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Category: Vision

Creating a Clear Focus with Brian Anderson

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Brandon Burton (00:00.928)
Hello, Chamber Champions. Welcome to Chamber Chat podcast. I’m your host, Brandon Burton. And here on Chamber Chat, I introduce you to people and ideas to better help you serve your Chamber members and your community. Today’s guest is a dynamic leader with a deep commitment to community and economic development. Brian Anderson is the President and CEO of Chamber RVA, the regional Chamber of Commerce serving Greater Richmond, Virginia.

A native of Florence, South Carolina, Brian is a proud graduate of Francis Marion University with a degree in economics. His career journey is nothing short of inspiring from serving four years as a U.S. Army and Military Intelligence Officer to nearly two decades in the beverage industry with giants like Coca-Cola and Anheuser-Busch to serving as chairman of the Whitfield County Board of Commissioners in Georgia.

Brian transitioned to the chamber world in 2008, leading the greater Dalton Chamber of Commerce and later the greater Columbus, Georgia chamber before taking the helm at Chamber RBA in 2019. Brian has earned his IOM designation and is a certified chamber executive. He is a recognized leader in regional collaboration and workforce development.

Brian currently serves on several key boards shaping the future of Virginia’s economy. He brings to this conversation a wealth of insight on business leadership, regional strategy, and the importance of public-private partnerships in driving long-term growth. But let’s dive into an engaging and energizing conversation with Brian Anderson. Brian, I’m excited to have you with us today here on Chamber Chat podcast. I’d love to give you an opportunity to say…

Hello to all the Chamber Champions who are out there listening, and if you would share something interesting about yourself so we can all get to know you a little better.

Brian D. Anderson (01:57.651)
Well, hello, Brandon. It’s a pleasure to be with you today and to have a conversation about, you know, not just our industry, the things we’re doing because we are very proud of what we do. But I’ve been around this long enough to know that our chamber colleagues out in the listening audience, we all learn from each other. We can all do better at what we do by understanding how each of us has faced different opportunities and challenges. So happy to be with you today.

interesting about me. I think the biggest one that I tell young professionals when I meet with them most of the time is how I got here. And it’s interesting more and more that I meet younger leaders coming into the industry. I didn’t start the Chamber when I was 42 years of age, which is a late and never knew what a Chamber would do, what a Chamber does. But I felt that

Brandon Burton (02:25.752)
Thank you, Mark.

Brian D. Anderson (02:53.201)
going coming out of the beverage industry after 20 years, I wasn’t having the impact I wanted to make. I was doing well as far as their their goals and their measurements, but I didn’t feel like things were that I made a contribution. And so opportunity came open through my political life that the Chamber of Commerce in Dalton was in need of a leader. And I. You know, wanted to try something different. I didn’t know what that really meant.

But I got into it and here I am 18 years later and found that intersection of business and government to be a really sweet spot for me as an interest and also a passion for me to help make a difference in not only the life of the communities I’ve served, but also me feeling that I’ve validated my skill set and things I can do well and give back.

Brandon Burton (03:40.973)
Yeah, absolutely. I like that, you know, being able to want to make a difference and feel like the work you’re doing is making an impact and that’s important and Chamberworld is a great fit for that. But thank you for your service as well in the Army. We appreciate that.

Brian D. Anderson (03:53.291)
Here it is.

Brian D. Anderson (03:57.643)
Thank you. That was fun too. I tell young and younger people, you can get leadership development anywhere. Just get it. Whether it be through the military, whether it be through a service organization, you just, just you learn leadership by doing it, not by necessarily reading a book. That’s helpful. But you got to just go out there and experience things, make some things happen, make some, you know, fail at times, but then fail off. And so I think experience can help you in any way, any way you can get it.

Brandon Burton (04:13.219)
Yeah.

Brandon Burton (04:19.587)
Yeah.

Absolutely. Good piece of advice there. So I’d like for you to share with us a little bit more about Chamber RVA just to give us an idea of the size, staff, budget, scope of work, just to kind of set the stage for our discussion today.

Brian D. Anderson (04:38.921)
Well, I’ve been here six years and the organization is, it was in good shape when I took over, which is not always the case in my other two stints, but Richmond is a wonderful region to live in. Our chamber serves nine localities in Virginia. You don’t have cities within counties. They are separate jurisdictions. So we serve one city, the city of Richmond, a town of Ashland, and then seven counties ranging from Chesterfield and Wrico and over.

Colonial Heights, Guchelin, Palitan, and Hanover. And that’s a pretty large geography, but they’re also contiguous in the sense of not only being connected in geography, they all work well together. So we serve that region to be an enabler across the full region. We have 12 staff members, which is not enough. We could use 15 or 16, but 12 is what we have currently.

And they are all wonderful teammates that are in the right seats doing the right work. And so I’m fortunate to have a very qualified team. They’re not all experienced. There’s some of them are young and have just could joined us, but they’re the right people for the work we’ve hired them to do. Our budget’s about three and a half million dollars up from about three one when I took over. One of the areas we had not done well when I got here was membership development. We have been declining.

And now for six years in a row, we have added net new members and net new revenue. And we’re very proud of that. And we serve about 725 members. We don’t count locations. So those are actual member companies. So if you have 10 locations or 15, it’d be more. We serve companies. And that’s about a population of about 1.4 million people in this region.

Brandon Burton (06:23.276)
It counts as one.

Brian D. Anderson (06:34.443)
We currently are operating and we just finished our first year of the three year strategic plan. We used 2023 and 24 to develop that plan. Because before that, we felt we were like a lot of chambers, a little bit not as focused as we needed to be, kind of a little bit of everything. Anytime somebody asked to do something, we’d go do it. Had a lot of events. And I’m not sure we were making the impact that we needed to make. So we, as a team and with some volunteer board members.

and a strategic consultant coach went through a process and said, how do we become more impactful in the work we do? And we settled on kind of revamped things we were already doing, but also cut out some things. And we settled on four strategic pillars, two of which chambers do every day. The first is we connect people. We have events and we build relationships. We build capital and we continue to do that. But those events we have now are

very targeted to the work we do and or the audience. We do some small business events, we do some lead investor events, I host a CEO round table monthly, any way we can connect a member where they are. So that’s been a real focus and really paying dividends for us. Advocacy, we are in the middle of the General Assembly as many states are and so we are at the state house daily advocating for bills that are pro-business or trying to

have bills that aren’t, we oppose those. And we also take no action on some. They have nothing to do with the business community, we ignore them. We do the same level of advocacy at the local level. We’re always weighing in with our jurisdictions, whether it be zoning and planning, whether it be budgeting and how they’re gonna do bond referendums. So we try to take an active role with our local governments as well in the spirit of how does their actions, their policies make the region stronger.

Our other two are a little bit different, probably from some chambers. The third one would be economic development, economic empowerment or economic mobility. And that’s looking at our data coming out of COVID. We knew the thing, we knew where we were going in, but the numbers post COVID showed the disparity or the difference between those with means and those without. And so we’ve been very focused working with the Brookings Institute, the Urban Institute, our regional partners.

Brian D. Anderson (09:00.445)
on understanding what drives economic mobility and how we can help every family and individual move up that ladder to some degrees. We’ve been very focused on that the last, really five years, but really intently the last three. And then the fourth one, again, some chambers have some role in workforce development. We have taken on that as a primary charge. Again, not to deliver programming. We have plenty of partners that can do that, but we are working with NextGen

Brandon Burton (09:01.518)
Thanks.

Brian D. Anderson (09:29.417)
sector partnerships out of Nashville to really put the business community at the center of the conversation, C-suite executives telling us what’s not happening in the development world, development, and what they want to happen or need to happen. And then those of us around the outside of the room, community college, four-year institutions, K-12, Boys and Girls Club, any of those that can have out of school or around school activity.

they now are leaning in differently to try to get the outcomes we need. Being able to get young people to go into the paths that we need, construction, IT, health sciences, advanced manufacturing, and then having those programs deliver faster outcomes. You can get a certificate, a degree, all the way up to a four-year in a faster way. So those four pillars drive us every day. We’re very focused. We just had our annual meeting recently where we talked about how we successfully

Brandon Burton (10:19.8)
Here we go.

Brian D. Anderson (10:27.512)
executed those measures in 2025 and how much we have left to do in 2026, but very focused on again the work we have to do to make the best difference for our region.

Brandon Burton (10:38.594)
That’s fantastic and that that leads in very well to our discussion today.

to stand on is really just as a chamber developing that clear focus, that clear direction to go with your core work and things that you’re working towards to really move the ball forward in your community. like you mentioned, a lot of chambers get involved and get pulled so many different ways because something comes up in the community and everybody wants to volunteer the chamber to take that on, right? So.

Brian D. Anderson (10:52.555)
.

Brandon Burton (11:12.578)
So we’ll dive in deeper on this topic as soon as we get back from this quick break.

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All right, Brian, as we mentioned before the break today, we’re talking about creating a clear focus for your chamber. you had mentioned you guys just went through your strategic planning process and kind of the four areas, the four pillars of work that you guys are focused on that really helps chart your work and makes things a little bit more clear.

as things are presented to you and what direction you guys need to go in. Talk about the adjustment, you know, from how things were in the past to realigning that focus to make it really work within those four pillars.

Brian D. Anderson (11:40.832)
Mm-hmm.

Brian D. Anderson (11:45.148)
Thank

Brian D. Anderson (11:57.115)
The first step, I think that you should start with and we did. I’ve always had this experience because we get better at it as we do it. Start with your mission, vision, values. We had a good mission statement, a good vision statement. Wasn’t as crystal and crisp as we needed it to be a little bit too broad. Even just refining the words within that. That took six months of not just what was in the mission statement, the value statement, but the words we chose.

And then from that, you have a lot more license to again, narrow down what’s really critical to the business community. Now, the other thing I’d say real quickly is, you know, what’s your chamber’s role in that geography? If you’re a local community chamber serving a city or a county or a very defined geography, you may have a different set of expectations and things you need to be focused on. As a regional chamber, we had a little bit more license to what we can and can’t do.

And we’re very upfront about like, I’ll give you an example. A florist is probably not going to get much value out of being a chamber member, a chamber RBA. We don’t do retail type chamber activities. We are focused on large regional issues that affect cross jurisdictional populations. And we’re clear about that. And every meet the chamber, we have to talk to prospects. If you’re a retail type operation, you’re probably not going to…

Brandon Burton (13:14.99)
Okay.

Brian D. Anderson (13:23.787)
be served by us well, so don’t join and write a check that you’re gonna regret. I’d rather you go join the local chamber or some other place you can get the value you need. We serve, but with that, we serve about 60 % of our membership, or 50 employees or less. We serve small, medium, large. We have all the corporate partners. We have the Fortune 500 companies, but we serve a good mix of people. So with that, we’re focused on professional type companies.

rather than the retail type. being knowing your mission and who you serve is the first kind of step. And then the third might be what’s your member value, member proposition. What does a member want out of the work you do and how can you deliver that? So we spent, again, a long time defining that and understanding it before we got into what are we gonna do. But eventually you get to that point and you’ve got all that focus.

you say, okay, what’s the most critical things we can do as a region and what’s the business community’s part of that, then it’s a little easier to get into, okay, these three things or four things will drive that. I’ll tell anybody having not done it this well in the past, don’t have six, seven, 10 strategies. Get it as close to what you can get down to this manageable and again, is also going to give you the biggest impact and how you deliver that. So the four I mentioned earlier are what we got.

Brandon Burton (14:21.326)
So thanks for watching.

Brian D. Anderson (14:51.881)
got our focus on. And right now, again, at least through 18 months or 15 months, those strategies are delivering the tactics we need to execute. And now we can see through some measurements how that’s generating the impact we want. So mission statement, member proposition or member value, member benefit leads to how you get the strategy right to go forward.

Brandon Burton (14:54.006)
I like it.

Bye.

Brandon Burton (15:08.526)
you

Brandon Burton (15:20.43)
Yeah. So you have that strategic plan with those four pillars that you mentioned earlier. You guys also have taken on a regional vision as well. So you want to talk to that and how that aligns with your strategic plan as well?

Brian D. Anderson (15:32.331)
you

Brian D. Anderson (15:37.385)
Yes, and in this case, they’re very much aligned because we already had the economic mobility focus within our strategic plan for the chamber. But again, coming out of the pandemic, working with two regional partners, which now grown to five total. We knew that our business union had a role with economic mobility, just like the local government has a role. So does philanthropic activity. So all of those focus.

on how we lift families up and people up, we take that and drill it down to say, how does the business community weigh in there? So how do we have a different member, have a different employee benefits program? For instance, maybe 401k is not the best thing I need right now as a 22 year old, I’d like down payment assistance or help with childcare. So helping our member companies think about mobility difference in a different way.

so they can help their employees be successful and meet them where they are in their life. So it’s taking that regional thought, drilling it down to again, what individual companies can do and then us as a business sector weighing in together. So RVA Rising, which we now call it, came out of that five year journey of deep diving into data. Dr. Raj Shetty from Harvard has a whole lot of data across the country from a study he did.

that basically can tell you kind of what your economic mobility number is. And we found we were pretty low. I Charlotte, in 2013, Charlotte was the 50th out of 50 cities as far as not having economic mobility. We weren’t ranked, we weren’t big enough. But when you look at the heat maps of that data, we looked just as poor in economic mobility as Charlotte did. So we said, okay, let’s partner and understand what Charlotte’s doing, drill it down to the level of what we can do and now track that over time.

From all of that work, we worked with the Urban Institute, we worked with the Regional Growth Initiative out of the Brookings Institute, with eight other communities around the country. And that again validated that we were on the right path, but also gave us some metrics to understand what mobility looks like. So that regional visioning now has a deeper dive on affordable housing, a deeper dive on workforce development, and a deeper dive on what happens with health delivery.

Brian D. Anderson (18:02.409)
both modality and inequity. And that’s the three we’ve kind of worked on so far with a couple more coming later. But that’s where all of us like leaning in now on those three priorities in the forefront.

Brandon Burton (18:07.662)
Bye bye.

Brandon Burton (18:17.249)
Yeah, that makes sense. So you mentioned, you know, working with different institutions, like you mentioned the Brookings Institute. how do these, you know, arrangements come about when you work with these institutes? Is there formal agreements? And I’m asking for those chambers that are listening, I’m asking on their behalf if they want to take on this kind of a focus, how do you get started and how do you build those relationships to be able to help drive

Brian D. Anderson (18:33.355)
Thank

Brian D. Anderson (18:44.223)
Great question. I’ll tell you, sometimes it’s intentionality, sometimes it’s luck. In our case, it might have been a little bit of both. Yeah, because we were already, I guess, in tune with what’s happening in that kind of economic mobility space, the conversation. One of my colleagues, mean, Vice President Strategy, kind of learned about this thing out there, something you could apply for with Brookings. And she said, I think we should do this. I said, of course we should. So we kind of pulled together a team and.

Brandon Burton (18:50.872)
Take either one, yeah.

Brian D. Anderson (19:13.385)
We applied to be a part of this regional growth initiative network. There was going to be eight regions around the country that were picked and we were selected. And I’ll tell you, not know even from the application, I couldn’t have told you how much, how impactful it was going to be at the end. We thought we would just do some sharing and we would do some learning. We would do some, you know, data work, but we, basically had eight convenings. Each city hosted one over about 18 months.

And we went, had a very curated two day discussion in each city by the Brookings folks who brought us in some cases, things happening around the country. And then they’d say, now, how do you react to that? So sometimes it’s being in the right place, the right mindset, meaning what you’re listening to, and then having the will or willing to take the risk and spend the money in some cases to go be a part of something bigger. That was the first one that really, and then from that we would have never known about wealth. We may not have known about next gen.

sector partnerships, having not done that work. But since we went through it, we learned what somebody else was doing. We said, you know, that really could apply to us and how we’re thinking about workforce. And so, you know, one good idea, one good pursuit turned into a second one. Urban was our community foundation, very forward thinking organization. We’re doing some work on their own. How does their work make an impact? They learned about Urban Institute and all the work they’ve done around the country and all the data they now have from working in those.

Brandon Burton (20:21.88)
So, thank you for watching and have great

Brian D. Anderson (20:41.439)
those communities. So they were working parallel with Urban, while we were working with Brookings, and now we’ve brought all that together under RBA Rising. And they both have been critical to helping us see how we’re doing or not doing, how we can measure success and progress. And we’ve now leaned in more heavily with Urban because their data is much more far reaching. They’ve got 16 or so measurements of how you can determine if you’re economically mobile. And we’re using their first five pillars right now.

Brandon Burton (20:51.822)
you

Brandon Burton (21:04.622)
So, excited to be here.

Brian D. Anderson (21:11.071)
to keep us focused.

Brandon Burton (21:12.758)
That was my next question with RVA Rising is what metrics are you looking at to measure success and see that things are moving in the right direction?

Brian D. Anderson (21:20.675)
And I encourage the listeners to go just Google Urban Institute. They’ve got a whole lot of information on their website that, can be applicable anywhere. don’t have to just be like that. Because I think the thing I’ve learned again after 18 years is every community is different. Every region is different. We have similarities, but you got to know what’s happening in your geography and how you can impact that. they’ve got 100 different measurements that could be tracked and looked at.

We’re now taking their wide ranging set of information from all these communities around the country and we’re picking which ones matter to us. So we’ve got a whole group at our Plan RVA, which is our local government, regional commission type entity. They’re taking the lead on building us a dashboard or a scorecard or whichever term you’re happy. They’re looking at what measurements fit our region and will determine whether or not we’re

Moving the needle quick example a lot of times you’ll hear people talk about our poverty rate 12 % of our our citizens live in poverty Well, if you have a whole lot of people move in to make good money That number could go down to 9 % or 10 % and you haven’t affected the people who are already there who live in poverty So we’ve we’re looking at data that says how do we get down very granular? Into the zip code and the neighborhoods and the families to measure whether or not mobility is happening or not

Brandon Burton (22:50.062)
super helpful and being able to have that dashboard or scorecard to be able to see how things are moving and growing and developing is going to be super helpful as things progress.

Brian D. Anderson (23:01.739)
Yep. And it’s hard. I mean, we give a caution. It’s hard. We’ve just been trying. I mean, I don’t have anything I can hand you right now that says this is how we’re doing, because every time we think we’ve got the 10 or five or whatever, something else kind of comes in. So it takes time, but I’m confident we’ll get there. But again, we’ve got to get away from measuring things like in education or workforce development. Graduation rate really doesn’t mean a whole lot. Yes, you want your students graduating from high school.

But what happens after they leave? they going into a post-secondary track to get a credential or a certificate or a diploma? Are they going straight to work? And if they’re going to work, is it fast food, minimum wage? Or is it into something that can build? So you got to be careful, again, how the data can be, one, understood by the group you’re talking to, but secondly, is it really measuring something that’s important?

Brandon Burton (23:56.897)
Right. So I’m curious between your strategic plan that’s recently rolled out and your regional vision, you guys have your focus. You guys are really honing in on those things that are important to really move the needle in your community. Throughout this process, did you guys have to address any sacred cows or have other ideas been presented to you since? And how do you respond in saying that this isn’t

Brian D. Anderson (24:03.061)
Thank

Brandon Burton (24:25.538)
the focus of the chamber at this time.

Brian D. Anderson (24:28.491)
Often, I mean, just last night, the last thing I looked at before I left the office was, again, a good partner that we work with regularly said, hey, we’re going to, this group wants to apply for a grant. We want you to be a part of it. We looked at all the information. We didn’t see anywhere that it made sense for us to do anything, write a letter of support or not, but certainly encourage them to do that work. So I think every day you creep in because again, I…

You got to be careful when you have the brand power a Chamber of Commerce does because that can work for you or against you. And too often it gets you pulled into things you shouldn’t be a part of. Now, I also wrote a letter of support last night from one of our local government officials to be recognized as a C-suite executive for the contributions he’s made. So I don’t mind doing things and lending the Chamber brand, the Chamber horsepower when it’s needed. What it can’t do is distract our team going down another path.

Brandon Burton (25:01.965)
Yeah.

Brian D. Anderson (25:24.731)
that pulls us from the things we’re core. I’ve joked about in my career, I think I it at the Institute, but I’ve certainly carried it. Don’t do the Christmas parade if you can get out of it. Now, some places, the chamber has to do that because it actually is core to who they are and core to that town. But most chambers probably should not be doing the Christmas parade. It’s a lot of manpower, a lot of cost, and maybe not gonna get you where you need as far as policy.

and working on the other things you need to work on. But that’s the kind of example that we work, and I call it, don’t let it be the Christmas parade project that pulls you into something you don’t need to be a part of. We had a few, ours remained on the event side. Chamber people also think you gotta have something going on every hour of every day. So I’m constantly kind of reminding our team, when you plan a, you, your team, little part of the bigger team, plan a breakfast, and then another part of our team plans a lunch or a dinner the same day.

Brandon Burton (26:02.167)
Yeah.

Brian D. Anderson (26:21.791)
That causes some of us have to be, you know, almost half our days committed and we’re just there as participants. So we’ve been very careful to make sure everybody looks at a master calendar. We try not to have anything of significance the same day and maybe same week. We cut the number of events, probably 25%. We’re very focused on ones we have to make each one count rather than let’s just have another one. But then we use that filter when people say,

Brandon Burton (26:37.4)
See

Brandon Burton (26:48.92)
Yeah.

Brian D. Anderson (26:51.563)
Hey, I want you to plan a dinner and do this topic and invite these people. If it doesn’t answer the first two or three questions of our filtering, it doesn’t happen. We politely say you ought to go partner with somebody else.

Brandon Burton (27:02.38)
Yeah.

Yeah. Yeah. And just having those events that you do choose to do, having them fit those, the areas of focus that you guys are honed in on is so important because it would be very easy for a member to say, well, I was just at the breakfast yesterday. Why do I need to go to this thing today? And I mean, they’ve got their own calendars they’re trying to deal with. So the things that they’re involved with need to be focused and impactful as well. So being respectful of their time and resources is just as important. So.

Brian D. Anderson (27:16.683)
.

Brian D. Anderson (27:29.695)
Yes.

Brian D. Anderson (27:32.975)
And I have to another question just for regional chambers are some that may cross two or three different jurisdictions. We even go so far we plan something we try to go reach out to other parties. Is anything happening? Especially it’s a big signature event or the tourism folks got anything that week or the economic development people. We talk to our partners so we try to also not contaminate or take away from other people’s events because we know what happens when we plan something to find out.

The city’s doing something at the same time.

Brandon Burton (28:06.35)
Exactly. Well, as we start to wrap things up here, this has been a great conversation and reminder for all of us listening to hone in that focus and sharpen it. But I always like asking for some sort of a tip or action item for the listener who’s wanting to take their organization up to the next level. What would you offer them as they strive to do that?

Brian D. Anderson (28:30.955)
A of quick ones. The ACC, which I’m a member of the board for the Association of Chamber of Commerce Executives, has a ton of data, ton of information. You can go get all kinds of reports that they keep as a repository. If you haven’t been to IOM as a young or entering leader of a chamber, I highly recommend IOM. It’s the best place to get the grounding for our profession. And then if you’ve been around the industry for a while and you need some personal motivation or maybe to validate that you know what you’re doing,

CCE is a good process to go through too. You need to be, I think, five or six years experienced in the role and some other criteria. on the ACC website. But all three of those will help you have the things you can have sort of at hand. You can go out and just get those. Another more, another area you can think about is have a mentor or a partner. Somebody that you respect either in your state, in your state association, maybe somebody you’ve met at

Brandon Burton (29:22.988)
Yeah.

Brian D. Anderson (29:28.829)
a convention or a conference, have somebody you can call when you’ve got a question you can’t ask your chairman. You know, this just happened. I’m nervous about it. My website had something happen and you don’t want the boss to know that you’re dealing with something. Have somebody you can call and share that with. All of us have been there, at least if you’ve been there as long as I have, you faced a lot of different challenges. Reach out to somebody in the industry. We’re all, we’re only as good as all of us are together.

because this is a tough job. met a young lady yesterday who’s running a one-person chamber. Her job’s 10 times harder than mine because she’s got, she’s expected to be on all the meetings I’m expected to be at and to deliver the same value as I’m expected. But I’ve got 11 partners on our team that help us do that. So help each other. Each chamber should be talking to each other regularly. We are not competitors. We are collaborators. If we do those kinds of things, I think you got a chance to be successful in a very rewarding profession.

Brandon Burton (30:04.878)
you

Brian D. Anderson (30:26.027)
that I’ve enjoyed for the last 18 years.

Brandon Burton (30:28.34)
Yeah, I love that. I also like asking as we look to the future of Chambers of Commerce, how do you see the future of Chambers and their purpose going forward?

Brian D. Anderson (30:38.591)
Challenging, you younger business leaders, entrepreneurs aren’t joiners as other generations have been. You’ve got to work harder to get people into your community, your fold, get them to be investors. Secondly, on the political front, we’ve never been more divided. We can’t even debate topics anymore. Either you’re in or you’re out or you’re pro or you’re con. So chambers are going to have to bring that business voice into the policy arena even more than they ever have.

use the trust that people still have in the corporate or business community to your favor. We’ve got to be in conversations that are probably more more uncomfortable, but that’s why we’re there. We’ve got to make a difference on the policy side. And then lastly, just talent like everybody else, finding good people to do what we all need to do because you don’t go to chamber school necessarily. We hire people who have a skill set and maybe a good experience or two, and we turn them into chamber professionals.

Those are the three things that I’m watching right now that give us challenge every day is just, do we stay focused to what we can control, but also influence sometimes what we can’t control while we find a different.

Brandon Burton (31:50.936)
Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. Well, I wanted to give you an opportunity, Brian, to share any contact information for listeners out there who may want to reach out and connect or learn more about your strategic plan or about RBA rising and really sharpening that focus. Where would you point them and what would be the best way for them to connect?

Brian D. Anderson (32:13.355)
Well, chamberrva.com has all of our information from what we’re doing. As most chambers, we have a really good website, got our contact information on it. But my email is brian.anderson@chamberrva.com. Reach out to me, happy to help. Our team is very talented. We got a lot of good people that would be willing to help as well. So if you’ve got a question, we’re happy to help you.

Brandon Burton (32:35.028)
Awesome. We’ll make sure we get all that in our show notes for this episode. this has been great having you on. Chamber chat with us today, Brian. I appreciate you setting aside the time and sharing your experiences and things that are making a difference in your community and really just helping all those listeners out there to adjust their focus and make sure the work that they’re doing makes an impact. So thank you.

Brian D. Anderson (32:39.295)
Wonderful.

Brian D. Anderson (32:59.947)
Thank you for what you’re doing, Brian. This is a wonderful way to help all of us be better. So thank you for the work you’re doing.

