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Brandon Burton 0:00
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You’re joining us today for a special episode in our 2024 ACCE Chamber of the Year Finalist Series. And our guests for this episode are Chad Warmington and Brent Skarkey. Chad has a rich history with the State Chamber of Oklahoma, where he serves as the President and CEO Since 2020. Under his leadership, the Chamber spearheads pro business advocacy and political affairs on behalf of Oklahoma’s business community. Brent is a long term media personality and communications professional in the in Oklahoma. Brent currently is the Senior Vice President of Communications at the State Chamber. Previously, he worked in local news and sports, but Chad and Brent, I’m excited to have you with us today here on Chamber Chat Podcast. I’d love to give you both an opportunity to say hello to all the Chamber Champions that are out there listening, and to share something interesting about yourselves, so we can get to know you a little bit better. Chad, would you like to take the first stab at it?
Chad Warmington 2:08
Well, I was gonna pull up, pull rank and make Brent go. So
Unknown Speaker 2:11
there you go.
Chad Warmington 2:15
So Brent, you get to go first.
Brent Skarky 2:16
Well, just happy to be here. It’s an honor to be in the running for prestigious award through a very prestigious Association, and we’ve done some great things here at the Oklahoma Chamber, and I’m very proud to be a part of it as the communications guy, and excited to keep the message going. I think we’ve got a lot of momentum here at the Oklahoma chamber, and excited to be a part of it. And something interesting about me. Played so much golf lately, I first have golf elbow for the first time. So some of the olds out there can probably relate to that
Brandon Burton 2:53
golf elbow. Alright, that is so
Chad Warmington 2:59
not interesting. I mean, okay, we’ll go with that. I wish I had something better. Yeah, no, I think, you know, I was just thinking, I mean, was always interesting for me. About Me is living in Oklahoma, and it’s a great state, right? But I’m originally from Michigan, and so I sometimes just kind of Marvel here now, coming up on year, like 27 or 28 of being here, that that Oklahoma is my home. But it’s funny how often it comes up that I’m a non native Oklahoman. And so I’d say the interesting thing is that at some point I’ll get to be, you know, get to be a certified card carrying Oklahoman. I’ve got three Oklahoma born and raised kids, but running the State Chamber of Oklahoma for a Michigan guy is a pretty cool gig, and I’m pretty excited to be here in Oklahoma, and I’m pretty excited about what we’re doing
Brandon Burton 3:48
at the chamber. Yeah, no, I can. I can resonate with that. I’m a born and raised as a California and I’m in Texas now. So took a while for Texas to accept me, but I feel like I’ve been embraced, and then I’m now a Texan, so I understand that it’ll happen. It’ll happen
Chad Warmington 4:05
one of these days. I’ll get, like, a ceremony and a certificate or something that’s right,
Brandon Burton 4:11
a belt buckle and hat has a
Chad Warmington 4:13
That’s right. That’s a great idea. Yeah, maybe we’ll start that. There’s a new chamber program for next year.
Brandon Burton 4:18
There you go. So I’d love for you guys to take a moment to tell us a little bit about the State Chamber of Oklahoma. Give us an idea. Obviously, it’s a State Chamber, so we understand, kind of the you know, the area you cover, but give us an idea of staff, size, budget, scope of work you’re involved with those sort of things to kind of set the table for our discussion today.
Chad Warmington 4:40
Yeah, I’ll jump in on that. And again, happy to be here and excited to talk to you a little bit about the State Chamber of Oklahoma. So when you know, when I’m going around the state talking to local chambers, I always try to, you know, point out kind of where our area of work is. And so for me, what I like to say is, you know, local chambers have such an important. Role in their communities, and they’re doing so many more things that we’re not doing in terms of just community development and the networking that goes on and economic development in a lot of cases. And for the State Chamber of Oklahoma, our field of work is really what we call, what I call 23rd and Lincoln, that’s the cross streets of where our state capital is. And so our focus really is on what happens in that immediate area, either under the dome at the legislature or with the executive branch, in all the executive branch and regulatory agencies. And so for us, you know that that’s kind of our everything, and that’s why it’s so great for us to be able to spend time with local chambers, hearing about those policies that we’re working on and how they’re impacting communities. So this our chamber. When I arrived here in 2020 I had about a solid three weeks before covid hit and and then the world turned upside down. So we’ve had quite a bit of change from the from that time we were a staff about 26 at the time that went down, I think our post covid Low is about 10 or 11 on staff, and now we’re back up to 20. And so you’ve had a, you know, significant turnover in our staff, which has been great. We’ve been able to bring in a lot of really good new people, and it’s been a fun team to be a part of. We’re running around about a $5 million chamber a year and and hoping to, you know, see that grow like I always tell the team, it’s, you know, more money, more mission, more revenue, more opportunity to, you know, to really impact Oklahoma and to help grow and make our mission of making Oklahoma the best place in the in the state or state, we want it to be the best place in the state, best place in the country, to grow a business and So, you know, obviously for us, you know, being a nonprofit doesn’t mean we’re not motivated by that. For us, what motivates is more revenue. We get to do more mission, and that’s what we’re excited about.
