pandemic hit and Chambers were stressed in new and complicated ways. As a result, several new lessons rose up to the top. In fact, I covered 20 lessons learned in 2020 for that year’s summary episode. Some of those key lessons were:

Trim the fat by burning sacred cows.
Chambers need to be agile to make quick pivots.
Set aside reserves in your budget.
We learned how to go virtual and how to use new digital tools.
Many Chambers saw podcasting as a way to stay connected with their members and community.
Probably the number 1 lesson from 2020 was the need to be flexible!

Lessons from 2021

As the “new normal” sets in, additional lessons need to be applied, which should help to sustain Chambers moving forward. Because of the timely relevance to these lessons, I will expand more than just a few highlighted bullet points. You can also access my lessons from 2021 at chamberchatpodcast.com/episode153.

Finance & Membership Models

Many membership organizations have had to really evaluate their overall structure. Everything from finances to membership models to strategic partnerships were on the table for discussion to keep their organizations in operation and to provide the needed service and value to their members. Some organizations saw the value in merging with another similarly aligned organization, possibly a tourism or economic development organization. Some Chambers even came together to create more of a county-wide or regional organization. There is value and strength in coming together. However, going back to one of the lessons from 2019, a Chamber must stay true to their strategic plan.

Some Chambers did not see the need to merge with another organization but they saw the need to create a triage for their business community whether or not a business was currently a dues paying member of their Chamber. As recovery from the pandemic started to pick up steam, some Chambers saw value in creating a free membership offering. I like the idea of how these Chambers are setting up these freemium models, but I would personally like to see the data from this model being implemented at other Chambers before applying it to my own.

In my opinion, Chambers are all about advancing their communities. This is accomplished through advocacy, networking, and connecting the right individuals for a stronger business environment. Doing these things will help to strengthen all areas of their community.

Online Communities

So, when more people are less involved in their communities, how does a Chamber go about doing this great work?

Well, one answer might be through creating strong online communities as a starting point. Online communities might serve as an on ramp to get others involved which can then transition into more in-person relationships. In today’s world, a Chamber would be doing a disservice to themselves if they are not utilizing the power and leverage of an online community.

Keep in mind that with many generations living and working in your community, they each prefer different methods of communication. Some really like in person events. Some will never attend an event but they will engage and support the Chamber in big ways through their screens.

Join the Chamber Chat Champions Facebook group to learn from others and share your thoughts on topics covered on the Chamber Chat Podcast.

Online communities can be set up on platforms such as Facebook. My word of caution is that you create a strategic plan for your online community BEFORE you launch it. This will help you in creating community guidelines and will guide you in the creation and frequency of content. This strategic plan should also create a road map for the member experience.

Preparing for the Future

Futureproofing is the next lesson that I will address. When COVID first reared its head, almost everyone caught off guard. Consumers made panic purchases of obscene amounts of toilet paper, business owners who were solely brick and mortar didn’t know if or when they would be allowed to open their doors again. Chambers adapted quickly to keep their business community apprised of government mandates and regulations, but at the same time were needing to cancel most of their non-dues revenue generators. Chambers were not prepared for this major disruption.

Moving forward, I would encourage Chambers to think and to prepare for worst case scenarios. How will you continue to serve your members if you had to shut down again? How will you bring in revenue if you are unable to gather and if businesses don’t know where their next dollar will come from? This idea of futureproofing can be wrapped in with the previous point of creating a strong plan for an online community. This can allow for you to pivot quickly and to deliver content and information to the people who need it the most.

Your Role as an Influencer

Casey Steinbacher’s e-book “From Relevant to Essential” laid out a great argument that shows why Chambers need to understand their role as influencers in their communities. I would encourage everyone to read this book for the full effect, but in a nutshell, we live in a world that is very different than it was 20 or 30 years ago. The newer generations engage in different ways and they tune into different voices. One of the main points of her book is to urge Chambers to embrace their role as influencers.

We don’t normally think of Chambers as influencers, but why are Chambers so great at conveening people and organizations for a greater cause…because they are influencers. Why do businesses join their local Chamber and ask for input on staffing, marketing, accounting, etc…because they are influencers.