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Empty Building Tours with Deb Brown

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Brandon Burton (00:01.024)
Hello, Chamber Champions. Welcome to Chamber Chat podcast. I’m your host, Brandon Burton, and here on the podcast, I introduce you to people and ideas to better help you serve your Chamber members and your community. Today’s guest is a leading voice in rural revitalization and a fierce advocate for the potential of small towns. Deb Brown is the co-founder of SaveYour.Town.

where for the past decade, she’s partnered with Becky McCray to deliver practical, inspiring solutions that help rural communities take bold action and create lasting change. Deb’s expertise is grounded in real world experience, from her impactful work as a Chamber of Commerce Executive Director to her varied background in retail, insurance, and entrepreneurship. She brings an energetic, no-nonsense approach that resonates with community leaders and grassroots

doers alike. She’s also the author of From Possibilities to Reality, Savior Small Town, a hands-on guide that brings essential reading for those working to breathe new life into rural places. Whether she’s leading workshops, crafting strategies, or sparking conversations, Deb Brown brings insight, connection, and deep belief in what’s possible when a small town takes ownership of their future.

Deb, I’m excited to have you with us today here on Chamber Chat podcast. I’d love to give you an opportunity to say hello to all the Chamber Champions who are out there listening and to share something interesting about yourself so we can all get to know you a little better.

Deb Brown (01:40.504)
So first of all, thank you for the lovely introduction and for having me on your podcast. I am a fierce advocate for belonging to the chamber and being active in your chamber. So I’m glad to be here having conversations with you. Now, what do you want to know about me that might be different?

Hmm. I know how to set off fireworks. In fact, I’m a licensed pyrotechnician and I learned to do that while I was a chamber director in Webster City, Iowa. So it goes to show many things can happen when you work with a chamber.

Brandon Burton (02:08.277)
Wow.

Brandon Burton (02:19.104)
That’s right. It just shows how Chamber Executive wears many hats and carries credentials that you never dreamed you’d have to carry, right? That’s awesome. Well, tell us a little bit about your organization, Save Your Town, just kind of how it started, what the vision is, what you guys do, and kind of anything you want to share about

Deb Brown (02:23.15)
Indeed. Yes.

Deb Brown (02:43.478)
So we, Becky McCray is the rural small business advocate and she started a small biz survival back in 2006. And it is one of the first early blogs that talks about small businesses and rural communities and actions you can take. And I had been following her on Twitter of all places, right? When I first started on Twitter and I didn’t know any better. So I just reached out and started talking to her.

Brandon Burton (03:12.94)
There you go.

Deb Brown (03:13.452)
I guess I still do that, right? Anyway, we met in person at a bloggers tour in Hutchinson, Kansas and hit it off and started doing some things together. I was living in Iowa at the time and she lives in Oklahoma. We were involved in the 140 character conferences, which again is a Twitter-based conference.

Brandon Burton (03:34.05)
Twitter.

Deb Brown (03:37.059)
We just really got along and thought along the same lines. And she came to visit me one day and we’re sitting over dinner and she said, you know, I think we should do something together. I’m like, okay. So our first venture was a toolkit on how to do a pop-up in a small town. And my first question to her was, are people really gonna pay for this? And indeed, indeed they did because at that time not very many people were doing that.

Brandon Burton (04:01.12)
Yeah.

Deb Brown (04:06.83)
And we have grown over the years. I was still working at the chamber at that time and went out on my own with Becky in 2017. we’ve grown and spent many, many hours in rural communities across the United States and Canada. And it’s work that we love to do and we like being on the ground and hearing.

what people’s challenges are and working with them to figure out ways to overcome those challenges. That’s a short synopsis for you.

Brandon Burton (04:40.226)
Yeah, no, that’s great. It gives a good background. So I’d mentioned in your bio that you were a chamber executive. You mentioned it with the fireworks. Maybe just to continue helping to set the stage, tell us a little bit about your experience as a chamber executive.

Deb Brown (04:59.566)
Oh, sure. So my father had had a heart attack and we moved from North Carolina back to Iowa. And I was looking for something to do. So I volunteered at the local chamber in Hampton, Iowa. And lucky me, the director was phenomenal. And I ended up actually doing the communications, Main Street work and social media work. This was 2009, right? A while ago.

Brandon Burton (05:28.162)
Great.

Deb Brown (05:28.904)
and learned a lot in Iowa has phenomenal main street and chamber organization. So I really did learn a lot and the position for executive director came up in 2013 in Webster city. And I thought, sure, let’s apply for it. And danged if they didn’t hire me. So I was able to be a director there for a little over four years. it was for me.

Brandon Burton (05:47.03)
Yeah.

Deb Brown (05:55.511)
I had some background, of course, in chamber, but more in communications and tourism and talking to people and conversations. So I was given the opportunity at that chamber really to set the stage for the things that we could do in that community that would really make a difference. They had lost a major manufacturer two years before I got there.

employed 2,000 people in a town of 8,000 to kind of give you an idea. It was a company town and had been there for a long time. So you, many of your listeners will know exactly what that feels like. And there were some challenges, but as a community and as a chamber, we figured it out and really had a good time reinvigorating the community and getting more people involved and got past that.

Brandon Burton (06:29.858)
Wow.

Brandon Burton (06:36.32)
Yeah.

Deb Brown (06:51.416)
pour me stage into look at who we are. We’re phenomenal. What else can we do? So that’s my chamber experience. I just tried new ideas all the time.

Brandon Burton (06:57.43)
Yeah.

Brandon Burton (07:06.274)
Very good. Well, it definitely helps to give us some background so those listening know you understand chambers. You’ve been in it. You’ve been in the throws and some of those, you know, deepest, toughest struggles that we see.

Deb Brown (07:12.993)
yeah.

Deb Brown (07:18.54)
And I wanna throw in here too that I do have my IOM certification and that is probably one of the best educational trainings that I have received in my lifetime. I was fortunate to have a great class, but also the instructors, it’s unbelievable training. And if anybody has the opportunity to do an IOM, please do it. And no, I’m not being paid to say that.

It’s just been huge in my life going forward from that point.

Brandon Burton (07:45.654)
Yeah.

Yeah, very good. Well, for today’s topic, we’re going to spend most of our time talking about what I see as a very unique revitalization tool, we’ll call it, to help revitalize some parts of maybe your downtown or town square that maybe is looking a little empty, a little quiet, a little, you know,

It needs some help, say. We see this in small towns all across the country. And Deb’s got some great ideas on how to address that. And we’ll dive into that as soon as we get back from this quick break.

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All right, Deb, we’re back. So as I teased before our pause there, today we’re talking about this unique approach to revitalizing downtowns, town squares, some of these areas where we see

parts of towns that maybe get forgotten. Maybe they had a great historical impact in this community, in any community USA, right? We see it all across the country, but I’m gonna let you introduce what this approach is and how you go about doing it.

Deb Brown (09:08.47)
Absolutely. So we’re going to talk about the tour of empty buildings. And I want to tell you a story about how we came up with this entire idea and this concept. So I mentioned before working in Webster city, when I went over for the job interview, I counted 14 empty buildings downtown, 14 in a town of 8,000.

And I knew if I got the job, I was gonna be responsible or one of them to help fill those empty buildings. And I got the job. And yes, of course they said, so Deb, what are you gonna do to fill these empty buildings? And my first response is, well, what are we going to do? I have some ideas, right? And my thought was,

The beautiful, some were beautiful historical buildings. Most of them had a great story. I know that people are curious and they want to see what’s in places. Like if I can go upstairs and see where they stored their things in the old bank vault, I want to do that, right? So we came, I came up with the idea, let’s showcase these buildings because instead of hiding them or ignoring them,

Brandon Burton (10:08.033)
Yes.

Yeah

Deb Brown (10:24.844)
We want to fill them, so let’s showcase them. And it’s vacant or underutilized buildings. You can do that for. And actually, the tour’s design, it raises awareness about these building vacancies and inspires the reuse and revitalization ideas.

In a month’s time, we figured out, we scheduled a tour of empty buildings. Now, would I recommend doing that in a month’s time? I might tell you to take two months, just saying, but I didn’t know any better. And I had a group of people that were ready for change. They were tired of the story that we failed because it didn’t fail, things just changed and that’s life. Life happens.

Deb Brown (12:00.003)
So, you know, we had some really great members and people were ready to try something new. They were tired of that we failed story because that was just a story. In real life, things happen and change is the only constant, right? So a group of us,

Brandon Burton (12:02.082)
Okay, sounds good.

Deb Brown (12:24.906)
members got together and said what can we do? So we made a list of the empty buildings, got in touch with the realtors to ask them do you know the owners, which ones are for sale. We’re fortunate to have a local historian in the community and Nancy put together stories about each individual building which was great because it’s good to know the history right and our chamber champions those

Brandon Burton (12:48.588)
Yeah.

Deb Brown (12:51.5)
were the retired individuals that were still members. We called them chamber champions. And they stepped up to say, well, I’ll tell that story. I’ll go in this building and I’ll tell that story. So we put the tour together and it was, you could come and go as you please. It was over a time period of three hours. A local engineering company made the map for us.

Brandon Burton (12:56.802)
I love it.

Deb Brown (13:15.182)
And we made that available both online and at the chamber office. So you could come and pick it up or print it off. And the biggest secret I can share with you both before and after the tour is we talked to everybody. We had conversations with everybody. Have you heard about the tour of empty buildings? Are you coming? And people had not heard and it involved being out in the community and being in the places where people talk.

One of my favorite stories is I went to the morning coffee where the old guys go and all have coffee, right? You know this group, most small towns have them. And crotchety group of old guys. And one of the fellows said to me, Deb, what are you doing? It’s not gonna work. It just doesn’t make any sense to me. Why should I share about it? And I had to think for a minute and I said to him, you know, where’s your daughter live?

Brandon Burton (13:47.2)
you

Brandon Burton (13:52.266)
Yep, yep.

Brandon Burton (13:58.019)
is that we have a front-end center that we’re able to start moving. And just in some cases, why should I share a back-end? And then I think, well, it’s not too bad. It’s not too bad. It’s fine. But I think that we have to be very careful.

Deb Brown (14:11.182)
Because well, you know, she lives at the state capitol. I’m like, yeah, that’s right. You got grandkids, right? And he goes, yeah. I’m like, what would it be like if your daughter can move back home with her family and start her own business in one of these empty buildings? And it’s like the light bulb went off over his head. Everybody has a motivating factor and that was his.

And now he saw reasons where he could share that story. And he became one of our biggest advocates and in fact did share the story amongst his group of peers and organizations. It was just wonderful. And so a month later we had the tour, 44 people came and I declared that a success because that was 44 people that not only got to see the empty buildings, but also took their stories and shared them.

Brandon Burton (14:35.094)
Yeah, I it.

Deb Brown (15:03.018)
outside of the tour with their friends and families and associates. And we continue to share the local newspaper got on board every time somebody rented a building, they showed up and took pictures of the new renters and made a big deal about the ribbon cutting and shared about those people’s stories and the kind of products and services they were providing. The local radio station got involved.

It was, it became just so much fun to see what was happening in all these different buildings. And there were 12 buildings on the tour. In 18 months, 10 of those 12 buildings were filled.

Brandon Burton (15:42.53)
Wow

Deb Brown (15:45.571)
And they weren’t filled with another factory or some new big conglomerate from outside of our community. The majority were filled with entrepreneurs and local businesses that may have been expanding or ready to move from their garage to a brick and mortar building. Why did it work? Because we kept talking about it. And we shared every story possible and we use social media because

Brandon Burton (15:53.154)
you

Brandon Burton (16:09.034)
That’s awesome.

Deb Brown (16:13.742)
This was 2013, social media was important, much more important than before all the stuff that goes on with it now, right? Yeah, yeah, yeah. It was just people being in touch with their families and sharing stories. So I love talking about the Tour of Empty Buildings because I know it works. We heard from Natchez, Mississippi that does the Tour of Empty Buildings just about every year.

Brandon Burton (16:21.826)
all the algorithms now and how they manipulate it.

Brandon Burton (16:44.309)
Yeah.

Deb Brown (16:44.312)
Buildings come and go, business owners come and go. know, things don’t stay permanent. So for them, it made sense to do that little bigger community. We heard from a group in Australia, and I think it was in Sydney, who said, you know, we do tours for tourists to go see different things in our community. We have added one empty building into that tour because you never know when a tourist might want to start a job.

Brandon Burton (16:57.868)
Ha.

Brandon Burton (17:10.914)
That’s right.

Deb Brown (17:13.454)
We were just hearing all different kinds of people wanting to take advantage of this tour. And we got the phone calls from some of our neighbors. Hey, can we do one in our community? And of course, what am I going to say? Absolutely, you can do one in your community. And here you and I are 12 years later, still talking about the tour of empty buildings. I want to go a little bit further and share another story from that.

Brandon Burton (17:28.758)
Yeah.

Brandon Burton (17:35.33)
That’s right.

Deb Brown (17:41.773)
the local movie theater closed my first week on the job. You know, that’s just wrong. In a small town, the local movie theater is really important, right? And I think it was the straw that broke the camel’s back for a lot of people in town. And so I said, let’s bring a bunch of people together and talk about this. So I just said, hey, let’s meet in two weeks at the middle school and see what we can do.

Brandon Burton (17:46.114)
I don’t mean… Right?

Yeah.

Deb Brown (18:08.458)
huge group of people showed up that wanted to save the theater. So that told us right there was an unofficial informal gathering to just see who was interested. And there were a lot of people interested. This group ended up forming a 501C3. They raised money. Now it was going to cost $90,000 to upgrade from old film to digital.

and had to buy the building and the building was for sale for $30,000. That’s a lot of money, right? But we didn’t care because we knew we could raise the money. People wanted to save the theater. The alumni associations in town jumped on board. We decided to sell the seats at $300 a pop, not actually sell the seats, but you could have your plaque on the back of it.

And the alumni associations bought those like they were giving them away free, made a huge difference. The students at the high school created movie trailers about the project that could be shown on social media. mean, everybody jumped in and got involved. And it was, the majority of the funding came in five, 10 and $25 donations. There were a couple of $10,000 donations, but the majority of it was small. And that

Brandon Burton (19:13.186)
That’s really cool.

Deb Brown (19:30.164)
speaks to the power of a small town that knows what it wants and someone or some group of people is there to help guide them to achieve that. That’s just one story from those 12 buildings.

Brandon Burton (19:40.205)
Yeah. Great story. Yeah. So I do, I’ve got some questions about the empty building tours. So, with this initial tour that you did at the 12 buildings, you had 44 people come to do the tours. What was your initial goal going into it? Like what, if we can accomplish one thing out of this, doing these tours, what would that be? And then with that goal, you mentioned talking about it everywhere, but

Deb Brown (19:48.142)
Sure.

Brandon Burton (20:10.22)
Who was it that you were really targeting to be on those tours?

Deb Brown (20:14.114)
Very good question. So the initial goal was to change the conversation from, we suck, we have empty buildings, to look at the possibilities. Look at what we do have. There’s place for lots of new businesses here. And that’s important because if you’re thinking positively, these are the kind of things you can accomplish. But if you keep that negative attitude around you, it’s just hard to break through that.

So that was the initial goal, get the building shown and maintain that good conversation and get people excited again. Excuse me. Generally, we’ve seen chambers, economic development groups, even local community organizations do put these tours on.

And you want to fill them with people that want to start businesses actually. So maybe it’s entrepreneurs, maybe it’s another business that wants to expand its footprint. Perhaps it’s, we never looked for big businesses. We were looking for the smaller businesses and how we can make that happen. A good example is three of the empty buildings went into the incubator project.

Brandon Burton (21:20.648)
So, that’s the plan. And that is the plan. And this is what I’m going to do.

Deb Brown (21:35.885)
which was just something I made up. I approached the owner and said, what if we helped entrepreneurs start a business and they could do that in your building, free rent first three months, reduce rent the rest of the year, they pay the utilities, the chamber will help with marketing and the SBDC will come in and help with the tools that they can provide. And she said, fine, sounds like a great idea.

Brandon Burton (21:47.011)
Because the treatment is being done in a way is not going cause any harm by any of the other things. And it must be a similar kind of treatment that involves the type of treatment.

Deb Brown (22:04.73)
And that really worked. That was phenomenal. And not just that, there were several different people that tried that idea out and a couple of them ended up buying buildings in town and expanded their initial footprint. So you just have to think a little differently, a little outside the box, give people a chance, lower those barriers to entry because that’s what an incubator project does.

If you think about buying a building, you know, there’s $100,000, another hundred grand to rehab it and fix it, and you haven’t even tried your idea out, makes no sense, right? So an incubator project gives you that opportunity to do that. I hope I answered your question. It kind of went off.

Brandon Burton (22:38.242)
Right.

Econ Dev Ops is the virtual assistant service built specifically for small Chambers of Commerce and Economic Development Organizations (EDOs)

Brandon Burton (22:50.722)
Yeah, very cool. Yeah, yeah, you did. In fact, as you were giving your response, it reminded me I had heard I was trying to remember where I’d heard it from. And I’m pretty sure it came from the book 13 ways to kill your community. Yes. And he talks about one of the ways to kill your community, obviously, uses reverse psychology, right? You don’t want to kill your community. But if you did, one of the things would be don’t paint. Like don’t

Deb Brown (23:06.146)
Doug, yeah.

Brandon Burton (23:20.514)
don’t keep things fresh, don’t keep things looking good. And he talks about the downtown environment and where there’s vacant lots, some communities put a little park, you know, in this vacant lot and, you know, updated the facade on the buildings. And I think it was in here where he even talks about putting posters up in the windows of some of these vacant buildings to show, you know, either how that building was used in the past. when there’s

When you’re walking down Main Street and you see this empty building, maybe it used to be a barber shop and you’ve got posters of a barber in there doing this, you could put posters, these screen posters on the windows to help people imagine what the space could be. And it’s not necessarily getting them in the doors and doing the empty building tour like you’re talking about, but it’s drawing attention to what can this space become?

What has it been in the past? What can it become? And keeping it beautiful, keeping the area looking nice, making sure that there’s not broken windows in these buildings, because that just spirals into bigger things.

Deb Brown (24:31.234)
And you know, I want to piggyback on that because it doesn’t have to be the building owner that does all of that. You know, I follow this lawn mowing service on TikTok and they actually go to people’s houses and mow the yards for free. man, that stuff is addicted. But we call those ninjas where what if…

Brandon Burton (24:46.4)
Yes, yes, I’ve seen that.

Deb Brown (24:54.54)
Me and a couple of my friends went and washed windows on one of those empty buildings. Just wash the windows and swept the sidewalk. That makes a big difference because people notice, are they doing in there? Look, the windows are clean. Sometimes if it’s a local owner, they get a phone call that says, what’s going on? I see your windows are clean. It’s little ninja things that other people can do. What are they gonna do? Are they gonna tell you to dirty the windows again? Of course not, right?

Brandon Burton (25:23.04)
That’s right.

Deb Brown (25:23.342)
So how can we as community members become a ninja and help? What things can we do? You have an empty lot in town and you’d like a restaurant, you know what, go take a card table with a couple of your friends and eat lunch there every day. Because you know, people are going to drive by and go, what the hell is Deb doing over there? And they’re going to stop or call me and I’m going to say, we want a restaurant here. So we’re trying the idea out.

Don’t be afraid to take those tiny steps to get people thinking and talking about what you’re doing. It matters.

Brandon Burton (25:59.009)
Yeah, I love that. I love that. Those little things matter. So back with the focus on the empty building tour, I imagine there’s some level of coordination when trying to track down the owners of the buildings, if they’re a local owner, if they’re out of town owner, if they’ve got a realtor that they’re using. How do you gain access to these buildings and coordinate?

Deb Brown (26:07.522)
Yes.

Deb Brown (26:22.548)
So that’s easier than you think. The majority of small town realtors that I know anyway, know their community very well. And they know the history of the buildings that they’re responsible for. For us, that was the perfect outreach to get in touch with all. We asked all the realtors in town, let’s sit down and visit because we want to do something with these buildings you’d like to sell or rent or fill, right?

Brandon Burton (26:25.324)
Okay.

Brandon Burton (26:31.948)
Yeah.

Brandon Burton (26:48.065)
Right?

Deb Brown (26:50.048)
So those were willing partners in the progress of it. Like I said, I counted 14, 12 came on the tour. And one of those actually backed out at the very last minute because that kind of stuff happens, right? And ended up he had a building that probably shouldn’t have been toured. And that’s why he backed out. It happens, right? It happens. you know, one person, the chamber director does not do all this work by themselves.

Brandon Burton (27:05.75)
Sure.

Brandon Burton (27:11.456)
Yeah. Yeah.

Deb Brown (27:19.948)
You will lose your mind. This is an opportunity where you can, yeah, no, you need to gather as a crowd and people that want to participate in this project with you. It will be usually the realtors and the building owners. Some of the local ones just pick up the phone and call them. Or you know they go to lunch at this restaurant every Wednesday, go sit down and visit with them. You know these people. This is not difficult.

Brandon Burton (27:21.73)
I’m glad you said that.

Brandon Burton (27:44.406)
Yeah.

Deb Brown (27:48.399)
Often we make projects hard. You know, so maybe I don’t know Connie, but I know that my board president does, and I’m going to say, can you go talk to Connie, and here’s what we want to know. So use your connections, and don’t be afraid to ask other people, what are your ideas? What do you think we should be doing? The newspaper was thrilled to be involved, and they came up with their own idea about follow-up and how

Brandon Burton (27:48.512)
That’s right.

Deb Brown (28:16.3)
they can be most effective with these new businesses. So the more you work with lots of people, the more ideas, and you want to try them all because you don’t know which ideas are going to work and which aren’t. if the idea doesn’t work, so what? It just didn’t work. Go to the next one, right?

Brandon Burton (28:28.876)
Yeah.

Brandon Burton (28:32.714)
Yeah.

So would you have everybody meet up at the chamber office and then walk to these buildings or would you caravan or how would you gather to begin this tour? Right, yeah.

Deb Brown (28:38.9)
No.

So to do the actual tour, mean? So we didn’t do it that way because we wanted people to come and go, say, you may only want to look at three buildings. You don’t want to look at all 12 buildings. So you would pick up your map or download it. And you knew from four to seven, you could go look at the buildings. So counting was interesting because we had somebody in each location that counted the number of people that were serious. They came in to look at stuff.

Brandon Burton (28:55.678)
Okay, gotcha.

Deb Brown (29:12.43)
By serious, mean stayed, had a treat, and asked a few questions. That’s serious enough, right? So I wouldn’t recommend doing a ride around tour unless that’s something you want to do. Maybe you have a group of, Centerville, South Dakota had this idea. They had empty buildings that were not open.

Brandon Burton (29:19.009)
Yeah.

Brandon Burton (29:27.852)
Red.

Deb Brown (29:39.819)
So they decided to meet downtown and they did a walk around of their empty buildings. And I think there were six or seven. And the economic developer knew, again, somebody that knew most of the people in town. And they just walked around and talked about the history of the building and what could be possible, answered questions. And I think they had maybe 14 people on that tour. It’s a tiny town. It was perfect for them. Esteline, I think they’re South Dakota.

Brandon Burton (30:02.452)
Okay.

Deb Brown (30:09.58)
The weather was not the greatest when they did theirs. So they decided to do just a mini tour for their board and a few building owners. They wanted to try the idea out. Let’s work with our board and see how this is going to work. And that worked for them because it was a smaller group, a new director that didn’t quite know how to be a chamber director yet. He’s really learning and he’s great. But this was good for him to try it out and see what his board thought.

And of course it was positive because you bring a group of interested people together talking about the possible success of your community. How could it not work out?

Brandon Burton (30:49.322)
Right. Yeah, I love that.

Deb Brown (30:50.754)
Yeah, it doesn’t have to be huge. can be work what works in your community.

Brandon Burton (30:57.1)
Yeah, yep. And you’ve shared some great examples of how different communities have taken it and adapted it to fit and work for their communities. So I love that. Well, Deb, as we start to wrap things up, I wanted to ask you on behalf of the chamber leaders that are out there listening who are wanting to take their organization up to the next level, what kind of tip or action item might you share with them as they try to accomplish that goal?

Deb Brown (31:27.79)
So I have a couple of things. The first one that I suggested just about everybody is to host a coffee and calendars event. And how this works is perhaps you want to work with a select group of people.

it might be your nonprofit organizations, invite them to come over for coffee and bring their calendars. And what you’re gonna do is talk about the next three months on the calendars of what people are doing. You wanna share information and see if there’s any way that you can collaborate or work together. The way that we did it is, I think we, maybe 10 people there, and we met.

I don’t even remember where we met. Doesn’t matter. It doesn’t have to be at the chamber at City Hall. can be at the coffee shop for that matter. And I asked people to go around and tell us who they were, what organization they were with, and tell us one thing that we may not know about their organization. And we found out that Building Families, a nonprofit organization, had funding to give to daycare, possible daycare owners to help

Brandon Burton (32:17.27)
Good evening.

Brandon Burton (32:26.914)
and the other organization. And without them, there’s no chance of a government to get money to make the big bang without the contribution.

Deb Brown (32:41.358)
If you have a house and you wanna start your own daycare, but you need to get licensed, it would help with the licensing. Maybe buy new toys, maybe put a fence up, just those small things that are necessary, but an individual may not have. That’s huge. You know how hard it is to find childcare these days. So to have an organization have that kind of funding, was a big deal and we didn’t know it. And I’m the chamber director and might’ve thought I should know it, right?

Brandon Burton (32:45.214)
Okay.

Brandon Burton (33:06.73)
Yeah.

Deb Brown (33:08.64)
So you start with that so you learn about each other and then you start looking at calendars. So maybe you’re having an event February 14th and so am I at one o’clock, both of us. Can we partner? Can I do mine at 10 and you do yours at one so we can have people in town the whole day? Begin to have these coffee and calendars kind of conversations on ways to work together to collaborate for the benefit of the community.

Brandon Burton (33:35.648)
That’s a great idea. Great.

Deb Brown (33:36.36)
Anybody can do that. Chambers can do that, but so can the local church society. mean, think about who could do that. So that’s my first tip.

Take the small steps. Not everything has to be a big deal. Find out from your membership, what is it that they want? I used to have one of my staff, part-time staff, was a retired school first grade teacher. That should tell you. Nobody told Joanne, no. So she would make the phone calls to members and say, Deb wants to come over for half an hour and have a conversation with you. And book the appointments. And I’d go with my notebook and just simply ask, so.

Brandon Burton (34:08.396)
Yeah.

Deb Brown (34:19.244)
What can we do for you? What is it that you want? And they were frankly surprised because nobody had ever asked them that. Generally we go with our hand open, right? Find out what your members want and how you can help them and how each other can help each other. We’re in the business of making our communities the best they can possibly be by supporting our local businesses and our members.

Brandon Burton (34:29.751)
Yeah.

Deb Brown (34:48.332)
Remember that. Continue to support your local businesses and your members in the way that they ask for help.

Brandon Burton (34:54.498)
Great pieces of advice. I love it. I like asking everyone I have on the show as we look to the future of Chambers of Commerce, how do you see the future of Chambers and their purpose going forward?

Deb Brown (34:59.629)
Thank you.