Brandon Burton 6:50
Absolutely brand anything you’d like to add to that.
Brent Skarky 6:54
Well, coming from the news background, I always knew the chamber as the voice for business in Oklahoma, and I, my mission coming on board is to make it even more so you’ve got a lot of great local chambers that do a lot of great work with the local communities and furthering business in their communities. But really it is our charge, our mission, to make sure that we are the voice for business throughout the entire state, political times, or, you know, going everywhere, as far as special interest over here and special interest over here, but it really is our goal to be that voice for business, to be some one that speaks up on behalf of the business owners and the companies of Oklahoma, and in turn, grow the Oklahoma business environment to make sure that, like Chad said, The best place in the country to grow, start and relocate a business.
Brandon Burton 7:45
Very good. Well, I know you guys are doing great work there in Oklahoma, and we’ll, we’ll dive into that, some of that work as we format these chamber the year finalist episodes. We really like to focus a majority of the conversation around the the two program synopsis that were included on the chamber year of the year application. So we will dive into that in much more detail as soon as we get back from this quick break.
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All right, we are back from our break. How. I’ve wanted to have you guys kind of introduce what the two programs are at just a high level, and then we can dive into each one individually in more detail. So I don’t know, Brent, would you like to tell us what the what the two programs are,
Brent Skarky 10:16
sure? And I think it is pretty universal for a lot of states and chambers across the country, two big problems for the Oklahoma business community, workforce and taxes. Workforce has been a problem for our state and a lot of others, even before the pandemic, but obviously covid made it a an acute problem for a lot of different business owners and business communities throughout the state, we have done a deep dive into seeing what the real problems are with the workforce chain, and what we can do to transform the pathways, to make sure that Oklahoma has the workforce, not only to grow the state, but to really make sure that our existing companies have the workforce they needed, both the numbers and the trained employees they need to flourish and and grow their businesses, and in turn, grow the economy for the state of Oklahoma, and we’ll get into the specifics of that a little bit later. Then, on the other hand, taxes. Oklahoma has always been fairly competitive when it comes to taxes, but we had been slipping in the last couple of years. We once again did a big research dive into what where Oklahoma stands on the national level, and we found that the news just wasn’t good. So we took a look and how we can change things, and teamed up a lot of very prestigious organizations and very learned organizations when it comes to taxes to make sure that we were on the right track. And I think we’ve got a pretty good plan that we know we can’t implement immediately because change at the state level is never quick and never easy, but we’re making progress, and we continue to push forward. Because I think really when it comes to recruiting new businesses, tax code is a huge thing. Talking about that absolutely.
