Category: Vision

Chamber Turnaround with Warren Call

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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 Warren. Call Warren is the President and CEO of Traverse Connect, the economic development organization focused on advancing the economic vitality of the Grand Traverse region in Michigan. Traverse connect hosts the northern Michigan chamber Alliance, a coalition of 18 chambers of commerce and economic development organizations representing over 7500 businesses across northern Michigan that advocates for economic competitiveness and pro growth rural business policies. Warren’s role is to lead strategy for the organization, advocate for area businesses, represent the region globally and collaborate with local, state and national organizations on critical issues related to economic development and regional competitiveness. He holds leadership roles in several public policy initiatives dedicated to economic expansion, and was appointed by Governor Gretchen Whitmer to the Board of Directors for the Michigan State Housing Development Authority. Prior to joining traverse connect, Warren served as vice president and regional manager for Huntington National Bank with oversight board investments in private banking across northern Michigan. He holds an MBA in international finance from St John’s University, and a BA in history from Michigan State University, where he was the captain of the Michigan State University Alpine Ski Team. Warren, 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. Yeah.

Warren Call 2:45
Hello, Brandon, thanks for the opportunity, and welcome all the chamber champions that are out there listening. It’s, it’s a pleasure to be with you. Yeah, Warren, call from, from Traverse, connect in Traverse City, Michigan, kind of maybe a little bit of background for me. The as you mentioned there in the in the bio ski racer, skiing is kind of my thing. I grew up in in a ski family. My parents both worked in the resort business, so we, we kind of lived there. And so I grew up skiing all the time. I was a high school and college racer. Worked in the ski business for a while in Utah, as well as in in Michigan. My brother was it was also chief of course for World Cup races in Colorado. And so we do a lot of traveling for skiing. We ski a lot here, and then been in a number of avalanches due to, due to my skiing experiences. Wow,

Brandon Burton 3:49
see, I’ve never been much of a skier. I’ve been snowboarding a couple times, but nothing. I can’t do it. It’s just not me. And I see videos of these people to get caught up in avalanches and like, that’s why I don’t do so that is interesting, though, and definitely an address adrenaline rush, I’m sure, absolutely. Well, tell us a little bit more about traverse, connect, give us an idea of size, scope of work, staff, budget, that sort of thing to kind of set the stage for our conversation today.

Warren Call 4:22
Yeah. So for anyone that’s not familiar with with Traverse City, traverse City’s Northern Michigan, the northern lower Michigan. So there’s the university the Upper Peninsula, the up, as we call it. We’re in the northern part of the Lower Peninsula of Michigan. The pinky of the mitt is, is basically where we are from a map standpoint, right on Lake Michigan. We’re about four hours north of Detroit, six hours north of Chicago, one of our claims to fame, Good Morning America, named us the most beautiful place in America due to Lake Michigan and the dunes and all that kind of stuff. Um. We’re Travers Connect is a hybrid entity. We’re both a Regional Chamber of Commerce and a regional economic development organization covering the five counties around Traverse City are, we’re we’re a small town, we’re a small region. We’re a Micropolitan Statistical Area. So think about 150,000 people in kind of the the micropolitan area our our chamber organization has 1000 member companies here in our in our five county footprint, we have about a $3 million budget and a staff of 11 here in Traverse City, we have a brand portfolio, as we call it, because again, we’re, we’ve, we’ve expanded beyond being just a traditional chamber. So we have under the traverse connect brand. We’re, we both have the five County Chamber of Commerce services as well as direct economic development for for this region. So business attraction, business retention strategies, you know, incentives for for business relocation, things like that. We also have what’s called the northern Michigan chamber Alliance, as you mentioned, and proud to report that it’s now 19 chambers of commerce and economic development organizations across the footprint. So that footprint is basically the northern half of the mid northern Lower Peninsula, and then all of the Upper Peninsula of Michigan. So the reason for that is from an advocacy and public policy standpoint. When our team is in Lansing, the capital of Michigan, or in Washington, DC, we’re not speaking on behalf of just Traverse City or just our micropolitan region. We’re speaking on behalf of all of Northern Michigan with a unified voice. We also kind of going through that band, brand portfolio further we’ve got, we house the Traverse City young professionals organization. We also have the Grand Traverse area manufacturing council. So that’s a subset entity that’s obviously focused on manufacturing. And then we run what’s called Michigan’s creative coast. That’s a talent attraction program for our region that is nationally, trying to attract talent to to Northern Michigan, so that that’s, that’s kind of us in a in a very brief nutshell.

Brandon Burton 7:36
And we could do, we could do about eight or nine podcast episodes and all these different branches that you guys are involved with within your your brand portfolio. It’s fascinating. I imagine, with the the 18th chamber now in the northern Michigan Alliance, that you’re probably close to 8000 businesses or so that are being represented on that, that advocacy front.

Warren Call 7:58
Yeah, our, our Director of Government Relations was actually just looking at that yesterday. She’s She’s put out a updated survey to all those those organizations, because we do want to make sure that I think we’re probably close to, or maybe over 8000 at this at this point. So you know, that’s, that’s a lot of businesses and a lot of organizations that we represent. And again, from an from an from an advocacy and public policy standpoint, you know, Northern Michigan, as with many rural areas and rural communities, you know, you can sometimes get lost in the mix. From a standpoint of, you know, in Michigan, Detroit speaks pretty loudly. Grand Rapids speaks pretty loudly. We want to make sure that policy makers know that the rural areas of northern Michigan are important too, and so we have that unified voice to speak on behalf of the rural areas.

Brandon Burton 8:50
I love it. It’s a great idea and a great strategy. So our focus for our conversation today is we’ve titled The episode is chamber turnaround. So we’re going to dive in deep onto to how traverse, connect became what it is today, and kind of the background story to that and and I’m sure a lot of the story can resonate with other chamber leaders across the country as they hear it, but we’ll dive in deep into that story and experience as soon as they get back from this quick break.

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All right, Warren, we’re back. So tell us, what is the background? What’s the story on on traverse connect, how did it come to be and and this whole idea of chamber turnaround, I think it’s safe to assume that things maybe weren’t as ideal, and then things had to happen to to get it on track to where it is today.

Warren Call 12:56
Yeah, it’s, it’s interesting Brandon, because what what we face here in the Grand Traverse region, the Traverse City area is unlike a lot of Michigan, or actually a lot of the kind of the industrial upper midwest Great Lakes region, we’re actually growing. We have really been on a pretty good trajectory from a growth standpoint, for a while, and what we needed was we had a lot of great institutions and a lot of great initiatives that were they were they were they were well intentioned, and they were well meaning, and what they weren’t is they weren’t modernized for our environment. So what we really needed to do is we needed to take kind of that big picture of Chamber of Commerce, services, economic development, and we needed to modernize our approach, or for the region. And what that really related to was we had a lot of organizations that were doing good things, but a lot of it was siloed. So there wasn’t a lot of coordination across some initiatives there wasn’t full coordination across the region. And so what we looked at was an opportunity to reimagine what business support services, in kind of its most general sense, looked like in our region. And it became, frankly, a wholesale reconstruction of of our organization and of of the approach to economic development and and Chamber of Commerce services for the entire region. So, from a from a background standpoint, it really, it really started back in in probably 2016 2017 there was, there was a number of initiatives that had kind of gone by the wayside. So a kind of an older, traditional public sector, county led Economic Development Corporation had gone dormant and didn’t have a lot of operations in it at the same time. Um, 100 plus year old Regional Chamber of Commerce, I wouldn’t say had, had certainly was still functioning and well functioning, but it was pretty traditional, and it was perhaps even a little bit stale in its approach.

Brandon Burton 15:15
I’ve heard that before from chambers have been around a long time. Yeah, right. And fantastic

Warren Call 15:21
legacy, very successful legacy, but needed, needed a refresh, basically, yeah, and then we had a number of initiatives that had newer initiatives that were important, so, especially in innovation and technology. So a new tech incubator had been stood up. A couple other good initiatives, but they were, they were in their own silos and not plugged into some of the other things that were going on. So a number of us, and I should, I should probably point out that I have no background in economic development or Chamber of Commerce services. So back at this point, I was actually working in the in the finance industry for a national bank with I was overseeing their northern Michigan operations. So I was involved in these things, but as a as a volunteer board member, yeah, so I was a volunteer board member on the Economic Development Corporation and on the technology incubator, and I was involved in one of the committees through the chamber, and there was things like that. But so we work, we were working as a community to re envision what economic development and Chamber of Commerce services should look like. And it there was a couple of retirements at some of these different organizations, and so we looked at that as an opportunity to kind of rethink what it what everything should look like. And at that point, I got asked by some of the people that you know, they said, well, great, but if we’re going to reconstitute everything, we want you to move from being a board member to being the guy in the chair. So I didn’t expect to be in that role. But that’s, that’s how it happened.

Brandon Burton 17:02
It sounds like maybe you spoke too much in these board meetings. I think so. I think, I

Warren Call 17:07
think I shared my opinion a few too many times, right? So what we ended up doing is the county’s Economic Development Corporation was reformatted with with new board members. I was, I was, again at that point, the volunteer chair of that organization, when we reconstituted it. And what we did is we, we built a strategic plan for rebuilding everything. And so that that process happened through 2017 2018 and then in 2019 I stepped into this role at traverse Connect, which at that point was a kind of a community development organization that hadn’t really found its footing. And so we, we, then my job was to work with a consultant that we had hired and build a strategic plan, not just for my organization, but for the entire region. So this really was a soup to nuts kind of approach. We had community wide forums, we had a listening tour. We had a steering committee made up of key leaders from business industry nonprofits from across the region, kind of, as I call it. That was our big shots group, right? We had prominent CEOs and other leaders who, you know, have influence. And what we ended up doing is through, through those public listening tours, those, those, those the kind of the road show as it was, the industry forums that we, you know, we brought together the manufacturers, and we brought together the healthcare providers, and we, you know, all these things. We ended up basically opening the hood, ripping everything out, and putting it all back together again in a new in a new structure. So we merged Travers connect and the Traverse City Area Chamber of Commerce together into one entity that’s now called Travers Connect. We spun off a couple of of subsidiaries that were no longer, you know, relevant, and we we then merged in over time, we merged in some of these other things. We expanded that chamber Alliance. It had gone when we went from 12, now up to 19 members. We also brought in and merged the Grand Traverse area manufacturing council as a now a subsidiary of our organization. And really what it was was we took all these outdated structures and we were trying to address the fact that we had growth in the region, which was positive, but we also had a lot of growth challenges. So we’re a very popular. Destination for tourism. We’re a popular destination for second homes, and those are very valuable aspects of our economy, but they’re not our only aspects of our economy. We have actually a lot of technology. We have a lot of advanced manufacturing. We actually have more employment in manufacturing than Michigan’s average. And for anyone that knows Michigan, there’s a lot that says a lot, right? So people think of us as a great place for vacations and beaches and cherry pie, but what they don’t realize that there’s also a lot of other things going on in manufacturing, in technology, in agriculture, so advanced value added agriculture, right? We, you know, if, if your kids ever eat, go, go squeeze, you know, applesauce in the packet that’s made right here in a very massive facility here, matern, the French company that has their their location here, we make a lot of wine that gets shipped all over the world, etc. So we’ve got a lot of things beyond tourism and and second home ownership, which are important to us. But one of the challenges there is we have a high cost of living because so many people want to either be here part of the time or be here, you know, for vacation, etc. So we have workforce challenges. So while we’re population was growing, our working age population was declining. Yeah, so 35 to 49 year olds, that core working age population, the people that run businesses, that you know, teach school, that have kids in the school system, that you know sit on nonprofit boards that kind of your core working age population that had declined by 7% between 2010 and 2019 Wow. So you can’t have a vibrant year round economy and community if you don’t have the people that are here year round working and, you know, getting their kids into snow pants and out to school the next day, right? It’s, you’ve got to, you’ve got to have that, that that year round population. So that was a wake up call to our region that we needed to do something. And so that was kind of all of the the work we did to institute a new structure and develop a new a new strategic plan was focused on the fact that we need to be a year round economy so and I can go into more more detail about, kind of, some of the key highlights of that, but I wanted to pause and see if,

Brandon Burton 22:33
yeah, I think that’s important to dive into some of those key highlights. I’m always curious as well, when there’s restructuring like this that goes on as to it. And you gave a great background about you being sitting on, on the two boards and ideas, you know, bubbling up. But you know, when you put the rubber to the roads to have the traction to actually implement these changes, it can be kind of sticky. You know, when you’re dealing with with leadership, with other organizations, multiple boards. So as as you talk to your next point, if you can try to work some of that into about the approach and and for a chamber listening, you know, not everybody’s has that perfect timing where everything aligns to just make it happen, but the vision is there of this is the direction our community needs to go. So if you can kind of speak to that a little bit too, as you in your response, yeah,

Warren Call 23:30
and there, there’s, there’s a lot there. But certainly, I think the key things here that we learned were that over communication. And I just mean complete, over communication and repeating. The reasons why we’re doing this were really key aspects of our approach, I think, because what we found was that, you know, people, people fear change. Yes, and organizations fear change. But really, when it comes down to it, there’s actually not a fear of change. They fear change because they fear loss. People equate change with loss. They think that the change you’re making is going to result in some kind of loss for them. And so we had to really do our homework to show that this change was not going to result in loss, it was going to result in gain for the community.