Deb Brown (35:11.386)
We live in this space, particularly those of us over 50, where we have one foot in the old way and one foot in the new way. So the new way of doing things is generally taking the small steps, building connections, gathering our crowd, figuring out how to work together as a group or as an organization. And the old way is letting your board make all the decisions and, and

deciding without input from the community, figure out how to get from the old way to the new way. Those communities that can do that are going to do really, really well. Yeah. And I’m not young, just you’re saying, I understand the old way and I know why it worked when it did, but it’s time for a new way. Let’s support as many people as we can.

Brandon Burton (35:52.578)
Yeah, I think that’s a great point. Yeah.

Brandon Burton (36:04.395)
Yeah.

And change can be hard. And if we can be helpful in helping to bridge the old way to the new way, let’s help make that transition a little bit easier.

Deb Brown (36:16.204)
And know, change is the only constant. There’s always gonna be change, right? The other stuff comes and goes too, right? Yeah.

Brandon Burton (36:20.438)
That’s right. That’s right. Yeah. Well, Deb, I wanted to give you an opportunity to share any contact information for listeners or anywhere you’d want to point them if they wanted to reach out and connect and learn more about what it is you have to offer or how you can help their communities. Where would you point them?

Deb Brown (36:42.898)
So to find out about us, if you go to saveyour.town and it’s S-A-V-E-Y-O-U-R dot T-O-W-N.

Wealth of information, sign up for a free newsletter, read the stories and the articles about what different small towns are doing and enjoy yourself at the site. Both Becky and I have written books and we’re pretty excited about it. Mine is, you mentioned it, From Possibilities to Reality. And you can find that one at saveyour.town. You’ll find the article that talks about the books. If you go to saveyour.town/books.

You’ll see both of our books there. Just sign up for the newsletter. It’s free and we share stories from people that we meet on the road, emails that we receive, from people like you that have stories to tell us. We are committed and invested in our rural and small towns and we want everyone else to be as well.

Brandon Burton (37:47.01)
Yeah, very good. I will make sure that’s in our show notes for this episode to make it easy for listeners to find the website and find you and find the book and reach out and connect. But Dev, this has been a great conversation. I’m glad we’re able to get you on the show and to really explore this empty building tours idea and some of the success stories that have come out of this, not just in your community, but in other communities that have adopted this strategy. I think it’s a really great idea.

Deb Brown (37:51.544)
Thank you.

Brandon Burton (38:16.384)
So thank you for sharing it with us.

Deb Brown (38:16.707)
Thank you. And thank you so much, Brandon, for having me on the show. feel for anybody has a chamber question that I might be able to answer, just shoot me an email, deb@saveyour.town. Be happy to answer.

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How Forward-Thinking Initiatives are Reshaping Communities with Linda Parsons

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Brandon Burton (00:00.972)
Hello, Chamber Champions. Welcome to 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. Today’s guest is a seasoned leader in the Chamber and Association Management with more than 25 years of experience, advancing economic development and community collaboration. Linda Parsons has served as President and CEO of the Moore County Chamber of Commerce. since 2014. Under her leadership, the chamber has been nationally recognized as a four-star accreditation from the US Chamber of Commerce and twice named as a runner-up for the National Chamber of the Year. In 2025, Linda was honored by her peers as the North Carolina Chamber Executive of the Year, a testament to her impact across workforce development, business advocacy, and strategic planning.

Her leadership extends far beyond her role as she actively serves on a wide range of local and state boards focused on education, healthcare, childcare, and economic growth. Before relocating to North Carolina, Linda gained valuable public policy experience with the Ohio Chamber of Commerce and served under two Ohio governors as a state and local government commission. She holds a degree in politics and government from Ohio Wesleyan University and is a CCE and a graduate from the US Chambers Institute for Organization Management. Please welcome to the show Linda Parsons. Linda, I’m excited to have you with us today here on Chamber Chat podcast. I’d love to give you an opportunity to say hello to all the Chamber Champions who are out there listening and to share something interesting about yourself so you can all get to know you a little better.

Linda M. Parsons (01:50.836)
Well, Brandon, I really appreciate the opportunity to be here today. It’s always great to connect with our chamber colleagues across the country. So a little bit about myself. I think you asked for an interesting fact. And a lot of people do not recognize that I am artistically inclined. I was a ballerina until I was 18. And I am fluid in piano, violin, and a vocalist.

Brandon Burton (02:04.59)
That’s right.

Linda M. Parsons (02:19.341)
I am a painter and I have thrown pottery throughout the years. Currently not doing that, but so artistically, that’s always what’s motivated me and it’s what brings me joy when I have the time to do it.

Brandon Burton (02:34.7)
Yeah, I love that. And I wish we would talk more about that just as a society, just the joy that comes from creating things, know, just being expressing your creativity. There’s so much goodness that comes from that. So I’m glad you’re leaning into it. It is. It is. Yeah. Very good. I love getting those those little interesting facts about people.

Linda M. Parsons (02:49.299)
It’s also relaxing.

Brandon Burton (03:00.494)
If you would tell us about the Moore County Chamber just to give us an idea before we dive into our discussion today. Help us understand the size, staff, scope of work that you guys are involved with, budget, just to set the stage for our discussion.

Linda M. Parsons (03:14.291)
where I’d be happy to do that. So the Moore County Chamber of Commerce is located about an hour south of Raleigh in two hours from Charlotte, North Carolina. We are a population of about 110,000 people, one of the fastest growing counties in the state of North Carolina outside of an urban area with a projection to grow 50,000 people by 2050.

So it’s a lot of growth that is expected. I’ve also seen figures of another 70,000 residents. So we shall see. We are a tourism-based economy, and we also have a strong healthcare economy. We have currently 620 members with a staff of three, with just shy of a little over a half million dollar budget. And we are a mighty three.

Between the three of us, we have almost 40 years of experience in the chamber industry. All of us have a chamber background, which is extremely rare in the chamber industry. I’ve gotten both of them from seasoned chamber organizations, one in our state, one in the state of Texas. And we work very hard on a variety of issues ranging from workforce development, childcare is a very strong advocacy area, housing.

Brandon Burton (04:19.607)
Yes.

Linda M. Parsons (04:39.315)
transportation, leadership training. We have one of the oldest leadership training models in the state. And then of course, you know, just supporting that general member, whether it’s a solopreneur or a large corporation in our area. Golf is heavy. are home of the second home to the USGA. They built their second headquarters here in Moore County. And we also are home to the World Golf Hall of Fame.

And so if someone is a seasoned golfer, they’re probably very familiar with Pinehurst Resort, who is in the process of building another course in our community. So we have about 43 courses within 15 minutes of our community.

Brandon Burton (05:23.402)
Wow, well that is a great snapshot, but also painting a picture as you do, right, with your creativity, but painting a picture in the mind of what the community looks like. And I’m picturing with these beautiful golf courses and whatnot, just the beauty of the area as well. That definitely does help to set the stage for our discussion today. And as we kind of went back and forth a little bit on trying to figure out exactly what we wanted to cover,

Linda M. Parsons (05:24.263)
I’m out.

Linda M. Parsons (05:34.298)
Okay.

Brandon Burton (05:52.943)
I see a lot of the things that you guys are doing there in the Moore County Chamber as being very future forward, leaning and thinking. So we’ll dive into some of that future thinking, as well as some of the more actionable things that you guys have been doing to really take action on those thoughts and vision of what the future looks like. And we’ll dive into that as soon as we get back from this quick break.

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All right, Linda, we’re back.

As I mentioned before the break, today we’re talking about some of these future looking things that you guys are doing there at the Moore County Chamber of Commerce. One of the first things that I wanted to learn more about is I know you guys recently have gone about this, a new co-working space in your community and really targeting those people that work from home or those entrepreneurs and.

individuals like that, businesses like that. So please tell us a little bit more about the co-working space, how that came to be, how it works. know different chambers have co-working spaces, they’ve stood up, they all have their own nuances. So I’d love to hear the approach that you guys have taken and hopefully others listening will learn some things and be able to take some notes as to what they might do in their community as well.

Linda M. Parsons (07:12.209)
I’d be happy to do that. And I think one of the things that’s been very fortunate about our chambers, we have a board that has had progressive thinking throughout the years. They understood that if we remained the same, we would no longer be relevant in our community and for our region. We do serve a six county region, meaning we have a lot of traffic that comes into work and a lot of traffic that comes out. And we are also 45 minutes away from the largest military installation outside of the Pentagon.

So back in 2014, literally 30 days after I was hired, our building sold. It had been on the market for quite some time and I was working at the chamber at the time, but it wasn’t CEO. And so we sold our building and went to a temporary home and really tried to develop what our vision was. And we had heard about a particular business in downtown Southern Pines that was going to be building a building, three story building in the historic district.

So I approached him and asked if we could go into the building with him together and take the top floor. Fast forward to 2020, we built a building during the pandemic. We started that building in 2019 and finished it in 2020. There was some delays with supplies, but he was very forward thinking as the owner of the building, majority owner of the building where he had a lot of supplies dropped in before the final roof was put on. So a lot of the people that were having delays,

We didn’t necessarily have some of those delays. We did with appliances. But we went from a 10,000 square foot building that was built in the late 80s and was able to take that investment and turn it around into a 3,500 square foot penthouse suite in the downtown historic district of Southern Pines.

Brandon Burton (08:41.741)
Yeah.

Linda M. Parsons (09:05.18)
It was probably one of the best decisions we’ve ever made. I literally threw the spaghetti on the wall and said, I think this is what we need to do. And when we do it, we need to open a collaborative workspace. Obviously not realizing that the entire world was going to shut down in March of 2020. So at that time, this construction had already started and I didn’t have the ability to shift the layout, but we moved forward and kept got creative. So we have a platform where people can drop in and work on a daily basis.

with a drop in rate. have subscriptions very similar to some of the corporations you see across the country, such as WeWorks, where they can pay to play a couple of days a week and a month. And then we have a conference room space that serves as overflow for individuals working quietly, not on Zoom calls or other things like that nature. And we have that ability to rent out that space.

One of the most popular things for us has been that remote worker who works for Fortune 500 companies across our country and they regularly use our space, they consider it their home. It does help where above a bar, but we also serve in adult environment if they so choose, as well as other snacks and coffee. I never thought an espresso machine would be so popular as it is. But one of our biggest leaders really has become the military

Brandon Burton (10:19.234)
Yeah.

Brandon Burton (10:29.806)
Bye!

Linda M. Parsons (10:33.78)
component. So we have a lot of groups from the military that use that space sometimes for transitioning veterans to learn what they need to be doing to acclimate into the civilian world, as well as other training opportunities that they do in our space. And so I would say that is the majority of our user with the second being our members. And based on their membership, they have that option to use the space. So we have a lot of people that do team meetings, interviews.

Um, if someone is opening a new place in town, they have that opportunity to do other interviews if their growth is still under construction. It has been a revenue generator. So we were able to eliminate the God, the events that were a burden. Shall we say a time sucker for the stack. And now we just have to manage a calendar, which is fairly simple because we kind of have a regular users.

Brandon Burton (11:19.202)
Yeah.

Linda M. Parsons (11:29.628)
And from there, it’s got a website, it’s got a following, and we are regularly booked. And it’s been a great investment for the organization and for our community.

Brandon Burton (11:43.437)
Yeah, I love that. love the, again, the forward thinking of being able to have that kind of space and before, you know, COVID even hit and to be able to see where needs are going and to be able to address that before they even really showed up in mass numbers like they did after the pandemic. I think there’s a uniqueness too of being able to serve

So you mentioned the remote workers, also entrepreneurs and startups and kind of that vibe that comes into it because they’re getting associated with the chamber early on in their journey. But I’ve also, I’ve seen and heard of some coworking spaces that are not connected with the chamber as being almost a chamber in themselves as far as the networking aspects go.

and who you meet within that networking space. Do you have any additional thoughts or insights on those points with the entrepreneurs and startups and the networking effect that happens in the coworking space?

Linda M. Parsons (12:52.752)
It absolutely is true. It is an opportunity for people that are working there to connect with others that may not have in otherwise while sitting in their living room navigating their children or their barking dog. And so I’ve actually seen some relationships form where they have now gotten into business together. Meaning we have a couple of consultants who have been able to do some work with some of our other workers.

During the holidays when everybody kind of took a break, it was fun to see everybody come back in January. How was your holiday? What are you working on? And we actually have one gentleman who used our space transitioning in his career, not military, but just a career transition. He got his MBA while in the space, was able to connect with one of those military groups and has now opened a consultant business.

So it’s fun to see those success stories, as well as the members who use the space as they grow and upsize their business and utilize it for team meetings and see that growth of those businesses or nonprofits that are using this space.

Brandon Burton (14:04.6)
Yeah, I love those success stories. What’s the relationship like with the work, with the chamber itself, kind of the space that you guys have within this top floor versus a co-working space? it kind of blend into each other? Is there distinct areas for chamber and co-working space or what does that lay out?

Linda M. Parsons (14:25.202)
It’s a complete blend. So we went with an urban design, meaning open ceilings, lots of metal. We did not shy away from comfortable furniture. We have standing desks. I’ll be honest, my board gave us complete discretion. They said, here’s your budget. You make it work.

And so we have an office in the front that is a collab space with a desk, a desk and a standing desk and a round table so people can have meetings. Then our offices are with incorporated within the middle. And then there’s another office in the back that gives a little more privacy. Again, conceivable, fix people. And then the conference room space is off of a massive kitchen and what we call the gathering space. So.

Great example on Friday mornings from seven in the morning until nine a.m. We have a group of military veterans that move our space for coffee. And when we come in at nine, they’re wrapping up, they clean up our kitchen, they go about their day. They’ve had their time to have a private coffee and we’re able to jump in through our workspace and do what we need. I do have a standing nine a.m. meeting every Friday. They know that. And even if they stay behind, they respect the fact that we are in our space.

working and doing our thing, but it gives a good blend. So our collab users have key fobs. can come and go as they please. And if we’re not there, they have access to the space, they have access to the kitchen and it works really well. So it’s a good blend. and it, it makes it feel like home. I don’t know how it’s. In fact, one of our coworkers users use that term this week.

Brandon Burton (15:48.93)
Yeah.

Brandon Burton (16:08.77)
Yeah.

Linda M. Parsons (16:13.875)
It’s a place that I call home.

Brandon Burton (16:17.132)
Yeah, that’s nice. That’s very nice. So I’m curious with the design and building it out, just from the little things from the scheduling to the key fobs to having the kitchen stocked. And did you guys consult with somebody else who’s done this before or was dreamed up on your own amongst the staff and the board and you guys like, let’s go do this. How did things come together?

Linda M. Parsons (16:44.479)
So when we initially came up with the concept and got the board approval, A, to move forward with the building and B, to do the collaborative workspace, we did visit several co-working spaces in our state. Most of them were corporate or other forms of, they weren’t connected to a chamber. And so we took some of those ideas, particularly knowing we were gonna be above a bar.

You know, we even discussed putting taps all the way from the first floor to the third, but we felt that we wouldn’t be able to go through a keg fast enough. So then we created relationships with local breweries. And so those breweries were able to put in the beer, can beer, so that the shelf life was a little bit better. We looked at those spaces from, you know, aesthetics, furniture, comfort.

Brandon Burton (17:17.219)
Right.

Linda M. Parsons (17:32.47)
And those things were very important to us. Standing desks are extremely important, but not everybody likes the standing desk. Some people like the sit. Some people like high tops, so we have high top tables. And then we very thoughtfully configured our conference room. If anybody remembers their science days from high school, you had a black top science lab table with wood legs. We reversed it. have

Brandon Burton (17:52.877)
Yeah.

Linda M. Parsons (17:58.368)
custom-made tables made in the state of North Carolina out of ash wood with black metal legs all on casters. So the room can be configured in whatever format somebody wants. Whether it’s a large conference table, they want to do classroom seating for a training session, which obviously works really well for the chamber when we hold a session. I’ve seen it done in pods where people are working with individual teams.

Brandon Burton (18:09.368)
Very cool.

Brandon Burton (18:17.944)
Yeah.

Linda M. Parsons (18:25.225)
And that has been very good. And then the other thing is we went with very top of the line technology. We did not shy away from technology. I talked to our IT guy and I said, I want you to bring in the best IT that you can possibly bring in. If the chamber is encouraging businesses to be on the top of their game as it relates to marketing, IT and other things, we can’t not do the same. So we have a seven-point television.

that does direct streaming. have access so that they can do Zoom meetings or other video type teleconferencing. We have mics around the room. We have a second TV in the room, because it’s kind of an L shape. So you can have a private session in the other part of the app. We have the same technology in the other offices. And we’re not shying away from updating it. With some of our military folks, we have some more restrictions.

Brandon Burton (19:12.622)
Okay.

Linda M. Parsons (19:25.211)
in reference to how they access technology. We’ve been working with them as well so that they can still access due to their firewalls and be able to utilize the space. So we didn’t shy away from the technology. And when we had our full budget, that was something that we thought, Philippe, thought about. Plus we have TVs in the lobby. So if they need to stream something while they’re in the kitchen using space or highlight a sponsor.

whatever their program is, they can do this thing. As it relates to the key fobs, it’s part of our security system. Probably the biggest challenge is if we lose internet and power. That’s a problem. But we can work around it and we have, but technology’s great, but you can’t control mother nature. And a couple of years ago, unfortunately, Moore County was

Brandon Burton (20:07.342)
Ugh.

Linda M. Parsons (20:24.277)
had a massive power outage that was done by a human, not by Mother Nature. And so we could not access our space because the town with the county was out of power for seven days. I was the only one with a computer, but all of our collab users completely understood because they couldn’t work either.

Brandon Burton (20:38.328)
Move.

Brandon Burton (20:45.39)
Brave.

Linda M. Parsons (20:46.005)
We didn’t make the national news and it’s unfortunate that someone chose to do that to our entire power grid. But those were good lessons to learn. How do we overcome that? We put in some other parameters so that we can get into our space, but sometimes you just can’t control technology. So it’s great, but Mother Nature or unfortunately some people have other plans and you just have to work around them. And we’ve got great people. They’re like, understand it.

Brandon Burton (20:56.27)
Thank

Brandon Burton (21:05.059)
Yeah.

Brandon Burton (21:15.778)
Yeah. So there’s been a few different times and ways you’ve mentioned the forward thinking of the board and of your staff. It sounds like historically, at least in recent years, there’s been a very forward thinking board for your chamber. What are some, a few other examples maybe of looking to the future and planning ahead and not getting caught, you know, with the

unexpected with what the future presents.

Linda M. Parsons (21:47.328)
think I’ve been very fortunate in my tenure as president to have a board that understands that the three of us do have chamber experience and we look thoughtfully at studies, whether it’s ACCE studies, whether it’s our own studies that we’re doing and monitoring our membership trends, things of that nature. And so we bring things to the board and we make our recommendations on not what’s happening today. You’re always gonna have your

these events are happening or this program is occurring, we are always moving five years ahead. So a great example back in 2014, I actually made my board read the book, The End of Membership as you know it. And I’ve used a lot of those books and guides to help them understand that if we continue to, I used to use the term be our grandfather’s chamber, maybe to some it’s a

great grandfather. Not that they didn’t do wonderful things, but we wouldn’t remain relevant in our community. There’s a lot more competition. There’s a lot more ability to do things digitally. There’s just a lot of competition. And so by being able to stand out as a organization who’s been around for 59 years, I think always looking ahead, how can we do something differently? So we eliminated a majority of our events and we really focused on some key

leadership, HR training that’s connected to workforce development, childcare, housing study. So we’re investing in a different wave, the long-term of our community and our employers in our area, whether they’re a nonprofit, a small business, a large business. And it’s been really good. I think that members, we still do networking. You’re always gonna have a little bit of networking.

It’s a critical piece, but sometimes you can remind them you can network differently. You can network digitally, even through our own organization. You can connect with a military person and help them as they develop their resume and transition into the civilian life. And so it’s really been, we’ve been really fortunate to have that board who really hasn’t stopped us from trying something. Have we had failures?

Linda M. Parsons (24:13.233)
Absolutely. And I think those failures too.

Brandon Burton (24:15.726)
I’d hope so. Otherwise, that means you’re not taking any risk, right?

Linda M. Parsons (24:18.641)
Exactly. And I love to take risk, calculated risk. The building was probably one of my biggest calculated risks. That’s a pretty big risk. But I know that if it is a beautiful building, it is set in a beautiful place. And a lot of people think it’s an historic building. To me, that is a win.

Brandon Burton (24:24.195)
Yeah.

Brandon Burton (24:30.318)
Yeah.

Brandon Burton (24:44.514)
Yeah, that is really cool.

Linda M. Parsons (24:46.037)
I had someone recently come in, they’re like, so how old is this building? And I’m like, five years?

Brandon Burton (24:51.47)
But with the spirit of 100, right?

Linda M. Parsons (24:56.731)
Exactly. I think, you know, analyzing what programs are successful in a chamber. What does the chamber industry look like in five, 10 years? What are trends that we’re seeing? For example, AI, know AI is an important trend. So we’re in process of developing a curriculum in partnership with our local community college to help our business community navigate AI to their benefit and learn it so that

they’re doing things safely and that they’re doing things that are going to be helpful to their business as they continue to right size their business. we’ve held a session last fall. We sold out in seven days and we did it in our our own respective conference room and we’ve had a request to have it again. And so it’s it’s been great to see that excitement and the people that were in that room for that program are

were not traditionally attending events. And so I think you have to, you can’t just do one size fits all. Our chamber is not a one size fits all. We like to…

Brandon Burton (25:57.708)
Yeah.

Linda M. Parsons (26:08.437)
cater things to the members’ needs, whether they’re small, medium, or large.

Brandon Burton (26:15.918)
I love that. So as you’re giving that response, my mind’s racing with all these different things, but like you’d mentioned, networking is always going to be some aspect of the chamber and paying attention to tools that are coming. I recently did an episode with the founder of an app called Chamber, but with a Y, so the C-H-A-Y-M-B-E-R. And it’s all about being able to network digitally or you meet somebody in person, but then you connect digitally and

continue to build that relationship and that networking. And there’s great tools and resources available that we just need to be aware. And like you mentioned, AI and being able to stay on the forefront of some of these things and introduce them to your membership and help them gain the confidence to use some of these new tools because change can be scary, right? I mean,

just human nature, like if you wanted to survive, you don’t change, right? So being able to help hold their hand through some of this change is so important. But being from Ohio, you may be familiar with Matt Appenzeller, Southern Ohio Chamber Alliance, but he’s made the distinction between with chambers being either a lamppost, where you’re shining a little bit of light on a

portion of town square or being a lighthouse where you’re really showing, you’re shining the light of where the direction needs to go. Really, you know, bringing people along to where you see things are going and guiding them that way. And that’s, that’s what I see you guys doing there at the Moore County Chambers, being more of a lighthouse and really shining that light, saying this is where things are going, come along with us because this is where the future is bright.

Linda M. Parsons (28:03.125)
We talked a little bit about in the beginning about my artistic background. I’ve always said that sometimes a chamber is kind of like a conductor, a conductor of a symphony. We may not always have the answer, but we can connect and collaborate with different organizations or people to help make our businesses and our local economies be successful. I may not always have that answer, but I can connect a business to our local school system. I can connect them to the college.

Brandon Burton (28:11.011)
Yeah.

Linda M. Parsons (28:30.447)
When everybody was saying, what are we going to do? Everybody’s leaving the workplace. I need employees. I need more students to go into this career path. OK, well, let’s start a workforce development collaborative task force so that we can work in partnership instead of all working in silos. A lot of times, that’s what happens in communities. Everybody’s working on something, but they’re not talking to each other. OK, well, it’s not going to be successful if you’re not talking to each other, being direct and open. And events will always have their place.

Training will always have its place, but our world is changing and we’ve got to change with it to continue to remain relevant to our members, otherwise known as investors, who are investing in us and our community.

Brandon Burton (29:17.08)
That’s right. I love that. Well, Linda, as we begin to wrap things up, I wanted to ask on behalf of the listener who is striving to take their organization up to the next level, what kind of tip or action item might you share with them as they strive to accomplish that goal?

Linda M. Parsons (29:34.804)
I do think reading the book, End of Membership as you know it, is a really good idea. And I really think taking a pause and stepping back and doing an analysis of everything that you’re doing, what is successful, how much time are you putting into it. The people time does cost you money. And if you’re doing an event to turn around to do in another event to pay for that event, is that really the most cost effective thing?

Brandon Burton (29:54.99)
We are finished.

Linda M. Parsons (30:02.101)
for your organization and the members that you serve. Sometimes taking that pause is scary, but by doing an analysis of everything that you’re doing, helps you move forward. While we did that back in 2017, we actually had a discussion yesterday that we’re gonna be doing it as a team discussion again, so that we’re prepared for this next 10 years. And…

and are able to continue to serve that investor of our community. So I do think that’s important. I also think if you’re really new in the career, find a mentor, find somebody that you, an organization and a person that you can regularly check in with. Being at the top is lonely. It’s a lonely place to be and one of the most exciting places to be, but it can be scary. Taking those risks are scary at times. And so being able to talk

Brandon Burton (30:53.539)
Yeah.

Linda M. Parsons (30:57.599)
through those things with somebody I think is important.

Brandon Burton (31:01.324)
Yeah, absolutely. And really the idea of looking 10 years in the future and trying to plan and work towards that before too long, you have a 10 year plan, but you probably have to readdress it on an annual basis and see, we still on track? And I had heard a recent interview of Elon Musk and somebody was asking him about how he sees the future. And this is the man who’s literally building the future, right? With self-driving cars and robots and

Linda M. Parsons (31:28.341)
Correct.

Brandon Burton (31:31.286)
putting people on Mars. And he gave a great forecast of in the next one to three years, but himself, he said, 10 years? I have no idea. I have no idea what the future looks like in 10 years. And I think it’s good to have a plan, but we need to constantly make sure we’re still on course with that plan, that we’re going in the right direction.

Linda M. Parsons (31:51.638)
Absolutely, because you never know what curve ball such as COVID, which a lot of people got thrown at, know, nobody knew that was coming and you had to pivot and you have to be able to pivot quickly.

Brandon Burton (32:00.751)
Yeah, exactly. Well, Linda, I feel like this whole episode we’ve been talking about the future of chambers, but I’m going to ask the formal question that I always ask towards the end of an episode, which is how do you see the future of chambers and their purpose going forward?

Linda M. Parsons (32:21.449)
think we are at a great place to really excel our communities forward. Kind of looking at that road where you have two choices to go, Chambers had the opportunity to really pull their communities and help them in the areas of workforce development and bring employees to their employers, whether it is cultivating that relationship as young as kindergarten.

to others who are maybe second chance individuals looking for employment, veterans, the opportunity is there. And I think the chambers that embrace that and start working as collaborative units in their communities are gonna excel and be extremely successful.

Brandon Burton (33:09.526)
Yeah, I love that. And that visual again, that road, I think Alice in Wonderland, right? She comes to the fork in the road and she asks, which way do I go? Right? And the Cheshire Cat says, it depends on where you want to go. You know, and you got to know where you’re headed. Yeah.

Linda M. Parsons (33:15.658)
Mm-hmm.

Linda M. Parsons (33:20.277)
She does.