Most Chambers turn to social media to flex their influence muscle. I find that many people turn to social media to tune out and they are not usually in the mindset to engage with Chamber content as it comes across their feed. Podcasts however, offer a much more intimate way to share information, and establish or reinforce your influence in the community.

Strategic Partnerships

This year as I did the Chamber of the Year Finalist interviews, each Chamber talked about their response to the COVID pandemic. Almost every Chamber shared how they created a strategic partnership with either their local Small Business Association, local banks, or other similar organizations to help distribute financial resources and relief to the businesses in their communities.

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These types of partnerships can open doors to new services and opportunities. These opportunities will help Chambers better serve their business community going forward.

Diversity, Equity & Inclusion

We have seen people and organizations of all types recognize the need for more focus and attention on diversity, equity and inclusion. Unfortunately it took the murder of George Floyd for the many of the racial injustices to rise to a higher level of importance. On the positive side, this extra focus on racial equity also allowed for a greater focus on other areas of diversity. It opened our minds to new ideas on how to be more inclusive to people who have traditionally been left out of our organizations for a variety of reasons. We also realized the need to provide more equitable opportunities for everyone in our communities. I believe we still have a long way to go with diversity, equity and inclusion, but we are going in the right direction.

Horseshoes vs. Chess

Anyone who listens to the Chamber Chat Podcast on a regular basis will know how much I love Dave Adkisson’s book “Horseshoes vs. Chess”. This book is what I describe as the best portrayal of what a Chamber of Commerce is and should be as well as what a Chamber Exec is and should be.

We are often asked what Chambers of Commerce do. Horseshoes vs. Chess helps to answer that question in a way that ordinary (non-Chamber) people can understand.

In the book, Dave shares an analogy about Chamber work compared to the games of horseshoes and chess. Some people look at Chamber work the same way they look at a game of horseshoes at a picnic. You don’t have to know much about the game, you can just toss your horseshoes towards your stake and if you get close you get a point.

Dave shares how Chamber work is really much more like a game of chess. You have different pieces that can do different things and you need to understand the role of each piece. One piece may be education. Another piece might be workforce development, and another tourism, and another economic development, etc. The idea is that you must know what each piece is capable of doing while also understanding that you can’t move all of the pieces at the same time. I think this analogy is perfect and it should resonate with most Chamber professionals.

Make Pivots

The final lesson that I will share from 2021 is that I need to make some pivots. I am coming up on the third anniversary of Chamber Chat Podcast. While I still plan to continue with the podcast, I do have some other new and exciting opportunities and projects that I am working on that I hope to reveal very soon. Hopefully you and your Chamber have noticed areas where you can grow and improve as well. In the end, it is about providing the best value and the highest level of service possible.

I wish you all a very successful 2022. I am sure it will be full of new lessons that will help us move closer to our potential. Keep up the great work!

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.

Also, 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.

Creating a Vision with Pat Patrick

Below is an auto-generated transcription of my conversation with Pat Patrick. 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.

Introduction

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

Voiceover Talent 0:14
And now your host he wants to support your health by encouraging you to go for a 30 minute walk outdoors. He’s my dad Brandon Burton.

Brandon Burton 0:23
Hello, Chamber Champions. Welcome to the Chamber Chat Podcast. I’m your host, Brandon Burton, and it is my goal 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 Pat Patrick. Pat worked in executive marketing roles and advertising capacities for Safeway stores, Tyson Foods and Foster Farms poultry company and I see marketing systems overseeing multi million dollar budgets and multiple advertising agencies over his career. Pat came to the Lodi Chamber in California in 2001, where he was appointed the chambers president and CEO. Pat has been part of the success of Lodi wine country through establishing international access to Central America and China for Lodi wine exports and major strategy was leading the sponsor leading and sponsoring trips abroad for Lodi ventures and for foreign buyers to visit Lodi. He was also the author and developer of vision 2020 a catalytic economic look forward the Lodi community which has positioned Lodi for early success in the new decade. Pat has and is today active in volunteer roles, such as several local not for profit boards, including the Adventist Health Lodi Memorial Hospital, reaching outside of both Lodi both regionally and nationally in the chamber industry. Pat has served as past president of the Northern California Chamber association was asked to join two national fellowships one developing healthy communities and the other focusing on workforce development, and 2017. He was elected by his peers to be the board chair of WAC. In 2020, he was selected to receive the excellence and leadership award the organization’s highest honor. Pat is a graduate from the University of Texas and the Institute of organizational management. At Pat, I am happy to have you with me today here on chamber chat podcast. I’d love for you to take a moment to say hello to all the chamber champions who are out there listening and share something interesting about yourself so we can get to know you a little bit better.