Brandon Burton 11:54
And Brent, I think you gave a great overview there. Chad, would you like to dive in on the workforce issues and kind of the origin and why that was such an area of importance to really tackle on the chamber level, and to to have this kind of rise to the top as a program to submit on your application. Yeah, well, so when
Chad Warmington 12:15
I got to the chamber again in 2020, for me, I wanted to really focus on being really data driven in terms of what we spent our time on. It’s easy to get, you know, kind of in the bubble of your own building and thinking about the issues that chambers always talk about. But I wanted to know from business leaders what their biggest concerns were, you know, from, not only from our members, but I also wanted to know kind of what business leaders around the state thought, you know, for me, you know, the value proposition what we do is that we’re we’re working on things that are that are headaches to businesses, or that are things that keep them up at night. But if we don’t know what those are, and we’re talking about things that we think they are, it seems like kind of a risky proposition. So for us, we really started out with research, and we went and we asked our members and business leaders around the state, you know, what were the most important things to them, what are the biggest concerns that they had? And so for us, our policy development process starts there every year, every year we do a business leader survey, and that drives our agenda. And when we got so after our first edition of that, we got the results back, and I’ll never forget, we were sitting in our conference room, and workforce was at the top of the top of the issue. It was 62% there wasn’t even a close second in terms of what business leaders were concerned about. And we’re sitting around the table and and I said to the team, well, what, what does this even mean? Like, what do we even have a workforce agenda? And the answer is, we didn’t, and we didn’t know really what it was that we were going to try to go address. And so for us, you know, building a better equipped workforce was a key, you know, issue for business leaders all across the state, because they couldn’t find quality access to the people that needed to grow their businesses, and then, therefore, Oklahoma’s economy wouldn’t grow. And so that kind of started a journey for us, which turned into partner with the governor. We got a big grant from him to go out, and we hired McKinsey, an international consulting firm, to come in and help us diagnose like, what is going on in Oklahoma’s work, workforce ecosystem that’s not working. Why are we not getting the talent that we need? And so spent about six months with them, and really came out of it with some pretty clear ideas on things that we could do to address the challenges that Oklahoma’s workforce, you know, faced. And so it’s been a really great eye opening experience for us to get to always go back to the data, right? We’re tracking our progress. We identified the issue. We’re tracking our progress on are we moving the needle on it? And I think that’s the way we’re going to continue to run as long as we’re here. I want to always make sure that we’re we’re focused on things that really matter to businesses, and that’s how we got that’s how we got started in the workforce. Space, yeah, I’d
Brandon Burton 15:01
say 62% on that feedback of the surveys that workforce really matters. And like you said, addressing workforce is going to affect the overall economy throughout the state. So I think that it becomes obvious, as you’re stating, that this is a an area of focus, that the Chamber needs to be involved with Brent, as far as the execution of this goes, what what’s been at some of the implementation tactics being used? Well, I
Brent Skarky 15:27
you take that data, data, and you look at it, and you try to figure out what was going on. And chance told this story a million times that we had a an initial plan of the workforce pipelines drawn up by some of our researchers, and they put together a chart. We call it our spaghetti chart because it looks like a plate of spaghetti. The pathway is just going all over the place. And this organization reporting to that organization, but they don’t go through this organization, and they don’t communicate with this organization. A lot of great workforce related programs going on, the state workforce related offices throughout the state that are doing great things, but they weren’t coordinated. They weren’t talking to each other. And we looked to other states to see how they did it, and we saw that there was a plan to coordinate everything going through a centralized place. We called it the Oklahoma Workforce Commission. We drew up legislation that would implement that, but we wanted a body that had autonomy to make decisions on how to best coordinate pathways for workforce to get optimum number of people trained, to get optimum number of people into the workforce, and to get those high level jobs, or those high level skills that the Oklahoma workforce needs to flourish and grow. So we worked with legislators, we work with private businesses to develop a plan that ultimately was the Oklahoma Workforce Commission, which needed legislation, but it also needed help from the governor’s office to implement as well. Because there are federal dollars that go into workforce, that that need to be funneled a certain way, and then there are state dollars that need to go into workforce, that need that the permission of the legislature to then be accessed. So it was a long process. We involved a whole lot of different offices on state level, and we were able to, last year, push through SB 621 which is the Oklahoma Workforce Commission. It is a nine person, private business person commission that will ultimately lead to better coordination in the workforce. And Chad was very skilled on some of the inner workings that it took to make this happen, and has definitely looked to other states to make sure that we’re doing this the right way, because we felt that having that private business voice was very important because the bureaucracy of the state level really hadn’t worked so far.
Brandon Burton 17:44
Yeah, so I like when a chamber can see a need, create a program or an approach and be able to spin it off so it doesn’t have to stay within the chamber forever, and it can be thriving as its own entity. What kind of connection is there with the chamber today, with the Oklahoma Workforce Commission? Is there still feedback? Do you guys sit on a board or committees, or vice versa, or have What’s that relationship look like today?