And every community is unique. Every community has its place. Every community isn’t the same. And yes, we borrow things from communities, but you have to look at your own community and what does that future hold?

Brandon Burton (33:38.004)
Exactly. Well, this has been a fun discussion. I’m grateful to have had you on the show. I wanted to give you an opportunity to share any contact information for listeners who may want to reach out and connect with you and learn more maybe about the co-working space or how you guys are navigating the future. What would be the best way for someone to reach out and connect?

Linda M. Parsons (33:58.176)
So they can contact me directly at the chamber, 910-692-3926. If they want to see a little bit about our space, they can visit thirdfloorcollabspace.com. And if they want to visit a little and learn a little more about the chamber, it’s moorecountychamber.com. We do get confused with Moore, Oklahoma. In fact, today we have an application for a membership in Moore, Oklahoma.

Brandon Burton (34:15.371)
you

Linda M. Parsons (34:24.937)
We are not in Moore, Oklahoma. We are in North Carolina. So please be mindful of that. You can find me on LinkedIn as well, as well as LinkedIn.

Brandon Burton (34:32.334)
Very good. I’ll make sure to get those in the show notes and make it easy for people to find and connect with you. But Linda, thank you so much for spending time with us today here on Chamber Chat Podcast sharing your experience and some of these things that you guys are doing to really position your community well for the future and look after those investors that are within your stewardship. I really appreciate you sharing those things with us.

Linda M. Parsons (35:00.106)
Thank you, Brandon, for the opportunity and I wish the Chamber community all the best.

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Chambers as a Lighthouse with Matt Appenzeller

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Brandon Burton (00:00.902)
Today’s guest is a dynamic, I’m gonna start that over. I forgot my intro. Hello, Chamber Champions. Welcome to 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. Today’s guest is a dynamic leader in the world of small business advocacy and economic development.

Matt Appenzeller is the executive director of the Southern Ohio Chamber Alliance, representing 127 chambers of commerce and helping thousands of small businesses access health insurance and other vital benefits. He also serves as plan administrator for the SOCA benefit plan, a statewide medical plan designed specifically for small employers.

Matt’s leadership journey includes serving as executive director of the Preble County Chamber of Commerce, where he spearheaded the creation of the Preble County Economic Development Partnership and was named community leader of the year in 2012. Passionate about cultivating the next generation of entrepreneurs, he also serves as president of the Board of Trustees for the Ohio Business Week Foundation, a hands-on business camp for high school students hosted at the Ohio University’s College of Business.

two decades of experience in sales and management and a proud seven-year tenure in the US Army, brings a wealth of knowledge, discipline, and commitment to service. He currently resides in Cincinnati with his wife Lauren. Matt, welcome to Chamber Chat podcast. We’re happy to have you on the show today. I’d love to give you an opportunity to say hello to all the Chamber Champions out there listening. If you would share something interesting about yourself so we can all get to know you a little better.

Matt Appenzeller (01:52.044)
Well, to share something interesting, I was stationed in Germany before and after the Berlin Wall fell. So I got to see it before and after.

Brandon Burton (02:06.437)
that how long were you there on either end of that mark in history?

Matt Appenzeller (02:10.397)
So I was there for a total of four and a half years and I had been there, gosh, I want to say like two and a half years, two and three quarter years when it fell and then finished out my actually second enlistment from there.

Brandon Burton (02:33.623)
I just, yes, yeah, yeah.

Brandon Burton (03:05.657)
Well, is a that is an interesting fact about you. In fact, just last week I met a German native who grew up and lived his whole life in Germany and talked about, you know, what a significance that was when the wall came down and just a life changer for for the whole the whole area. So very cool.

Matt Appenzeller (03:24.086)
Yeah, yeah, for the, yeah, I think that, you know, the concept of freedom, we all talk about that in our own country here, but, you know, think about a time when, you know, people in East Germany literally risked their lives just to get across the border. And if, you know, there were

It was a militarized zone and they were avoiding gunfire to do it. So that’s how precious freedom is.

Brandon Burton (03:54.989)
Yeah. Yeah, freedom’s a great thing. Awesome. Well, tell us a little bit about Soka. Help give us an idea of the organization, the size. I know your bio talked about 127 chambers that you guys serve, but just help kind of set the stage for what you guys do and who you serve and that scope of work you’re involved with.

Matt Appenzeller (04:17.166)
Sure. So the Southern Ohio Chamber Alliance exists to support Chambers of Commerce. So what we do is we cultivate relationships with insurance carriers, brokers, and other affinity partners so that we can offer cost saving and value added products and services to employers. But we do that through Chambers of Commerce, which helps the chambers drive membership.

and also drive non dues revenue for the chamber. Southern Ohio Chamber Alliance has been around now for, we’re in our, we’re in our 33rd year. I’ve been leading the organization for the past 13 years. know, typically our meat and potatoes is so to speak, has been through healthcare or health insurance. We’ve had a series of partnerships over the years. Currently.

You know, after the, the affordable care act was formed, us and some other interested partners got together to start a self-insured plan for small employers that gave the small employer like the same chance of the self-insured plan that a large employer would have. And Brandon, I got to tell you, it’s whenever I’m speaking about this in front of people.

You know, we thought that this would be a temporary thing until Congress sort of shored up some provisions within the Affordable Care Act as it relates to small employers. And about a year and a half into it, we discovered that, know what, Congress is not going to do anything anytime soon. So we went ahead and put our foot on the accelerator, so to speak, and it’s done very, very well.

It’s actually called a multiple employer welfare arrangement. That’s the legal term of the plan. And we’ve been able to serve over 7,000 employers in that health plan. And it’s a, it’s a privilege to be able to offer that kind of value. And we’ve gotten now, including our approximately, you know, 130 chambers, we, we have chambers throughout the state who also participate in that with us. And so,

Matt Appenzeller (06:40.024)
We’ve got about 275 chambers of commerce in Ohio that are helping with the distribution of that plan.

Brandon Burton (06:46.981)
When I think of over 7,000 employers and then break that down to the number of employees and families that that affects, that’s huge. That is a huge impact.

Matt Appenzeller (06:55.882)
It is. It is. We’ve been hovering around, you know, 50,000 employee lives for a really long time. And like you just said, I mean, it’s a big number and it’s a privilege to be able to do it.

Brandon Burton (07:16.771)
Well, for our topic of discussion today, just a little bit of background for listeners, Matt and I have gone back and forth on some emails and LinkedIn chats and different things. And I think even at ACCE last year, we talked a little bit, it was, Matt’s had some pretty neat ideas that we’ve gone back and forth about. He’s working on a new book right now where some of these ideas are going to be flushed out even more. But I’d said, you know, it would be good just to get you on the podcast.

and we’ll talk about some of these ideas that you’re trying to get out there and more normalized in the chamber world and shine a light on it. So we’re gonna kind of be all over the place, you know, throughout this conversation, but it’s all gonna be chamber focused and it’s gonna be all about improving the impact that a chamber can have. And we’ll dive into this as soon as we get back from this quick break.

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All right, Matt, we’re back. As I mentioned before the break, we’re gonna dive in on all things Chamber. So I mentioned you’re working on a new book. I don’t know if you wanna start with kind of what the book’s focus is gonna be on or if you wanna dive into some of the specifics. Do you have any preference?

Matt Appenzeller (08:19.273)
Awesome. Let’s do it.

Matt Appenzeller (08:33.247)
Yeah, well, let me start by, you know, kind of just laying out how it got started, right? So I used to spend a significant amount of time on the road visiting chambers. Now we’ve hired someone to do that, but…

Over the 13 years of not just me doing that, but the other two people on our staff, between the three of us, we’ve got about 50 years of chamber experience, right? And we see the same four problems that local chambers, you know, they end up having, they experience them over and over and over. And so I wrote this paper called the four critical challenges facing local chambers of commerce today.

And, you know, somebody said, I can’t remember. think it was somebody on my staff said, you know, you don’t just write a book. I actually think I said that and she said, yeah, you kind of should. And so we just sort of expanded the ideas from there. And, and here we are, right. I, it’s this, writing a book as I’m finding out as a, as a huge undertaking. sometimes it’s very enjoyable and sometimes it’s not.

but we’re just trying to get the word out. one of the things I see Brandon is we see changes in leadership at these chambers of commerce. And I know that with your background, you have seen it also. they just ended up recreating the wheel, right? Before the next change in leadership. And so if we can put some…

literature out there that maybe helps to reduce that and helps to point chambers at least in the maybe in the right direction or at least points out what problems that they’re going to face and how to avoid them well then I feel that we’ve we’ve put out a valuable product.

Brandon Burton (10:42.061)
And you’re right, I’ve seen it a number of times and people will join the chamber because they like the chamber president, the executive, know, there’s something, some connection there or the salesperson that sold them was really good and they really liked that salesperson but then that salesperson gets hired on at another business in the community and that member fades away, you know, once renewal comes around because that salesperson’s not there. So being able to get to that core value of what the chamber does,

Matt Appenzeller (11:04.568)
That’s right. That’s right.

Brandon Burton (11:12.005)
the chamber is going to be in the future, I think is so critical to be able to retain that purpose for chambers and how they operate and being able to help ingrain that in their membership.

Matt Appenzeller (11:27.046)
Absolutely. And, you know, we recently had a conversation with one of our guests on our podcast that, you know, he says it’s all about relationships. Well, and he’s right. He’s right. It is. And when you have these changes in leadership, you know, those relationships get interrupted and then they have to be reconstituted. And it just, is very difficult for a chamber to have.

some moment gain momentum if they’re constantly having those leadership changes. So that in itself, now that I’m on it, that is one of the four critical challenges, you know, facing chambers of commerce is leadership and specifically the changes in leadership.

Brandon Burton (11:58.928)
Yeah.

Brandon Burton (12:14.233)
Yeah, absolutely. So one of the aspects that you talk about, that we’ve talked about, and I know you’re addressing in the book as well, is you have this really intriguing analogy that you’ve used between lighthouses and lampposts. Do you want to tell us what that, what your background, what the analogy is all about and how chambers can take that home?

Matt Appenzeller (12:36.717)
Sure.

Matt Appenzeller (12:43.454)
Absolutely, absolutely. So let me start at the beginning of that, right? So one of the things that think chambers really need to do is to have the right mindset on who they are as a chamber. If you’re just going to be this community organization or if you’re going to be a beacon of light, right?

And one of the things, as you know, has occurred in our profession is there’s this emphasis on the word relevance, that chambers need to be relevant. And I’m going to take exception to that, right? In fact, I do take exception to that. I think that, well, let me tell a story. I’ll do it that way. So I’m…

doing some work on my laptop and my wife is next to me on the couch and she’s watching one of the entertainment shows. I think it’s the extra with Mario Lopez and whatnot. But anyway, this aging celebrity gets on the show and is pitching their pet product. And my wife says, well, look at so-and-so just trying to be relevant again. And I thought to myself, boy.

Brandon Burton (13:52.941)
Ouch.

Matt Appenzeller (13:56.018)
Yeah. mean, is this where we really are? I mean, is this where we really are with change? Are we really like aging institutions just trying to remain relevant again? If that’s the case, we need to stop talking about setting our sights on being relevant and we need to start raising our sights to having an impact. So I say all of that.

Brandon Burton (14:17.965)
Relevance almost a relevance a point of desperation almost so

Matt Appenzeller (14:21.87)
It seems that way. we want to take chambers from relevant to impact. And so we drew the analogy of, hey, do you want to be a lamp post? Well, that’s being relevant. You’re just shining a light on a little square or a little portion of the public square. Or do you want to be a lighthouse where members and the community are looking to you for direction?

And you are being the spotlight. You’re not trying to be in the spotlight. You are being the spotlight for your community. So which one do you want to be chamber? And that’s why I say chambers of commerce. One of the very first things they need to do is just think about the mindset that they currently have. If it’s centered around relevance, I’m here to tell you that’s way too low.

Brandon Burton (15:12.665)
Yeah, yeah, I would totally agree with that. And as you were talking about the lighthouse shining the light.

I see some correlation even with Dave Atkinson’s book, Horseshoe vs. Chess, where he correlates the, running a chamber is like playing chess, where each piece is a different part of your community. You’ve got tourism, economic development, school district, city, all these different entities. And as a convener,

Matt Appenzeller (15:28.344)
See, mm-hmm.

Matt Appenzeller (15:37.806)
That’s right.

Brandon Burton (15:45.534)
a chamber should be shining the light on the different chess pieces. So that lamp post, not lamp post, that lighthouse rather, as that light’s going around, it should be shining on those different chess pieces each time it goes around. So I love the analogy. It really resonates for me. And hopefully those that are hearing this, hopefully it’s turning on a light in their minds as well as to what they can do.

Matt Appenzeller (16:09.358)
Well, thank you. And I try to outline that in the book as best as I can. I guess readers will have to tell me if it resonated with them. But the analogy is clear. mean, just don’t think that we can settle for just, you know.

shining a light on this small area. We need to be the spotlight and be that leader where people literally look to us for direction. The world is changing very rapidly now. we need to be able to use, chambers of commerce need to be able to use their convening authority, as you mentioned, to do just that and to be that beacon of light for their community.

Brandon Burton (16:58.723)
Yeah. And I think if you are operating as a lamp post, I mean, I don’t want anybody to feel bad, but you you’re, missing the mark. I mean, it really, if you’re, if that’s all that you’re focused on, there’s a lot of other parts of the community that need attention and it will really take your chamber to a place of impact. So I love that. This kind of transitions us to the next thought that I wanted to address with you is,

Matt Appenzeller (17:16.866)
That’s right. That’s right.

Brandon Burton (17:28.407)
So some chambers are operating as a lamppost, and some have caught the vision and they’re operating more as a lighthouse now.

I know it’s been an issue for you. I’ve recognized it as well, but how can a chamber?

see how they’re measuring up. How do they compare to other chambers amongst their peers? I know ACC has their annual benchmark survey, but what percentage of chambers participate in that? So that’s a problem in and of itself, but I know you have some thoughts about trying to measure and see the performance of your organization compared to others.

Matt Appenzeller (18:01.602)
that’s right

Matt Appenzeller (18:11.468)
Yeah, yeah, that’s right, Brandon. another one of the four critical challenges that we’ve said is that in our profession, there is a shockingly low amount of industry standard metrics within our industry. Now, ACCE does a great job of collecting data and publishing it every year.

I guess one of my concerns is that no one really knows about it. Well, there’s actually two things, right? Number one, I’m not sure that they’re getting enough participation in that. And then number two, once it is published, like no one really knows about it unless you’re a member. And so…

Matt Appenzeller (19:01.678)
It renders the data almost irrelevant because if no one’s seeing it, right, if not enough people are seeing it. So an argument that I make in the book is that, one of the things as you know, and Dave Atkinson outlined this in his book. And so we need to get away from the saying that says, if you’ve seen one chamber of commerce, you’ve seen one. Right. Because.

That I believe is harmful to the profession. What chambers need now is to be able to have metrics and not myths, right? Every chamber can be measured on a certain amount of standard metrics. We recently developed a scorecard for chambers that we actually are just rolling out this week. And we…

are measuring chambers in on seven data points across three broad categories. Those broad categories are membership growth, financial strength, and revenue composition. until chambers, especially the smaller chambers and brand again, you have experience working with some of these smaller chambers and smaller communities, right? I think one of the biggest problems is, is they don’t know how they’re

being against their peers. And so they, they, kind of choose this strategy is maybe this working and maybe this strategy and, they don’t have any benchmark. That’s right. That’s right. And so with, if you have standard metrics, industry standard metrics, you can isolate where those strengths and weaknesses are within your own organization. And you can build up the strengths and you can also, you know, begin working on those weaknesses as well.

Brandon Burton (20:41.005)
It’s a lot of guessing. Yeah.

Matt Appenzeller (21:02.176)
So that’s what we’re trying to do here. We’ve got a kind of got a small audience to work with. Hopefully we’ll gain some traction with it, but I’m confident that if we just persist, we will.

Brandon Burton (21:15.375)
Yeah, as you mentioned with the ACCE benchmarking surveys and the results and the whole reason that I started this podcast is trying to help those chambers that are underserved that their board doesn’t allow for them to have the budget to participate in their state association or ACCE. So as those results come out and they’re a struggling chamber that needs to know what these standards should be, what they should measure themselves against, and they don’t get access to these

reports because their board doesn’t allow them the budget to do so it just perpetuates the problem and we need to be able to help get it out and I think you know with these areas that you’re talking about measurement for those should be standards across different chambers and it still allows for the autonomy for chambers to address the needs specific to their community while still having those the standards to work with.

Matt Appenzeller (21:48.024)
That’s right.

Matt Appenzeller (21:52.772)
That’s right.

Matt Appenzeller (22:12.046)
That’s right. Let me give you an example. Let me give you an example and I don’t want to give too far off track, but like, okay, let’s just take, you know, let’s just take Richardson, Texas, which I know is kind of near you in the North Dallas area. And I don’t know if Richardson has a chamber or not. I’m just saying that, right? Okay. Okay. So I mean, if you declare yourself a chamber of commerce in Richardson, Texas, then what that chamber probably has done,

Brandon Burton (22:29.241)
They do, yeah.

Matt Appenzeller (22:40.346)
is they’ve put a boundary around their service area. And so you’ve automatically restricted your market area. So I don’t think chambers understand the significance of doing that. Like any business out here, you wouldn’t do that. You wouldn’t draw a boundary around where you would sell your product or service. You would try to expand it as far as you can.

I know that we do that for a reason, but you got to understand how that impacts the bottom line by doing that. within that, let’s say that we determine for a chamber of that size that the standard market penetration rate is, let’s just say it’s 28%. And Brandon, you’re running a chamber and I’m running a chamber, right?

So Brandon, in your chamber, let’s say we both have the same goal of increasing revenue by 15%. Your chamber is running at 20 % market penetration. So we know that you’re already eight points below what the average is. Well, operationally, your choices are very clear. You just need to increase your sales effort, which will increase membership dollars.

and probably sponsorship dollars because an increased number of members. Now, on the other hand, if my chamber is that 36 % market penetration rate, and I’m already eight points over what the average is, it would be a really bad business decision for me to do exactly the same thing you are. And that’s why we need to have metrics, these standard metrics, because depending on where you’re at,

Brandon Burton (24:25.881)
Yeah.

Matt Appenzeller (24:33.332)
in the spectrum of things, you’re going to make different business decisions about where you’re

Brandon Burton (24:40.877)
I love that perspective of being able to see where to allocate resources. I think you’ll still, I would imagine you’ll have your outliers who are way ahead of the pack that are gonna bring that industry standard up higher than, you know, mess up the curve for everybody. But it does help to see where to align your efforts and focus to be able to meet those goals.

Matt Appenzeller (24:57.838)
That’s right. That’s right.

Matt Appenzeller (25:09.57)
Yeah, and hopefully we’ll be able to create cohorts to where those outliers are with the other outliers. And at least they can be compared to each other, right?

Brandon Burton (25:16.407)
Yeah, that makes, yeah, yeah, I like that. And as far as the geography goes, you see a lot of chambers that are starting to address that in their name at least, being the using Richardson, maybe the greater Richardson or the Richardson area chamber. So it’s not just that geographic area, but branches out a little bit, but.

Matt Appenzeller (25:41.422)
That’s right. That’s right.

Brandon Burton (25:42.992)
To your point though, in today’s world, as a business owner, you’re not gonna limit yourself, especially with websites and just the online presence. Anyone in the world could be a potential customer. So as a chamber, why would you limit? And chambers have websites and a lot of them you can join members, join the chamber, can even do sponsorships through their website oftentimes. So why would you limit it? So, yeah.

Matt Appenzeller (26:08.664)
That’s right. That’s right. There’s something to think about it because it does impact the bottom line and the long-term viability of your chamber.

Brandon Burton (26:17.315)
Yeah, absolutely. Do you want to touch on the other two areas and just highlight those a little bit?

Matt Appenzeller (26:25.038)
Sure.

Yeah, so let me back up with the four critical challenges. We say that two of those challenges impact all chambers, and those are the pace of technology and industry standard metrics. The other two challenges only impact some chambers because other chambers have actually solved that problem. And those challenges are leadership and complacency.

Now, if we start with technology, we are living in a really strange time as it comes to technology. mean, it is coming at us in waves. And everybody, think, is having difficulty keeping up with that challenge. But as it relates to chambers, if

If you’re not keeping pace, if you’re not modernizing, if you’re not standardizing, optimizing, or using, if you’re using outdated technology infrastructure, you know, it’s hard for your members to have confidence in you because they’re using that stuff while you are, right? So I know it sounds like keeping up with the Joneses, but that’s just the reality of where we’re at right now as it, as it.

comes to technology.

Brandon Burton (27:51.312)
So on the technology front, I’ve.

You know, obviously with AI, there’s people of different camps and different, you know, different thoughts around it. But, um, to your point, if you’re not using the latest tool sets, if you’re not using the latest technologies that your members are using, that, puts you at a disadvantage. It puts you at a place of, you know, maybe not knowing what you should know to be able to help the business community. Um, but all of your chambers, you know, have the pushback of, well,

Chambers are all about the relationships and if we rely too much on AI Then we’re not building those relationships and having that human touch with our members How would you rebut that? What would your thought be with that?

Matt Appenzeller (28:41.42)
Well, I would say that first of all, the next phase, as far as I understand, the next phase of AI is that it’s going to be into the agentic phase. And so you don’t just have to be using AI for communications. You can be using it for other parts of your operation to do tasks for you that help you save time. But I would also say that an interesting proposition here is I know of at least one chamber that is considering

using AI to make retention phone calls, right? Because that agent can work for them in retention 24-7, right? And so I think that chambers of commerce will need to explore every possibility on how this can be used and what works best for them.

Brandon Burton (29:35.813)
Yeah.

And obviously, you know, the caveat is it comes with training. comes with, you know, being able to give a scope for the AI agent to do, you know, what you want it to do and to not just be another, you know, spam call that you get the filter through. But so there’s all that to deal with. But I think you make a great point that the businesses in your community are using these things to save costs, to be able to stay competitive. And we need to as well as chambers, as an industry, we need to do it to show

Matt Appenzeller (29:46.147)
That’s right.

Matt Appenzeller (29:50.593)
Right.

Brandon Burton (30:07.016)
Not just that we’re relevant, but that we see where the word things are going where the puck is headed, right?

Matt Appenzeller (30:11.214)
That’s right. can’t be a lighthouse for AI at least in what all your other members are using when you yourself are not using it.

Brandon Burton (30:23.331)
Yeah, yeah, absolutely. Well, is there anything else that you wanted to touch on? I know we’ve covered a lot and there’s a lot still to go, but what else stands out for you?

Matt Appenzeller (30:31.971)
You know?

Well, there’s just a lot of ground here. And so I would say just in one of the other areas, as far as complacency goes, I think that in some of these smaller chambers over time, what ends up happening is, I don’t think it’s like a conscious choice. I just think that they have mission drift that over time, you know, they have somehow become, you know, rather than the chamber of commerce, they become like the

the chamber of charity or the chamber of community or the chamber of civics, as one of my colleagues used to say. And then there’s also this sort of hesitance, hesitancy to have an impact on their community because having an impact as a leader in your community means that yes, you do need to stick your neck out there and.

Sometimes people are not going to take too kindly of that. Yeah. So you just got to understand that, you know, impact makes waves. That’s a kind of the point we make in the book that, you know, you can’t shy away from it. I mean, it’s just part of the territory. This is Sue. This is the role that you’re in as a leader and as a chamber. And if you want to make an impact in your community, you are going to make some waves.

Brandon Burton (31:33.325)
It burned a little bit,

Matt Appenzeller (31:57.912)
So I’m just making you aware of that, right? You can’t shy away from it.

Brandon Burton (31:59.312)
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, you can’t lead a chamber just to make friends, you know, it’s gonna, it’s gonna make some ways for sure. It’s a great note. Well, Matt, I like asking everyone I have on the show, especially on behalf of those listening who have that desire to take their chamber up to the next level. And I would say even to be a chamber of impact, what kind of tip or action item would you leave with them to try to accomplish that goal?

Matt Appenzeller (32:06.21)
That’s right. That’s right. That’s right. That’s right.

Matt Appenzeller (32:30.35)
well, I’d say just actually two things. First of all, again, back to technology, make sure that you are modernizing, standardizing, optimizing. That’s really important in today’s day and age. I know it’s coming at us fast. I know that you may make a decision now about a product and all of sudden the technology changes, you know, three weeks later, but you just kind of have to roll with it. The second thing that I would just say is that, you know, if people would

If they have ever read ACCE’s original Horizon Report in 2025, you know, they talk about catalytic leadership and that’s the kind of leadership that your chamber needs where you are the people who are initiating change, not just the one that is helping them cope with change, right?

And so I think that that’s the kind of chamber, the most successful chambers are going to be the ones who are doing that.

Brandon Burton (33:37.541)
Love that, not just to help them cope with change. The chamber of counseling, right? Yeah.

Matt Appenzeller (33:41.334)
Those aren’t my words. Yeah, mean, yeah, I mean, those aren’t my words, but those that comes directly out of the report. I highly encourage people to read that and also read the follow-up report for 2035.

Brandon Burton (33:51.385)
Yeah.

Brandon Burton (33:57.562)
Yeah, awesome. Well, Matt, the other question I like asking everybody, and I think this is going to be particularly on point with our discussion today, how do you see the future of chambers going, the future of chambers and their purpose going forward?

Matt Appenzeller (34:16.536)
Yeah.

I think a lot of that is gonna be dependent on where technology takes us, right? I see.

smaller chambers coming to the realization that they’re going to need to merge simply because like the industrial era is kind of over, right? I mean, I’m not gonna say it’s completely over, but you just don’t get a lot of new building as much as you have new technology that is driving commerce, right? And so,

And so I think in some of these smaller communities where they may have been bedroom communities and a segment of their population, you know, drove to the next county and that’s where everybody worked. And now those jobs are no longer there. I just think it’s the prudent move for them would be to consider merging with other.

smaller chambers within their area and just forming regional chambers and doing it that

Brandon Burton (35:30.019)
Yeah, yeah, definitely could be some value in doing that and obviously, know, assessing the needs in your community and see where that technology takes us. It’ll be a fun ride for sure. Well, man, I wanted to give you an opportunity to share any contact information or anywhere you’d like to point anyone to that might want to learn more about these concepts you’re talking about or connect with you and where would you point them and direct them?

Matt Appenzeller (35:37.602)
Mm-hmm.

Matt Appenzeller (35:41.55)
That’s right. That’s right.

Matt Appenzeller (35:58.702)
Sure, well, you can go to our website at joinsoca.com, joinsaka.com, or you can send us an email at info@joinsoca.com. If you want to learn more about the scorecard or maybe some of these other concepts, we’d happy to share them with you.

Brandon Burton (36:19.055)
Very good. We’ll make sure those are in our show notes as well. So it’ll be nice and easy to find and click on. But Matt, this has been great having you on the show. I look forward to the book coming out and getting it out there is another core piece to the chamber library that all these chamber leaders out there should have.