Brandon Burton 24:28
That’s a great framing. I like that. So

Warren Call 24:31
really thinking about, again, what you need when you’re going to implement big change like this, especially with 100 plus year organizations, and you know that legacy of the Chamber of Commerce and things like that, you’ve got to show that you’re respecting and building on that legacy and enhancing what it’s going to do going forward, not taking away from it. So part of that is, again, like I said, over communicating. So. Part of that is having a clear enemy. So again, from our perspective, that clear enemy was we lost 10% of the working age population between 2010 and 2019 right? I think I said 7% before, but it was actually 10% we lost 10% of that working age population in that that time period that got people’s attention, and that was the enemy, and we were able to focus our efforts around that enemy that allowed organizations to really work together. It allowed, you know, we had a business leader meeting with a county commissioner, meeting with a nonprofit, you know, hospital leader, all of them could agree that if you lose your working age population, you’re in trouble. So that that focused everyone’s mind, and it allowed us to do a couple of key things. Number one, I think it helped everybody kind of check their ego at the door, because it wasn’t about their organization or their project, it was about defeating that, that enemy, and then it also allowed us, I think, some latitude to what we ended up calling slaughtering some sacred cows. It’s

Brandon Burton 26:12
important, yeah, because everyone

Warren Call 26:15
realized that if we were going to address this issue of work, losing the working age population, we had to to come up with some new solutions. So that’s, that’s, that’s kind of the framing that helped us. I also think it was important that we did a lot of listening first. So we, we hired, sorry, we formed that kind of, what I called the Big Shots group, the key leaders across community as a steering committee, people that are trusted across business, industry, nonprofit, etc, that that helped. Then that steering committee was the one that gave me direction, and gave our consultants direction, and then we did these community wide forums, we did the listening tour, we did the workshops that were open to everyone. So we really we incorporated everyone’s feedback. And I think it’s important to do that regardless of what you’re doing. But here’s the thing you got to think about. And I think chamber professionals know this, you’re never going to make everybody happy, right? So that our new solution, our new structure, our new strategic plan, I think it’s well done. But of course, there, there’s going to people, be people that are going to not like some aspect of it, right? But being able to say we asked everyone for their opinion was really important, right? Even if we didn’t incorporate their opinion, maybe they didn’t like the final product, but we asked everybody. Nobody was nobody was on Ask. Everyone got tired of hearing my talking points because I repeated them so many times, and our steering committee repeated them so many times, but at least everyone felt like they were, they were heard.

Brandon Burton 28:03
It goes back to that over communication. And nobody can say, you know, I didn’t know this is happening, right? You’re talking about it, and you’re not catching them by surprise,

Warren Call 28:13
right? So that’s, that’s what resulted in, for example, the decision to have a hybrid structure, you know, our our leading private sector businesses were really tired of the chamber asking them for money and sponsorship and dues, and then the economic development corporation trying to get some funding, and then the tech incubator and blah, blah, blah, blah. So, you know, one entity that that has a really, you know, clear mandate. Now, you know, my private sector business leaders can say, I’m writing a check to traverse, connect, to do this, this and this right, so that, that we came really clear. And so it gave us, it gave us focus and clarity too. And we were, we were really intentional. And the end result of that, that hybrid structure and our strategic plan outlined exactly where we were going to lead, where we were going to support and where we weren’t going to get involved. So our focus became, you know, Travers Connect is going to our mission is to look at the economic vitality, strengthen the economic vitality of this region by growing family sustaining careers. So family sustaining careers year round. You can afford to live here. You can afford to put your kids in child care, etc. You can afford a house, a family, sustaining career is kind of the North Star. The way we do that in our three pillars of primary focus is the economic competitiveness of the region. Number one, strengthening that. Number two, direct support for business. Businesses, number three talent, making sure we’ve got talent attraction development and that continuum of of talent development, then we were really specific about where we’re going to support. We support the technology incubator in early stage company development. We’re not the leader in early stage. They’re the leader. We support them. We’re not the leader in housing development, but there’s an entity called housing north. They’re the leader in housing development. We support their efforts. So we’re really clear about, you know, some of those, there’s a community development. So some of the kind of more societal, environmental things. Yeah, we’re not the leader in that, but we support the community development coalition that is the leader in that. Okay,

Brandon Burton 30:51
this is all super fascinating, and I could see it’s a big undertaking as well, but being able to align the needs within the community to be able to say what’s important. How do we want to, you know, advance the future going forward, you said, create these family sustaining careers. Can you talk a little bit about some of the the outcomes that you’re seeing from these changes? How is the the temperature change? How has the mood changed in the community by implementing this. Well,

Warren Call 31:24
certainly, you know, again, as chamber professionals, know you’re never going to make everybody happy. So there’s still the same things that we always have, right? We still have challenges with with, you know, elected officials not agreeing with each other and different priorities. And always that tension between managing appropriate growth versus maintaining our character and our charm of our communities. Those are always things that continue to be items of debate. But I think where there’s where there’s really clear success in there’s probably three things I would touch on that have really been been clear success. First of those is under that, that banner of the Northern Michigan chamber Alliance, the opportunity to to leverage the connection between economic development and public policy, that that’s been really helpful for us across all of Northern Michigan, so that the Michigan Economic Development Corporation and other kind of policy leaders know what our priorities are, and they know that we’re we’re focused on it. They know that we need funding for our initiatives. They know that when we’re when we’re out there trying to recruit an advanced manufacturing company to come to Northern Michigan. They know that it’s part of a concerted strategy. So I think that that was one really, one really big win, especially since, you know, again, we’re a fantastic place to vacation. We’re a fantastic place for second homes and so a lot of policy leaders downstate, Michigan, that’s what they think of when they think of Traverse City. And that’s great. We want to, want them to continue to think about that, and that to be continued to be a strong part of our economy. But also we’re a great place for an advanced manufacturing entity to relocate. So that that’s one thing. The second thing is, it’s allowed us to leverage some unique attributes of our community to focus on cluster development, industry. Cluster development, we’re not going to be a place that Ford or GM are going to set up a huge production facility. That’s not the right fit for us. That’s the right fit for downstate Michigan, the right fit for us, from a cluster development, is freshwater research and innovation. We’re on Lake Michigan. We’re a great place for research and development as it relates to water technologies, marine technologies, things like that. We’re a great place for value added agriculture, as I mentioned, we’re a great place for testing and deployment of drone technologies. Our our local college is is a leader in the Midwest for drone technologies, and the way that drone technologies are need to be developed for rural communities. Think of agricultural uses. Think of rural healthcare delivery, both with drones and with telemedicine. Those are things that are unique to our region. So we’re leveraging our unique things to develop these industry clusters in rural health, in drone deployment, in marine technologies, to again, Grow family sustaining careers, right? We want, we want, you know, if, if some company is going to build the next, you know, advanced underwater drone research product, we want that to be, to be done here, right? Because we the. This is a good place to do it. And then the final thing I would talk touch on is Michigan’s creative coast, our our talent attraction initiative. We, I think we, we had a good plan and we built a good program. We also got really lucky Brandon, because we built this nationally focused talent attraction brand, and it went live about three weeks before the pandemic hit, wow, and one of our big initiatives as part of that was with remote work and technology. If you can work anywhere, why wouldn’t you want to work here? And our timing could not have been better, because all of a sudden the world realized they could do things from anywhere, and it’s been a huge growth for us. We’ve been able to attract entrepreneurs, remote workers, technology, biopharmaceutical entities. It’s just been phenomenal from a standpoint of attracting talent and attracting entrepreneurs,

Brandon Burton 36:03
that is huge. Yeah, I appreciate you touching on those three areas. And when you’re talking about economic development leveraging, you know, working with the public policy, the thought came to me, it used to be that the media kept government in check and made sure that, you know, trying to keep them honest, we’ll say, Right? But now I see that shift being more with with chambers and economic development on the advocacy front to keep governments in check. And if they know that you’re you’ve got your eye on these, you know, policies that affect business, then it’s hard to get something past a group, you know, of 18 chambers that are, you know, form this alliance to to make sure that business is being protected and it’s a fertile place for business to grow and thrive. So these, these are great areas, great successes that are, that are coming out of this and and I feel like in the format that we have for this podcast, we might have bitten off a little more than we could chew, because I could, I could listen to you for a couple hours, you know, going in depth with all of these, you know, different aspects and the the winds that are coming out of this. But I appreciate you being able to try to condense this to to work with this format, and kind of give a glimpse of what’s possible as you align resources and ideas and and getting you know the stakeholders involved, and really convening them all together to to create a good cause going forward in your community and region. As we start to wrap things up here, I wanted to see if there’s any any tip or action item that you would share with the Chamber who’s wanting to take their organization up to the next level. What would you suggest for them? You

Warren Call 37:51
know, what I learned in this process Brandon was, I think the key thing is leverage. Chamber leaders have way more leverage than a lot of them that real they realize or that they use. And I think, you know, chambers, chambers, and chamber leaders oftentimes are kind of the key servant of the community, and that’s that’s an important role, but I think it’s important to remember that it’s a servant leader role, and I think there’s an opportunity to have a bit more swagger in your community and and take the initiative. Be bold, you know, be authentic, but also be the authority, because, because the chamber knows more of what’s going on than most other people in the in the region, yes, build a vacuum, fill the vacuum of leadership, and really leverage that. And I think you can do that with your staff. I think you can do that with your board, your community, obviously, elected officials. So that’s what I would say. I think the best way to do that is, is to quantify things. And so metrics and quantifying helps you to leverage your authority.

Brandon Burton 38:58
I like that having the data to back up what you’re trying to accomplish and and I love that word leverage too. It brings power, quite literally, as you apply apply a force with leverage, you’re able to do a lot more than what you can do on your own. Absolutely, as we look to the future of chambers of commerce, how do you see the future of chambers and their purpose going forward, you know,

Warren Call 39:22
I think it’s gonna be really interesting. I think that, you know, as a as an industry, you know, as everyone knows, you know that that struggle for for member retention, I think, is always gonna is, is always gonna be there. And we don’t need to get into all the kind of the traditional things about, you know, retention and non dues, revenue and all that kind of stuff. But the key thing is, the chamber was always thought of as the authority, traditionally on business issues. Then the internet comes along and business leaders feel like they can kind of get information from other sources, so they don’t necessarily need to be involved. In the chamber, they don’t need to be members. I think that’s been a struggle over the last, you know, 20 years. I think maybe, and I don’t know for sure, but maybe as the internet becomes less of an information source and more of just a confusing mix of everyone’s opinion, maybe there’s a need again, for kind of that trusted authority, that authentic, trusted authority. And I would, I would love to see chambers and economic development organizations fill that role, because I think it could be kind of a full circle thing where, you know, there’s, there’s a million websites, and you really don’t know what’s going on, so you might need to just go talk to your local or regional chamber to figure out what’s really going on with business issues.

Brandon Burton 40:46
Yeah, I like that. I’ve never thought of it in that context before, but I like that. It gives you something to think about and see that that full circle come back around right? Well, warm for for those listening who may want to reach out and learn more about how things have developed, there at traverse connect, what would be the best way for them to reach out and connect with you? You

Warren Call 41:10
know, I’m, I’m 100% against email. I think it’s a waste. There’s, there’s actually a really good book called world without email. If you haven’t read it, you should my cell phone, 231-651-9174,

Brandon Burton 41:27
alright, we’ll get that in our show notes for this episode to make it easy for for people to reach out and connect with you. But Warren, this has been great having you on and thank you for you know, kind of pulling back the curtain and showing what took place to create travers, connect and aligning all those desires, interests, abilities, to be able to bring them in under one roof, and also shut off some of those sacred cows that may weigh you down a little bit. This is a great exercise that probably every chamber needs to go through on some regular basis, maybe not to the same extent, but to really see what the purpose is and what’s driving them. But thank you for sharing your experiences with us today. This has been fantastic, and I really appreciate it. My,

Warren Call 42:18
my, my appreciation to you, Brandon. I appreciate the opportunity. Thanks for having

Brandon Burton 42:24
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Engaging Partners in Purpose with Carl Blackstone

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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.

Our guest for this episode is Carl Blackstone. Carl has a deep knowledge of working with small and large businesses as a well as well as professional trade associations on local, state and federal levels. Carl has served as the former manager of the State Government Relations for the South Carolina Chamber of Commerce and as a district field manager for Mark Sanford when he served in the US House, Senate representative, in addition to other community roles, currently, he serves on the board of the Association of Chamber of Commerce executives and the South Carolina State Chamber of Commerce as the President and CEO of the Columbia Chamber. Carl’s focus is creating a strategy to make and to help make the region more competitive for the next 20 years. Carl, 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. Well, greetings

Carl Blackstone 2:06
and from South Carolina. Great to be with you today, and thanks so much for having me. You know, this chamber world is so small. I’ve met so many folks from around the country. They’re in chambers, but I haven’t met you. I apologize, but look forward to one day, but I’m just a boring guy from the southeast. I got four daughters. They’re in college, and so I’ll be working forever. But I love what I do and enjoy it very much. But otherwise, I’m just a boring guy,

Brandon Burton 2:35
a boring guy. Yeah, I’ve got, I’ve got three daughters myself, son and three daughters. So I can, I can sympathize with you a little bit. It’s great, but, yeah, we’ll be, we’ll be working a long time. That’s right. Well, Carl, tell us a little bit about the Columbia chamber. Give us an idea of the size, staff, budget, scope of work to kind of set the stage for our discussion.