Chad Warmington 18:12
Yeah, it’s a really good question. I like to always say is, you know, it’s a crawl, walk, run, approach, on the on the Workforce Commission, right? And what I really like to say is, it’s our little baby bird, and we keep nurturing our baby bird. It isn’t quite flying yet, but it’s getting there. And so I think our relationship right now, or our connection, is one we you know, we’re pretty passionate about who got on the Workforce Commission, and so there’s three appointees each by the President of the Senate, the Speaker of the House and the governor, and we did a really good job of vetting people and then suggesting names to them, because we were really concerned about who got on it. So we still have that connection that we vetted most of the people that are on it, and then, frankly, part of the deal was we got some ARPA dollars, some American rescue plan dollars that were dedicated for the commission, but there weren’t any state dollars at first. And so once we got into that, we realized that the ARPA dollars really aren’t appropriate for administrative costs. So we’ve really kind of taken the lead on kind of shepherding it through this kind of initial six months until we just got we’re able to get some state appropriations for it, and now they’ll be able to go out and hire their executive director and get going. It’s only been up and running about six months. So we’re very connected to it. Our goal is, obviously launch it and get out of the way, but we’re also willing to do whatever it takes for it to be successful. And so we’ll continue to, you know, keep that posture that until baby bird flies and leaves the nest. We’re going to do everything we can to, you know, to keep nurturing it because we know, we think, we know it’s going to be impactful. And the folks that have been appointed to the Commission are really good, sincere, you know, private sector leaders who want to see this work. And so we’re going to do whatever it takes, frankly, to keep it going. Yeah, and. I’m
Brandon Burton 20:00
sure there’s all sorts of intricacies we can dive into, as far as the staff and how their, you know, roles are developed and and just the whole structure of the organization. And I think it was alluded to that similar things have been done in other states. So there’s models that you can look at. There’s, you know, other chambers can look to you. Other states can look to you as you kind of looked around the country as well. As we shift gears a little bit, but let’s shift a little or focus over onto the tax reform program or issue that was on the application. Chad again, if you want to give us the origins and why this was important to you. I imagine it was data driven, as your other program was, but tell us more about that.
Chad Warmington 20:50
Yeah, it really was. And again, particularly when you get into tax policy, there’s a lot of ideas and thoughts and opinions on what you know, what are the appropriate tax policies or tax reform that a state should pursue. And so again, we tried to kind of come at it from a little bit of a different view, and said, How do we make sure that Oklahoma’s tax code is competitive? And so if, at the end of the day, in terms of economic development and growth, you have to have a competitive tax code, well who’s the best to kind of measure where we where we rank on that? And again, it goes back to us, kind of in terms of the three things we do, policy, policy, policy, politics and advocacy. And we really wanted to dig into the policy on this tax reform, but we wanted to approach it from a more of an unbiased viewpoint. It’s real easy for me to think it’s, you know, gotta be, by golly, it’s gotta be the personal income tax, and we’ve gotta lower that, and that’s what’s gonna drive economic activity. But I wanted to know that for sure. I want to look at states that were doing really well, and look at our tax code as compared to the states that were so we ended up hiring the Tax Foundation based out of DC, which is a nonpartisan, really well, you know, respected organization, and said to them, Look, we want to do tax reform, but we want you to tell us what makes us the most competitive, and then we want to be able to go back and track that over time. We want to score ourselves based on if this is what competitive looks like, and we’re here. How are we going to get where we need to go? And then let’s score ourselves. And so again, it was really very data driven, and the Tax Foundation put together a fantastic kind of guideline for us to share with policymakers on what would make Oklahoma’s tax code competitive. And you know, when you’ve seen one tax code, you’ve seen one tax code, they’re all different. And so we have a really interesting mix of lower property taxes, little bit higher sales taxes and kind of a medium income tax. But where does that put us in terms of overall competitiveness? I think the Tax Foundation gave us a really good roadmap of how to make sure we balance those things in terms of what makes it competitive, but also be politically smart, like what is actually doable in the state from policy standpoint, and so it’s been a real fun journey. And the