Something Interesting About Pat

Pat Patrick 3:28
Well, thank you, Brandon. It is my honor to be on here. I think you’ve done a couple of 100 of these and so but I’m just honored to be included. I’m excited to share with my fellow chamber professionals, some of the success that has come to the Lodi chamber of commerce with a great program. And something interesting about me. Well, my best friend’s dog, his name is Tucker. I don’t know. I think I sent you a picture of Tucker. Yeah. So if the people can see Tucker then they’ll know Hey, I’m an okay guy. Because that dog is great looking dog and he’s my best friend back. He’s here. He comes to the office. He’s He’s our greeter

Brandon Burton 4:20
the chamber mascot there. Hey, man. That’s awesome. Oh, yeah, I’ll have to put a picture of Tucker in our show notes so people can log on and see that and we’re getting close to a couple 100 episodes. This is actually 158 But we’re getting up there. We’re racking them up. So met with a lot of great chamber people. So it glad to add you to the mix. Yeah. So before we get into our discussion today, I’d love for you to take a moment to tell us a little bit more about the Lodi chamber kind of the the the size the scope of your chambers. staph budget, that sort of thing to kind of set the table for our discussion.

About the Lodi Chamber

Pat Patrick 5:04
Sure. We are in 2022. Next year we will be 99 years old. Formed in 1923. And at that time probably our membership was made up of a lot of farmers because we are surrounded by something called the Hanford sandy loam. That’s not my description, but that’s the name of the dirt around us, which is very, very rich and has a long history of growing great things. Today there’s 100,000 acres of wine grapes that surround Lodi but I as a wine region, and with the home of Robert Mondavi, right, he was he grew up here is quarterback on the high school football team. And he worked in his family’s vineyards. And he when he’s he went to France to you know, learn his winemaking craft and then came back and put in a very large production facility in Woodbridge, which is a suburb of Lodi. Lodi is a town of 68,000 people. Okay, so we’re not, we’re not big at all. The chamber has 700 members, and we had a staff of seven prior to the pandemic. And since then, we’ve been operating on three and a half staff and we’re busy people. And so we have we are coming back with that, you know, pretty good bank balance in the bank right now. Because we cut a lot and so our membership stayed with us. We couldn’t do any of our events. We have a couple of large revenue producing events first those were gone. But we are coming back strong. It is good to hear Yeah, we got a good ambitious 2020 to play.

Brandon Burton 7:14
Good deal. So and I know we’ll we’ll get into that with our topic for the we’ve settled on for this episode is which is creating a vision. And specifically you guys have what’s called vision 2020 And we’ll have you share some of the details of that as soon as I get back from this quick break.

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Topic-Creating a Vision

All right, Pat we are back. As I mentioned before the break we were talking about creating vision and specifically around your Vision 2020 that you helped to author for the Lodi chamber there in a nutshell what is Vision 2020.

Pat Patrick 10:02
In a nutshell, vision 2020 is an act was an economic look forward. It started in 2014 an economic look forward for our community. We identified five major areas of great challenge for Lodi, but they also offered great promise for lota. And so as I told people, we get to decide which one that’s going to. You’re going to be for Lodi and those were Workforce Development how to you know, get the young people of today ready for the jobs that they’ll need tomorrow. And then our own communities economic competitiveness. Lodi was never has never been marketed as a place to come and do business. And we are 90 miles east of Silicon Valley, which was probably another at that time, the number one place for job creation in the United States, right. And then we had business and community health. We wanted to make sure businesses healthy and their number one asset is their people. And so we joined arms with the hospital and and some other health care professionals to create a whole plan to get Lodi healthier. And then we looked at the livability of Lodi because today we have 90 wineries. And this close to some major population centers we develop the tourism industry. But tourism was the other was the last area that we looked at. And we just need to bring more people to Lodi and the livability aspect which I skipped over was one of those people that we need in our community to grow our community. What do they think the livability is like Ilona, and so we’re concerned at that from a tourist standpoint, from a job creator standpoint, and then for young families to work in those new jobs.