Carl Blackstone 2:56
So we’ve been around. Were found in 1902 and so we’ve been around for 125 years or so. We have we’re mid sized chamber. We’ve got a staff of about 15. We’ve got a budget little two, two and a half million dollars, and about 12, 1300 partners in our under the umbrella Columbia as a whole is capital city, smack dab in the middle of the great state of South Carolina. Metropolitan Area is a little less than a million people. It’s because it’s a state government town, capital city, we have the University of South Carolina two blocks from my office. It’s been somewhat of a different place for businesses, because everybody knows it’s a government town, and the government mentality has been very strong here for years, and so when I I’ve been here for 10 years as the CEO. I’m not didn’t grow up through chambers. I worked at the State Chamber and and did lobbying work for the State Chamber years ago, but I didn’t really understand chambers, and that was a State Chamber, not a local chamber. And so when I found myself in this position, I’m like, holy cow, it’s a new world, and I’ve learned a ton. But the hardest thing we’ve had to do is really change the mentality of Columbia businesses. Say, Yes, we are government town. That is a positive, that is a wonderful thing, great attributes to have for recruiting businesses. But that’s not the only thing we are. We have great companies here, we need to be a little bit more pro business and think differently on how we approach things. And so at that time, 10 years ago, the we weren’t doing well. The city was not growing. We’re pretty stagnant, quite frankly, over the last 30 years. And that’s combination of the. Poor leadership, poor planning. It literally was acting from the business community, quite frankly, that that had created systemic problems that we needed to address. And so we needed more business minded people representing us on the city county level. We needed just to be more aware of what was going on and engaged in the political process, which helps. I mean, if you think about what government does on a day to day basis, they can help you, hurt you, and if you learn the business, we have a significant as a whole. Everybody thinks the southeast is got cheap labor, cheap taxes, cheap land, everything. But in reality, that’s not the case, especially in capital cities. Capital Cities are unique, and we have to high taxes, and it keeps businesses from looking to this area. And so we’ve had a challenge over the last 10 years, but I think we’re in a good spot now, which is pretty exciting.

Brandon Burton 6:02
Yeah, I can see where being in a capital city could definitely have its its benefits, but some challenges along with it, and it’s something that piqued my interest is when you you’d mentioned some of the challenges when you came into this position 10 years ago, to kind of boil down to apathy from the business community. I thought that’s a that’s an interesting approach. Could you talk a little bit more to that?

Carl Blackstone 6:24
Yeah, well, a lot of the folks that were engaged Jamie, we had a stagnant board. We I, I’ve said it over and over, so this is not first time. So we were male, pale and stale, yeah, we were a functioning board that was doing the same things we’ve always done, and it was, in my opinion, wasn’t healthy. We weren’t creating an environment where new people wanted to come right?

Brandon Burton 6:50
Yep, it sounds like your chamber was a the traditional Chamber of 10 years ago. The male pale and stale, yeah. And so

Carl Blackstone 6:59
we were, we were, we’re a traditional chamber, but traditional in the sense that 35 years ago we split economic development out. We’d also we’re a chamber that does not have the local tourism industry at all. That’s a whole separate group. And my predecessors, and there were reasons why they did it. I wasn’t around sorts. I don’t want to criticize them for it, but the long term impact was, what is a chamber that does not have economic development, that does not have tourism? What do you do? And how do you make yourself not relevant? But how do you find how do you make yourself essential to a community that was really down on itself and not grow it. It was stagnant. And so it was interesting back in 1950 Richmond, Virginia and Raleigh, North Carolina, Charlotte, Atlanta, Columbia, Austin, Texas, we’re all about the same size. And then you fast forward to 1980 in Richmond, Raleigh, Columbia, three capital cities in these southern states were all the same size, and all of a sudden, now Columbia hadn’t changed. The same size they were in 1980 and Richmond and Raleigh are totally different. Not that I want to be I don’t think anybody in Colombia wants to be those other cities. It’s how do we attract and retain talent here in Columbia, and how do we make ourselves a draw? And a lot of the things that we were doing systematically were just not good for business, high taxes, not innovating and really not doing a whole lot to to change it. We were doing everything that we were doing, and so our hope, my hope, and you know, the team that we we have, was like, alright, we can, we can be the best Columbia. We want to be the best Columbia, but we don’t have to sit and do things just because it’s the way we’ve always done it. And it was maybe two months into my 10 years, like, Why? Why are we doing this? Why are, why are we doing this event? Or why are we sending stuff up? Well, that’s the way we’ve always done it. Yeah, that’s got to stop

Brandon Burton 9:12
the wrong answer, right?

Carl Blackstone 9:15
Hear that again and but changing the leadership, and then also you gotta have, if you want to attract new businesses, they gotta feel like they’re have a route to be participating. They gotta be participatory. We need them involved, but we needed to. We need to change. We need to have a board that reflects the community, both not just demographically, but also we needed different. You know, at one time, we had a board of, you know, our idea was diversity was had six different bankers sitting around the boardroom. Well, that’s not, yes, we diversity in banks, but we don’t have diversity of. Thought diversity of industry, and so we’ve been very, very deliberate in making sure that our community feels like we’re reflective of them, but but more importantly, that we’re actually we appreciate in their ideas and their thoughts. And how do we be a little bit more progressive?

Brandon Burton 10:18
Yeah, I like those thoughts and your comments around the you know, seeing the other similar sized cities grow and develop in that time period and and to have Columbia stay about the same as it was in the 80s, anytime something stays stagnant, you know, life kind of ceases to happen, right? Things start to die off a little bit. And to be able to invigorate that again, get it going. That’s that’s the key, to be able to keep it. Don’t let things become stagnant, right, right? Yeah, keep

Carl Blackstone 10:48
that part and but that’s where the chamber can really, is that the Chamber’s responsibility by itself? No, absolutely not. There are no, uh, single person that can do anything. And so you got to work with your city leadership and your business leadership and and the triple part, I mean, the triple PS really do work, not just in development, but also with ideas and how to get things moving along. And so we’re in a different spot than we were 10 years ago. It’s pretty amazing. You know, our growth in South Carolina has been substantial since the late 90s and early 2000s in Charleston and Greenville and south of Charlotte’s coming this way. And so we just have not been able to capitalize. But we finally been able to do so, and we’re seeing significant four or five times annual growth of what we saw two or three years ago, which is nice.

Brandon Burton 11:44
That’s awesome. Well, that’s a great setup for our conversation today, giving us kind of that the background on Columbia, how things are sitting, you know, the role of the chamber right now in Columbia and and as we focus our conversation today, we’ll focus on some of these maybe more unique approaches, you know, ways you guys approach things versus maybe the way some other chambers approach things and and I hope that there’s some some key elements out of this conversation that others can take and scale to their chamber and and be able to maybe implement some of these things to invigorate life in their communities as well. And we’ll dive in much deeper on this conversation, since we get back from this quick break.

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All right, Carl, we’re back, as I mentioned before the break, we’re going to focus most of our conversation today around kind of the the unique approaches that the Columbia chamber takes to your chamber work, versus maybe that of what some other chambers do. And in your explanation and background of the Columbia chamber, I think you’ve hinted on on several of these things, from the business apathy and kind of changing that mindset to the board makeup. But what are some of these other approaches or mindsets that you guys are taking there in Columbia to really see some of that growth that you guys are seeing and and to maybe energize some other Chambers as well, and kind of spark some ideas for them.

Carl Blackstone 16:22
Listen, let me just say we are not unique, and we’re also, I ain’t a smart guy. I want to set the record on this straight, because what I what I did when I got here was I had the privilege of having fresh eyes. Fresh Eyes is a gift. When you come in to an organization and you bring or whenever I hire new people, is really dig in with them to see what they see, because we get blinders on. And I guess my biggest fear is complacency, and complacency is a cancer. It’s a form of cancer that can erode an organization. And so I ask and spend a lot of time with new board members or new staff members or new partners. Say, what do we need to be doing differently? What do you see that we’re doing, that we’re missing? But so being always trying to find new ways to do things, I think, is critical for any organization. The problem we have in chamber world is we always underfunded. We have few two staff, and the easiest thing to do is what we’ve always done. Creativity takes time and energy, and you have to spend hours talking to folks, and that’s hard, but I think the end result is a better product for your partners, and we’re seeing that today. How do we continue to morph, even though we’ve had a good run the last three or four years? What we need to do differently? And I think taking steps back and really sending surveys to our partners and asking right questions, being on the phone and talking to them all the time or all right, this is good. Is this working? But their engagement is critical. And however we can find, I can’t say we have figured it out yet at all, but what I’m we are striving every day to make sure that we stay in front of the curve and businesses, you know, the chambers are in these unique spot because we have to understand politics, we have to understand the business and economics and accounting and law and all these Other things that we have to think about on behalf of our business partners, but we didn’t go to school for any of this stuff, right? I mean, we’re we’re learning on the streets like everybody else, but we need to lean on our partners to figure out what they need and and for us, in South Carolina, we’re seeing this huge post COVID surge of population and businesses coming in and great what’s our biggest issue? It’s workforce. How do we help our our partners? How do we help train and think about the workforce next week, next year, five years, 10 years. So it’s getting the mindset of, let’s being a community builder. Let’s think about thinking long term strategies on how we can be a player in not just the here and now, but later. It’s tough, and a lot of times the market throws a curve at us, and we’re not expecting it. We’ve just gotta alter our thought. I hate the word pivot after COVID, COVID, but I’ll use that word. We’ve gotta be always ready to think differently, which is, which is a struggle, but for us today, here and now, uh. We landed a very large OEM in Columbia that’s going to be producing a automobile, and they need 4000 workers by next year. And how do we ramp up? Because we know when a new new shiny object comes to town, you’re going to see folks leaving one job to go to another, and we got to find the workforce. Really dig in to think differently. On working with our local school districts, our state government for incentive purposes, on retraining folks, getting more high school kids into the workforce, workforce, work based learning opportunities for our kids. It’s a whole new world. We weren’t thinking about this four years ago.

Brandon Burton 20:45
Yeah, and there’s, there’s a lot of focus right now among chambers on workforce. I mean, it seems like you mentioned that P word pivot. You know, I think we can go the rest of our life without having any unprecedented pivots happening in our life, right? I mean, at least not calling them those, but yeah, to be able to see where these needs are. And there’s been, you know, this, this mass exodus of the workforce. And when you are looking for that growth and revitalization and trying to spark that energy into the workforce, where do you find them? How do you how do you retain talent that you already have in the community, and especially when everybody’s, you know, kind of vying for this attention as well that it is a it is a unique problem, and chambers are poised perfectly to address it. So

Carl Blackstone 21:38
addresses one thing is we’ve also got to embrace what our partners need, and they see us as a resource. And big companies typically don’t need us to help them with their workforce issue. I mean, they’ve got resources, they’ve got staff, but it’s a second tier, third tier, companies that struggle so much, and they need us because they don’t have the depth and that they don’t have the understanding of all the things that go into it, and so to be a resource for them, but also learning from our larger partners to say, Hey, how are y’all doing things that we can help teach others to do? It’s it’s not again. We’re not creating new products. We’re just trying to be dot connectors and say, Hey, how can we learn from one teach another? And it really helps the overall community.

Brandon Burton 22:31
That is an interesting thought, because I’ve heard a lot of chambers talk about when that big factory opens up, a big, major employer comes to town and they’re wanting to know, you know, we need, like you said, 4000 jobs filled. Can you guys help supply that? But in reality, those big companies come in and those jobs will flock to them, but they’re going to leave their current position. So that second tier is really it’s like, yes, we can help you find the workforce there, but you go to work overtime trying to find the workforce to fill the backside. So

Carl Blackstone 23:02
it is truly Robin chambridge. Is Robin Peter to pay Paul. And it’s the mindset, all right, understand that those are, there’s going to be fluctuations, but we need to that’s 4000 jobs. Doesn’t seem like a lot to some people that are, you know, in the Dallas area, that’s growing that many people in a month or whatever, for us, think about housing and the impact it has on the housing, on the track, on the schools. What does that if we bring in 4000 new people, is that 6000 kids we’ve got to start educating, and where are we going to put them? So the overall thought process we have to be we’re in a unique position. All chambers are that there’s no other entity that can bring the private sector with the public sector to sit down and find opportunities and and long term strategies on a lot of these issues. You know, we asked for years and years, we relied on government to fix problems, and we’re asking elected officials to do things more than we’ve ever asked them to do, but we as a chamber can provide a lot of resources to help assist find folks that are experts in their field, that work in your community, and sit them down. Let’s let’s have dialog. Yeah, but these community problems are long term. They’re not going away tomorrow, but we got to be thinking about them today, and building those relationships and having those relationships with both public and private partners really are beneficial.

Brandon Burton 24:51
Yeah. So the thought keeps coming back to me about the comment about the apathy of business owners and your comment about elected. Officials just now, elected officials definitely have their place, right? I mean, it’s important to work with them and to have the advocacy approach and everything, but they don’t have the same kind of skin in the game as the business does on Main Street, right? Who’s relying on this to feed their family, to for their employees to feed their families? They’ve got skin in the game. So to be able to get those businesses engaged in helping to find, you know, those the the employment, to help solve some of these problems that have to pop up in communities, to really rely on that business community, I think, is the key. And we’re chambers, help convene, and you’re convening with the electric the elected officials and everything as well. But, really leaning on those that have the biggest to lose and the most to gain, really by the success in the community. So I think you hit the nail on the head, whether you meant to or not. I don’t know.