funny thing about this too, is we did this two years ago, and I tell our team, it’s our example to remember that sometimes you got to plant the seed, but it doesn’t grow right away, and it took a full year before somebody went. The chamber has a tax plan, you know? And when it did, though, it bid hard, and we were able to get real good movement on a number of portions of that tax policy. And so I think, just as a, you know, as a reminder to all the organizations that are out there listening, you always won’t see the results right away of what you do, but you got to stay the course, and if it’s good policy, eventually people are going to pay attention. It helps to have, you know, a communications team that Brent leads, that does a good job of promoting it, but good policy wins out, and stay the course when you know it’s the right policy for your community or state that you’re working in. Absolutely,
Brandon Burton 23:52
I’m glad you guys took the interest to do the research and hire the team to be able to create those KPIs and those guidelines to be able to measure your success, and what would make Oklahoma successful. And as we know, chambers don’t, you know, create tax law, right? But you can do the research. You can plant those seeds and Brent from those seeds that were planted. How have you seen it grow to where it is today? Well,
Brent Skarky 24:21
I think Chad brings up a good point, like sometimes you look at taxes and just think, cut the income tax, and that’s going to be the end all be all and everyone’s going to be happy. But we took a strong look on some of the business friendly taxes, or business not friendly taxes, that were on the Oklahoma code. And where can we make those changes, smaller tax changes to make Oklahoma more competitive. We did away with franchise tax, which was a antiquated tax that was really just a tax for doing business in Oklahoma that makes us very uncompetitive on the national scale. We also did full expensing of capital equipment that frees up businesses to grow in their own. Space, and we also push a different income tax code, but we also know that condensing tax brackets is also a way that Oklahoma can make some serious progress and be more competitive. And really it’s worked. We haven’t gotten everything through that we wanted to, because tax reform is tough, and you’re always going to get pushback from lots of different sides, but we’ve gone from 30th in the country to 19th in the country in just two years, and that has been a testament to Well, first, our staff pinpointing those tax changes that can be made, but also our government affairs staff really advocating for those smaller tax tweaks that can happen that that make a big difference, specifically when it comes to the business community, and for people looking at our tax code from the outside state. So implementing those and educating the public, we get a ton of media interest every time we talk taxes, because, let’s face it, affects everyone exactly, exactly. We just did a grocery tax that has been very popular, obviously, with the masses. But, you know, there are intricacies that we thought might be better when it comes to using that money to grow the economy. And we educated a lot of people on that, and I think that actually resounded pretty well with legislature, because it’s not always just about, you know, the bottom line, when it comes to the number, it’s about making sure the money is available within the business community to grow the existing businesses, to increase the economy.
Brandon Burton 26:31
Well, I’m impressed being ranked 30 in the nation and moving your way up to 19. I mean, you can’t get everything you want, or else you got nothing left to do right? So you got to have that job security and keep moving forward with the progress. But that is a that’s a needle being moved in a great way. So congratulations on that, and and I’m sure it’ll continue to move in the right direction as well. So great, great programs you guys have submitted, obviously making an impact in Oklahoma, and, you know, kind of leading the charge for for other Chambers as well, and being supportive there Brent, you have something to add well,
Brent Skarky 27:12
and I’ve always been a fan of Chad’s overall vision for the chamber itself is to tackle big issues. Lots of times, State Chambers will get bogged down, a little bitty tweets, little bitty nuances for specific businesses, for specific members, but we really have taken a big picture approach, doing things that will change the state to not only make it better for business, but to make it better for all Oklahomans. We passed some legislation this last spring to rework graduation requirements for Oklahoma K through 12 students that will help them have better options, ultimately leading to better jobs for them, but it helps the business community as well, because we’re going to get more trained, skilled employees and workers into the workforce, but not always. It’s not always a chamber that looks at the big picture like that, and I think we’ve done a pretty good job with that, through our workforce initiative, through our tax initiative, and some of the changes we’ve made there.