Matt Appenzeller (36:39.827)
Yeah, so just one more point on that, know, Dave Atkinson challenged all of us really like to have this dialogue and that’s really all I’m trying to do. I mean, I personally think that we need more literature out there because we just don’t have a lot. So that’s all I’m trying to do is just make a contribution to our profession before my time is up. Right. So thanks for having me. Really appreciate it.

Brandon Burton (37:06.943)
Absolutely, it’s been my pleasure.

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Importance of Being Proactive in 2025 with Clint Nessmith

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

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

Our title sponsor for this episode is Bringing Local Back. Remember when your community could turn to a local TV station or newspaper for the latest updates and affordable ads? Those days may be fading, but the need for local connection remains. That’s why we created Bringing Local Back, a game changing platform that restores the local visibility and advertising power to your community. It’s more than just tech. It’s about driving engagement and creating new revenue for your chamber. Ready to see the future visit bringinglocalback.com to schedule your demo today. This is the future of local commerce.

Our guest for this episode is Clint Nesmith. Clint is the CEO of Resource Development Group and brings over 20 years of fundraising expertise to the table. Throughout his career, he has led successful funding campaigns and advise chambers and economic development organizations of all sizes across the country. Clint’s background also includes leadership roles in University Advancement and with the Metro Atlanta Chambers forward Atlanta campaign. Under his leadership, RDG continues to serve as the only firm in the US solely focused on generating revenue for chambers and economic development groups. Clint lives in Statesboro, Georgia with his wife and four children, but Clint, I’m excited to have you with us today here on Chamber Chat Podcast. I’d love to give you the opportunity to say hello to all the Chamber Champions that are out there listening, and to share something interesting about yourself so we can all get to know you a little better. Thank you, Brandon. It’s a pleasure to be here today.

Clint Nessmith 2:10
Thank you for the invite, absolutely. Well, so yeah, I would say the the the most interesting thing that is happening in my life right now is I’m now a grandfather. For the first time,

Brandon Burton 2:21
I thought you had an extra big smile. So yeah, and she’s

Clint Nessmith 2:25
a cutie, my overachieving daughter, who has always done everything early in her life, from graduating from high school early to graduating from college in three years to do you know, getting married at 21 has they wasted no time, and we are. We now have a about a two week old granddaughter, so we’re super excited.

Brandon Burton 2:50
That’s very exciting. Very cool, awesome. Well, tell us a little bit about resource development group for those who may not be familiar, just give us a little bit of background about what it is you guys do, who you serve, kind of your areas of expertise, if you will,

Clint Nessmith 3:06
perfect happy to so resource development group, as you highlighted earlier, we’re very niched, and we’re really a boutique firm. We only work with chambers of commerce and economic development organizations to help them raise the money to fund their various programs. We this is actually our 30th year of operating. I’ve been with the company for 22 years, and took over a CEO a little, little over three years ago, and it’s been a, been a great transition. We are continuing to carry forth the service offerings that that we always have, and we’ve added a few new ones, as well, around investor relations support and also turning our campaign management software that we own and built, providing it with a with the capabilities to also be used for Investor Relations tracking, which is something that no CRM does well. And we kept hearing folks talk about that over and over again, and we said, we think we can probably do something along those lines. So we’re we’re excited that that we’ve been able to add that too. But what’s interesting about company, and some of the conversations I have with other chamber executives, is we frequently get the question, hey, we don’t do economic development. Like, do you guys ever work with chambers that don’t do economic development? And resoundingly, yes, we do. And what’s funny is, we code a lot of that as economic development within our own company, even if chambers aren’t specifically thinking of it that way, but we have, over the years, certainly supported chambers in raising money for advocacy, livability, talent development, and more and more housing and homelessness are working their way into the strategies that we. Uh, are working with, yeah.

Brandon Burton 5:01
So do you just, do you do kind of a one on one with these chambers and figure out what their needs are, what it is that they need to raise the funds for, or is there some survey that goes out? Or how do you assess the needs of each community?

Clint Nessmith 5:15
Yeah. So we always start off basically saying, Do you have a plan? Do you have a strategy? Many of our clients will have just gone through a strategic planning process, whether that be internal or using a strategic planning firm like an EY or or an Amy Holloway. And if they don’t have that in hand, then we have to work with them to really develop what their strategic pillars are highlighting, what are we going to be able to do that we can’t do today as we move continue to build on the momentum within the marketplace, and so we will sit down through our feasibility study process with them, work out, what are we going to do, and then who are we going to go and test this in front of? We usually will interview somewhere between 30 and 40 leaders from around the county or the region or the state, depending on the area that our clients cover, and we’ll actually take that, that draft strategy out and test it on and as we test it, we’re not only getting feedback on the strategy, but we’re getting feedback on the organization and their recent their recent successes, and how well they feel engaged in the work. And of course, we’re also getting feedback on a proposed needs based budget, and then that to fully fund that strategy. And then within that budget conversation, we’re testing individual investment amounts, which ultimately allows us to come back and provide a very data driven feasibility report that covers a lot of ground. Yeah,

Brandon Burton 7:04
that’s great. It sounds like you guys are problem solvers. You figure out what those problems are in the community based on their strategic plan, and then see what they’re not able to currently do with the current setup, the current funding, and then find the solutions to overcome that hurdle. So I think that, uh, that transitions really well into our topic for today, where we’re we’re talking about the importance of being proactive here in 2025 and once you have that strategic plan, as you’re looking forward, what kind of things do you need to do to keep that momentum going? So we’ll dive in much deeper on this topic as soon as we get back from this quick break,

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Brandon Burton
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All right, Clint, we’re back. As I mentioned before the break today, we’re talking about being proactive, especially here in 2025 from your perspective, as you work with chambers and economic development organizations, what does that mean to you to help them be proactive and and forward thinking as they manage their organization?

Clint Nessmith 11:18
It’s, it’s, it’s always important to be proactive. Clearly, and the reason the business community and public sector and foundation community tend to sort of gravitate to chambers and economic development organizations is they do tend to be proactive. They do tend to get things done in a very in a way that can be measured. So you always have to be proactive. But whenever there are economic challenges, you have to that, that that the importance of being proactive really becomes even more of a priority for chambers and Ed is I’ve, you know, you highlighted earlier. I’ve been doing this over 20 years. I have lived through a number of in my career where there was economic uncertainty, whether that be post September 11, whether that be 2008 and the great recession. We all, most of us, I would imagine most of your listeners have lived through COVID and worked through COVID, every one of those economic shock that that led to economic uncertainty, much like what we’re seeing in 2005 with the tariff talks and the changes and the potential impacts that that’s having some positive some negative on our in perspective communities, and able to be what we’ve seen is being able to be really proactive, be seen as a resource anytime you’re in the sort of economic uncertainty that’s that’s incredibly important, because All of your members, all of your investors are looking to someone to sort of help them work through the challenge, someone that can provide them with the most up to date information, someone that can assist them when they have questions. So yes, being proactive is always important, but when there is economic uncertainty, that’s really where Chamber of EDOs can really shine. Yeah.

Brandon Burton 13:25
So it can be really hard to predict when the next, you know, COVID, you know, shutdowns would be, or the next big terrorist attack, or major economic disruptor, right? But as I see it, as a as a chamber leader, as economic development organization leader, you’re, you’re kind of that Captain guiding the ship, right? You need to be able to to look ahead, have some foresight, and be able to see what are those potential threats to our community. How can we be prepared? And maybe, you know, we hear about rainy day funds and things like that, to be able to prepare for the future, for those unexpected things. So what does being proactive? How does that translate into these organizations, chambers and EDOs, to be able to sure, take those action action steps?

Clint Nessmith 14:13
Yeah, so I’ve had this conversation a lot lately. I think everybody knows that there is a lot of uncertainty for the first half of the year that we’ve been here in 2025 I can, I can assure you that every as you look back in those those previous sort of economic shock events, that if a chamber or Edo is proactive and seen as a resource, anytime you’re in a situation like this, you are ultimately going to be rewarded. You need to it’s important to not sort of hide from the challenges. That your members are are facing the we need to we need to acknowledge that there are stresses and that there is uncertainty. I’ve, I’ve had conversations with clients that were trying not to talk about the potential impact of tear up tariffs in their community, which I think is a mistake. I think your members are dealing with that every single day and are trying to work through it. And so acknowledging it is is important, and you can do that without being political. I mean, some folks are concerned that, you know, they sort of weigh in on this. It’s going to be seen as political. It doesn’t have to be viewed that way. You can simply talk about, here’s what, here’s what the impact is going to be on our local employers, and based off the information that we have right now, here’s the research that we have, here’s what we are doing to try to be proactive, to assist you all. And as we go through this, through this process, and and, you know, I kind of, I like to say, you know, pull that COVID playbook back out. It’s very relevant today. Over communicate. Invite the media to reach out to you for comment. Find opportunities to pull your members and investors together to give those updates. Create a create a toolkit. We’ve got a call. We’ve got clients that have created tariff toolkits that is really just loaded with information about the latest and greatest. You know, whatever is coming out of DC, here’s what we know. Supply chain assistance. There’s a lot of companies trying to figure out. Maybe you know new supply chains, what can you do, from a research standpoint, to help your your members figure that out? So you know, there’s a lot there that be valuable. And as I said before, chambers and EDOs that are able to be great partners in times like this are going to be rewarded.

Brandon Burton 17:16
Yeah, as you talk about the current situation with tariffs and like, Man, this really does rhyme with the whole COVID problems, with the supply chains and all the disruption. And how many people remember the whole Suez Canal incident, you know, that disrupted supply chains and being able to figure out these, these solutions. But also what stood out to me in that explanation was being able to look for potential obstacles that can stand in the way of your community, you know, progress in your community and the business progress, and also the possible solutions, and be proactive in moving forward, in having those solutions and not scrambling once those obstacles, you know, rear their ugly heads. But I already have a plan in place of, yep, we prepared for this. Let’s move forward and and those communities are going to be much more healthier. On the other end of whatever that challenge is, are you seeing some examples, as you’d mentioned, the the tariff toolkits? It’d be kind of neat to see what’s all included in a tariff toolkit. But what are, what are some other examples you’ve seen of of organizations that are being proactive?

Clint Nessmith 18:28
Yeah, it’s, you know, we’re, it’s funny. We are currently working with the Detroit Regional Chamber and their mission auto initiative. And mission is really an association for the automotive mobility industry. We actually did our feasibility study back in the fall. Before you know the all the tariff conversation really got got going, but we’ve been raising money to fund elevated program, programs for Michelle around advocacy and workforce development for the industry throughout this entire year. And, you know, there, we kind of gut check ourselves all along to say, you know, let’s make sure that we’re we’re still doing the right thing, and we’re being appropriately, appropriately, appropriately acknowledging the challenges that the industry is going through right now, and the industry adjacent folks you know, to the to the to the mobility industry, but where we’ve really consistently leaned in on is we’re able To show how Miss Auto is going to bat for the automotive mobility industry, how they’re playing offense and defense, and we’re having meetings with folks that in some cases, they’ve laid off employees, they’ve closed plants in response to. Uh, some, some tariff, but some just continued automotive sort of realignment. But who will also say we’re going to elevate our funding support provision because we see it as such an ally the automotive industry that we’re operating in that without them being there, we know we would not, as an industry, be as well off as we are today. And you look at great it’s been a slower campaign because of the impact that the tariffs are having, particularly on the automotive mobility space, but for the commitments that have come in the door. Worse, we’ve seen a 33% increase in funding. Think about all of your listeners out there, what they would do with 33% more revenue? Excitement, yeah,

Brandon Burton 20:55
yeah.

Clint Nessmith 20:58
And but it just goes to show that even in a challenging time or an uncertain time, you can be successful in raising money if you’re seen as a solution. Yeah, absolutely.

Brandon Burton 21:10
And I think it’s important to mention just whatever every community is so different, whatever industries are in the community, the layout of the community. And when you think of these potential obstacles that can affect the businesses within your business community as a chamber and Edo, some of those, maybe those global type things, like tariffs that we’re talking about, or a worldwide, you know, virus and other things can be very localized. You know, maybe your community is in a flood zone, and, you know, you just it rains hard and it really hurts businesses. So what can you do to be proactive in these different scenarios that affect you, either on a very localized and a much more wider scene, and I don’t know if there’s, you know, the best exercises or approach to really flesh out what those potential threats might be. What have you seen to as chambers and EDOs take that step to be proactive? How do they assess what those possible threats might be? Yeah,

Clint Nessmith 22:14
well, it’s, it’s, you’re doing a strategic plan every three to five years. There should always be. There should always want

Brandon Burton 22:22
analysis, and, yeah, always

Clint Nessmith 22:26
and, and if it if possible, you know, setting aside dollars to either proactively address what you think that challenge is going to be, or setting aside dollars in a special sometimes they’re called opportunity fund that is kind of there waiting to be pulled upon if something unplanned happens. I live in I live in Statesboro, Georgia. We were hit really hard by Hurricane last year like nothing I’ve ever lived through before, as many in the south work and and those you know, you think you know, kind of thinking ahead of, okay, this is, this may not be a one off thing, even if we weren’t playing planning for for some sort of response before for something like that. Let’s make sure that, as we think ahead, that we were our plan is taking into into consideration having to maybe live through something like that again. And what would we do mean? You look back at, I’m going to go way back, remember the unfortunate bombing in Oklahoma City. Yeah, we worked with the greater Oklahoma City Chamber for a very long time. And Roy Williams, who, of course, is retired now, can tell you how the chamber responded after that bombing. And they, you know, there, there’s definitely playbooks out there. I mean, they’ll, he’ll tell you that they immediately turned the chamber, into a place where the media could gather and report from and were welcoming questions and talking about, well, here’s what our local community is doing to work through this, this unplanned for unprecedented challenge that we’re now facing. And what’s interesting is, you know, Oklahoma City was really struggling kind of in the early, kind of late 80s, early 90s. And while that was a horrific event, the Chamber figured out a way to use that to actually be one of the things that sort of elevated that community over the next 25 years, and and and so need to be proactive. You need to be thinking for the future. I will always love Opportunity Fund, our client, the greater Wichita partnership, right now is setting up an opportunity. Opportunity Fund, that’s an economic development organization in Wichita, that’s the 10 county region, and they’re doing it for different reasons. They’re doing it because they’re one of the fastest growing communities in the country. Right now. Their economy is on fire, and they are tired of having to take an unplanned the have the first step be we’ve got to go raise money so we can address this, which, of course, just slows down your response time. So instead, they’re going to set up an opportunity fund so they can immediately take action. Because we all know, in this world, the quicker you can respond, the more likely it is you’re going to end up with a successful conclusion, yeah,

Brandon Burton 25:42
I love that. The whole idea of the Opportunity Fund, I mean, any any household, it’s good to have that, that savings, you know, for So, right? Why don’t we do that as a business, as an organization? Why don’t we have that opportunity fund and and teach it and practice it and have it be a normal thing,

Clint Nessmith 26:00
right? You got it. And

Brandon Burton 26:03
I think there’s even opportunities within the opportunity fund where you can invest, you can do other things with it, where you can you can see it grow, and doesn’t just sit there. But when that opportunity really comes, you really are

Clint Nessmith 26:15
prepared exactly, you know, I know many of our chambers do have sort of that rainy day fund, or, you know, just the reserves that they’ve built up. You know, you look at the Greater Philadelphia chamber, which is another client of ours, and they had some real, you know, Philadelphia had some real challenges over the last couple of years. Well, they used some of their rainy day fund to really beef up their their local advocacy work. And if they hadn’t had that available, it would have been really hard to do what they did. And ultimately, it was a heavy lift, but they were able to do it. And they they’ve had theirs knowing that, you know they were going to need it at some point. And

Brandon Burton 27:01
yeah, it’s great to see. I mean, you hate to have to tap into it and use it, but it’s great to see a real example where they had it. They were prepared. They’re able to put it to work and and solve problems. So that’s what it’s all about. Well, Clint, I wanted to ask you, for those listening who would like to take their organization up to the next level? What kind of tip or action item might you suggest for them and trying to accomplish that goal?

Clint Nessmith 27:30
Great question. It’s, it’s, I’m going to repeat myself at first, if we move as I answer this, it’s important to have a strategy, even if even if it’s an internal strategy, you have to have a strategy, and you need to, you need to make sure that it is a it has been, it’s refreshed every three to five years, and in every single one of those strategies, it shouldn’t be, how do we keep doing what we’re doing one of it should be, how do we do what We’re doing better? And how do we the new opportunities and challenges that we think we’re going to be facing over the next three to five years, you’ve got to be constantly looking to get better and and then ultimately, that allows you to go out to your funders, community governments, foundations, to make a case for increased funding support, or to join your organization, potentially for the first time, and support you financially, but but the key is to communicate. Here’s what we’re going to do. We need to do that we can’t do today. And oh, by the way, we’re the only ones doing it in our service area. I we frequently will do organizational roles charts to very clearly map out what key organizations are doing within an ecosystem, because it gets noisy and your funders get confused and but being able to show here’s what we are doing uniquely, but also here’s how that dovetails into what other key organizations are doing, so that we aren’t working in silos. Both of those are incredibly important. But my, my, my number one sort of caution this year is if you are thinking about raising revenue, get on it, because what we’ve seen the first half of this year is fundraising across the board has become more challenging. A lot of across not not not just in economic development space, but just any nonprofit, there’s a lot of there’s a lot of grants that were out there that have been paused, and a lot of folks are kind of taking it on the chin. Well, I mentioned earlier about a six to nine month sort of delay whenever you have an economic shock before everybody kind of really gets moving again. Well, this. Fall and in the summer, we are seeing and predicting everybody that has ever needed to raise money being raised raising money in a very aggressive way, because they’re trying to make up for what they didn’t pick up in the first half of the year. So thinking about raising money and take the steps now to try to get out in front of that wave, stake your claim, your unique value, and begin making some of those, those major ask, even if, even if they’re not official, you need to at least see them with those funders that have the likelihood of giving you the most money. And you know, that’s, that’s what I would suggest.

Brandon Burton 30:44
And to your point, with the when these challenging times come, we’re, we’re in the middle of one right now with the tariffs, certain organizations may feel hesitant to go and ask people to invest, ask for for more money, but these are the times where they really see the value of what your organization does. It’s really time to be able to showcase and say, here’s how we support your business, to help you grow and help you thrive. Help our community be strong. Now this is what we need from you, right? And as they can see that happening, yes, it may be a strain, it might it might be hard to have some of those conversations, but if you don’t capitalize on that opportunity of showing what you’re doing in your community, you’re missing a huge opportunity. And it’s your point earlier, when you talked about at the beginning of our recording, some chambers listening might think, well, I don’t do economic development. Yes, you do, and like Clint said, they would code, you know, certain programs of work that you do as economic development. Just because you don’t have that economic development contract formally, doesn’t mean that you’re not involved with economic development and own that sector of it, as Clint talked about, having that, you know, that diagram showing the areas of responsibility, show what you own, and go after the funding for it,

Clint Nessmith 32:07
you know. And you made it something you just said there keyed off another thought, if you are worried that you’re going to and somebody by asking them to do more than they’re doing now with your organization because of perceived challenges that they may be facing. We always like to remove as many barriers as possible to getting to yes, and one of those is, listen, we’ve got this great we’ve got this great we’ve got the strategy. We’re being very proactive. Our goal is to see you this level within the next couple of years. You know, we recognize you may not be able to do anything else beyond what you’re doing this calendar year, but let’s map out a stair step plan to get you there in one to two years. And you know, you start to get people thinking about, okay, how am I going to do that? That’s a great way, though, to grow revenue. And of course, you want to tie it back to that strategy, but it’s a great, great way to recognize, we know you may be facing challenges, but here’s a way that you can still support us in an elevated way, and people will appreciate that,

Brandon Burton 33:27
and it builds ownership for these companies within the community. Does That’s awesome? Well, Clinton, as we look to the future of chambers of commerce, I always like to ask all the guests I have on the show, how do you see the future of chambers and their purpose going forward?

Clint Nessmith 33:44
I That’s a that’s that’s a great question. You think about how chambers have evolved just since I’ve been in this industry over 2223 years, chambers today are not what chambers were in 1999 when I worked or 2000 I guess when I worked for the Metro Atlanta chamber, there are so many more areas that we’re having to get involved in as an industry. I mentioned homelessness and housing. Earlier chambers used to never be involved in homeless, child

Brandon Burton 34:23
care, too.

Clint Nessmith 34:24
Child care, talent development. I mean, you know, there’s a lot, there’s a lot there, and we’re just going to continue to see that. And the reason is, is that when leaders of your community see these challenges, they’re looking for a partner that has proven themselves to get results in the past, and usually where they point back to is a chamber of commerce or an economic development organization. And so that’s what’s really driving this constant change. And. I, you know, you think about sea of chambers in the in the future, I think they’re going to continue to be just as relevant as they are today, as long as we are helping to solve community problems. You know, unless you’re, I think you’re all of your listeners would recognize that the value of networking, just for networking sake, is getting weaker and weaker. You have to be part of the solution for driving your community forward, and as long as you’re doing that, you’re going to be relevant.

Brandon Burton 35:36
I agree. Amen. Preach on. So I wanted to give you a chance to share any contact information for listeners who may want to reach out and connect with you. Talk more about how they can be proactive. What would be the best way for someone to reach out and connect

Clint Nessmith 35:53
right? Yeah. Our website is RDGFundraising.com and my email address is clint@rdgfundraising.com, feel free to reach out.

Brandon Burton 36:09
That’s perfect. We’ll get it in our show notes and make it nice and easy for people to reach out and connect with the Clint. But I appreciate you joining us today, here on chamber chat podcast, sharing your perspective. These are things that, if chambers aren’t already thinking about, they should be. I think a lot of them are, but they need that, that motivate of talk, to be able to get them back in gear, get them focused, get them, you know, driving towards that destination. So I appreciate you, you know, coming and stirring the pot a little bit and making them think worthwhile conversation. Yeah,

Clint Nessmith 36:43
thank you. Really appreciate it. Brandon,

Brandon Burton 36:46
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Community Strategy with Jason Mock

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

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

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Our guest for this episode is Jason Mock. Jason is a dynamic and visionary leader committed to fostering strong connections between businesses and communities. As President and CEO of The Greater Dalton Chamber, he works to drive economic growth, advocate for businesses and create a thriving future for the region. His leadership extends beyond Georgia. With a proven track record in chamber and community development before leading the greater Dalton chamber, Jason served as president and CEO of the San Marcos Area Chamber of Commerce in Texas, and as the director of Small Business Services for the foresight Chamber of Commerce in Georgia. Jason is deeply engaged in regional and state leadership. He serves on the board of Thrive regional partnership and the Georgia Chamber of Commerce. He is a member of the hub chamber Council, a key policy group of Metropolitan Chamber leaders across Georgia, and serves on the ALI Alumni Advisory Committee for the Appalachian Regional chain, Regional Commission. His career began in politics, studying political science at the University of West Georgia and working with former congressman Lynn Westmoreland, and later served as political director at former Georgia Secretary of State, Karen Handel, and played a role in the 2008 Republican National Convention and John McCain’s presidential campaign. Committed to professional excellence. Jason earned his IOM certificate in non profit management from the US Chamber of Commerce Institute in 2016 Jason, I’m excited to have you with us today here on Chamber Chat Podcast. I’d love to give you an opportunity to say hello to all the Chamber Champions who are out there listening, and to share something interesting about yourself so we can all get to know you a little better.

Jason Mock 2:53
Brandon, thank you so much for having me today. You know, I don’t know what’s most interesting about me, but I will say that at one time, I got to drive around Lee Greenwood at an event. And for those that may not recognize Lee Greenwood, you know, God bless America, very powerful guy that loves to sing about our country, but got to drive him and his son around back in the day for some political events when I was working for on the presidential campaign for McCain. So, so,

Brandon Burton 3:26
which is pretty cool. Yeah, he’s still on the circuit too. It seems like I just saw him, you know, a few months ago on stage. So that’s that’s great, very interesting. I like asking that question because we learn these, these fun tidbits about people, but tell us a little bit about the Greater Dalton Chamber. Give us an idea of size, staff, scope of work you guys are involved with and budget just kind of set that perspective.

Jason Mock 3:52
Greater Dalton Chamber. For those that may not be familiar, we’re up in northwest Georgia. We’re home to a lot of people know us as the carpet capital of the world. Now we like to say we’re the flooring capital of the world, just because we’re carpet and hard services, as well as astro turf. In fact, if you watch the national championship football game that was hosted in Atlanta, Georgia this year, that turf was made right here in Dalton, Georgia. So kind of unique and special about that. But our community is a, you know, manufacturing community, but it is one of entrepreneurs. Our chamber is about 800 members. Our staff is about we have 10 folks on staff, and we always are looking to grow and and find different ways. But you know, we’re engaged in a lot of different things, mainly in the connecting side of things that networking most chambers are, but developing talent, workforce development is key for us, as well as the advocacy standpoint. So those three. Standpoint, or our focus as an organization. And I know today we’ll talk a little bit about more about the community side of things that we’re working on. We really dive into making sure that, you know, not only with the voice of our business community, but we’re also looking at how we’re growing greater Dalton community as a whole, for for families, residents, and anybody that’s coming to visit our community as a throughout the time,

Brandon Burton 5:27
That’s great. That gives a great snapshot and and a great you know item to pinpoint, you know, the manufacturing to the national championship. So yeah, that turf, and that turf is becoming more and more popular everywhere.

Jason Mock 5:42
It seems like you see it, not just at the National you know, in sports from a major league to the NFL, but you’re seeing it down to the Parks and Rec and in fact, Shaw sports turf, that’s the one that made the national championship. They’re making it where they’re putting these coconut shells in them, and it’s supposed to keep the temperature really cool on the ground and during the turf. So for those that are in the the South, in the summer times that you know that that turf can get a little hot, and they’re finding ways to keep it safe from a temperature standpoint, as well as a safety on the knees and the ankle. So it was kind of cool.

Brandon Burton 6:22
Yeah, one of our neighbors just put it in their backyard turf, and got me envious. And I’m like, shoot, how much does that cost? Gotta figure this out. He told that lawn mower very quickly. That’s right, that’s right. Well, you had mentioned it a minute ago that our focus for our conversation today will be around the strategy you guys have for building community there in the Dalton area. And look forward to diving in deeper on this as soon as we get back from this quick break.

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All right, Jason, we’re back. As I mentioned before the break, we’re talking your community strategy today. Chambers across the country, throughout the world, need to have some kind of strategy right to build their community and and I always like getting the perspective from different chambers to see what is it that’s working for you guys, what? Where’s your areas of focus? And maybe it lights a spark for somebody listening to see ideas that they can maybe implement in their community. But tell us what I believe. It’s called, Believe Greater Dalton.