Carl Blackstone 25:53
Well, the hardest thing to do is when you hit apathy. The apathetic feeling yes is re engagement and finding hope and that things can get better. And it’s, you know, if you’re a small business that has 10 employees and you’re barely eking out a paycheck to very worried about meeting payroll every two weeks, it’s like, All right, do I really have time to think about regulatory relief. I feel it every day. I see it. I have to have staff to deal with it, but they don’t have to. You’ve gotta really educate them on how we can make things better. They gotta see the light at the end of the tunnel. And so rebuilding is tough, maintaining is tougher, but I promise is better than the

Brandon Burton 26:46
alternative. Yeah. So how do you what’s your approach with your partners, as you guys call them there in Columbia, what’s your approach with partners to help get them engaged, to to step away from that apathy and to really buy in? I know you had mentioned before surveying and listening to them, seeing what their needs are and and I know other chambers are going to hear that and say, nobody opens our surveys, nobody opens the emails. So how do you do that? How do you get that feedback? How do you get them to step away from the apathy and to really lean into that engagement? Well,

Carl Blackstone 27:18
you have to have multiple redundancies, right? I mean, there’s the open rate on those surveys are pretty abysmal, but it has to be done at different levels. So we try to have meetings every year or every month that are opportunities to engage the public sector. Private sector have not just talking about politics, but projects that are coming and then making sure that we’re asking questions while we’re with them, have open dialog times to for them to voice their opinions. What’s going on, what’s good, what’s bad, but at all of our events, our goal is to ask questions of what we need to be, what do we need to know to help you all? And as soon as you start that dialog, and you do it over and over again, they actually start to believe it, which is good. That’s what we want, but it does. It’s not a just mention it one time and expect a flood of phone calls or emails. No, that doesn’t happen, but it’s gotta be built in to the process of every month, our annual our monthly meetings, our quarterly meetings, small I mean, you know, but also you gotta put your money where your mouth is if you really are trying to focus on small business, alright, let’s create a new group dialog, just for small business. What do y’all want to hear? What do y’all need to do? Let’s just focus on the area that needs focusing and that’s helped, that served us well. The other is, and this is the hard thing about I’ve got the best staff, best team in the world. I love they are fantastic. But we also, day in and day out are in a bubble. Yeah, they don’t have to go in and clock in clock out, and they don’t have to deal with regulatory issues, and they don’t have to deal with a lot of stuff. But we think we do and or more importantly, we think we know what our partners want. And quite honestly, you know, the worst thing we can do is think for ourselves. We need engagement, and that’s the key. And I remind our board this all the time. Look, we need y’all to tell us, don’t expect us to be you know, what did Ronald Reagan say? I’m here with the government. I’m here to help. Yeah? I can’t pretend to to know exactly what the issues are in a business. I need them to tell us and so, but we got to have that open dialog. We got to it’s it’s repetitive. I spent hours on the phone, but it’s important to to make sure that we have. People that we can call or give us straight answers to what we need to be working with and making sure that we’re providing that ROI

Brandon Burton 30:06
to our partners. Yeah, if I could summarize it, I’d say just stay curious on what those needs are for your your partners and and you mentioned, you know, you’re not going to get that flood of phone calls or emails, which is probably a good thing, because I wouldn’t really be sustainable either you couldn’t address them all last time. You might it might help in seeing some trends, but being curious in those personal interactions, if you’re at a luncheon, or if you’re, you know, visiting some members as you talk to them, what are some of the challenges you’re facing? And have it be a genuine conversation versus just greeting them, you know, thanks for coming to the luncheon. Yeah, you can elevate that that short conversation so much higher by being curious.

Carl Blackstone 30:45
Well, folks think you know if, if they get the first phone call from me, and I only call them once a year when their renewals up, right? I mean, there’s not a whole lot of authenticity in that call, right? I mean, they know exactly what I’m up to, so it’s important to have multiple contacts just to know, hey, we really do care. We really are inquisitive. We want to know how we can be helpful. And those, again, it’s all relationships and building out those relationships are are better for us as a chamber, but long term, it truly helps not only the chamber, but it helps our retention. It helps across the board. Yeah, absolutely.

Brandon Burton 31:26
Well, Carl, as we begin to wrap things up, I wanted to to ask for the chamber listening. Who’s wanting to try to take their chamber up to the next level. You’ve shared some great insights. But do you have any you know actionable, maybe tips or action items that you can share with those listening to maybe try implementing at their chamber to spark some life and step away from the apathy.

Carl Blackstone 31:52
Well, I think they’re different communities. Each you meet one chamber, you meet one chamber, right? Everybody’s different. Every community is different. But I think when you find we’re not good at everything, we don’t know everything, and so I think we try hard to stay in contact with partners, ask them what we need to be doing. I don’t have a silver bullet. I’m just making this up as I go quite honestly, but I think over time, people see us as a resource. They that they need, and they feel like, if we don’t know the answer, it’s okay, but we’re gonna go figure it out and try to find the answer. And I think companies and people are very happy with that answer. It may not work for us if we’ll try new things. We’re not saving the world, we’re not curing cancer, we’re not we’re not doing brain surgery or anything like that. We try different things all the time. It works. It works. It doesn’t. It doesn’t. It could be a timing issue, just could be whatever. But don’t be afraid to try new things. Don’t be afraid to ask questions. Don’t Don’t hesitate, because the end of the day, we’re going to be doing this tomorrow, and we’ll try something else. So I, I think too many people try not to take risks. I like taking risks even little old nonprofit that we run. I think it’s, it’s worth, worth doing, yeah, and then again, it goes back to my biggest fear, which is complacency. So taking risks helps alleviate a little bit of that complacency.

Brandon Burton 33:34
Absolutely get to find some comfort in the discomfort, right? That’s right. So you mentioned that, you know, you’re just trying to figure it out as you go, but I’d say that the key element to that is taking the feedback. So as you implement new things, you’re you’re being staying curious, getting that feedback and that that tells you that’s your your guide as to what’s working, what’s not. Well, I like asking everyone I have on the show as we look to the future of chambers of commerce, how do you see the purpose of chambers going forward?

Carl Blackstone 34:07
I you know, I think the best years of chambers are yet to come. I recognize them. Why they were created years ago, and the value that proposition that they’ve offered in years to years have just been B to B, and I don’t think that goes away. What I do think, though, as businesses in this environment that we’re in right now, political, environment, world, environment, whatever chambers, have this unique opportunity to really help define their communities for generations, and what the stuff we’re working on today may not come to fruition for 10 to 1520, years, but being at the table and helping solve these critical problems are important, and there’s no other group, if you look around, who’s going to be there? Well, it’s got to be the chambers, and it may be uncomfortable at times. It may. Be not fun, but at the end of the day, is it necessary? And businesses want to go and relocate, or they want to flourish where they can feel like they have they want to live work and play. Their employees want to live work and play in a community that’s vibrant, that is in an atmosphere that can make money, but they have a great quality of life, and so chamber is going to have to be at the tip of the spear in creating some of these long term strategies in their communities to fulfill the needs of business. So it’s going to be a fun challenge for the next few years. I’m excited. It’s new, different. Every day is different, so it’ll be fun. But I think looking at your book of work today knowing that it’s got to change, what can you live without? What Can You Live Without doing and what? What’s the best ROI for your partners, your numbers, or whatever? That’s what’s going to have to drive you. So, yeah, what

Brandon Burton 36:07
I find super interesting about chamber work is it is never ending. You know, once you solve one problem, there’s always going to be another, another thing to address. So never Is it the work of a chamber going to be complete. So job security there. So well. Carl, for listeners who may want to reach out and connect with you, what would be the best way that you’d have them reach out and contact if they had any questions we talked about you can hit our columbiachamber.com

Carl Blackstone 36:36
or cblackstone@columbiachamber.com we’ll get right to me. So love to if I’ve ever, if you ever have a question, if I can be a resource, let me know

Brandon Burton 36:45
that’s perfect. We’ll get that in our show notes for this episode. But appreciate you taking some time to be with us today, here on chamber tap podcast, share some of the approaches you guys have taken and really, you know, diving into engaging with your partners and helping them step away from that apathy that’s that’s so critical and keeping the work of chambers moving forward. So thanks.

Carl Blackstone 37:06
Yeah, absolutely, don’t be afraid to reach out. My My was reluctant when I first got to the Chamber of reaching out and asking for help, and call it pride, call whatever it was, but the best resources for me are other chambers, and we love the R & D working chamber world, reuse and duplicate, so embrace that as well, but find a mentor, find a friend at another chamber and and pick their brain. It’s a huge help.

Brandon Burton 37:35
I love that plug. That’s why this podcast exists. To your R & D. Well, thank you, Carl, this has been great, and I appreciate spending time with you today, and for you carving out some time to talk with us, this has been wonderful.

Carl Blackstone 37:47
Thank you. I’ve enjoyed it. Thanks.

Brandon Burton 37:50
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Thinking Big with Ryan Tarrant

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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.

Our guest for this episode is Ryan Tarrant. Ryan is currently the President and CEO of the Jackson County Chamber of Commerce and Experience Jackson, Jackson County’s destination marketing organization. In this role, he leads a strategy and vision to improve the regular quality of life in Jackson County for businesses and residents through advocacy, collaboration and destination development. Ryan previously served as the Chief Operating Officer of Business Leaders for Michigan, the state business roundtable, which he dedicated to making Michigan a top 10 state for jobs, education, widely shared prosperity and and a healthy economy, where he oversaw the execution of the organization’s work plan and public policy engagement strategy. He also has prior experience as a chamber executive, where his success included securing more than a million dollars in public funding for an award winning talent attraction and retention initiative, and created a robust advocacy strategy that drove community infrastructure projects, place made, placemaking activities and engagement with local, state and federal officials. Prior to his work in membership based organizations, Ryan held a variety of positions in government and politics, serving as chief of staff to US Representative John Molinar and as a district director for us, rep dave Camp and run numerous federal campaigns. Ryan has a bachelor’s degree in political science from Saginaw Valley State University, and he and his wife, Cheryl, have two mostly adult children and reside in Jackson, Michigan. Ryan, I’m excited to have you with us today here on Chamber Chat Podcast. I’d love to give you a chance 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.

Ryan Tarrant 2:59
Yeah, thanks, Brandon. You know, reading through that bio, it’s starting to make me just feel old. You know, I didn’t feel that old before. And you know, have those Boomer, growing children that tend to go leave for college and then come home and stay for a little bit. So, you know, hopefully we’ll be empty nesters soon. But yeah, I grew up in a mid sized town similar to Jackson, you know, we’ve got 30,000 people grew up in Bay City, Michigan, and, you know, great town had a, had a great upbringing, you know, you had the river, you had the lake, you know, grew up, you know, sailing and doing those things. You know, they have a sailing association. So, you know, really, every kid in the community can go out and learn to sail. And, you know, just, just kind of a fantastic place to grow up and live, you know, real sense of community. But one of the things, you know, it’s a traditional Midwest blue collar town, and so, you know, over the years, as you lose some of that manufacturing, you know, I think there’s a tendency for people to kind of say, well, you know, we’re, we’re, we’re just, you know, I think Madonna called it the dirty little town, because she grew up there as well. Okay, you know. So, so I think for me, you know, growing up in Bay City, you had a region, and Bay City kind of always felt like that, that little bit of a red headed stepchild. You had Midland with the headquarters of Dow, and you had Saginaw that was twice as big and, and so, you know, you always felt a little bit less than maybe, but, you know, so I think that’s what’s kind of drawn me into to the chamber world.

Brandon Burton 4:31
Yeah, it turns into a fighter. It sounds like little scrappy. Yeah, yeah, that’s good. So as far as the the chamber goes, what? What’s the size look like? Staff, scope of work, things you guys are involved with?

Ryan Tarrant 4:48
Yeah. So our chamber is about little shy of 700 members, you know, budgets little north of 600,000 and then I also run experience Jackson, which is our destination. Marketing organization, which is actually housed in the same building, but has a completely separate board, had combined. We have a staff of 10, and then the combined budgets, you know, roughly about 1,000,006 or 1,000,007 between the two. So two distinctly different missions. You know, from the chamber perspective. We we have a strategic plan that, you know, really tries to put our members first. You know that customer service, what our events look like. How are we connecting our members? You know, you’re kind of, if anybody thinks of a chamber, it’s, it’s that traditional chamber experience, but it’s really only, you know, probably a quarter of a third of what we do. You know, the other two pieces are, how do we impact our community? You know, what kinds of things can we? Can we take on? Can we convene and collaborate on to to improve the community? And then the third leg of the stool for us is, is that government affairs and advocacy work? You know, here in Michigan, we we’ve seen some some changes for businesses on the public policy side. And, you know, how do we, how do we push back on that when we need to? How do we, how do we work with our elected officials on some of those issues? And, you know, so over the last year, I’ve been here about 14 months this year, we we’ve had some issues with aggressive panhandling, you know, coming out of the out of the pandemic, I think a lot more communities have dealt with, you know, homelessness, panhandling and some of those types of issues, maybe more than they had in the past. You know, we got to the point where in our downtown, specifically, it was getting pretty aggressive. We have a self described progressive city council, okay, who had had pushed back on it for a long time and and so we spent about nine months working with them, to come to a compromise agreement early in the summer, to to kind of abate that a little bit as far as that aggressive behavior, as far loitering and accosting. And so, you know, had some success there. You know, we go after a lot of different state appropriations, earmarks, if you will, to to kind of ramp up projects, and that’s kind of the scope of what we do. Yeah,

Brandon Burton 7:04
well, that should set the stage for our discussion today. You guys are busy, for sure, get your hands in some several things and making an impact, but we’re going to focus our discussion today around thinking big and some of these big swings you guys have tried and these ideas that that come to you, and I’m excited to dive into this conversation and learn from these things you present to us today as soon as we get back from this quick break.