Brandon Burton 28:08
Yeah, now as a State Chamber, you guys do a lot of the heavy lifts, for sure, and I’m always amazed and appreciative of state chambers to be able to do that and provide those resources for the local chambers just take back to their communities and really amplify the advocacy that you guys are involved with and making those, those big changes. I do like to ask, as we have you guys on the podcast as a chamber the year finalist, you guys are kind of the top of your game at the moment, what kind of tip or action item might you have for listeners who are wanting to take their chamber up to the next level, but what might you suggest them to try to implement or to try to work towards that goal? Well, I
Chad Warmington 28:50
think for me, what I would say is we wouldn’t be able to do any of the stuff we’re doing if we didn’t have a team that worked really well together. And so, you know, I know that every leader has that issue of trying to get your teams to be a team and to have that collaboration. When I got here, we were very siloed off, you know, marketing and membership stayed in their lane. You know, government affairs did their thing, and there wasn’t a lot of communication back between the two. The Communications Department was kind of trying to pick up things from each of the other two departments, but there just wasn’t. There was very much siloed off. And I think the thing that for us, that made, you know, that’s really helped us turn everything kind of around and have a lot of success in the last couple years, is we knocked down all those silos, and we really are very collaborative. And frankly, we, you know, there was people that we brought in that didn’t help, and they’re no longer here. I mean, so it was a little bit of a trial and error getting the right people that could do that, and, and so my, my guess, my strong encouragement is, you know, focus on that first. Because if. You get that right once you, you know, once you kind of figure out the things you need to do for your community or your state, they become much easier when your team is a team. And then the last thing, I think is in this is, over the last year, we really implemented this is, we’re trying to build kind of, you know, excellence down throughout the organization, get people to get outside of their, you know, of their, of their, just their department. And so we’ve got cross functional teams that are working on things this year. So we as a team spent two days off site developing what our kind of four top, you know, priorities for the year are. And then we built and self selected a team within the chamber that has members from every department working on it. And so we’ll have a communications person working on a revenue issue, you know, for us, or we’ll have, you know, somebody from membership and marketing help understand, you know, what we’re going to do in terms of how the best communication strategies that we want to use are the software we use. And so we’ve got these collaborative teams that are, you know, cross pollinating each other, and I think that’s the single best thing that we’ve done in a long time. It’s been fun. We have a monthly reporting session. We have a leader of each group. And it’s been fun to get, to get and sit in those meetings and have them report back, and have our comms person leading, you know, the discussion on internal software programs that we’re going to use, you know, and so it’s an opportunity for them to grow. But what it really does is it build that sense of team. It builds the communication skills that we need internally to go get these things done. And it’s been just an eye opener for me in terms of, I’ve always, you know, known how important was to break down those silos, but to take it to the next level and force those people to work together has been a game changer for us.
Brandon Burton 31:41
Yeah, I love the idea of cross pollinating, so it does really help when you are in your, you know, maybe formally siloed area, to know what the other team members are doing, so you can work cohesively towards a common goal. So I love that idea, and that’s that’s so important to being able to elevate your organization, for sure, Brent would do you have anything that you’d like to add?
Brent Skarky 32:06
I we’ve got a great board here at the Oklahoma State Chamber with a lot of very well respected business leaders, and from a communication standpoint, I love that, because I’ve been able to use those people as our voice. Obviously, you’ve heard Chad, he’s an incredible public speaker, and we’ve gotten him out, spreading the word, I think, just the awareness of what we do. And, like I said, being that voice. But circling back to the board, using those board members as your voice as well. They are experts in their field. They’re well respected across the state, and to get those people out front, leading the charge with you as well as important. I mean, yes, do the work yourself. Speak out yourself and let people know what you’re doing. We use your board members as well as as great PR representatives, because honestly, a lot of people know them in the community, and it’s just another respected voice out there that will ultimately lead to more success for you, more buy in from the community, and just better public perception in general. And I think that it’s important to use all the tools you have at your disposal.
Brandon Burton 33:10
Absolutely. Great tip. I love it. So I like asking everyone I have on the show about how do you see the future of chambers and their purpose going forward?