Jason Mock 10:40
Believe Greater Dalton is our community strategy led by the Chamber of Commerce. It was something my predecessor and board chair at the time had many conversations about, because we were constantly doing a strategy, year in and year out, and some were working and some were were not. Some of our community leaders were feeling like that. Those strategies were being in silos, and the only people that can make a decision with those that were at the table versus being a community strategy for for the greater good. And so over time, believe greater Dalton came to life in 2018 and it is a it became a five year strategy to look at our community, and we really dove deep into what our community needs, what our community is needs to focus on for the for the future. We brought in a consultant to help us with this process. We interviewed community leaders, chamber businesses, elected officials, we held focus groups, we did surveys, we did it all to kind of figure out what are the top issues that are facing our community. And we came up with six areas of focus that we wanted to focus on in those first five years. And then we went out and raised those dollars once we knew those focus points. First year, we raised a little over a million dollars in that process to focus on six areas like I talked about. And those areas were education, housing, downtown, entrepreneurship, community, pride and economic development. And each of those had we broke them down into more of like objectives inside the education model. A lot of folks right now across the country are talking about third grade reading, and from a business community standpoint, it is very important that we look at third grade reading. And so from a chamber, I know a lot of folks, colleagues around will be like and listening to this going well, is the chamber out there in the school system teaching third grade reading? No, we’re not. We’re but we are working with our our educators. We’re working with our school districts to figure out ways that we can improve third grade reading so that that our third graders are reading at, you know, at grade level throughout the year, and so really, the focus of that is, how do we solve some of these problems? You know, when it comes to housing, you know, we’re not out there building housing, but we knew and know that housing is an issue for our community in I’ll back us up a little bit. No eight, no nine. When the housing crisis took place, it really hit greater Dalton because of our industry, we were pretty much a one horse town at the time, and so developers backed away. And so we really knew that we needed to have a focus to look at housing, at all aspects, from the workforce housing all the way up to the executive housing. And so when we launched this in 2018 we we did a housing study, which we produced with with a group. But that housing study allowed for developers in our community to have almost a road map that they could go to business or go to the banks, they could go to developers and go to investors and find a pathway to build housing. And we’ve started to see our housing stock to change in the sense of, we started to see additional workforce housing. We started to see more mid level executive housing. We’re we haven’t solved the problem, but we are working to fill those gaps, and we’ll continue to do that. So really, the true focus was how first six years, we’re flying the plane and building the plane at the same time. And so a lot of studies were done, a lot of looks at how we can improve our community. And so we were putting dollars into those areas that we felt would move the needle. And then fast forward, we said, You know what? This is something that we really, truly need for generations to come. We don’t need this to be a one year plan. And so believe greater Dalton 2.0 came about. And so we have additional five years where we went out and did the same process again. And but came up with some new strategies to look at.

Brandon Burton 15:03
So after that, the five years, what, what kind of strategies did you see in the second evolution of it?

Jason Mock 15:11
Yeah, some were the same. Housing still stayed at the top. I mean, when we talked to our investors, when we talked to community leaders, they still talked about, hey, we’re making progress, but we still haven’t. You know, we still are not at the finish line from a housing standpoint, so housing and education stayed at the top of the of those two lists. But what changed a little bit was we weren’t focusing on just on downtown. We said we gotta focus on our community as a whole. We got to focus on revitalization as a as a whole, greater Dalton ecosystem. And so we started to tackle different projects and different things, and a lot of this is public, private partnerships. I’ll give you example of one where the city came to us and they wanted to do, and this was in the first year, but they wanted to do some downtown improvements, of some streetscapes. They were able to get a grant to help with this, but they needed some additional dollars to cover the streetscapes, and so they came to us, and they asked for some for some funding. And so between the city, the grant, believe, greater Dalton, as well as our downtown development authority, we all chipped in some money into this to allow for this project to happen. It’s being constructed right now. It’s a little bit of a mess, but we know it by by the end of this year, that streetscape is going to be tied in to allow those businesses along that that corridor to be more successful, to have better parking for their interest, to have better walkability for their customers. At the end of the day, it’s going to be a game changer for that area, but it’s going to be a game changer for our community, because hopefully it’s attracting more businesses to that corridor so that more can grow and more can be successful, right?

Brandon Burton 17:01
So as you talked about education, housing, still stayed on that list, or still, you guys are moving the needle, but the problem’s not solved yet. And makes me picture, you know, a world where all the community problems are solved, and then what purpose does the chamber have, right? That’s right. You gotta have some job security there, right?

Jason Mock 17:19
Hopefully. So I’ll say we, we got a lot of work. I mean, we’re blessed to live in a great community. We got a great industries that call greater Dalton home. But, you know, there’s, there’s a lot of things that we want to improve on. We’re always trying to cross that finish line. I always say that the in our world, the finish line is always moving. That goal post is always is always moving. When we think we’ve accomplished and got a good product, we go, ooh, we need to tweak it here, or something else comes about. So there’s always job security and making sure that our communities are successful Absolutely.

Brandon Burton 17:59
And that was my point, that goal line keeps moving, and there’s always going to be, you know, things to focus on, and some of the things will stay on that list for some time, until you can really find a positive solution. But seeing that these are issues in almost every community, it seems like I don’t think anybody’s found that silver bullet just yet, but they’re all working towards good things and innovative ideas that’ll come out of it too. Yeah,

Jason Mock 18:26
and one thing I’ll say that has made this successful for us, and it may not make it successful for another community, but what’s made it successful for us is the folks that we’re engaging with. We have a big tent kind of philosophy, everybody’s invited to the room, everybody’s opinion is listened to and allowed to give comment about what’s going on. So we meet regularly with community leaders that are not businesses. They may not even be a chamber member. We’re meeting with folks to make sure that they understand the value of believe greater Dalton and what’s going on, but we’re also there to listen to what they they their input. Because we know this is a community strategy. It’s led by the chamber, but it’s a community strategy that we want our community to buy into. And so if it’s, you know, somebody that is retired and but lives in our community, is invested in our community. We want to hear from them. It’s a single mom trying to raise two kids. We want to hear from them. If it’s that business owner that has two employees, or that business owner that may have, you know, 1000s of employees, we want to hear from them, because this is their community just as much as it’s our community.

Brandon Burton 19:38
Yeah. So that leads right into the next question I had for you. So you had mentioned, with the in 2018 when the strategy was first being built out, there was a lot of surveys and things going on. How has that evolved? You mentioned you wanted to hear from all these people. I imagine surveys are going out to members the community at large. How is that being communicated? How are you gathered? Bring that information. We

Jason Mock 20:01
actually do a survey every year to our community. It goes out we we blast it out as best we can. We get it on social media. We make videos about it. You know, I’ll say this, our community, our city limits, is about inside city limits of Dalton, 52 53% are Hispanic. So we we put the survey in English and in Spanish. We have our marketing materials in both English and Spanish. We have folks that are speaking about it at different events and Rotary Clubs and civic groups. So we’re out there, you know, pounding the pavement for about three to four weeks the surveys out there, and the main thing we’re looking at is a net promoter score. Many chambers are starting to look at net promoter scores for their their their membership, from their events. We look at it from our community as well. And so we’re trying to improve our net promoter score throughout the years we’ve we’ve climbed a little bit on some things. We’ve dropped a little bit on some things, so we’re constantly working on that. The other thing we do with our survey is we poll and survey our high school students, our juniors and seniors. Get this survey. We want to hear from them. So we work very closely with our school districts, our superintendents, our principals, to make sure that this survey is getting in the hands of our students so that they can give us feedback. One thing we want to do is, you know, talking about the brain drain, we don’t want that those folks to leave our community. We’re blessed that we have Dalton College, Dalton State College, here in in our community. We have a technical college here in our community. But we also want folks to know, students, to know that there are great jobs in our community. So we want to hear from our students what they think about greater Dalton, because we know that they’re the future of our community.

Brandon Burton 21:56
That idea just alone in asking those high school juniors and seniors for their feedback shows that, hey, the community cares about me, right? There’s a place for me if I want to build a career here, if I want to, you know, grow my family here, there’s a place for me, and I don’t need to look somewhere else necessarily. And

Jason Mock 22:14
what’s amazing about this is going back to that net promoter score, usually, the net promoter scores of our students is higher than our net promoters of our adults, of the community. So that’s a great thing. I mean, I mean, when you look at it, the future is bright for us, but the that they really believe in the place they live, they love the place they live. And that’s, that’s cool.

Brandon Burton 22:33
Yeah, that is cool. I’ve got a a son that graduated last year, and a daughter, it’s a junior this year, and I’m thinking, would she, would she specifically fill out a survey? And I hope she would, yeah, I hope that would give that, that boost of confidence of, you know, the community cares about me, and they want me to they want my feedback. You know what? My opinion matters, especially as they get into that voting age, and they get more involved civically, like we want them, knowing that their voice matters and

Jason Mock 23:01
going still with that same survey, we also we carve it out a little bit. We ask you if you are a mother or father or parent or guardian with a student in our school system that has been in their school system currently or in the last five years. They then fill out a different or same survey, but they’re filling out some additional questions about how they rank our schools. What is it that they like about our schools? What is it they may not like about our schools? We take that data, we meet with our superintendents, we meet with our school board representatives, and we talk to them about the information that they have. Some of the data at the last year, survey came back that are we have two school system. We have a city and a county district that our County school system, their career and technical education was being called something in house. Parents were calling it something else, or didn’t recognize that. So that the that change right there had a negative on what they were offering. But what the school says is, we’re calling it a, they’re thinking it’s B. So we gotta work on our language. We gotta look at work on our communications. Fast forward to this year. Those numbers were drastically improved because of the way that they changed how they communicated that with their with their parents, so just little things like that making a bigger difference for how, you know, we can solve problems around here. Yeah,

Brandon Burton 24:29
some minor adjustments that are easy to make and it, you know, it’s night and day difference. Yeah, that’s great. Have there been other examples like that? If the feedback that you get from the surveys, just, I like those, those minor adjustments. Because sometimes you see the feedback, you’re like, Oh, this is gonna be big undertaking. This is another five to 10 years to move this ship, you know. And others are like, we can do that next month, you know? Yeah,

Jason Mock 24:54
most of them, those little ones, are great, like you talked about. A lot of the stuff we get are. Those bigger picture you know, ooh, this part of our community needs to be improved. I would love to see us have this type of retail store or this or that, but that right there just gives us feedback, and really and truly, it gives us our elected officials political cover. A lot of times, elected officials across the country are hesitant to make a decision, hesitant to make a move when it comes to growth or spending some dollars, but when you can come to them and say, the community as a whole has voted, has given their opinion that they want to see this improve, that’s political cover that they can go back at a county commission meeting and a city council meeting and say we’ve heard through our chamber, through this survey that’s given out to the community, that this is an important issue to us, and therefore we’re going to step into that arena and help solve that, because now they have that political cover to do that.

Brandon Burton 26:03
Yeah, having data means everything, right? That’s right. Having that information, I love it. Well. Jason for chamber listening, who’s wanting to take their organization, even argue their community up to the next level? What kind of tips or action plans, maybe you offer them to try to accomplish that goal.

Jason Mock 26:24
First of all, I would say, get a group of leaders together to have that conversation. And this is where you’re going to think big picture. What are the issues we’re facing today, what are the issues we may be facing tomorrow, and then, what are those issues that we may be we’re not sure of that are 20 years, 30 years down the road, if you can get that, if you can get that group together and have that kind of conversation as first but two, you gotta be willing to talk about, I hate to say it this way, the ugly in the room or the ugly in the community, what needs to be improved On. You can’t be as scared to lay it out on the table to say, you know, we are not successful in this area. We need to improve our school systems in this way. We need to improve our streetscapes in this way, or our look in this way. But it’s going to take a lot of push. I’ll say the first time that believe greater Dalton got introduced to the Board of Directors for the chamber. It was not well received. The board did not want to get into this arena. It took some more conversation. It took some more time with business leaders to convince the chamber board, at the time to invest in this project, once we had that investment from the board, we then had to go out and get the investment from our elected officials. We knew we needed both parties. We knew we needed the business leaders and we needed the the elected official side of things invested in it. So we had those two sides. And then we went and found key leaders. And I would suggest you go find key leaders that may not be at the table, may not be at your may not be a board member, may not even be a chamber member, and this is a good way to get them to become a chamber member, but you may have to have those conversations with with key leaders in the community that you may not talk to on a regular basis, and if they can get their buy in, and then I’ll say, dream big, but Start slow. You want to have that big picture of one day our community can look like this. Our community is going to have XYZ, but know that that doesn’t take place overnight, that it takes time. We the first year. You know, lot of people go what you did the first year. We did a lot of studies. We paid for a lot of information, but that data helped us to be ready for year two, or for the believe 2.0 the next five years, where we’ve put some more data. I’ve had invested more data, but at the end of the day, we’re working on more projects than we’re working on on studies this year, and so that will just grow. So just know it takes time. It takes leadership, it takes vision. And you know, Rome wouldn’t see, you know what built in in a day,

Brandon Burton 29:06
right? Yeah. And as you’re giving that explanation, I’m reminded the book 13 ways to kill your community. And you talk about, you know, pointing out the ugly. And you know, people don’t want to live in a community that, whether it’s visibly ugly or just, you know, things are not welcoming, or whatever those those stinky parts are, you know, your community got to recognize it and fix it, that’s right,

Jason Mock 29:29
and just have those open conversations. I think chambers that chamber CEOs and leadership that don’t have those tough conversations with their boards or with their community, or doing a disservice to their Chamber members, because our members are talking about it. Our business community is talking about it at the water cooler, or at the ball games with their with their kids, or, you know, at church, you know, they’re talking about, Oh, would you see the potholes that we came in on throughout, you know, the. This afternoon, or whatever it may be. So we have to be open minded to know that if they’re talking about it, then we should be talking about it. Yeah,

Brandon Burton 30:06
absolutely. Well, Jason, I’d like to ask everybody I have on the show, as we look to the future of chambers of commerce, how do you see the future of chambers and their purpose going forward?

Jason Mock 30:18
They’re changing every day. You know, I think the chamber of the past and the past is last, is yesterday. Chambers are always evolving and always having to think of things. I think if this kind of project, believe greater Dalton community strategy for a greater community would not have been something that would have looked at 2030 years ago, I think chambers would have just said, That’s not our lane. We don’t need to get in it. I think more and more we’re seeing chambers having to get in lanes that we may not have been in last year or 20 years ago. We have to be thinking about how we’re truly growing a community as a whole. We’re helping our members, but we’re helping the bigger ecosystem of our community. And at the end of the day, we may not be serving and helping some members through this process. They may be elevating themselves because we have a better community. That’s okay. That’s okay because we want businesses to succeed, and at the same time, we want to show value what we’re doing. And hopefully they see that value, and we can show that, hey, look, we’re we’re working on your behalf, even though you may not know of us, you may not see us, but there’s a role that we love for you to play within our community, within our chamber. So I think chambers have to think big picture, be very broad in the way that they operate, and not pigeonhole themselves and just those events and networking side, but really look at the whole ecosystem of the community that they they represent.

Brandon Burton 31:47
Yeah, great explanation. Absolutely need to to get outside of just the the networking and so forth. That’s a means to an end. It’s not that. It’s not the main focus. So, right? But I

Jason Mock 31:59
think in the end, you know, we’re going to have to look at, you know, I don’t know this answer, and I know you’ve, you’ve tackled it a little bit on your calls, and love to learn more about it. But the membership side, I mean, that is always changing, and it’s a dynamic stuff. And, you know, I was telling somebody, and you’ve heard this, and our audience has heard this, you know, people were joining the chamber because my grandfather was a chamber member. My daddy was a chamber member, you know? And now it’s getting to a point where the new business owners are going, I don’t, I don’t know that, and there’s really showing value of what that value is and and everybody’s value is different. Everybody’s Chamber’s value is different. Everybody’s community value is different. So you have to find that value that fits for your community and your organization. Yeah, absolutely.

Brandon Burton 32:41
Well, Jason, this has been fun to have you on the podcast. I appreciate you taking time to be with us today and sharing some of your experiences examples you know, going through the your community strategy there in Dalton, wanted to give you a chance to share any contact information for listeners who may want to reach out and connect with you? Yeah,

Jason Mock 33:00
I’m happy to my email address is mock@daltonchamber.org, and I’ll be brave enough, I’ll throw my cell phone out there. If anybody wants to call me, please do 770-241-3629, I’m happy to meet with you, talk to you, and help any way I can. I think we’re all in this industry together, all in the boat together, and whatever we can do, I can be learning from you, and hopefully you can learn a little bit from us. That’s perfect,

Brandon Burton 33:27
and we’ll get that in our show notes for this episode to make it easy to find. But again, Jason, it’s been great having you on the show and and appreciate you sharing these examples and and really, you know, shining a spotlight on what what a community can do to really have a strategy and move the needle going forward.

Appreciate it.

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Long-Term Vision with Johnna Reeder Kleymeyer

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

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

Our title sponsor for this episode is Bringing Local Back. Remember when your community could turn to a local TV station or newspaper for the latest updates and affordable ads? Those days may be fading, but the need for local connection remains. That’s why we created Bringing Local Back, a game changing platform that restores the local visibility and advertising power to your community. It’s more than just tech. It’s about driving engagement and creating new revenue for your chamber. Ready to see the future visit bringinglocalback.com to schedule your demo today. This is the future of local commerce.

Our guest for this episode is Johnna Reeder Kleymeyer. Johnna is the President and CEO of the Colorado Springs Chamber and EDC. She has a distinguished background in leadership roles, including serving as president and CEO of the Regional Economic Development Institute Cincinnati, and holding leadership positions at Duke Energy Citigroup, United Way of Greater Cincinnati in Ohio and Kentucky, the O’Bannon County Chamber of Commerce and the Jackson Downtown Development Corporation in Tennessee. John is a proud graduate of the University of Memphis for her Bachelor’s in communications. Thomas Moore University for MBA, and she attended the University of Oklahoma Economic Development Institute where she earned a certificate in economic development from the International Economic Development Council as the inaugural President and CEO of the Regional Economic Development Institute in Cincinnati. Johnna led a 15 County, three state regional economic development organization. Under her leadership, the R, E, D I, Cincinnati achieved 175 project wins, created 25,000 jobs and secured $1.4 billion in capital investment within four years in 2022 she became the president and CEO of the Colorado Springs chamber and EDC, Southern Colorado’s largest Chamber of Commerce and Economic Development Organization. Since then, she’s led major initiatives in aerospace and defense, develop, Defense Development, legislative advocacy, and has successfully overseen the securing of 29 economic development projects, creating over 5000 jobs and attracting over 1.1 point $8 billion in capital investment. Johnna, I’m excited to have you with us today, here on Chamber Chat Podcast. I’d love to give you an opportunity to say hello to all the Chamber Champions who are out there listening, and to share something interesting about yourself, so we can all get to know you a little better.

Johnna Reeder Kleymeyer 3:02
Oh, well, thank you so much. I’m honored to be with you. And want to say hello to all my colleagues out there. And really want to say, just, just keep doing what you’re doing. Some days I feel like these are thankless jobs, and we’re carrying the weight of our communities and trying to make big things happen. But just know you’re never alone. I’ve been doing this a long time, and you are making a difference

Brandon Burton 3:26
Absolutely.

Johnna Reeder Kleymeyer 3:29
So if I, if I think about something interesting, let’s see I’m I was born and raised in Tennessee and lived in Ohio for over 20 years, and after the the pandemic, I said, I’m going to do like a millennial and and I’m not a millennial, if you’re, if you’re looking at me right now, and said, you know, where do I want to live versus where do I have to live? Our children were grown, and I had had a lot of success at ready Cincinnati, and said, Do I Do I really need or have to stay in the Midwest? And my husband and I said, Let’s go to a beautiful place that’s fast growing, and let’s see if we can make a difference there. And so I came to Colorado Springs, and have not looked back. It’s been fantastic, but very unusual for someone that’s almost in their 50s to do that, versus someone that maybe were in their 20s. So very unique path that that I’ve taken,

Brandon Burton 4:27
yeah, you could have fooled me. I thought you were a millennial. So flat

Johnna Reeder Kleymeyer 4:31
flattery works on me. You think

Brandon Burton 4:34
my friend? So you guys did what a lot of people did and took off to Colorado. It’s beautiful country there and and lots of good reasons to be there, but tell us a little bit more about the Colorado Springs chamber and EDC to kind of set the stage for our discussion. Help us get an idea of the size staff, scope of work. You guys are involved with budget to kind of set the stage,

Johnna Reeder Kleymeyer 4:56
sure. So we’re the second largest chamber. The state of Colorado, behind the Metro Denver chamber, we’re the second largest city in the state of Colorado. It’s about three quarters of a million people in our metropolitan statistical area. It’s a community that’s made up of five military installations, which is really unusual. It’s a huge part of our economy, which has really led to that large aerospace and defense sector here, our chamber and EDC has over 1000 members. I have a six and a half million dollar budget. We host not only typical chamber functions such as government affairs and Small Business Services and membership services, but we also have the economic development arm of our organization. Our community is the size that it works well for it to be joined together as one organization. We also host a group called the Pikes Peak Housing Network, where you’re in a faster growing state like we’re in in a fast growing region, affordable and attainable housing are a real issue, and so this organization works constantly to try to try to help solve, how do we have more housing in our in our region? And then we also host the Small Business Development Center in our region to a very important piece to to work for small business and entrepreneurs, just as we work for primary employers, primary sector, and trying to recruit and retain them. So some traditional goals and some non traditional roles, that’s

Brandon Burton 6:28
great. It’s enough to keep you busy, for sure, and it’s a neat dynamic, having the military, you know, involved there as well, and having that focus. Yeah, it

Johnna Reeder Kleymeyer 6:37
is. This is my first community to have such a military presence. But when you have, when you have one army installation and four aerospace I’m sorry, when you have four bases that are around the space and the Air Force, it’s, it’s a huge part of your economy, and it really adds to the fabric of our community,

Brandon Burton 7:01
absolutely so for our discussion today, we’re going to, we’ve titled this episode long term vision. I like being able to talk vision with chambers so other chambers can hear and maybe get some ideas and maybe broaden their minds as to, you know, what’s happening in Colorado Springs. Maybe it can be scaled to, you know, wherever they’re at in the country, so we’ll dive into that as soon as we get back from this quick break.

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All right, Johnna, we’re back. As I mentioned before the break, we’re going to focus our discussion around long term vision for Colorado Springs. But first, we’ve alluded to it a couple times already. The tremendous growth there in Colorado Springs, what’s drawing so many businesses to want to choose to invest into to grow in Colorado Springs in that region.

Johnna Reeder Kleymeyer 11:04
Well, I think it’s a variety of things. I think number one, Colorado has so much natural beauty and such an outdoor lifestyle, I can literally walk out my office door Brandon and be on three trails. So we have about 600 hiking biking trails in our region. You can be in the mountains and minutes. It’s a really, it’s a lifestyle state. And what I mean is we all talk about that we want balance in our life and harmony in our life. Well, people have moved to this state because they’re living it. So where talent comes then follows business. We know the importance of, after you have a good site for an economic development prospect, you have to show can you get the talent. So Colorado has was a was a net benefactor during during COVID, and continues to grow as a state. Colorado Springs has really taking off because you have big city amenities, but you have a small town atmosphere. We are not a ski town, but you can be to in, you can be skiing in an hour and a half away from us. But then you had, we’re not a mountain town. So we, we have lots of we have lots of amenities because of the aerospace and defense culture here, even in in in down times, in an economy, quite often for national security reasons, our economy bounces back quickly and and and goes down less severe than what some other communities might face that are so dependent on other sectors. I think it’s it’s also that during the pandemic, a lot of young people realized that they didn’t have to live in the super high priced cities, and could move to more mid tier cities, mid size, and have a lot of the same amenities. We have the arts, we have sports here, we have universities, and so they could have all those amenities, but maybe not the big city prices or, unfortunately, some of the the other things that that go along with, with, with the large cities, the the taxes and homelessness and crime and and things such as that. So this city’s really done well because of that. And then I will give my team some credit. I think it’s important when you’re the chamber and the EDC that you’re on the forefront of selling your community, telling your story, or it’s told for you, and you may not, but what is told, if you’re not getting in front of that, and this is a community that, I would say is the best kept secret in Colorado, in a lot of respects, it’s fast changing, and so we’re out there working on those national news stories, I would think Any Chamber of Commerce would want to be going out and telling their story. We work very closely with our Convention and Visitors Bureau to try to recruit tourism to this area, so that while we have tourist is one part of our economy, we also have primary sector employers, and we’re doing that in aerospace and defense, cybersecurity and advanced manufacturing are our three areas of focus, and the chamber in EDC where we lead that charge, I like to say we’re the quarterback of the team, and then we have a whole lot of great folks on our offensive line, our city, our county, our utilities, our state organization and such. So I think that’s contributed to our success.

Brandon Burton 14:21
That’s great. I’m glad you got to the point of bragging on your team and telling the story of the work you guys are doing and what Colorado Springs has to offer to create that narrative so it’s not being created for you. I’m a big believer in being an agent of action like that. So how do you guys there at the Chamber in EDC? How do you go about advocating for for sound and a sound environment for business to be conducted?