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All right, Ryan, we’re back. I mentioned before the break. We’re talking about thinking big today. So in all these different areas of work that you guys are involved with, what are how do you incorporate thinking big? That might be the better way of asking it. How do you incorporate it? You know, every

Ryan Tarrant 9:53
community has its own personality, I would say. And you know, a lot of places in the Midwest you look at and. And and those these communities kind of take a look. And, you know, in our state, if you’re in a mid sized community, you look and you say, Okay, well, you know, Grand Rapids and Detroit sort of get everything and you know, and they’re doing a phenomenal job. I mean, you know, we all know, know about the NFL draft in Detroit and things happening in Grand Rapids with beer city, and then you’ve got Traverse City up north and and so they get a lot of play and a lot of a lot of credit for things. And I think we can, we can have a little bit of fall into a little bit of a rut where we just sort of expect to get, get what we get, and move forward, and nothing really changes, you know. And I think we take a little bit of a different perspective on it, which is, you know, kind of that, why not us? You know, if, if there’s, there’s these opportunities out there, you know, I mentioned appropriation as far as the government advocacy side goes, you know, why not us? You know, if you’re not even asking, you’re never going to get anything, and everything’s always going to be the same. You know, downtown Jackson seen a lot of redevelopment over the last decade or so. I mean, it’s really come back. You have restaurants, you have businesses downtown, and, you know, we have Consumers Energy, which is, you know, either number one or number two, as far as the biggest energy companies in the state that’s headquartered on one end of our downtown, the other end of the downtown, on the other hand, has something called the Hays hotel. It’s this historic hotel, 10 stories, and it’s been vacant for 21 years. And as I came into the community, and you know, I we would talk about the Hays hotel, and you would have people who would just kind of roll their eyes because they’ve all heard it before, and something’s going to happen with it. You know, fast forward and, and there’s a developer who’s who’s committed to it, and, and, you know, through our conversations with them, learned that there was a little bit of a gap with with all of the the different funding components, you know, you look at over the last couple of years, the increases in interest rates and labor shortages and supplies. And so, you know, it would seem that every time they would fill a gap, there was, you know, maybe another hurdle at the back end. So, you know, we kind of took a look at that and said, Well, you know, what if we tried to hit the easy button here a little bit. And so we engaged with our elected representatives at the state capitol and and kind of had that conversation and said, Look, this is, this is sort of that, that transformational project that kind of completes downtown and books and bookends Consumers Energy to then start to infill some of those, those side streets. You know, we were successful in securing we, we actually asked for $3 million and secured four and a half million dollars. Wow, yeah, they treated it a little bit like the 2023, housing market. You know, you put it up for 100 and they give you 150 right? But, you know, those are the types of things that you know, if you say, why not us? And you make the ask, you know, it’s okay to fail. You know, nothing changes if you fail, but nothing changes if you don’t try either.

Brandon Burton 13:05
Yeah? So, and if you do fail, you learn something, and you can apply it to the next, the next, you know, big idea, right? That’s exactly right, yeah. So, as we talk about big thinking, I I can’t help but think of you can’t have big thoughts if you don’t have big vision, right? If you don’t see a bigger plan or bigger vision for your community, can you speak towards that as to how you see Jackson County, what the possibilities are, what how you would like to see yourself in the future, and to be able to apply that to these big ideas that you’re working towards?

Ryan Tarrant 13:42
Yeah, I’m a big fan of, you know, looking at what others are doing and kind of figuring some of those pieces out, like, what are those aspirational goals? You know, I mentioned Grand Rapids, you know, there’s some other communities out there. We actually transitioned one of our team members into more of a data and analytics role, you know, he has a skill set for it, and so, you know, he’s been doing a lot of this. And, you know, not just kind of the, you know, hey, we’re going to do a community assessment and ask people how they feel. You know, we’ve been doing those for 40 years. And over the last 60 years, the city has lost 40% of its population because people’s feelings aren’t based on anything that you know maybe is real or or achievable. And so, you know, we look at at similar communities and find those comparable communities, then, you know, okay, what are, what are their chambers doing? Who is that, that sort of spark plug in the community, that organization, or that individual, you know what? What’s caused them to grow to, you know, achieve additional educational attainment, those types of things. And so, you know, for us, over the last couple of months, we’ve started to look at some of those things. And you know, you can look at Grand Rapids, and the things that we found are, you know, the two biggest keys to to growth seem to be, you know, persistence in your goal and strategies. And you. Yeah, and then, you know, having sort of some spark or some leader that that actually moves it forward. And when I talk about that persists, persistence, when you look at Grand Rapids, you know that that downtown redevelopment in Grand Rapids started in the mid 70s when Gerald Ford was president. You know, the Secret Service, when he became president, told him he couldn’t do a parade in His own hometown because there were so many vacant buildings and they couldn’t secure him. So, you know, fast forward a few years, and they had a conference center come in, and then, you know, and then it was a civic arena, and then it was a medical mile and a four year institution. And it’s been driven by, you know, collaborative efforts, but also by a couple of larger corporations or families that are located there. You know, similar things can be seen around the country. You know, you look at Bentonville, Arkansas with with the Walmart and Walden family, and then you look at places that that have the opportunity to do those things, but maybe don’t have that one or two businesses or individual that individuals with wealth that can kind of pull it off and keep people together. And what does that look like? You know, I talked to our peers in Mankato, Minnesota last week, and, you know, talking to them, and that persistence is there too, you know, they, they’ve, over the last 40 years, had these 20 year plans. I mean, they’re telling me they’re on number three. And so how do we create that? I mean, you’re talking mid 80s, yeah, how many changes of leadership have we had in since the mid 80s? You know, I’ve been in in communities where where you look at things and you go, Okay, there’s this collective group of leaders who have this vision and support each other and collaborate. But then you have one or two leave, and you have another one retire. And if, if that vision isn’t written down, and you’re not not pulling in those successors immediately into that, those leadership roles and to help with that vision, it starts to fall apart. And so, you know, it’s, it’s that keeping people together and that consistency in what you’re doing. Yeah,

Brandon Burton 17:06
now I love that, the creating that vision, and being able to see where there’s certain individuals in a community that maybe carry more influence they might, and I’m not talking necessarily elected officials, but you gave the example of the Walton family, and, you know, they’ve got money, they’ve got influence, big business. How do you get those people within your community to kind of, I don’t know how to say this, in the way that that I intend, but to engage, but to to not be so hyper focused on their individual business growth and success, but to be able to look at the greater picture of the community and get them to engage in the community, to see it grow and success and succeed by applying some of their skills and connections and abilities to the greater good

Ryan Tarrant 17:55
and and I think the biggest, the biggest key there. I mean, you know, you talk to economic developers. And you know what number one or number two is always people, if you’re talking to site selectors, on what’s the first thing they look at if they’re going to go into a community, right? It’s, do you have the quality and quantity of workforce, you know? So when you start talking to those, those you know, whether it’s an individual or a larger corporation, you know, everything I try and do comes from a perspective of, you know, talent, attraction, retention. You know, is this something that’s going to help us attract and retain talent, or is it just something that that we’re doing to do and how does it move the needle? You know, on our destination marketing organization side, you know, we’re making a big outdoor Bucha. Because, you know, we have something called the Irish hills in our county, and there’s, there’s opportunities for for gravel biking out there, which is the fastest segment of cycling. You know, we’ve got 11 miles of mountain biking trails, and our one of our city parks that just needs to be regrouped and maybe added to. And so, you know, how do we do that? Because now those things translate to those quality of life amenities that, you know, when one of our major corporations, or even, you know, a physical therapy organization, is hiring somebody out of college, you know, do you want to go to Jackson, or do you want to go to Chicago? And if you don’t have those quality of life amenities that, you know, you’re not going to compete with the big city lifestyle, but that’s okay. Utilize the assets you have, but make them as good as they can be. Yeah,

Brandon Burton 19:27
that makes a lot of sense. That place making aspect is huge. And I love the example you gave, the Hayes Hotel. I’m in Texas, and there’s a big historic hotel not too far from where I’m at, that has been vacant since, I believe, the 50s. So it’s been it’s quite the icon. People see it, but just now, things are starting to happen to revitalize it. And it’s great to see it’s great to see those success stories and to see it turn around. And it’s something that builds a community. Be around it too, where you can see progress happening on like, a magnified level, right? Yeah,

Ryan Tarrant 20:07
yeah. And those are the sort of transformational things that you see in a community that, yeah, you know, it’s sort of the I mentioned the last decade in downtown Jackson. And you know that that, to me, is that transformational piece that sparks the next decade.

Brandon Burton 20:22
Absolutely, are there some other big things that that you’ve taken a swing at, or, you know, that they would fall into this category of big thinking that we need to highlight?

Ryan Tarrant 20:35
Yeah, so, you know, you mentioned big things, and I mentioned, you know, a lot of lot of mid sized communities out there, you know, sometimes I think in a in the chambers, we can get hyper focused on our day to day. We’re all so busy, you know, all of those things, but, but we’ve really gotta, gotta kind of identify some of those swings. I mean, we can do that by focusing a little bit, right? Yeah, you know, making sure we’re training our sites and we leave that capacity for for those big swings, you know, but for us, I, you know, revamping those, those mountain biking trails are one of our big pushes for next year, you know, because what we’ve learned is, is, if you’re in that 12 to 20 mile range of mountain biking trails, and you develop them so, you know, you I guess, and I’m learning about Cycling right now, apparently it’s like skiing. They have green so little kids can do it and like me, and then they have black diamonds that are really challenging. And, you know, I break my neck so, you know, bringing in a trail builder to develop that and to add miles to it, so that we can draw people in, you know. And it’s in one of the, you know, I would say probably lower income or more diverse neighborhoods in the city. And so the proximity of it, you know, it’s not just doing that for talent attraction, but how do you make that accessible to everybody? So as a piece of that conversation, we’re looking at it and saying, Okay, can we do a mount like library, if you will, where, you know, a kid from the neighborhood can walk down and and, you know, show his card and essentially rent a bike without paying for it, just like the library and go ride the trails and have fun. You know, you want, you want those things to be accessible for everybody. You want everybody to be able to enjoy them, you know, and to do that because it gives you that, that sense of community pride, because with each one of those things you accomplish, it, it builds on itself. You know, we’ve got, we’ve got another nonprofit in town that’s called the hope kitchen, that’s taking the old Masonic Hall and creating a community kitchen, teaching kitchen to sort of train chefs in front of the house. And, you know, to make sure that that we have that pipeline of of talent for our restaurants, so that, you know, when somebody comes into town, or when you go downtown or to a restaurant in our community, you’re getting the service that you you expect. I mean, I think we’ve all been out to eat over the last couple of years, since COVID and and it always feels like, you know, a lot of time, I wouldn’t say always, but often times it feels like, you know, maybe that level of service that we were accustomed to pre COVID is not the same as post COVID, yep. And so, you know, teaching those people, you know how to do that, and and for us, you know, how do we support that? You know, when they need, when they need to purchase their equipment. How do we how do we help them, whether it’s with with grant funding, through the advocacy process, you know, those types of things. So yeah, so those are some of the, some of the things that that are on our radar right now.