Brandon Burton 12:24
I think those five points the workforce development, economic competitiveness, business and community health, livability and tourism are things that probably most chamber champions listening can kind of look internally at their organization and say, how do we measure up in these different categories? Where do we need to bulk up? Where do we need to shift some some focus to make their communities stronger in these different areas. So as we talk, I’m sure you’ll highlight some of the things like you have with the wineries and stuff that are very specific to Lodi, but for those listening, you all have, you know specific things for your communities as well that make you attractive and make people or that can make people want to live and work and visit and do all sorts of things in your community. So I’d encourage everyone to pay attention to those things in your own community as we go about our discussion today. But how, how is the division created? Kind of how you know who was involved with the with the creation of it?

Pat Patrick 13:34
Um, well, it’ll be fires often start from little sparks, right. And so I am a member of WAC, which was outlined in the introduction. And the president of that organization is a fellow by the name of Dave Kilby. And so Dave does a good job, and helping executives grow. Chamber executives grow. He’s a reader. I’m a reader. He has suggested some really great books to me over the years, right. And a couple of those really changed my life in terms of how I viewed my job, and here at the chamber, and what I’m really responsible for in this seat as president and CEO of the community Chamber of Commerce. And so it got to be when I looked in the mirror in the morning, here, it was, it was a challenge. I started to challenge and so the book that really got me was a book called The Coming Jobs War. Again, it was written in like 2012, but I think it’s very still very good and applicable for today. But it changed my life. It’s written by Jim Clifton. Jim Clifton is the CEO of the he’s the CEO of the Gallup Corporation, I’m sorry. Okay, who who does a lot of polling, obviously, not just political polling, but he polls on everything in the human endeavor that we go through. And he does. So in about 150 different countries, they have offices in 75 around the world. So he knows what’s on top of mine on people’s heads. And it says, In the number one thing was jobs, what happens if I lose my job in this world right now? What happens if I can’t get a job that I want, or, you know, 25% of the world’s population is without a job. And that’s still true today. So it’s a it’s problematic. So. And he talked a lot about the influences on a community. And it just changed me, I, I saw some challenges that we had in Lodi, and no one really addressing the community, you know, your city does a general plan, which identifies where to put the housing, where to put the industry where to put the commercial, but they don’t really plan that much on the economic growth, the security of that, because without that, you don’t have a good community at all. And so we, we, you know, I took that on, because we had health challenges, too, in the county where we live in California, one out of every two people are either pre diabetic or diabetic. That’s a lot of money that, you know, that the workforce has to put in to, you know, towards that element alone. So we got a good response from our larger employers, we came out with programs to help their people get healthier. That’s what one of those five areas was about in the workforce development, the retiring baby boomers, the younger people coming in, are they prepared to work with the millennial generation, there are some challenges. And so we see that and we wanted to have some frank conversations with our school district to make sure that we were preparing kids for the workplace, not only on hard knowledge, skills, but soft skills as well. And so I just sort of lit myself on fire.