Johnna Reeder Kleymeyer 14:47
Well, I’m a I’m a big proponent of the Entrepreneurial Operating System that Gina Wickman has has coined, and it’s in the book traction. I’ve used this in several organizations that I’ve. And we adopted that when I first moved here, little over three years ago now. And so just what you said, we do not measure activity here at the Chamber in EDC. We measure outcomes. And that could be really hard for chambers of commerce, because you have a lot of competing priorities. You have a lot of legacy programs that people have done for years and years and and it can be chambers are famous for adding things on. We’re not very good for taking things away. So this chamber, we really have evaluated all of our programming, all of our events, all of all of our initiatives that we’re focusing on, from government affairs to economic development and in between, and if we don’t have measurable outcomes, it’s hard for us to sell to our constituents, to our membership, why we’re doing it. So we do this crazy thing, we stop, we stop doing it if it is not working. And so I would just encourage your listeners that as they’re leading their chamber organizations and trying to decide and help shape the future of their community. Measurable outcomes can make all the difference, and I believe in the smart principle of specific, measurable, actionable, realistic and time based. So put those together so you agree with your board on what success actually is, and then you can all celebrate together. But if, if you as staff, have a different mindset of what that is than your board, you’re not going to see success for your community, and frankly, you might be out of a job. Yeah,

Brandon Burton 16:35
I love how you said that you there at the chamber. You guys don’t measure activity. You measure you measure outcomes, and that’s really where the rubber meets the road, and you can really see the needle move in your community. Is by by measuring those outcomes. And that is, I think, the definition of success that you’re talking about is seeing those outcomes that are measurable. So it

Johnna Reeder Kleymeyer 16:55
is, and that doesn’t mean, you know, did we? Did we have 250 events this year. Oh, my goodness gracious. That exhausts me to even hear that, right? And you know, real outcomes. This is hard work. We’re working on things like housing affordability and attainability, child care in our community, retaining our military installations, ensuring that we’re having good policy at our state and local level, for for business and low regulation. We’re working on Union bills right now. We’re we’re working on a K through 12 program to ensure that we can have homegrown talent, not just imported talent to the state of Colorado. These are not easy topics, and they don’t happen overnight. But if it’s not the chamber doing it, who is

Brandon Burton 17:42
That’s right? So that’s a good transition. I wanted to ask you about workforce, and if workforce is a struggle throughout the country, but what initiatives you kind of touched on them a little bit there. But what initiatives are you guys doing there in Colorado Springs to address it the workforce challenges that so many communities are seeing? Yeah,

Johnna Reeder Kleymeyer 18:00
you know, we’re fortunate because we’re the second most educated state in the Union, but when you peel back that onion, it’s because of so many people that move into the pop move into the state of Colorado. It is not necessarily that it’s our homegrown talent. So when you really look at our test scores and graduation rates and such. And this is, this is the same all over the country, but we’re actually going deep and looking at this on how do we solve it? Because I don’t believe in the long term the United States, you know, we’re short on population for jobs of the future, so not all communities are going to succeed. And we want to be sure that we’re seen as a mega region, with both our partners, all the way to Denver to all the way down to Pueblo Colorado, as a mega region of Front Range talent, the Front Range, or the front range of mountains here in Colorado. So we’re going deep with our 17 school districts in our metropolitan area to evaluate those test scores, to evaluate the why. And we’ve created an initiative called innovate Pikes Peak, and we’re partnering with education experts, a group called Peak education, because I’m not an education expert, we’re business people and but we’re trying to solve an issue that will produce talent for us in the future. Again, homegrown talent. Because I’ll remind everyone Brandon that while business and chambers sometimes shy away from getting involved in education, we should remember that while maybe your children have choices in life, not all children do, and if they’re not graduating with a great start and maybe certification, certificates, some some college, two plus two programs, they’re going to live in your community. They’re not going anywhere. So they can either live in your community or they can live on your community. So we believe that the chamber and. See has a role to play in ensuring that those young people graduate with a great start. So this innovate pipes peak is all about evaluating career pathing and whether that be a college track or that be a technical track. We think that the two blend together. So we’re working with our higher education and our K through 12 right now in the business community is really leading on defining those paths and where we need to be involved for the future, because the duplication of resources and the teacher pay and all of this does not add to success for our children long term. So we’re stepping in, we’re leaning in on that. We’ve got those measurable outcomes, and this is a big, hairy, audacious goal that we’re working on, but by the end of the year, we’ll have a pathway, a roadmap for our business community to follow

Brandon Burton 20:51
Absolutely and you know, I haven’t seen any formal surveys on this, or anything. Maybe you have, but it seems like youth, as they graduate high school, they feel like their future, either they stay in their community and don’t go anywhere, or they have to leave the community to go to school and get a job and and in very select communities, you see the sense of pride where a student graduates. And like I live in Colorado Springs, I want to raise my family here. I want to have build a career here. So there’s something to that, building that sense of pride within the community, where they don’t have to feel like the grass is greener, you know, five states away, to go to school and get a start their career somewhere else. But have that be the desire even. And maybe they do go somewhere for school, but they come back because they see the opportunities and that pride within the community.

Johnna Reeder Kleymeyer 21:43
I think I’ve heard the quote before that the grass is not always greener on the other side, it’s greener where you water it. So I think it’s the chamber and EDCs role to water that grass. How are we ensuring that there are opportunities for young people? How are we ensuring that they can afford to live in our community, to buy a home. You know, the most likely to move are an 18 to 34 year old. And so if we can make sure that the Colorado Springs metropolitan area is on their radar, even if they go away to school, we want them to think, wow, it was pretty cool where I lived, and I want to go back. So we like that boomerang effect too, because then they’re bringing back fresh ideas and perspectives too when they have lived somewhere else. But we’re working hard to build on that population, and I think any chamber needs to be focused on that. If you’re lucky enough that people just show up in your community, good for you, but I don’t think that’s the case for most communities anymore.

Brandon Burton 22:44
Yeah, I think it helps for like you’re saying that boomerang effect, to be able to see a contrast of another community and say, You know what the grass is really green back where I grew up. So let me go back there. Yeah,

Johnna Reeder Kleymeyer 22:54
that’s things like nightlife and outdoor activities and things that young people want and desire are are different than where I am in at this point in my life and career, but I think that’s why we have to ask the right questions and young professional organizations being active in your area. We started a we started a program called Find your calls, and we use cos and everything, because it’s Colorado Springs, but find your calls the play on words. And it’s a, it’s a suite of talent initiatives to recruit, engage and connect young professionals, young people. One of those programs is called Hello cos so, and it’s about, it’s a, it’s a summer intern program. So when interns come to our region to to work in the summer, housing was a big issue for three months to find somewhere to live. I mean, are you going to find it on Craigslist in somebody’s basement? That’s just scary. So, you know, we we worked with Colorado College, and we have a safe environment for those young people to live in the summer, and then the chamber and EDC does all the fun wrap around programming. So while they’re out of work, we we hike up Pikes Peak with them. We go to a switchback soccer game. We introduce them to speed dating with military generals in the region, where they can have interaction with people that are in charge of our national security, in our in our country, we think that chambers in EDC should be doing things to help our business community recruit that talent and then help that, help that young person fall in love with the region. Maybe they fall in love with the job too, but if they have a great experience in your community, they’re going to want to come back.

Brandon Burton 24:43
Yeah, well, and inevitably, other jobs will come, and people that are already employed are going to go to the new job, and so you got to backfill all the time. And you know, what I’m hearing is it’s not so much intent, you know, just to focus on the K through 12 and helping create, create a career. Path, but it’s really place making within the community. So they have a desire to be there. They want to be there. They love being there. So I think that’s just as important. Yeah, so I think you’ve touched on it in different aspects. But the next question I wanted to ask is, how do you see what is, what is your long term vision for Colorado, for the Colorado Springs Chamber and EDC.

Johnna Reeder Kleymeyer 25:24
Well, for us, I would say that for you know, so goes the community. So goes the Chamber in EDC. And we are, we are a community that has growing pains. And I’ll and I’ll say this so things that, the things that we’re having to work on are a how do you maintain a low tax, low tax environment, but at the same time you have big needs, such as road improvements and high quality schools, maintaining our military bases. We talked about housing, we talked about child care for young families. This is a really big deal, and something that the pandemic just exacerbated the problem, particularly for women and people of color needing to get back to work full time, working on all these issues. I call them growing pains, because we’re fortunate that we have these growing pains. If we weren’t a fast growing community, this wouldn’t be the issue. But with that the Chamber and EDC, we’ve tried to set those goals, set those measurements, and then where we focus, where we measure, is where we will succeed. And that’s what we’ve tried to do. You announced, you talked about some of our economic development announcements when, when you in the introduction, we weren’t, we weren’t seeing that until three years ago, and now we’re one of the top locations in the state for new announcements. It’s where we focused. We said we’ve got to get more of a diversity of primary employers in our region, and that’s where we focused. We’re now trying to solve those big issues Brandon that will make it where it’s the right environment for business to be able to thrive in place, expand or locate to our region. So I’ve given you several of those examples, and that’s where we’re spending our day. And I would just tell my colleagues out there that it’s not about party planning, it’s not about business after hours, it’s it’s, it’s not about having the best gala in the community. Those things are a means to the ends. Those are a networking opportunity. I think the future of chambers and economic development Corps are solving big issues for the community, coming alongside government where government cannot, cannot solve the issue because, either because they’re a public entity, or they just don’t have the dollars. And how are we being the conduit between business and private, the private sector of business, community officials and government officials? I think that’s the role for a chamber to play,

Brandon Burton 27:58
Absolutely and I love that, that vision that you have, where you focus is what’s going to grow, right? You got to keep watering those areas, make that grass green? Yes. So I like asking, as I have guests on the show, as for chambers that are out there listening, what kind of tip or action item might you share with the Chamber who’s trying to take their organization up to the next level. I feel like you’ve shared some good tips. But is there anything else that you want to expose and share with those listening?

Johnna Reeder Kleymeyer 28:29
Well, I think that I would just say, I know that many of our chambers, you know, I have 2528 people on on our team. So we’re, we’re a large organization for a nonprofit, especially for our size, but we’re doing a lot of things. I think number one, what I’ve learned through my career, and it sounds a little cliche, but it’s so true, is you can get a lot more done when you surround yourself with the right people, and when you don’t care who gets the credit. So we work really hard on our internal culture. We have a we have a culture of excellence and accountability. It is. These are lifestyle jobs. We don’t work. We don’t work eight to five here. We work when the clients need us. We do a lot of evening events and weekend things going on. But, but I would say that putting the right people around you as a leader in the chamber world or the economic development world will allow you to do more, and it will free you up as a leader to be more visionary and forward thinking and making sure that you’re helping drive results for the future, but you need people on your team that are also integrators of the mission, that are going deep and working hard to to close projects and to find wins in the community and work on big, big goals. So surround yourself with the right people, and then our philosophy here is, as long as we get the win, we don’t care who gets the credit. So quite. Often we may be carrying a heavy load on a project or an initiative, but we make sure that all of our partners are equally thanked and appreciated. Then there are other times, our partners are taking the lead and and we’re serving as a resource to them, and I just think you can get a lot more done when that’s your philosophy and that’s the way that you’re pushing forward? Yeah,

Brandon Burton 30:21
working as a team, right? So we’ve talked about the long term vision for Colorado Springs. The next question I have for you is, as we look to the future of the chamber industry, Chambers of Commerce in general, how do you see the future of chambers and their purpose going forward?

Johnna Reeder Kleymeyer 30:40
Well, I think it’s an interesting time for our industry and profession. I’ve been in and around this work for almost 30 years now, and seen it in four different states. I would say that all chambers, if you’re not constantly thinking about how you’re reinventing yourself and how you’re adding value for your membership, you’re going to lose membership. You’re going to be left behind. Now, what do I mean by that? Well, because our economy is changing so fast, and because the access to resources and artificial intelligence now and being able to reach people across the web, I don’t think businesses feel the need to be a member of a chamber of commerce, as they did maybe 50 years ago, 30 years ago, even longer. I liken it to years ago, our parents, our fathers. Usually it was typical, were members of the Rotary Club, and Rotary Club was the place to go so you could meet other businessmen or and at that time, it was man, but business people now and and do business and find ways to network. People have so many choices now as as businesses on how they connect with their customers and how they connect with other business people, that unless you’re constantly thinking about your value add as a chamber I think it’s going to be hard to make the case of Why be a member of the Chamber of Commerce when businesses are having to make choices about payroll and and health insurance and other things, or do they pay their chamber membership? We may get put at the bottom of the barrel. So I would recommend finding non dues, revenue sources. What are programs you can offer that are at a fee that add value, not add what are data sources you have that not everyone in your community has? Are there? Are there? Is there information or programming or something that you can do that’s a value add that I constantly say we need non dues revenue. Non dues revenue because just depending on a membership model for the future, I’m not so sold on that’s going to work long term, maybe, maybe in my career length. But those of you that are starting in chamber world in your 20s and 30s, now, I think we’re going to live in a very different society in 10 to 20 years, and you if, if you’re not at the table, you might find yourself on the menu. So get to that table and make sure you’re adding value that others others don’t have, and you’re differentiating yourself as an association. Yeah, and

Brandon Burton 33:17
I think it’s important to not just look at your chamber as a membership association, but as a business, operate it as a business and find those income generating. You know, you’re calling them non dues revenue, but in the end, it’s income generating, and that’s the only way to thrive and stay healthy as a business. So yeah, constantly

Johnna Reeder Kleymeyer 33:36
people will will say to me, Well, Well, John, you know, the chamber is here to just do good community work. And I said, and that’s a business unto itself. If I can’t make payroll, I can’t have our organization doing this work you’re asking us to do. I’m a business too. I have a profit and loss statement like every other business, and I think you hit that on the head. It’s important for us to be seen and think of our business in that way as chamber leaders.

Brandon Burton 34:05
Yeah, well, Johnna, this has been great having you on the show and sharing your insights and some of the exciting things that are happening in Colorado Springs, the impact your organization is having in the community. I’d love to give you an opportunity to share any contact information for listeners who may want to reach out and connect and maybe learn some of the strategies you guys are are working on, maybe without giving away all the secrets. But how would you have them reach out and connect with you?

Johnna Reeder Kleymeyer 34:30
Well, number one, I do believe that there are no new ideas. You just need to borrow ideas from our partners. So go out there and meet with other chambers and find those find those leads. You know, we have a national organization association that we can all tap into, but if they’d like to speak with me, I’d be flattered and more than happy to help in any way. You can find me on LinkedIn under Johnna Reeder Kleymeyer, you can find me on our website is ColoradoSpringsChamberEDC.com, and my phone number 719-500-9485, or my email is jreederkleymeyer@cscedc.com. I’d be happy to speak with anyone and be be flattered to get a call perfect.

Brandon Burton 35:26
We’ll make sure all that is in our show notes for this episode make it easy to find and connect with you. And I just want to thank you again for setting aside some time to be with us today here on Chamber Chat Podcast, sharing some of your experiences and tips that you’ve learned from and being willing to share them with the Chamber community, we appreciate it.

Johnna Reeder Kleymeyer 35:44
It’s my pleasure. Good luck to everyone out there. Keep making big things happen in your community.

Brandon Burton 35:49
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World Cafe Model for Board Retreats with Elaine Spalding

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

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

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Today. I’m joined by Elaine Spalding, president of the Rowan Chamber of Commerce in North Carolina, with over 30 years of Chamber Leadership Experience. Actually, we just learned 40 years of Chamber Leadership Experience across multiple states. Elaine has helped the Rowan chamber or national recognition recognition, and was named the 2020, Chamber Executive of the Year by Carolina Chamber Executives Association. She’s a CCE and an IOM graduate. She’s deeply involved in economic development, education and community leadership. But Elaine, I’m excited to have you with us today here on Chamber Chat Podcast. I’d love to give you an opportunity to say hello to all the Chamber Champions who are out there listening, and to share something interesting about yourself so we can all get to know you a little better.

Elaine Spalding 1:57
Thank you, Brandon, I love chatting with you before just learning about our both our backgrounds, experience in both Texas and California, and it’s been my honor to work for Chambers of Commerce now for I just totaled it up 40 years in Oregon, Texas, Kentucky and Of course, now North Carolina, and this is our favorite spot. We love it here. My husband and I get out and go hiking and kayaking, and we love the outdoors. We have two dogs, and they run us ragged, and just enjoying the beautiful state of North Carolina.

Brandon Burton 2:37
It is a beautiful part of the country. So I’m curious, what kind of dogs do you have?

Elaine Spalding 2:42
Oh, they’re both mutts we always adopt from rescue shelters. And one is a hunting dog black and white mix, and one is a really odd looking

Speaker 1 2:55
Beagle mix. Those are the best, the odd looking ones, right? Love them.

Elaine Spalding 3:00
Everybody stops and goes, what is that dog? Burton? Just love

Brandon Burton 3:05
them. Couldn’t recreate it if you tried? Yeah, one of a kind. Yeah, I love it. Well, tell us a little bit about the Rowan chamber, just to give us an idea of the size staff, scope of work. You guys are involved with budget to kind of set the stage for our discussion today.

Elaine Spalding 3:21
Yes, thank you so much for inviting it’s it’s really, the timing is perfect. Uh, we are celebrating our 100th anniversary for the Rowan chamber here in Salisbury, North Carolina. And so we just had our 99th annual gala meeting, which was tremendously successful. And all year long, we’re recognizing long term businesses in the community. We have over 800 Chamber members here in Rowan County, representing 60,000 employees in our community, very active business community, and we’ll be lifting up those long term businesses all year long with special promotions, with recognition on our website and all of our chamber newsletters and our social media. And in January of 2026, Brandon, you’ll have to come and join us. We’ll be having our 100th annual gala meeting.

Brandon Burton 4:15
Wow, that that’ll be something to plan for. I’m sure they could. You don’t get 100 I mean, that’s a, that’s quite the milestone. I mean, that’ll be something to celebrate,

Elaine Spalding 4:26
for sure. It’s a, it’s a wonderful community. We happen to have Food Lion, for folks that are from the southeastern part of the United States, we’ll know Food Lion. Grocery stores. Food Lion is headquartered here. They’re our largest employer. And then, if anybody knows the wonderful soda Cheerwine, we have a big cheer one festival here in Salisbury, North Carolina, and they’re over 100 years old as a company as well. So we’ll be lifting up a lot of those firms like that.

Brandon Burton 4:56
That’s awesome. It’s neat to be able to. To bring those into as part of the celebration and celebrate their success as well, right? That’s awesome. Well, I’m excited for our topic today. As we were planning this this recording today, we landed on the idea of talking about the World Cafe model for board retreats. And I have to admit, this is something new for me. So be learning as we go through this episode, but I look forward to diving in much deeper on this as soon as I get back from this quick break.

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Alright, Elaine, we’re back. So tell us, what is the World Cafe model for board retreats?

Elaine Spalding 8:49
Thank you for asking Brandon. It was a new concept for us as well. We have a wonderful new board member who works at Catawba College. Her name is Dr Christine Lynn. And I said, you know, I’ve been doing the same sort of format for our board retreats. I’d love to do something different. And she said, Oh, I can help you facilitate the World Cafe model. And it was beautiful, quick, easy way to get input from all of our board members and not have the boring sort of breakout sessions and report back sessions, so you basically just have all the board members going around to, kind of like, you know, sort of the speed dating assignments, where there’s different tables with the different focus areas of the chamber, business advocacy, workforce development, our minority business programs, young professionals, all the different things. There’s butcher block paper out there’s somebody that does a quick thumbnail sketch of where we are and what the challenges are in that area that get all these ideas from the board members. There’s seven minutes at each station, and you go around to every table. So everyone gives input. They they summarize it quickly at the end, and then your board votes on what the top priorities for the next year will be. I love the World Cafe model. So

Brandon Burton 10:13
how long does this day it sounds like you can, you know, bust it out in about two or three hours. Is that accurate?

Elaine Spalding 10:21
Yes, it depends on how many core areas you want your board to really focus on. So, you know, you just do rounds, and it’s seven minutes at each table. So, you know, you could, you could make it as long or short as you wanted to. Our program lasted the breakout part of it just lasted for an hour and a half.

Brandon Burton 10:39
Okay, so I know part of the idea with the board retreat is you get these board members together, and you spend time together, and it’s kind of that team building, and you get to feel like you’re you’re moving towards that common purpose and goal. Does this World Cafe model? Does that facilitate some of that same kind of team building feeling and environment that a traditional board retreat might do,

Elaine Spalding 11:03
right? And what I love about it, you know, group dynamics you always have in with our business leaders. You’ve got the Type A personalities, you know, the ones that know everything. And then there are those quiet leaders who really do know everything, but yet they might not contribute at that same high energy level. So it gives the extroverts and the introverts the opportunity to both share and we ended up with some wonderful new ideas and new ways to approach some problems that the chamber had been struggling with for a couple years, and a whole new focus on a very successful community leadership program, and we’ve just started a new youth leadership program. And so I think it’s, it’s that that model that really gets folks to contribute at whatever their comfort level is,

Brandon Burton 11:59
yeah. So how many times have you done the World Cafe model? Well,

Elaine Spalding 12:04
since our board retreat, we also used it for our leadership Rowan program and for our youth leadership program and the same sort of experience, you know, just fantastic ideas coming out from a quick, quick turnaround time. Yeah.

Brandon Burton 12:21
So structurally, do you feel like you need to bring in a facilitator, like you had one in your community there to facilitate the World Cafe model? Or is there a kind of a template? I think it’s nice having a facilitator, because you have somebody who’s kind of non partisan that can kind of help create the vision and whatnot. But how would a chamber who’s interested in in the World Cafe model? How can they?

Elaine Spalding 12:45
Yeah, I’d be happy to share information from Dr Christine Lynn. I’m sure she could help them with the the structure and the template. But I also googled it when she first talked with me about it, and there’s some pretty easy steps that you can get online for the World Cafe model, and it’s a relatively new concept, but I think one that’s really taken off for these kind of strategic planning initiatives.

Brandon Burton 13:10
Yeah, that makes, makes a lot of sense. And if she’s, if she’s done this for you, I’m sure she’s available for others, and

Elaine Spalding 13:16
she is a great volunteer. And fortunately, the college lets her. She works in the strategic planning area, so they love to get her out. It’s good for the college as well. So she’s done some things for some other chambers here in the region already. So yeah, it’s been good.

Brandon Burton 13:32
So I like the idea, like you said, you get those type A personalities and get those quieter personality but it gives everybody that option, to be able to share their voice, feel like they’re being heard, to contribute to what that vision is for the community or for the organization, whether it’s your young professionals or whatever, whatever group it is that you’re working with, right? What are some of the other positive outlooks or positive outcomes you see from utilizing this sort of model, yeah, I

Elaine Spalding 14:01
think that really making sure that we are listening to all the voices within our chamber, we have been very intentional about having a focused peer to peer support groups and, you know, we do the breakfast programs and after hours mixers and all that sort of stuff, but really focusing on our young professionals, our minority business council, our women in business groups and our agribusiness group, and getting folks that are dealing with the same issues and problems in their work a day world and The peer to peer support. Them coming up with programs and ideas for professional development that would be helpful to them and them just supporting each other. You know, we are growing here in North Carolina, lots of new people coming in, which is wonderful, and we want to make them feel welcome. We also particularly. With our young professionals. Want to retain them in our community, and so that program really helps, you know, open the door, welcome them to the community. They get some buddies. They can go meet at the brew pub. And, you know, whatever they may be interested in, if it’s if they’re interested in sports, or if they’re interested in arts and culture they can find a group of buddies to hang out with through the chamber, and I think that’s the best service that we can be as a business advocacy organization is just connecting our businesses together, connecting our newcomers in the community, and helping our employers retain those young professionals that they brought into the community. So that, you know, when somebody from a larger community says, Hey, we can offer you a little more money, they’re saying, No, I really like this community. I like the friends I’ve made, and I want to stay here.

Brandon Burton 15:54
Yeah, get them so ingrained that they’re afraid to leave right. Probably wouldn’t make the same friends or connections if you go somewhere else, right? Yeah,

Elaine Spalding 16:05
that’s, yeah, that’s part of what we do as chamber people, is to connect, but to be that, that convener, and to really be that champion for the business community that

Brandon Burton 16:15
makes such a positive environment for them to thrive anyways, right? Why would you want to leave, right? That’s great. So as you use this, this World Cafe model, have you seen any, maybe, any gaps within it, that, as you utilize it like well, we needed to tweak it here or there to really make it fit for our community, for our organization, or is it just perfect?

Elaine Spalding 16:42
You know, it’s like with all new things, you do make some adjustments as you go through it. But I I think that for so long, we were focused on having all these PowerPoint presentations and all the new technology. And, I mean, this is really just pretty basic. You put that butcher block paper out. People are writing down ideas, and then you capture it, you know, and have all the documents that you can share electronically. But I think that our volunteers, at least, were really looking for something more tangible, like that, that they could get their hands on and really feel like that they have contributed, and they see their ideas, you know, on that piece of paper.

Brandon Burton 17:23
Yeah, it’s funny how old ideas become new again, right? And we try to outsmart ourselves with all this technology and ways to approach things. And then when we come back to what really works well is the stuff that had been done a while back, right? And we maybe abandoned or forgot about. And so being able to go back to the roots, as they say,

Elaine Spalding 17:43
Yeah, and when I think having the smaller groups where you can really have a discussion, you know, if you get over about, you know, six to seven people, then not everyone feels like they can contribute. So having the smaller groups all sitting there together, you know, rattling off ideas is just a beautiful experience,

Brandon Burton 18:01
yeah, so what? What is the ideal number? He said, Not more than six or seven, but you need more than two. I mean, what?

Elaine Spalding 18:10
Yeah, you know? I mean, just like when you get folks around a dinner table, you know, if you get over about six, you can’t hear everyone’s conversation. So about six to seven is ideal for these kind of World Cafe breakouts groups.

Brandon Burton 18:24
Okay, that’s good to know. Yeah. Any anything else about the the World Cafe model that you want to highlight for us again, with me not familiar with it at all, I gotta rely on somebody who’s experienced this. No.

Elaine Spalding 18:38
Thank you for giving us the opportunity to share. I would just tell my fellow chamber buddies that you know, if you’re looking for something to to jazz up your boring board retreats, this might be a good model to look at the World Cafe model.

Brandon Burton 18:53
I mean, nobody listening does boring board retreats. But I mean maybe for somebody who hasn’t listened before, I’m just

Unknown Speaker 19:00
kidding. Their first time,

Brandon Burton 19:04
that’s right, they’ll have to keep this, you know, pin this episode, so when they are sitting at that boring boardroom tree, like, Wait, there’s a better way, right?

Elaine Spalding 19:14
We’re always happy to share. And you know, I I learned so much from my chamber peers. I love these kinds of opportunities, because no matter how long you’ve been in the business, or if you’re relatively new to the business, you know, you can always pick up one or two ideas from being involved in, you know, your chamber execs Association, either at the state level, the regional level, or with ACCE,

Brandon Burton 19:39
yeah, and, and I love doing these episodes for that reason, to be able to share ideas and for others to be able to pick up on them. But even as you’re talking about, you know, the young professional groups, I’m thinking nowadays, just about every chamber has a young professionals group, and they’re all talking about, you know, what are the needs? What are the struggles? What. Are we in? And I would guess, from one community to the next, a lot of them are coming up with a lot of the same challenges and solutions. I mean, there’s uniqueness for communities, for sure, but being able to share some of the best practices and things that are discovered, it really helps to shortcut some of that struggle to be able to overcome and find solutions. So, right, yes, lean into those, those you know, professional development groups and connections to build those and and strengthen your communities. Yep. Well, Elaine, I like asking for listeners who want to take their organization up to the next level. What kind of tip or action item might you share with them to accomplish that

Elaine Spalding 20:45
goal? Yes, well, I am a big believer in the three C’s Chambers of Commerce being a convener. We’ve talked about that being a champion and a catalyst, and really kind of grouping your marketing materials around those and I can send you a graphic of this, but we did for, for our, I don’t know if you can see that, but for by the numbers, for 2024 wrapped around all of the things that we have done, you know, the different events, the business advocacy programs, to Our state level and two trips to Washington DC, talked about the real value of the chamber, and I think now more than ever, our business leaders are looking for our local chambers to really be that business advocacy organization and to not be afraid to take on the big issues in your community. We in North Carolina, of course, have dealt recently with Hurricane Helene. Our friends in the mountains region of North Carolina and all of the rest of the chambers around the state have rallied around them and supported those business communities. And I think that’s the real beauty of being in this industry, being in chamber work, you can always reach out to another chamber that may have gone through a similar disaster. And I think of our friends in California with the fires, and this industry is so helpful. So I always encourage especially chamber professionals that are new to this business, to reach out to the folks around you. Reach out to professionals like yourself, Brandon, that that may know a couple of other folks have experienced a similar situation and can walk you through how they handled it. You know, every community is different, and you may need to tweak it a little bit, but boy, if somebody already has a successful model, you can certainly learn by that. And I think those best practices, benchmarking your chamber against others in the industry and tapping into this beautiful resource that we have within the chamber industry is just a wonderful, wonderful thing, and I I hope that everyone takes advantages of situations like chamber chat and any other resources that might be available to the chamber executives.