Brandon Burton 23:33
And actually just saw this last week, restaurant that had a sign posted on their door said, No, dine in, just take out only, and it’s something that’s stuck ever since COVID and and I hope that’s because the the data is telling them that’s the best solution for them, but my fear is they can’t get the staff to do dine in or decide easier at the community the Customer Services has fallen out something,

Ryan Tarrant 24:01
yeah, the worst one I’ve seen. I saw was I actually tried to order a pizza online, and got a note when I tried to to click Order, and it said, we’re short staffed. We’re taking time to orders for tomorrow. What I got pizza from somewhere else. I think I still have pizza. So yeah, but yeah, that was the most bizarre one. I mean, they updated their their website, and they’re ordering, oh my goodness, that quickly, that you know, hey, we’re just, we’re busy, and we can’t keep up, so we’re just not taking any more

Brandon Burton 24:35
orders. Wow. But hopefully your appetite is still there tomorrow. So that’s crazy. Well, as as we start to wrap up here, I like asking for the chamber that’s listening, who’s trying to elevate their organization to the next level. What kind of tip or action item might you suggest for them and trying to accomplish that goal? So

Ryan Tarrant 24:55
I think we were, we were sort of, you know, in that mindset of. You know, about a year ago, when we were sounds like, yeah, strategic planning, right? You know, how do we elevate to the next level? We hadn’t done a lot of community initiatives or, you know, over the past few years, we hadn’t done a lot of advocacy work for our members over the past few years. And so, you know, they’ve been doing kind of this, you know, event to event kind of mindset. And so one of the things that we did was we actually developed a survey for other chambers. And so, you know, I mentioned our revenues about 600,000 so we kind of kind of broke it out into those peer chamber, Chamber organizations, and then sort of those aspirational chambers that are in that next level at 700,000 to a million or so. And we really went through and kind of said, you know, how many, how many events do you have that would be considered, you know, kind of, quote, unquote, Premier events, you know, your annual meeting, or your community awards or, or those types of things and, and, you know, how many of these advocacy pieces do you do, you know, kind of went down the line to try and benchmark a little bit to see, you know, at different levels, is, is there a different, you know, what does that look like? You know, are we doing something that’s a little bit off and, and what we found from it, you know, we had, we had, it actually ended up getting 1010, or 11 responses, you know, we, we targeted, who we who we asked. But we it was split evenly between those, you know, smaller in our our level, and then those larger organizations. And what we found was, the larger you are, the less you do. It’s hard to think about, but say it again, right? Or at least the forward facing of what you do is less larger you are, you know, because so many of us think of events, the less you do. Yeah, and it was that, you know, it felt like, as you got to that larger, larger revenue size, and you start to get north of 700,000 you know, those organizations are focusing more, doing fewer premier events, probably doing them really well. But part of that is because they’re transitioning from doing more events to more of that community based work, more of that advocacy style work. And even within that advocacy work, they’re more focused. They might pick three or four priorities that they want to work on, versus having, you know, 10 or 15 and and throwing everything at the at the wall and seeing what sticks. So, yeah, you know, I think that that next level for all of us is, is probably being more focused, you know, we, we, and we can fall into that. I mean, I’m, I’m as guilty as everybody else, right? We get so busy, you know, that there’s so many things going on, and sometimes it’s hard to to put that focus and pinpoint on on that one thing that your members need. But you know, I think at the end of the day, you know, for us, if, if we can accomplish that, that top priority, versus numbers 10 through 20, I think our members are going to be happier with us. We’re going to continue to grow, and, you know, the community is going to be better for in the future.

Brandon Burton 27:59
Yeah, but it sounds like having your new data and analytics person is a great step in that direction, to really focus.

Ryan Tarrant 28:07
It does help to look at data. You know, fewer feelings, more things based on data, really, I think, helps us move the needle a little bit. So, yeah,

Brandon Burton 28:16
I just heard the other day somebody was trying to bring back an event after the pandemic, and they put out an email to all their followers and whatnot, and said, you know, if we get enough interest, we’ll put it on. And there was like 300 or so people that responded, yeah, we want to do this. And then the person thought, you know what this is? Just feelings, you know, let me put this out there again, to the ones that said that they want to come and have them put down a 50% deposit, and if we don’t get enough, we’ll refund everything. We won’t do it, but if we get enough, we’ll move forward. And I think he said, Out of the 300 plus, you know people of interest, I think six people put down a deposit. He’s like, we’re not doing it. So I pay cancel it.

Ryan Tarrant 29:03
And I started looking at our events, and kind of said, you know, and talk to our team about if people don’t want to come to an event, you know, they may say they want it in our survey end of year survey, which, you know, we do every year, to kind of, kind of benchmark ourselves and see how we’re doing and what their needs are. And they may say they want all the networking in the world. You know, for us, we offer 22 networking events a year for a grand total of $90 you know, it, it’s literally sort of boosted by sponsors and different things. But if you’re not going to come to it, but you say you want it, we’ll just stop doing it. Yeah,

Brandon Burton 29:39
yeah. Don’t need the practice, right, right?

Ryan Tarrant 29:43
It shows that, you know, we’re a week post election. It shows that sometimes the data and the polling can be

Brandon Burton 29:48
off. Yeah, exactly, yeah. Well, Ryan, as we look to the future of chambers, how do you see the future of chambers and their purpose going forward?

Ryan Tarrant 29:57
I don’t know that the purpose changes. All that much. I mean, you know, we’re, we’re still going to have that need for businesses who who want to get together, and who want to want to network with one another, develop those relationships. But I think, you know, if there’s any change at all, it’s probably that more and more of that is going to be about that, that bigger picture work that you’re doing. I mean, when we look at our community work, we’re not thinking of, are we doing this? Does it benefit our members? It’s, are we doing this? And does this benefit the community as a whole? You know, if, if the city of Jackson grows, and the county of Jackson grows and we have a bigger employer base, it certainly helps, helps our members. And so, you know, we worry less about those types of things, you know, right now, we, we are we awaiting word on a million dollar grant that we partnered with our local two year college on. And as a part of that, it’s workforce development, you know, is building out a workforce development collaborative to make sure our educational attainment is where it needs to be, and that all of our workforce development partners are working together, you know. And so about a quarter of that 250,000 would be essentially directed to the chamber to run that piece of it, you know. So, so I think you know that community based piece is probably the biggest thing. If, if people aren’t already doing that, how do you impact your community? You know, we know our businesses want to impact their community. That’s why they’ve, you know, for 70 years, sponsored Little League teams, right? You know, done those types of things. They sponsor the local booster club like they they want their people to have community pride. They want to want to see their community and be be proud of where they’re from, and say, you know, you should come visit. You should move here. It’s a great community, you know. And I think the chamber really in in most places, can be a driver of what we look what their community looks like in the next you know, 1015, 20 years,

Brandon Burton 31:48
yeah, yeah, that’s a great point. Well, Ryan, for listeners who may want to reach out and connect with you and maybe learn more about how you guys are doing things there in Jackson County, or maybe you’re one of the aspirational chambers that they’re looking up towards. But what would be the best way to to point somebody to reach out and connect with you? Sure my

Ryan Tarrant 32:09
email address is ryan@jacksonchamber.org, and my cell phone, because I actually got rid of my desk phone. I don’t use it anyway, is 989-708-7683,

Brandon Burton 32:26
that’s perfect, and we’ll get this in our show notes for this episode. Make it easy to find, but I appreciate you carving out some time to spend with us today on chamber chat podcast, sharing the example you guys are setting there in Jackson County and and sharing these ideas and some of these big things, these swings you guys are taking, I appreciate that, and it’s provided a lot of value to listeners today. So thank you for that.

Ryan Tarrant 32:49
Appreciate it. Thanks, Brandon.

Brandon Burton 32:50
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Creating Conveners with Tara Lea

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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.

Our guest for this episode is Tara Lea. Tara has been involved in the chamber industry at the local, state and regional level for the past decade, with a passion for leadership and a commitment to making a difference. Tara currently serves as a Vice President of Community Affairs at the Nebraska Chamber of Commerce. In this role, she orchestrates programs and initiatives aimed at cultivating the next generation of leaders and empowering individuals to enact positive change in their spheres of influence. Prior to the Nebraska chamber, Tara was the president and CEO of the Fremont Area Chamber of Commerce. In that role, she managed the strategic, fiscal and programmatic goals for the Fremont Chamber of Commerce. She also served as a spokesperson for the chamber through their region. With almost 600 members in the Fremont area Chamber. It’s the sixth largest and one of the oldest chambers in the state of Nebraska. Tara started her career, her chamber career as the president of the Ralston Area Chamber of Commerce, a 275 member organization dedicated to creating business and community vitality. She’s had. She has a very active role in creating the Ralston 20 year development plan. Prior to joining the chamber industry, Tara was employed at the University of Nebraska, Lincoln Professional Golf Management Program, and as the educational specialist recruiting students from across the country to make Nebraska their home. Tara has served as a board member for a variety of civic and government organizations. She’s She was elected to the Nebraska Chamber of Commerce executives and Mid America Chamber of Commerce executive board of directors by her peers, and is currently past chairman of both organizations. Tara has been recognized for both service and professional leadership through the Midlands Business Business Journal, 40 under 40 Leadership Award. She has earned her Bachelor’s of Journalism and Broadcasting and has a master’s in educational leadership from the University of Nebraska Lincoln. Tara is also a 2021, graduate of the US Chamber of Commerce IOM program. Tara, 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 so we can all get to know you a little better. Well,

Tara Lea 3:32
thanks, Brandon, and hello to all my chamber friends across the country, so excited to be on the podcast today to share just a little bit of knowledge that I probably ripped off and duplicated. From some of my friends across the state over the years. My bio is very long with some big words that chatgpt helped me make up. So thank you, Brandon for sharing that. But a big thing that you see in there is Nebraska has mentioned many, many, many times. Born and raised Nebraska, very proud Nebraskan. I think something interesting about myself, and I’m going back a few years here, but when I was a senior in high school, I was both a Nebraska cow queen and pig queen in the same year. So I got to go around the state of Nebraska to fairs and community events and hand out ribbons and just be a promoter of short horn cattle and the pork industry across the state. So I think my, my love for Nebraska, and kind of ending up here in the Nebraska Chamber of Commerce role probably started way back in high school

Brandon Burton 4:31
and talk about something to aspire to, cow queen and pig queen. Wow,

Tara Lea 4:36
just the royalty of Nebraska. You know, I still get the crown out once in a while. No, I’m just kidding,

Brandon Burton 4:41
and we’ve got her on the show today, folks, I love it. But tell us a little bit about the Nebraska chamber, obviously, State Chamber, but give us some perspective the size scope of work, how you guys are involved working with other chambers staff. Just to you. Kind of get our mindset straight as before we go into this conversation today,

Tara Lea 5:04
absolutely so. As you mentioned from my bio Brandon, I’ve kind of climbed the chamber ladder here. I like to say I started a small chamber, went to a mid sized chamber. Now at the Nebraska State Chamber, it’s an entirely new beast and animal compared to the local chambers. We have about 1000 members here at The Nebraska Chamber of Commerce, and our focus is obviously statewide. So we want to make a huge difference from Western Nebraska all the way to Eastern and North and South. We want to cover the whole state. So as most chambers do, we do a lot of lobbying for our businesses and communities across the state. But my role, which is new, is really to work with the local chambers across the state of Nebraska as well. So I kind of have that inside track and know what a weird job that we have. So I can be that person to new folks who come into a chamber role and help do some training and education for them. I can also, if they, you know, chambers have issues or events or things they have questions on, we’re the resource for them, trying to do a lot more meetings with the local chamber folks. So in a way, we’re making all the local chambers an extension of the State Chamber, and I think that’s just going to make the entire state a whole lot stronger as we move forward with that. Here at The Nebraska chamber, we have 12 employees that are here in the office, and then we just started a new initiative a couple months ago, which is also my baby, called six regions one Nebraska. And we’ve hired six navigators across the state, who then are kind of an extension of the chamber as well, working on some regional projects in each of those, those communities, in those areas.

Brandon Burton 6:36
Man, that you guys are busy. I mean, this is, this is awesome. I love, especially your role, this new role that’s been created, and seeing the local chambers becoming an extension of the State Chamber and and having the six navigators. I mean, Nebraska is not a small state. I mean, you get in the East Coast and you get states you can drive across in 30 minutes. Not so much in Nebraska, right? So it makes a lot of sense to have your your delegates?

Tara Lea 7:03
Well, it makes a huge difference, because even for the 12 of us, you know, each of us trying to get out to the western side of the state, it’s eight hours across the state, so we were not spending nearly as much time out there as we should have been. So yes, to have somebody right there in the community, to always be a resource has just been huge for us.

Brandon Burton 7:19
Yeah. Now that is fantastic. And really, that could be a whole podcast episode there. But our focus for our conversation today is going to be around creating conveners. So maybe some of that comes into the conversation today when we talk about, you know, helping to lift up some of these chambers, get them trained and educated, but ultimately creating conveners and and becoming one of those, you know, pillars in that C, you know, the 3c of chambers. So we look forward to diving deeper into this topic as soon as we get back from this quick break.

Joe Duemig 7:53
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All right, Tara, we’re back. So as I mentioned before the break, our topic for our conversation today is creating conveners. So as you hear that topic and the approach to your work, what does that mean to you? How do you approach creating conveners in your day to day work?

Tara Lea 10:20
So that has been just a passion of mine the entire time I’ve been in the chamber industry. I mean, even at the local level, it’s so important to bring together not just your your members and local businesses, but make sure they’re still working with city government and county government and, you know, make all of us working together to move things forward in the right direction. So now, in my role, literally, I get to do it every single day. So I mentioned the six regions one Nebraska initiative. I also run our leadership Nebraska program. So I know we have a ton of leadership programs across the country. Each of them has its own awesome element, but, you know, a lot of are very similar as well, but that’s really where I have the opportunity. We have about 350 Alumni members who we do events for throughout the year. And then each year, we take a class of between 30 and 35 those folks are from all across the state, and then we go visit different communities across the state. So at that time, it’s all about those introductions, bringing people together. It’s amazing to see, even years later, folks that are working together because they met at an alumni event or they were in class together. So I really think that’s to form those partnerships is huge, and anything I can do to make that happen is just a true passion of mine,

Brandon Burton 11:32
absolutely. So tell us a little bit more about that. As you as you take these alumni, you divide up, you go out and visit others. What? What does that look like? What do you provide? What’s the curriculum, if you will?