And started talking to I went around groups and pushing this concept 2020, I had a population pyramid, which is one tool that I would recommend to any chamber commerce professional. It’s a bar graph that shows the population and how it is arrayed in your community, population pyramid, and ours, what I mean, there’s 1000 things that that one graph can tell you. And it makes you aware of the changes that are coming over the next 10 years in your community population wise. Right now, we see a lot of shifts coming in. So how does that impact your community? How do you change your community to or prepare your community whether you know for what’s coming? And so we I would go out and talk to service clubs, I got on the stage at the community theater with about 900 people, and I just wanted people to get close to me. So the what was burning inside me would catch them on fire too. Because what vision 2020 needed was about 70 volunteers, leaders and influencers to pick up this mantle and start charging and that’s what we did. We put about 15 people in each one of those five areas. We call them that vision action team. Okay, kind of goes with Lodi right wine. So it wasn’t the chamber. I always envisioned the chamber being on top of a mountain kind of kicking over some big rocks and hoping that a landslide would start when when the chamber rocks would hit the healthcare rock and in the education rock and it would start to roll down. And so it it quickly became bigger than the chamber but the chamber had the responsibility to drive it. And that meant the board I tried to put as many leaders and influencers on my board as possible. We only had a board of 12. Today we have a board of 15. But in those days, we had a board of 12. And the best business people in Lodi is what the goal is. I could talk about how we do that to the nominating committee, which is valuable for chamber execs. But what we did was we, we built the board drove it in five areas. So we put two board members on each one. And so they were in charge of running their that their vision action team. And if it was tourism, we had the leaders and tourism in our community on that committee. If it was workforce development, we had the career tech people from the high school we had the community college, we had employers, from industry and from business, all kinds of business sectors. And health, we had a bunch of health professionals, they’re trying to work on this big problem about the diabetes, and the health of our community, the health of our business community. Very important. So you kind of get the idea. We had 70 people from the community, top people, the superintendent of schools, a CEO of the hospital, and they brought some of their folks. We had this we had city government, their city council people even had county supervisors want to sit in because they heard about this. I had one county supervisor say, Well, can you come do this for the county?

No, I can’t. There’s only one of me. But we wrote a 43 page booklet with color photographs and graphs and things to back up everything that we were trying to the condition that our community was in where we wanted to go and how we thought we were going to get there. So each of these five vats, the people, they started with a vision statement, they created a vision statement for tourism, created a vision statement for workforce development and so on. What will this look like? What will tourism look like in Madang? In 2020? That was the question, what will it look like? Right, and so they wrote a vision statement of what that would be. And then the next thing they had to come up with once they had the vision statement was what are the strategies that we have to employ to make that vision come to pass? And then once you get the strategies, strategy, number one, number two, number three, what are the action steps over the next five years because this was 2014, to get us to 2020 to achieve our vision. So vision flowed into the strategies. And the strategies were made up of action steps that were on a timetable. lead organizations lead people were identified to make sure that that thing kept moving forward, that actions do

Brandon Burton 23:29
I love that. I love the idea of these bats to be able to have these or these committees to over these specific segments have the vision to three that vision, the strategies, the action plan and see these things through to you know, like you said over a five year thing, so I assume the people that are involved with these vats, it was a was it a five year commitment to be on one of these committees. Is that how I was approached Okay. Very good.

Pat Patrick 23:57
As some people you know, drop out some new ones. Come on. So, yeah, so a lot of great things happen. We have a huge today we have a huge biking community bicycle. It was enough we want to have one stage I guess you could say we had two people in our livability that and they formed bike Lodi and now bike Lodi has done fantastic things. I mean, we have bike trails that go from downtown now all the way out in all directions. We didn’t have that before. We didn’t have tourism wayfinding signs before we got those put up. These are examples of the action steps to get things done right. And so great things just sort of organically came out. And it worked. It worked.

Brandon Burton 25:05
So now here we are, as we record this, or at the end of 2021. This will be releasing beginning of 2022. But you guys have been able to see this vision unfold. How do you vision out? You know, the next five years? Let’s say, I have is that looking for Lodi? And are you continuing the same type of structure, same type of model or what? What’s your thoughts and plans going forward?