Brandon Burton 23:15
Yeah, great tips. I love that any anybody can plug chamber chat anytime they want, I will fully endorse that

Elaine Spalding 23:26
I love that I love this business, and I love helping other chamber people. So when you call it, I thought, yeah, sure, you know. I mean, we could, we could talk about anything you want. And I am always happy to sit down and talk with other chamber folks and I, as I said at the beginning, I always learn more from them than I think they can from somebody like me who’s been in the business and work for a couple of different chambers. Yeah,

Brandon Burton 23:50
absolutely. Well, Elaine, as we look to the future of chambers of commerce, how do you see the future of chambers and their purpose going forward? Yeah,

Elaine Spalding 24:00
you know, ACC just released the new horizon yesterday, yeah, oh my gosh. And I poured through that last night. And I think all of the new things that chambers are being asked to deal with, some of these, you know, the environmental issues that we’re dealing with, housing issues that a lot of communities are dealing with around the country, child care issues. I mean, we’re still dealing with so many things since the pandemic that we really need to come together and support, not just the businesses, but our entire communities and the really good chambers are getting involved in some of these areas that we traditionally had not been involved with. So I think getting those experts that in your community can help the business community understand and continue to be that business champion, but be the convener in your community. So that your business, your elected officials, your education leaders, can all be at the same table and helping to solve problems in your community.

Brandon Burton 25:11
Absolutely, it’s it’s fascinating. Usually, when I ask that question, a lot of people will refer back to the original horizons report, and now that we’ve got the updated report, I’m curious to see how these and how that question gets answered, yeah, the next year or two, right? That it is fascinating.

Elaine Spalding 25:32
Yeah, I think that that’s that’s the beauty of this industry, again, kind of coming together and thinking about the future and how we can all work together to help our local communities, to help chambers of commerce, you know, all across the country.

Brandon Burton 25:47
Yeah, well, Elaine, this has been a blast to have you on the podcast with us. Today, I wanted to give you an opportunity to share any contact information for listeners who may want to reach out and connect and maybe learn more about your approach at the World Cafe model, or just how you guys are doing things there in Rowan, what, what would be the best way for them to reach out and connect with you? Sure?

Elaine Spalding 26:10
You know, as all chamber people do we run from meeting to meeting, best best to send me an email espalding@rowanchamber.com the phone number here at the Chamber is 704-633-4221, but best to send me an email, give me a couple of times that are good for you, and I’ll schedule a conference call time, and we’ll get it done.

Brandon Burton 26:32
That’s perfect. We’ll get that in our show notes for this episode to make it easy for them to find that and and connect with you. But thank you for spending time with us today and sharing your experience with the World Cafe model introducing something new to many of us. I hope this has been a fun conversation. So thank you.

Unknown Speaker 26:52
Thank you. Brandon, I really appreciate the invitation.

Brandon Burton 26:56
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Building the Right Chamber for Your Community with Heather Lebischak

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

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

Our title sponsor for this episode is Bringing Local Back. Remember when your community could turn to a local TV station or newspaper for the latest updates and affordable ads? Those days may be fading, but the need for local connection remains. That’s why we created Bringing Local Back, a game changing platform that restores the local visibility and advertising power to your community. It’s more than just tech. It’s about driving engagement and creating new revenue for your chamber. Ready to see the future visit bringinglocalback.com to schedule your demo today. This is the future of local commerce.

Our guest for this episode is Heather Lebischak. Heather is a dynamic and accomplished leader dedicated to driving growth, fostering collaboration and advocacy for her community. As President and CEO of the North Jefferson Chamber of Commerce in Fultondale, Alabama, Heather has been instrumental in championing local businesses and enhancing the region’s economic vitality. Under her leadership, the Chamber has flourished, offering innovative programs, member centric initiatives and impactful events that contribute to the area’s growth. Heather’s passion for service extends beyond her role at the chamber. She serves on the board of directors for the Central Alabama theater group, the North Jefferson Rotary Club and the Fultondale library. Additionally, she plays a vital role in shaping the future of education as a member of the Career and Technical Education and culinary advisory teams for Jefferson County Schools. Heather also contributes her expertise to the Central Alabama redevelopment Alliance Advisory Council, advocating for sustainable development and revitalization in the region, a dedicated community advocate. Heather combines her professional experience with her her personal commitment to making a difference as the group fitness director at Gardendale Civic Center, she promotes health and wellness while connecting with individuals in her community. She also serves in the nursery at our church, church of the highlands, reflecting her commitment to nurturing and supporting others. Heather’s innovative spirit, ability to build meaningful relationships and unwavering dedication to her community make her a respected leader and influencer in North Jefferson. She’s passionate about creating opportunities for others, promoting civic engagement and fostering a collaborative environment where businesses, individuals and organizations can thrive. Heather continues to inspire those around her with their tireless efforts to enrich her community and empower future generations. And Heather, we’re excited to have you with us today here on Chamber Chat Podcast. I’d love to give you a moment to say hello to all the Chamber Champions who are out there listening, and to share something interesting about yourself. Maybe we didn’t share in the bio already.

Heather Lebischak 3:21
Yes, so I’m very excited to be here. I If you had told me 10 years ago, I would have been reporting a podcast for a chamber, I would have said, what the hexa chamber? This is not a world I ever saw myself in. I was a very happy legal secretary slash paralegal. Plan to retire there and there’s, I won’t bore you with the details, but a few changes along the way led me to chamber world, and it’s a world I absolutely love. It’s very different from legal, where everything’s proprietary and protected. In chamber world, we’re big on collaboration, so that’s one of my favorite things about chamber world, but it was the hardest thing to get used to, because I’m used to protecting information. That’s the legal side of me. So it is definitely a world I did not know existed a few short years ago, but that I always see myself in now. That’s

Speaker 1 4:10
right. That is a interesting contrast from your previous experience and and then entering the world of R and D, where everybody’s ripping off and duplicating or collaborating, as you said, that seems

Unknown Speaker 4:22
better. I like R and D better. Yeah.

Speaker 1 4:26
Awesome. Well, tell us a little bit about the North Jefferson chamber, just to kind of give us an idea of the size of the chamber, staff, budget, scope of work, just to kind of set the stage for our discussion. Absolutely

Heather Lebischak 4:36
so about a little over a year ago, I was approached by three cities in the north Jefferson Community, Fultondale, Morris and Kimberly, with this idea of a Regional Chamber of Commerce to give a bigger voice to their communities. Fultondale has a lot of businesses. MORRIS And Kimberly do not, and separately, they didn’t feel that they could individually sustain a chamber. But together, they thought they could and that it would be, as our motto says, stronger together, to have a bigger voice for this community. So that was in about October, November of 2023, and we officially launched the North Jefferson Chamber of Commerce on January 5 of 2024, and also have to be my wedding anniversary. So it was a date I knew I could remember we launched last year. Since that time, we just had our first birthday, there is nothing I won’t do in the name of chamber or community. So our first birthday featured pictures of me with a smash cake like the first birthday should be with cake all over my face and pigtails and all the things. But it was an amazing first year we had around that we had 130 members. Our Facebook reach had grown. We were profitable. Year one, we were able to hire someone part time. When I first started the chamber, my guess was that we were five years away from our first hire, and I’m actually in the process now setting up interviews for our third hire, our first full time hire. So we have been very successful. It showed nothing to do with me. I have an amazing board, and it was a need in our community, and I have the backing from three amazing cities looking to add more. We have city members, but as far as our funding cities, it’s those three, Fulton, no Morris and Kimberly, but we are meeting with some others next month to see about bringing them on board, because the more the merrier.

Speaker 1 6:29
Well, you guys have a vision, obviously, the direction you want to take this and and it seems to be gathering some steam, both the membership and the attention of other cities, other communities, to pull in. That’s awesome. Yeah, we’re, we’re kind of at a stage in chamber world where a lot of chambers are celebrating their 100th anniversary, or a few, maybe even 150 so to just celebrate in one year like it’s it’s going to bring a whole new perspective to the conversation that we have today. I know a lot of people if they were to say, Well, if we redid this chamber thing all over again, we would do it differently. So I’m excited to learn what are some of the approaches that you took in establishing a new chamber. And maybe some of these things are things that still can be ripped off and duplicated in an existing chamber that’s celebrating 100 years, but there’s also bylaws and things like that to deal with, so depending on on where you are and and you know what some of these things are, it’ll be interesting to get your perspective today, but our focus for our conversation today will be focused around building a chamber that’s right for your community. And I think that’s very fitting giving your background, but we’ll dive in much deeper on this topic as soon as we get back from this quick break.

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All right, Heather, we’re back. As I mentioned before the break, today, we’re talking about creating a chamber. It’s right for your community. So you come into this where you’ve kind of got a blank slate, I assume, I mean, I guess, tell us the story. So you’d mentioned these three different cities approached you, but what was the vision? What kind of parameters were you given? Were you able to just dream big and go at it? What’s it like? That

Heather Lebischak 11:29
was the beauty of it. They I came from a neighboring chamber that was like a 35 year old chamber. It was fantastic. They were amazing. But when I was approached about this new chamber, I was actually, on a personal level, doing a fast with a friend of mine. And so for anyone that’s ever done a spiritual fast, it comes with a lot of clarity. And so when I was approached about this, I immediately knew, prayed over and knew that this was something God was calling me to do. And so I stepped out on faith. And by faith, I mean I felt very convicted that God didn’t even want me putting numbers on paper, so there were no dollars on the table. Guarantees anything when I signed on for this, but it was they had saved me, because we were a neighbor community. They saw what I did there. They knew what I was capable of, and so when I came on board, there were no parameters, and that was a beautiful thing. They just wanted me to strengthen their businesses. They wanted to show their businesses that we’re backing them, because they’re going to back you, which is a beautiful thing for a city to do. That’s what cities should do. They should make it easy to operate within the city. And so all three cities were fully on board from the very beginning, both not just financially. Obviously, I needed money, that’s a biggie. But even today, some of the councilmen and some of the council women and the mayor, they’re the most frequent shares of things on social media. They advocate for me. They promote me. They’re putting me in conversations and at seats, at tables that I wouldn’t have otherwise. And so there really were no parameters other than do what we’ve seen you do, and so I heavily relied on them. The first thing I had to do was start a board. There’s no handbook for starting a new chamber or a new business, for that matter. But chambers particularly are tricky, because we are, as we all know, we are a 501 c6 there’s stuff for 501 C threes out there, 501 c6 look, gets left out of all that. So there’s a lot of policies and procedures that were like, Oh, we think it’ll follow that, but we’re not sure. So there was a lot of guesswork in the beginning. I had just gone through the accreditation process with my last chamber for the state, and that included updating bylaws, drafting policies and procedures and employee manual, all the things. There’s about 40 items here. I had just gone through that with my former chamber, so it was kind of fresh on my mind. So I actually, literally yesterday, just finished it up for this chamber because I wanted us accredited after one year. Like, I wanted it to be like, that’s the first thing we do. So the first Biggie was forming a board, and I was coming into cities that I wasn’t as familiar with. The Chamber I came from was a neighboring city, but these communities I didn’t have a stronger tie, so I relied heavily on the city council and the leadership in the and the mayors in the cities to recommend people for the boards, because I wanted equal representation from all my cities, as well as all the other intersectionality points you want in diversity within a chamber board. So relied heavily on them, but they truly just said, come in, do your thing. And it was out. And by the way, do you need an office because here’s free space. So they were fantastic. I have a free office, fully furnished, a free boardroom. I have a huge venue I operate in that I can use for all of our events. So they were in all three cities. They don’t all have the same capacity as far as space, but they have all offered space on whenever i. Need it. So that’s a huge hurdle. I know a lot of chambers have to deal with, is renting and stuff like that, and that is not one I have luckily had to face.

Speaker 1 15:08
So are you in a city office, a city building then? Or so the city of

Heather Lebischak 15:12
Fultondale purchased it. Used to be an outdoor shop. It looks like a big barn on a hill. It’s a beautiful building, but the city purchased it and uses it as an event center, and there just happened to be an office and boardroom side by side that were fully furnished, that they weren’t using. So they’re like, here, you want to go there. And hey, we got extra copy machine. You want it? And the venue is fabulous. It’s gorgeous. I could not ask for a more beautiful venue. So I operate within the venue. And so when we have events, everything’s right here. Yeah,

Speaker 1 15:43
that’s awesome. So yeah, I can imagine it being a little bit maybe intimidating, you know, creating a board from scratch and not knowing the connections, and you know, who the those players are in these different communities. So did you have an idea, as you went to the different cities of what you were looking for as far as representation from each city, or were you just looking to get recommendations from them as to who they think would be a good fit for the board? What was your What was your approach to that? Yeah, that was definitely

Heather Lebischak 16:14
the scariest part, because the board is who you answer to, who you’re held accountable to, and in chamber world, boards aren’t always super familiar with the operations of the chamber. It’s just a very different world. And so answering the people that don’t know the inner workings is always hard. So you want people that are going to trust you, empower you, not get in the weeds with you. And I just didn’t have any connections to know who those people might be. I knew I wanted diversity among industry for sure, and diversity among other aspects as well, but I heavily relied on the city leadership for who those were. I wanted prominent people in the community. So I have a fantastic board. We started with the board of six. We now have eight, but we started with the board of six, all of which I consider friends now, none of which I hardly even knew when they signed on. So four, let’s say four of them, came by recommendation. One actually asked me to serve, and I’m so glad he did. He is in the nonprofit world, so he kind of gets what I deal with. And then one of them was just a kind gentleman who sent me an email when I left my last chamber and said, Hey, we’re with you. We’re Where are we going? We’ve seen what you do. And I was like, Oh, that would be a good guy to have to my corner

Speaker 1 17:30
for sure. No, that’s awesome. So you had mentioned that these three cities kind of came together, approached you about this, so there must have been some sort of a vision of what they wanted to see be accomplished. Were you able to expand on that vision? What? What kind of room? Yeah, did you have with that? And how’s that evolved?

Heather Lebischak 17:50
Right? So there, as I mentioned, fultonville has a lot of businesses. Was there, so theirs was more on the business support, pulling me into economic development discussions as they are, courting a business, pulling me into those discussions, having me help with those some help with event planning. MORRIS And Kimberly are not as business heavy. They’re more I can’t say the word rural. It’s a very hard word for me to say, but they don’t have as many businesses, so Theirs was a little bit different. Theirs was more on the event side. So I help them more with events, and a lot of the vendors at those events are my businesses, but theirs is more on the event planning side. Kimberly, especially Morris, has more businesses probably than Kimberly, so I do have the businesses there. The biggest thing I’m excited about with Morris is they are starting an incubator space that they are going to have available, and we will have space within there that we can operate and do trainings, and they are going to target minority owned businesses for that space to give them a inexpensive place to get started while they’re getting on their feet and getting their business off and running. So all of them had very different needs and so but I had fantastic luckily, I did have fantastic relationships with the leadership to know up front, what those needs were and be able to meet those needs, adapt as I went and realize even more needs than they thought they knew, that I can get plugged into and help out with.

Speaker 1 19:17
And I’m sure as you go about recruiting members, you’re hearing more of what the needs are as well, so you can continue to evolve and adapt, but tell us a little bit about that as you approach members. So you’re in an area where it sounds like there wasn’t a chamber that existed currently. So as you approach businesses and talk about the value proposition of a chamber and help them get the buy in and the vision of of what it is that you’re trying to accomplish in the community. What’s that pitch like? How do you how do you make that approach to these businesses familiar?

Heather Lebischak 19:53
Right? Well, particularly Morris and Kimberly, they were very unfamiliar with the Chamber concept. So the first and. You know, as I mentioned in the beginning, if you’d asked me maybe seven years ago, I would have been like, what? What is a chamber? I have no idea what that is. So the first thing is, is I felt like, before I start trying to get you to join, I need to get us established. I need us be active, a good website, active on social media. I need you to see me at some things and see what I can do before I ask you to pay me money to offer you services that you don’t know what are. So we spent a lot of time building that up. We started in around, actually, December, 8 or ninth is when I officially started here. So I spent that whole first month really building our brand. Mission Statement is huge to me. I tell my board, I drill it into my board. They’re probably sick of hearing it. But everything we do is viewed under the lens of our mission statement, which is we advocate, connect, educate and fight for businesses in the north Jefferson Community, and in doing so, strengthen the communities we serve. So we do want to strengthen the communities, but it’s always a byproduct of the business community, because that’s what we’re here for. So I spent that first month we didn’t even start accepting memberships until January 5, and that was intentional. One, if I’m being completely honest, taxes were a lot easier to wait till the next year when we were so close. Yeah, but the other reason is I wanted to spend some time kind of showing them who we were and what we had to offer. And so January 5, we launched, and I believe, Oh, don’t quote me on this, but she says that she’s recording a live podcast, right? I think we had around 36 founding members. So 36 joined on that first day. And so a lot of it is just putting together materials to educate them on what we have, relying heavily on referrals. We have, we actually have cards. We deliver that say, join us. We’re awesome, and it kind of goes through what we are as a chamber. Now that we’ve got a year under our belt, those cards also reflect a QR code with our 2024, annual report that shows everything we did last year, from our social media reach to our audience to our members, to our events, so that they know kind of this is what they accomplished. Last year, I’ve twofold, one for new members to see what I can do, and two for existing members to see where their money went, because I take that very seriously,

Brandon Burton 22:13
yeah. So

Unknown Speaker 22:14
as well as the funding cities, yeah, yeah.

Speaker 1 22:17
So as you talk about creating an organization where you can be that voice for business. Are you approaching advocacy at this point? As far as legislation? Are you getting into that at all? Or

Heather Lebischak 22:31
yeah, so it was part of my plan, from the beginning, was to get and initially I wanted to have some kind of government relations field. I’m in my I’m coming into my final year of IOM, which chamber people will know as institution for organization management. And so I met with someone last year to get some insight on how to launch that because it is not an area I know anything about. And so in meeting with her, she was fantastic in recommending one avoid the word government. And I was like, okay, noted, so we did launch last year our public policy committee, so we are not on the advocate side yet. As far as lobbying or anything like that, we exist right now solely to inform particularly I know everybody the boi report was back and forth and back and forth. And so we were keeping our members informed of that, most of which had never even heard of it. And at the time, it would have been a big deal, because it was an enormous fine if you didn’t pay. And so right now, our Public Policy Committee is strictly to inform. We hosted a state of the city event in Morrison Kimberlin last year, which, to mo everyone’s knowledge is the first one they’ve ever had in that community. We did that under public policy. We educated on where to vote, how to vote, how to register to vote, how to do absentee ballot, all of those things. There was a group of we. Were a group of us from the chamber actually in Ireland over the election, so we all had to do absentee ballots for that, but mainly just to keep them informed of policies that impact them. I do feel like in the future as a Regional Chamber, I do feel like we will take that step towards being a voice to advocate for our businesses when it comes to legislation, and maybe even going as far as to hire a person that that’s their job to handle that. Because I do feel like I do want to be that voice for businesses, not just at a local level, but as a state and federal level as well. Yeah,

Speaker 1 24:26
it’s exciting to see, you know, a chamber starting from scratch, and you can really go any direction you want to and and you don’t have to do what every what other chambers are doing, either right, like you can right kind of chart your own path. Are there? Have there been any unique approaches as you’ve kind of crafted this custom model of a chamber for these three cities that you’re like you know from my past experience in the chamber, I want to get rid of this, or I want to bring this in. What are? What are? Maybe a couple examples of some unique approach.

Heather Lebischak 24:57
Biggest one I came into i. I came from a 35 year chamber, and they were fantastic. It was a great city, a great business community, and but there wasn’t a lot of records like if you try to look back and see who won this award last year, who was even the executive director, I ran across a piece of paper in my desk that had the founding date, and that’s the only reason I knew the chamber was 35 years old, and it wasn’t neglect on anybody’s part. It’s just nobody thinks to write stuff down. And so that was one of the things. When I went into this, I was like, I’m writing everything down. Every event we have, we’re gonna know if we had a women in business luncheon last year, we’re recording the winners. We’re gonna know from year to year, and that annual report I did, it’s basically a chamber scrapbook. So for every year, they’ll be able to look and see who did what. So that was the biggest thing I took with my old chamber, was to record everything, and the other one was to create a very good not just a Policies and Procedures Manual, like a formal document, but a obnoxiously detailed, one of how to do everything, a how to mingle. We put on this event. We send them postcards on this day, we get sponsors on this day, we get posters to where, you know, heaven forbid I walk out and get hit by a bus tomorrow. They’ve got that document to know how to do, and it makes training a lot easier, as we’re looking to hire. But just the importance of doing that, taking the time, and it’s hard, because I started off as a one man show, so there wasn’t a lot of extra time, but taking that time to draft that document just a simple bulleted list of how to do everything we do.

Speaker 1 26:34
Yeah, and even, I mean, as far as creating policies and procedures in today’s world with AI and everything like, there’s tools that help with that process as well that will, you know, if you start a process from start to finish, and AI can watch you do it, and then, you know, write the bullet points, and here’s the detailed steps of how to do it. It’s pretty cool stuff. So you’re it’s a good time. Knows

Heather Lebischak 26:58
me well, I will say, though, when I first so if you were to look at, if you were to Google chamber by laws, you’re going to find the same ones. We all use the same one. Same with policies and procedures. And part of that’s how collaborative we are. We are happy to share. But when I was doing the policies and procedures at the time, I wasn’t AI was still, oh, the robots are going to take us over. Don’t use it. So I did, actually, if you look at my desk, I had five of them spread across my desk, and I literally typed them from scratch, picking out the pieces that I wanted from each one. Now my background, as I mentioned, was illegal, and what we did was draft these long planned documents. So it wasn’t super foreign to me, but it was a tedious process. Now, I do rely heavily on AI and particularly chat GPT it I told I made the mistake of saying yesterday, I was like, it does 80% of my job. And I was like, let’s word that better. It allows me to be 80% more efficient and do other things, which is the truth of it, the times I would spend drafting social media posts when I really should be doing something else, as opposed to worrying about putting something cute. I’m 44, years old. I’m past that. I don’t know the cute things or the hashtags or all that, so I rely heavily on that for when it comes to social media.

Speaker 1 28:16
Yeah, that’s That’s great. Good takeaways. Any other lessons from this, the last we’ll call it, year and a half of kind of ramping things up and first year in a chamber, any other things stand out to you that may be beneficial for other chambers listening to, you know, as they do their R and D, things that stand out. The biggest

Heather Lebischak 28:39
one for me is I learned a lot of patience. I am a microwave. I want it quick, quick. And I’m going to build a plane as I’m flying it, and I’m totally okay to do that. And if we land on one wheel, that’s okay. We got down. Um, but I did learn there are things where it’s okay to not do immediately, let it, let it simmer just a little bit. Think on it a little bit more, whether that’s responding to emails, putting up events, planning events, I like to I have been known to plan an event with a week’s notice when I get a good idea, and so sometimes that works out, but I have learned to slow down and think it through, talk it out, especially now that I do have a colleague that works with me who is fantastic, and she brings out things that I didn’t think about, which is fantastic. She is a perfect compliment to me as far as putting events together and programming and so as we’re looking to hire, I’ve relied heavily on her, because the things she’s looking for and asking are very different from the things I am but equally as important right now,

Speaker 1 29:36
that’s that’s good. Um, well, I like asking everyone that I have on the show for maybe a tip or a strategy for chambers that are listening and trying to take their chamber to the next level, what kind of tip or action item might you share with them?

Heather Lebischak 29:54
I think the biggest one, and it goes back to I have vivid remembers, vivid memories of being a chamber. Me and going to my first chamber event and listening to somebody talk about this $100,000 banquet they just threw and totally freaking out thinking, oh my gosh, I’ll never get there. I’m doing this all wrong. Take everything with a grain of salt. Everything’s scaled. Well, I say that everything is not scalable. You’ll hear that all the time. It is not true. Not everything truly is scalable. Not everything is for your chamber. Yeah. And so I think the biggest takeaway is is, does it fit your culture? Number one, does it fit your mission? Like I said, I drilled that into my people. But just take everything with a grain of salt. Take it all in and then figure out what it is that your chamber needs to do. What does your chamber want to be known for? And do those events align with that?

Speaker 1 30:46
Yeah, I’m glad you made that designation, that everything is not necessarily scalable, scalable

Heather Lebischak 30:52
because you heard me say it, because I just hear it all the time, but I was like, and I’m guilty

Speaker 1 30:56
too. I’ve said it before, but you’re right. You know certain things are not for your chamber, and you need to know your community. You need to know what where the value proposition is and what’s worth your time. You know what are you going to put your time and energy into, and what’s really going to have a return and be valuable to your members and and to your larger community? So thanks for mentioning that. We all needed to hear that. But Heather, as we look to the future of chambers of commerce, how do you see the future of chambers and their purpose going forward?

Heather Lebischak 31:30
I think they’re going to continue to be more and more relevant multiple as people become, like I said, I came into a community where a lot of people didn’t know what the chamber was, as they realize as the complexities of starting a business, it’s hard. It’s difficult unnecessarily. So in my opinion, one of my goals is to sit down with our cities and create a how to of how to start a business. When you come into Fulton Hill to start a business, this is how you do it. And also in that process, figuring out that we really need this. And so I’m hoping chambers can play a bigger role in that, not just encouraging them to come but helping them to get started. And so as we can offer trainings or advice or expertise in that field, I do think that we’re going to become more and more relevant as chambers and more and more needed, and as people realize, like, I really this is something I need. This is a business expense that is a must for me. Yeah,

Speaker 1 32:25
so earlier, you said there’s not a guide for starting a business. That sounds like you’re writing it. So maybe you know, version two is the guide of how to start a chamber. I

Heather Lebischak 32:35
hope so. Like, we’re about to do taxes, and I’m like, please don’t screw up anything. Too bad.

Speaker 1 32:41
That’s right. Well, Heather, I wanted to give you an opportunity to share any contact information for listeners who might want to reach out and learn more about how you’re doing things, the approach you’re taking. Where would you point people and what? What’s the best way for for them to react?

Heather Lebischak 32:56
So our website is NorthJeffersonChamber.com, and then my email address is president@northjeffersonchamber.com. I am a Gen Xer, so I regularly check my email. I will respond. It’s definitely the best way. I’m a texter too, but email is probably the best way to get in touch with me, and I would love to hear from anybody, answer any questions, anybody looking to venture out and do this thing? I have not yet had anybody to share this with, because it’s just like you mentioned, most chambers are 100, 150 years old. No, I was in a board meeting the other day, and we were, I’m on the state board of directors, and our director, who is amazing, was talking about growing the state board and reaching out to the existing chambers. And she made the comment, she said, I mean, it’s not like we can just create new chambers. And was like, one of the ladies was like, well, Heather did yeah, they’re not, but it’s just not something that happens. And so it would be cool to be able to help someone else through the process, even if it’s just a lending an ear to know, yes, I know how frustrating it is, yeah, and there’s not answers. Yeah,

Brandon Burton 34:01
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