Tara Lea 11:43
Yeah, great question. So again, if you have a local Chamber Leadership Program, you’re probably meeting one day a month or something along those lines. For leadership, we meet three days a month, so it is a huge time commitment for folks, but we start at noon on a Wednesday and wrap up on noon on a Friday. And the whole goal, obviously, is there’s a leadership development component, which is huge, but it’s also the relationship. So we are making sure the folks in this class are getting in front of the mayors of communities, or just the key people that are in that community, senators, whoever that might be, and then the top business leaders in those communities as well. So they have that resource and they know them. And then we take a lot of behind the scenes tours as well. So Nebraska is a large manufacturing state, so we get to see some really cool things that are made right here in the state of Nebraska. Each month, we’re in a different part of the state. So we do southeast, we do Western, northeast, central Lincoln, Omaha. We hit kind of all some of the hot spots across the state. And again, just to showcase it’s usually focused on the top hitting issues within a state right now. So obviously, this year, child care comes up in every single session. We go to communities and see what kind of facilities they have or how they’re kind of battling. The child care shortage crisis across the state. Housing has been huge for a number of years. It’s fun to go see some of the small homes and just or the things that are being created, you know, in these communities, to make sure they’re covering the housing they need, housing they need, and then just workforce. So issues in Nebraska, but also issues across the whole state, we are not going to find an answer. Unfortunately, I wish we had that crystal ball that told us, Hey, here’s the answer to all of this. And if someone listening does have that, please call me and tell me what that is. But it’s just nice to see what other folks are doing, so then the people in the class can take those ideas back to their communities and help build and try to solve some of these issues that we have across the state.

Brandon Burton 13:38
Even if somebody has solved it. It’s probably only solvable in their community and whatever adaptations need to happen. So the thought came to me as you’re explaining how this, how the program works with these visits, these manufacturing facilities, you know, just getting out and seeing, you know, the childcare place, the the workforce and the housing issues. How is this all working towards the goal of creating conveners? Or would you say that’s the goal? Absolutely

Tara Lea 14:09
is the goal. And I think it happens every single session, because someone will meet someone that then they can go work with or push a project forward, because they had the opportunity to convene and meet with those folks while they were on a tour, listening to a panel of speakers. Even just the leadership development, it’s it’s getting those folks in the class stronger and more knowledgeable, so that they can then go back to their communities and bring everybody together, convene people that need to be in the room to push things forward and make things happen across the state.

Brandon Burton 14:39
Absolutely, I was thinking just the just the perspective that’s opened up to these individuals to go through the program, I think is so valuable in creating conveners, to be able to look at a problem from multiple angles and say, Yeah, I know somebody over here. Let’s bring them in. Let’s and maybe that’s getting more into the catalyst phase. Is the you know that that other C, but I think being a convener is so important to be able to have those connections, bring them in, have that perspective, to approach things from from different, different angles, really, absolutely

Tara Lea 15:12
and as a State Chamber, we just really want to see all of our local communities advance and grow. And so that is obviously huge for us is when we can bring folks together and do some the right people, so then they can go back and make an impact within their community.

Brandon Burton 15:25
Absolutely. So I know we’re talking a lot about the leadership Nebraska, can we talk a little bit about how you work with chambers too? Because I want to know, because I feel like there’s some convener development going on with those chambers too. As you work with the local chambers, what are those interactions like? And what do you do to promote them, to support them, to train them. What does that look like? Yeah,

Tara Lea 15:55
so that’s something we’ve really focused on the last couple of years as well. We have no no better value than our local chambers across the state. They are huge resources for us as the Nebraska chamber. So we want to make sure folks are loving their job and wanting to continue working in the chamber industry. Obviously, that’s kind of an issue we’ve had across the state as well, as is folks kind of get burnt out or whatever issues might arise. So we really want to focus on, what can we do to make their lives a little bit easier? So the Nebraska chamber association is our statewide group of chamber executives, and we meet every other week on a zoom call where we’ll bring in experts in the chamber field. Maybe sometimes it’s just a social media expert, an HR expert, just people who can come in and educate our local chamber executives so that then they can be a resource in their local areas and their local communities. We also do two conferences a year where we get as many people together as we can. It’s usually two to three days, and it’s just pure professional development education, but also that awesome time to be with your colleagues who do the things that you do, day in and day out, and they understand how how this job is, so it can be a resource for folks moving forward, just to have that, that person to go to and talk to when needed. As far as spreading the word the chamber newsletter, we love to get local chambers in there. And one of my dear friends in Fall city and I Amber Holly started a podcast a couple of months ago called chamber chatter boxes, where we just interview local chambers and they talk about what makes their community unique, some of the events they have going on. We really encourage folks across the rest of the state or region to go and visit those communities in our podcast. So not nearly the level of the chamber chat yet Brandon, but we have goals to aspire 12 episodes in someday, we will also be at 309

Brandon Burton 17:47
Awesome, awesome. I love hearing chambers podcast. So this is, you know, going through COVID. That was kind of the vision that I saw. Is with the pivoting. I even set up a page on my website called the podcast pivot, right? So during during COVID, chambers still needed to get their messaging out and, and some did, you know, Zoom calls, and they used other tools where they could, you know, put out video. But podcasting, when people are at home and they’re doing different things, and they can listen and and be able to be educated while they’re doing other things, is so important. And I think the world we live in today where everybody’s so busy, that’s a way to reach people, absolutely, podcast so

Tara Lea 18:27
and drive time, yeah? I mean, just drive time in our state too. People in our car a lot, yeah, driving throughout Nebraska. So it’s a nice time to just pop on a podcast and use that, that that windshield time for good, absolutely,

Brandon Burton 18:40
instead of just listening to radio or whatever, I mean, right? Music, yeah, we all have those songs embedded in our mind already, so we don’t need to keep reinforcing. We can, you know, broaden our minds. But

Tara Lea 18:53
that’s right, I could sing a little bit for you if you want to. No, I’m just happy to everyone would turn their this podcast off right now if I started that.

Brandon Burton 19:00
But I was just gonna, I was just gonna say how great you sounded, you know, with the microphone and the podcast set up. So we’ll leave it right there. But

Tara Lea 19:07
perfect, sounds good.

Brandon Burton 19:11
So you guys meet twice a year for a conference that’s you. That’s kind of unique. I see most, most state association, State Chambers, are doing, you know, once a year. So do you know what was behind that? To do it twice a year, and is a turnout similar for both, or is one more supported than the other? Yeah,

Tara Lea 19:32
so we have a fall conference every year, and that’s probably that’s been going on for as long as I’ve been in the chamber industry, and we kind of rotate that across the state, so every region has a chance to be host and show off what they’re doing. That is our bigger event that definitely gets more chamber execs there. And then in the spring, we do what we call mini institutes. It’s just a two day session. It’s typically either centrally located in the state of Nebraska or Omaha, Lincoln area. And that started. Gosh, probably five or six years ago, just because people wanted more they wanted to get together more often. They wanted more education opportunities. And that one, it’s a little less attended, but again, it’s just a two day event, so sometimes people coming from further distances, it’s, you know, can I justify the day and a half compared to the three days? And so we tried to keep the prices really low on that too. We know there’s not a huge budget for professional development, a lot of small chambers, so we keep it under $100 for both of those conferences, and try to provide as much value as we can while folks are together. Yeah,

Brandon Burton 20:33
that’s great. I think for those listening who may be on a board for their state association, just take some ideas. See if there’s value in your state to do something similar. But from Tara’s perspective, it’s all about strengthening Nebraska. So don’t, don’t, don’t compete too Right, right? Don’t

Tara Lea 20:50
get too good. Go ahead and do a few things, but you know, don’t. Don’t be as good as us. Just kidding,

the whole country will be better if everybody works together. So it’s all good.

Brandon Burton 21:00
Absolutely. I love it. I love these approaches. I mean, you guys are, it seems like you’re doing things right, to build up leaders to to turn them into conveners that are going to strengthen their communities, be that extension of the Nebraska chamber throughout the state. I love the strategy that you guys are making. Is there anything else to the approach that you guys are taking that’s worth noting again, for those listening who may be taking something, taking what they hear today, back to state association or or up to their State Chamber and say, Hey, can we do this surgery? Have you thought about this? What? What would you suggest? Yeah, I

Tara Lea 21:36
know I mentioned it, but I really there’s so much value in having someone at the local level. And that’s, I think, when I came from a local chamber to the state that was the biggest piece that was missing. It was, you know, we were expecting our members to come to us all the time. And even at local chambers, we do that too, where it’s like we’re hosting these events. If they’re members, they should be coming to our events, coffees, urban cuttings, whatever it may be. At the State Chamber, we were hosting three events a year, and expecting folks to just show up. Well, that’s that’s not a great way to do business. That’s not a way we find out what our members need and want. So statewide, I think the best thing we did is have these local navigators in communities, where they can get out and hear from each individual member, or even if they’re not members, just communities across the state, local chambers, I think, do the same thing. And I’ve really stressed this to my local chamber friends, is that you need to meet one on one with with as many members as you can. We’re here to make the business community a better place. And if we don’t know what the issues are that our business leaders are facing, there’s no way we can do that. So that one on one, time that you spend with your members is so valuable and so important and and even if, you know, no solution comes out of it, just the fact that your business member feels heard is huge for them. And when that invoice comes around to pay again, you know, the following year, they’re going to remember that time they spent with you, and it’s going to be a lot easier for them to write that check, instead of, you know, debating if they continue their membership or not,

Brandon Burton 22:59
yeah, and this, I mean, I feel like we see this model from the US Chamber, where they have representatives that they come and they’re going to state conferences, and they’re going to local chamber, you know, events and being, being seen, being present, taking note on what, what are the issues of importance, and being able to take them back to the US Chamber say, Okay, let’s focus on these things. So it’s a great, great model. It seems to be working for them. So why not? Why not do it in Nebraska, or whatever state you’re in right now? So exactly

Tara Lea 23:32
Brita. The other thing I was going to mention that we do is, I know, when I was a local chamber exec, the lobbying side of things was not my cup of tea. I didn’t, didn’t follow very well. I didn’t, didn’t understand a lot about it. I can easily admit that. But so what we do at the State Chamber also is, during the legislative session, we’re giving our local chambers kind of cheat sheets that they can then share in their newsletters or meetings with their government affairs council, where we’re basically like handing it to them with the Cliff Notes, like, yes, here’s the big things that are happening during the session or even happened this week at the state capitol. Feel free to do a social media tweet that’s similar to this, or, you know, whatever it might be, just really getting those resources to the folks that aren’t comfortable with it and don’t, you know, I would never want to do a newsletter and put something that I wasn’t 100% sure about, and now we’re just taking the guesswork out of it for the local chambers. And here you serving on a platter, like here it is. Go ahead and just copy and paste, and then if they have questions, our government affairs folks here at The Nebraska chamber are amazing and more than willing to go out and do lunch and learns and things with the local Chambers as well with their businesses, so that it kind of takes some pressure off that local chamber leader and the experts can come in and really talk about what’s going on in the capital.

Brandon Burton 24:44
Yeah, and advocacy should be such a huge part of each local chamber, and we all know chambers typically run understaffed, so to be able to put in the time individually to do the research, take an opinion to say what’s best for our business community, that’s a huge and. That’s a full time job, really, yeah, and absolutely, to be able to have that support from the State Chamber to say, Here it is. Now, I would suggest for everybody still read it, you know, look at but yes, use that as a resource to promote and put out there and and call it your own, you know, say, in a partnership with the State Chamber, this is what we were standing on, and it’s hard to go wrong if you take that approach. So great point. Nobody

Tara Lea 25:27
goes to school to learn how to be a chamber professional, and we wear so many different hats that it’s just nice when we can have, you know, help out there along the way to make us look better. That’s always a good thing, absolutely.

Brandon Burton 25:39
Well, Tara, as we start to wrap things up here, I wanted to ask, on behalf of a listener who’s wanting to take their chamber up to the next level, you’ve shared some great, great tips and strategies, but what might you offer for a chamber that’s trying to accomplish that goal of of taking their chamber to the next level?

Tara Lea 25:55
Yeah, don’t be scared to try new things. I think we kind of get in our little ruts of we’ve always done it this way, so we’re going to keep doing it that way. And I think that mentality, hopefully, is changing a little bit as we’ve all had to reinvent ourselves, especially through the COVID years and things like that. But I think just go ahead and try that event. If you’re if you’re not sure if it’s going to work or not, do it one year if it flops, who cares? Don’t do the next year. If you are looking to change some initiatives within your city your community, go talk to the mayor. Go make those relationships happen so that you can really push things forward. But you can’t be scared to try new things, because we’re ever changing and continuing to show our value to our members and our communities. So take the leap and do whatever fun event or initiative that you’re hoping to achieve,

Brandon Burton 26:43
absolutely. That’s great advice. As we look to the future of chambers, I always like to see, you know, what does your crystal ball say? How do you see the future of chambers and their purpose going forward? Well, let

Tara Lea 26:56
me wait my taro cards out here. No, I’m just kidding. So I could not be more excited for I feel the future of chambers are going throughout our country. I mentioned before COVID, like we all did a rebrand, right? We were worried. What are we going to look like when we come out on the other side of this? We can’t do things the way we always did. I truly believe chambers are stronger now than we were five years ago. I think we’re just going to continue to grow. I do see some more partnerships happening, whether it be regional chambers forming or more economic development and chamber folks merging. I think that’s probably the way things are going to go. But I think we’re only going to be stronger because of that. So I think, yeah, I have no doubt that chambers will continue to play a huge role in their communities. They will be the people who know everything about what’s going on and the place that folks go to to find the latest and greatest information. And I can’t be I can’t wait to be part of the ride, and it’s so fun where I’m at now, because I not only get to see it at the state level, but I really get to see it happening in the local communities as well, and that is absolutely amazing. Yeah,

Brandon Burton 28:01
I love that vision of the future, and I am going to plug just our previous episode with Angela Wilson. She talked about negotiating contracts. So that is the future, with chambers merging and taking on more of an economic development role. Give that episode a listen and just really get into what you need to be considering as you approach contracts with these different partnerships. But I love that, that vision of the future. So thank you, Tara, absolutely. Yeah. 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. Learn more about how the Nebraska chamber is approaching different things, or what they can do to to strengthen their chamber. What would you Where would you point people to to reach out and connect?