Pat Patrick 25:33
Okay, good question. We, there were a total of 55 action steps that were created for those five. That’s right. And we achieved 38 of them, which is quite a few. And some of the ideas were just a bridge too far. And some of them weren’t, didn’t turn out to be a good idea at all. And so what we did was we wanted to keep an effort going, but the main effort, what changed in our world was businesses started coming over the hill, there’s been an exodus from the Bay Area, Sacramento has really prospered from that. And again, load I really hadn’t been marketed. And so we we created a completely new website. Not a chamber website, but what I call an attraction website. Yeah. And it’s called grow in Lodi, very simple, you can go to it grow in lodi.com. And you’ll see a lot of information about Lodi from what, what the living is about here, what the climate is about, what, what’s to do here. testimonies from business owners who were doing business in the San Francisco Bay Area, and they came over to Lodi and started or renewed their business and what has been their experience and so it’s it’s been catching on slowly but good. We have one of the fastest growing businesses the fastest. Certainly the fastest growing business in Lodi, and one from Sunnyvale is a business called Cepheus. Their molecular diagnostic company that bought out a supplier here that supplied them with a key product. And long story short, they bought that company 38 employees today they’re at 750. Next year, there’ll be a 2500. Wow, molecular diagnostic and healthcare right now is head of premium. They went from one small building to now four very large buildings and made the made the step to bring their research and development over here. So that’s huge for a small town. And so they’re growing in Lodi, and we’re using them as sort of a bell cow to bring other people over, because they’ve had some great success here. And they’re big proponents, they love it here. And so there’s room for more. And so that grow in Lodi, today’s Board is saying okay, what’s next? We really liked what vision 2020 did. How about a vision 2030 And I couldn’t agree more. Yeah. I agree more. And so we’re, we’re in the very early planning stages of that. I’ve got an excited board. And that is so key to any success that a chamber executive at a chamber could have is to get the right people on the bus and sitting in the right seat. That’s right. Yeah.

Brandon Burton 29:01
And I think a big part of that is these bats he talked about that’s putting the right people in the right seats that are excited and know about what the opportunities are in these different segments that are specific and relevant to Lodi you know, in our conversation but you get get those people in the right seats, they are able to create that vision, bring it back together create the synergy it’s just it’s a great model that you guys have gone through and and you’ve done well explaining it to because I can see all the different intricacies you know that have gone into this.

Pat Patrick 29:36
Right. Yeah, and some of the serendipities are the real the relationships that form you know, because here’s the school district in their silo so to speak, you know, fighting the battles that they fight working every day hard, everybody’s busy. And then here’s city government over here and they’re doing their thing and then here’s, you know, health care over here. They’re doing their thing. And here’s the Chamber of Commerce trying to help everybody out in all directions. And so, hey, what if we all got into the same silo? Right? Instead of all working, so, you know, making time to align ourselves with each other over the big community, the things that are really driving to unity, and, and their little rolling, or their big rolling and working together. And that is, that has been great. And I think that’s really one of the things that is, in the My current board about wanting to, hey, let’s do that vision. 2030. Right, because we know we’re not where we want to be yet. Yeah.

Brandon Burton 30:49
So as we start wrapping things up here, I wanted to ask you, for the listeners, what would be maybe a tip or an action item that you would encourage them to do to help, you know, elevate their chamber up to the next level?

Action Item/Tip for Chamber Champions

Pat Patrick 31:03
Yeah. Well, I mentioned reading, it’s a funny thing, you know, you’re gonna watch a video or you can listen to something of book on tape or something. Yeah. And they’re great. But, you know, set a goal, if you’re a leader, set a goal to read a book a month. And usually books around 200 pages long. And so that’s like 10 pages a night, put up a nightstand, and then go to sleep 10 pages, you know, but pick the book, and ask some of the ask some of the CEOs that you look up to for some both times that can help that can help a person out in their leadership role, their community role there, you know, the, the Chamber of Commerce, there’s some great ones out there. One of them’s called Make it Happen. That was one of the first ones that I got. And what happens When the Boomers Bail was very intellectually about the changing indite. In the demographics as the seniors, the baby boomers move out of the work force, and the millennials coming in the changes, you know, dramatic. So it changes you, it makes you smarter, and it also touches something inside you. Chamber executives have, I think, the best job in the community, they really do. Yeah, because you’re working for some great people, working for all the different businesses in your community that create the jobs and those employees, buy homes, make loans through the bank, create property tax, create sales tax, and it makes the community go around. I really believe really truly and believe that you don’t see a good community without a very robust active business community. Face it, we make the we make the community work. If you can get it better for business, you’ll get it better for the community

Brandon Burton 33:31
very too. And I appreciate you sharing those, those book references too. So we’ll have those in the show notes that people can look up and if they wanted to check out one of those books make it happen or what happens in the boomers Dale and you mentioned earlier the Coming Jobs War as well. So good options.