Chad Warmington 33:22
That’s a really good question, and it’s one I think about quite a bit, you know, I think we all realize and are seeing, you know, what I like to call kind of community or civic engagement is declining. People don’t spend the time in either on chamber boards or on, you know, community organizations that they used to. So how do we one, how do we, you know, get people to spend, you know, their volunteer time on with us, on their issues. And I think it’s really pretty critically important, because if it’s not chambers leading the way on things, who’s going to, right? I mean, who’s going to step in and fill that gap and fill that void, if chambers aren’t stepping up, and community leaders aren’t stepping up, you know? So I spend a lot of time kind of, frankly, frankly worried about that. I think what we’re finding, though, is that, you know, it’s like a flywheel, right? You know, I love the good to great concept. And if, for those of you who haven’t read Good to Great, there’s a, there’s a, they call it a, there’s a version. It’s called Good to Great for the social sector, sports, it’s for people like us that are running nonprofits. And part of that flywheel is getting people involved, and the more that they feel like being involved with you serves their community. It kind of builds that flywheel effect. They want to stick around and they’re telling their friends about it. And so we’re really trying to do that. We’re really trying to recruit leaders who are going to help us recruit other leaders and keep that momentum going, because civic engagement is dropping, and if not us, who and and it’s all, you know, our success is really determined based on the quality of the volunteers that we get to come help serve, you know, on our boards and on our committees. And so we got to keep that up. And. The I think it’s something that probably all of us, you know, may lay awake at night a little bit worried about, about how to keep up civic engagement. Yeah,
Brandon Burton 35:07
and I think that needs to be preached over and over and over again. If you know who’s going to fill that void, is it echoes, you know, to chambers across the nation. So we will, we’ll keep pounding that drum for sure. Brent, how do you see the future of chambers going forward?
Brent Skarky 35:24
I think Chad, hit it right on the head. We’ve had a couple of state questions that are going to be detrimental to the business community come across the Oklahoma legislature and the Oklahoma just overall landscape in the last couple of years, and who’s going to go to bat for the business community. In that kind of situation, it’s got to be someone, and in this situation, that’s us, and that’s really what you’re supposed to do in that situation. And I think it’s important in the social media world that we all live in to not be afraid to tell people what you’re doing. Tell people that, yes, we are leading the charge on this, to make sure that people know that yes, we have your back in this situation. Because I think in years past chambers would like to maybe stay in the background a little bit, know that they’re supporting people, but not really take a out front, leading charge on some of these things. And I just don’t think that’s how the world is working anymore. People are not afraid to tooth their own horn, and we have to be okay with saying, Yes, we’re making a difference. We’re leading the charge on this, and this is why you need to be a part of it, because this is the direction the business community is leaning. It’s time to get on board and and be active and be a part of it.
Brandon Burton 36:34
I love it, but you guys are making a great impact in the state of Oklahoma, as has been expressed throughout this conversation today, I’d like to give you both an opportunity to share any contact information for listeners who might want to reach out and learn more about how you guys are doing things there at the state Oklahoma, at the State Chamber of Oklahoma, and just to reach out and connect with you. What would be the best ways to do that? Yeah. Yeah. Well, for
Chad Warmington 37:01
me, my my email desk is just pretty simple. chad@okstatechamber.com, and again, if there’s anything we’re doing that that would be helpful to another chamber, we are listen. We are not proprietary. We’re all in the all in the business of helping our community succeed. We’d be glad or happy to share anything that we’re working on with you. We’re not competitors. We’re all trying to make our communities better. And if there’s something we’re doing that would be helpful to you, please don’t hesitate to reach out and and let us know how we can be helpful.
Brent Skarky 37:34
I couldn’t agree more. I coming from TV news. You always wanted to beat the guy that worked across the street from you, and it’s been an eye opener for me to come to the chamber world and know that I can steal an idea from Kentucky or share an idea with Washington and and be collaborative and be cooperative with some of these chambers. So yeah, brent@okstatechamber.com. Would love to talk best practice on a lot of different things across the board, because I I’m an open book. I think I’ve done a couple things that might be helpful to people, but I know that there are people out there with a lot of great ideas that would help me. So would love to talk more. Absolutely.
Brandon Burton 38:07
We’ll get your your emails in our show notes for this episode. But Brent, I can see where that could be a mind shift change, you know, and that
Brent Skarky 38:18
guy, next year, no, no, you feel that idea. It’s great.
Brandon Burton 38:21
That’s right, absolutely. Well, I appreciate you guys taking the time to be with us today on Chamber Chat Podcast. I wish you the very best of luck at the chamber of the year and continue making that big impact across the state of Oklahoma.
Chad Warmington 38:35
Great. Thanks for the time. Appreciate it.
Brent Skarky 38:37
Thank you, bud.
Brandon Burton 38:38
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