Pat Patrick 33:50
Those are just three. Yeah, if anybody wants to get in contact with me or you can go to the to the chamber website, Lodi chamber comm click on grow in Lodi, and you’ll see just a little introduction to vision 2020. Not the whole thing. But I could supply them with other information. Somebody wants to go further. I knew, I know, chambers do a lot of community type plans. But I never came across one that was an economic look forward. Because that really gets to the heart of so many issues. It does.

Brandon Burton 34:29
Right And speaking of looking forward as we look forward to the future of chambers of commerce in general. And how do you see the future of chambers and their purpose going forward?

Future of Chambers

Pat Patrick 34:40
We only become more and more important in the information age if we still refer to ourselves as being in the information age. There’s so much out there. And we know that a lot of it can’t be trusted, or it’s always going to have a leftward spin or around With spin, where is where’s truth? Versus truth? A chamber is not Republican, it’s not Democrat. It’s not red, it’s not blue. It’s, it’s it’s the community. It’s about the future. That’s where That’s where a chamber is roll is. And it, it creates opportunity did, I think a podcast from chambers, um, we we started down that path. But then the board sort of took us in a new way. And so I’ve got all the equipment that I’m working because I think, to be the same middle, right, the same middle, on on community issues, you’re gonna tackle probably anything that’s happening in Washington, DC, or, in my case, even Sacramento, as low as a small community, but in that community, you know, if your newspapers are going out, or they’re getting thinner, now’s a good time to start, I think, bringing two people together, like point counterpoint. Yeah. And and do it very respectful of each other. And do it with information, not necessarily what your opinion is, but what you know, to be the facts on this issue, and the other person who may be and have an intellectual conversation. And I think that can be very, very valuable. And it they, I don’t know where it would go. But I think it would go in ways start on the business platform approach. But I think it could go very deeper into things like homelessness as I can. Yeah, every community’s got that challenge. And, hey, there’s the smartest people I know, are business owners, right? Very successful business owners. What do they think? How can they think out of the box, and help the community get a program?

Brandon Burton 37:11
I love that if if the purpose of a chamber is to help build stronger communities, you need to be that go to resource of trusted information, that’s that sane center to be able to bring both sides together and really get behind issues to drive progress forward. So I think you hit the nail on the head

Pat Patrick 37:29
is that we call ourselves a three C chamber. I don’t know if you’ve heard that before. Yeah, yeah. A catalyst for business growth, a convener of leaders and influencers, for positive change, but always to be seen as a champion for the community, three C’s catalyst, convener, and champion.

Brandon Burton 37:50
That’s, that’s why I call my audience chamber champions, you know, they that’s one of the essays to draw him in.

Pat Patrick 38:00
And that’s what they need to try to ascribe themselves to the film. Yes.

Brandon Burton 38:05
Well, Pat, before we go, I wanted to give you an opportunity to put any contact information out there for listeners who may want to connect with you and learn more about your vision 2020 and going about creating a vision of their own their chamber, what would be the best way to reach out and connect with you?

Connect with Pat Patrick

Pat Patrick 38:24
Well, I can be reached at PPatrick@LodiChamber.com. And the old fashioned way on a telephone for my direct line is 209-365-4604.

Brandon Burton 38:45
Which is perfect. And I will get that in our show notes for this episode as well. So we’ve got a lot of good stuff in there. We got some book recommendations, we’ve got pets contact info, a pitcher Tucker, hopefully we’ll get in there as well. So go to chamberchatpodcast.com/episode158. And, Pat, it’s been a pleasure having you on here. I really appreciate you carving out some time to visit with me and to talk about this important work that chambers across our country are doing and you guys are doing a great job there in Lodi.

Pat Patrick 39:18
Thank you. Thank you, sir. Enjoy.

Brandon Burton 30:28
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