Tara Lea 28:45
Yeah, I am always available via email. I might take two emails, like it did when Brandon tried to set this up today, but I promise I will try to get back to you much of the first one. My email is just tlea@nechamber.com, again, T, L, E, A, at, N, E, chamber.com, or I’m always available. You can call me at 402-480-6918,

they also have a great Nebraska chamber has a website that’s great leadership. Nebraska has an awesome website. I would also, if you’re interested in leadership program, would follow leaders from Nebraska on Facebook. We’re always posting the fun things that we’re doing, so feel free to give that a follow and and steal some ideas from us as well.

Brandon Burton 29:31
That’s perfect. We’ll, we’ll do our best to link all of that in our show notes for this episode. Make it easy to find all the places and and links. But Tara, this has been great having you on chamber chat podcast. I love the energy and enthusiasm and the insight that you brought to us today, and appreciate you spending time with us. Thank you so much. Well,

Tara Lea 29:52
I so appreciate the opportunity and all the local chambers and State Chambers keep doing great work. Really proud of you, and can’t end without saying, Go Big Red.

Brandon Burton 30:00
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Creating a Chamber of Impact with Matt Lofy

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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.

Our guest for this episode is Matt low fee. Matt is the President, CEO of the Worthington area Chamber. And since joining the Worthington area Chamber in August 2021 he’s been driven by his vision, which is he wants their chamber to serve as a igniter of positive change, rather than merely serving as a resource to cope with change. Matt’s strategic focus on business advocacy, bridge building with key stakeholders and relentless pursuit of relevance has significantly strengthened the Chamber’s influence and engagement with local businesses, amplifying the voice of business, his initiatives led to a 20% increase in local business engagement within the his first year. This impact resulted in him being named as one of the chamber industry’s top emerging leaders, as a 40 under 40 honor honoree by ACCE and a 2023 chamber professional of the Year by the Chamber of Commerce executives of Ohio. Prior to this position at the Chamber, Matt served in numerous roles within the Westerville area Chamber, including executive director of leadership at Westerville he also taught morning spin classes for over a decade, and is a veteran of the United States Coast Guard. In addition to his professional success, Matt finds joy in his roles as a husband and father to his beautiful wife, Heather and their two young children, Tuckerman and Caroline. He’s also the founder and co host of the award winning Dadass Podcast, Matt, I’m excited to have you with us today here on Chamber Chat Podcast, I’d love to give you a moment to say hello to all the Chamber Champions and share something interesting about yourself so we can all get to know you a little better.

Matt Lofy 2:51
Absolutely. Thank you so much Brandon for this opportunity, and thank you to all the chamber champions who are listening. You know a fun fact I like to share you had mentioned about my my podcast and from one podcast post to another, one of my fun facts is we actually used our podcast platform, not so much to grow beyond just a local podcast, but to actually advocate. So we’ve worked with our Columbus City Council the last two years to advocate to get we’ve now had over 300 changing tables put into men’s and gender neutral restrooms throughout businesses and nonprofits in the city of Columbus, and so as a way to marry my passion project And my chamber career, to really bridge build with a public private partnership. So we’ve been able to do that and advocate for easier access to changing tables. That’s

Brandon Burton 3:48
awesome. I’m convinced that chamber work is like a drug. You just get addicted to it, and then whatever you do in life, it’s going to tie back to the chamber somehow. So that’s proof and point right there.

Matt Lofy 3:58
So absolutely can’t get away from it. I drank the Kool Aid. That’s right,

Brandon Burton 4:02
that’s right. I need to find out where to go to get awards for podcast. I’ve yet to win an award. So congratulations to dadas podcast. That’s pretty cool.

Matt Lofy 4:11
There was a local one here. So really, I think we joke, but we’re pretty serious. It was our mom, my colleague, and my mom and all their older friends who are retired, just voting daily. That’s all it was. So don’t

Brandon Burton 4:24
awesome,

Matt Lofy 4:25
but now we can say winning.

Brandon Burton 4:26
We can edit that out. Nobody has to know. No,

Unknown Speaker 4:29
it’s our secret.

Brandon Burton 4:30
That’s right. But tell us a little bit about the Worthington area Chamber. Give us an idea of your chamber size, staff, budget, scope of work. You guys are involved with just to kind of set the stage for our discussion today.

Matt Lofy 4:42
Yeah, for anyone who’s not familiar with Columbus, imagine a big circle around a major city. We are at the north, north central part of Central Ohio, and Columbus, which we actually get confused. Worthington, Minnesota. When I when I first started, I was told that half of the phone calls in Minnesota, in Worthington, Minnesota, are phone calls for Worthington, Ohio, but we’re a small chamber of commerce of roughly 550 member businesses, a modest budget in the mid 300,000 range, and a staff of two currently putting out roughly 65 to 70 events and organized meetings a year. So we were doing quite a bit for two people in terms of the scope. We went from a chamber that really wasn’t was kind of in a decline prior to COVID to not not being relevant or impacting our community or supporting our businesses during COVID. So really, we’ve done a lot as a two person team to bring back all networks. So from our Soho groups, small office, home office, which we call Small Business Roundtable, to our Women’s Business Network, yp, those all have been started from scratch within the last two to three years. So just to really show where we’ve been and how far we’ve come just in three years, and then we’re in a city that’s four and a half to five miles square, miles in size. Our school districts four times that, because we pulled from the city of Columbus, and so that’s really the taste of our community and our chamber in, you know, 90 seconds or less.

Brandon Burton 6:32
Yeah, no, that’s perfect. So you came into the chamber world at a very interesting time. So I think that’s going to play in well, your story with our topic today about creating a chamber of impact, because I’m sure you’re able to see all of the opportunity around you at that timing of when you came into the chamber here. But we’ll dive in much deeper in that 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 talking today about creating a chamber of impact. So how did coming into the Worthington area Chamber in August of 21 How did that timing affect your thinking going into creating a chamber of impact and the opportunity that you saw at that time frame?

Matt Lofy 9:07
That’s that’s a great question. We had our challenges, just as a lot of chambers did, because of the impact of COVID. What I had kind of up against me coming into this role is one I left another chamber in a neighboring community, but not in the president role that did everything, I think, right during COVID, coming to a chamber that hadn’t done much to impact the community or the businesses. So I had a different lens to look through, but at the same time, because of where we’re situated in in central Ohio, we pull from Columbus public health. So after my first week, we actually got put into a six month mask mandate. So there were just some extra layers that were added. But how I looked at it, it was because we hadn’t impacted our community and our businesses. I had a four. Whole deck of cards to play with, because no one was going to question and say, well, we didn’t do things this way. No one really remembered that. And so I jokingly say I came in like, I pulled a Miley Cyrus and came in like a record. Oh, yeah, I have to right. All I had to say is, I came in like Miley Cyrus, and you knew it, that’s right. But at that point, it was okay. We have a mask mandate, but we have to be seen. And so I started to really look at ways to how do we amplify the voice of business and our chamber without having events here in the first few days and not having the relationships? And so we use it as a way to completely flip our ineffective emails and getting squared away with three separate monthly email newsletters that went out and specifically targeting different areas of interest for our businesses. Instead of just showing and sending out future events and and things like that. We had to get better and more strategic with the way we reached out. One of the first things I did on social social media was I wanted to be seen and build a relationship when I couldn’t be in person and build relationships. And so with without knowing, at the time of your podcast, I kind of stole your name and created a chamber chat with Matt. Video, okay, bi weekly, where it was just me. I had my own theme music and introduction, and it was me sitting in my office, or even in my my basement office, giving key updates of what the business is doing. We might not be able to meet together right now, but this is what your investment in our chamber, in us is helping us do to impact you, your business and our community. So it really allowed us to take non existent social media and email and flip them upside down and more impactful, as well as start to strategize, you know, unfortunately, six months out what our impact would be when it comes to reigniting our network. So that was really what we did, you know, from day one to the first six months outside of cleaning out the organization and getting the house in order.

Brandon Burton 12:13
Yeah, now I can appreciate coming in and people don’t remember what the programs were before, but to be able to have kind of that almost a blank slate. I mean, you could do essentially what, what you wanted to, but to be able to be strategic about the emails going out. Can you talk to us a little bit more about that? You said, going from those ineffective emails, which I think everybody listening knows exactly what you’re talking about, and what are the what’s the strategy behind your three purposeful emails each month,

Matt Lofy 12:41
yeah, and let me, let me first go on the record, because I always want to say things first. I don’t have the magic formula. So I don’t want anyone to be like, oh, you know, or think that. I think that I have it all figured out. But I think from my previous role doing communications at another chamber to just emails I’ve gotten from other organizations. We get too fixated of we got to throw all this stuff into one email, and then we tend to sometimes get so bogged down about events that all we’re sending our event correspondence. Don’t look at my social media right now, because that’s all I’m doing. But I looked at, let’s get the events out of all of our emails, and let’s look at respecting people’s inboxes. And here’s how we’ve done it. And again, this is just one man one Chamber’s way to do it, but either the final days of a month or the first days of a month, depending on when, when that falls in the week, I send an events bulletin out that just has picture header, brief description and a CLICK HERE button, and we list out five events for the month with a corresponding social media post. We’ve we went from emails that we’re getting in the teens to the low 20s of open rates to mid 40s to low 60s. Open rates, click rates, I won’t talk about because I want to stay with the numbers that make me sound that’s right, that’s right, but open rate wise, and then what we’re seeing on registrations, in terms of revenue, we’re certainly seeing a huge amount of investment of revenue coming in per email specifically for our events bulletin, but then the second week of each month, that’s what I refer to as our member highlight cycle in our business connections email, where we’re putting out things in our Member Notes section, accolades about businesses, businesses who are hosting maybe an upcoming Lunch and Learn, or businesses we’re partnering with, as well as announcing our new businesses. And then somewhere in there a link to our events calendar, because again, I don’t want to bog down everything with give us more money come to more events. And then the third week, I try and put more advocacy efforts in there upcoming major events, but talking about what the takeaways would be at those events. You. So much about the event, and then any other major things that we’re doing impacting, you know, our city or regionally, and that’s been a really good winning formula for us. And hopefully anyone that you know wants to possibly use that, maybe it works for them. Yeah,

Brandon Burton 15:17
and I’d like how you said you still have your events in there, but you’re not drawing all the attention right to the events, but it’s in there. It’s like, oh yeah, I saw an email a week or two ago. It talked about an event. Oh, here it is, right here, and you can click on it, but you’re not focused on, give us money, give us money, right?

Matt Lofy 15:35
And that’s kind of the lens. And you’ve been in the industry for for a long time. I mean, sometimes we get a little too focused on events or revenue, you know, without respecting what we’re putting into people’s inboxes. And I think, you know, I’m a relationship builder. I’m a relational leader. And I think chamber leaders need to start thinking more relational than transactional. And that’s how I also try and view the emails, yeah,

Brandon Burton 16:00
and I think most chamber staff are probably guilty, at least at times where the next event’s coming up, and that’s all you can focus on, is the next event, and just getting bogged down with with that and nothing else, and forgetting that that one event is not the reason why 90 plus percent of your members joined right? Like it’s important for you in that time, because that’s what you’re focused on. But they all are members for so many other reasons, that as you reach out and communicate with them, you gotta be touching on those points as well,

Matt Lofy 16:31
well and and just in a what is the chamber done for me? Aspect, if, if we’re not putting that in the in the in the emails or in the newsletters to the membership they you know, I count that as retention, so, you know, we’re sharing out information, but also saying, Here’s what we’ve done since this last advocacy update, or here’s what we’re doing shortly. You know, there’s, there’s a lot of different things strategically, if we put it in the newsletter, that can go into recruiting new businesses, retaining businesses, beyond just getting butts in seats for another event, right?

Brandon Burton 17:08
Exactly. So the emails, that’s a great example of of making that shift to creating a chamber of impact. What are some other areas that you were able to attack as you came into the chamber there,

Matt Lofy 17:22
one of the things that we needed to do is our our community being as small as it is, like the city, not the school district, again, four and a half, five square miles, we’re so disconnected in a small community that we have a pro and not so pro business nonprofit that has started through the last decade in our community, not called the chamber, Okay, which one I thought was an issue, because we’re not relevant. We weren’t having an impact. That those groups had to start. We should have been convening both sides. But at the same time, if there’s those two groups, no one’s hitting that that 80% in the middle, the same center. So one of the things that I wanted to make sure that we did was get heard, and two of the things I did quickly was try and identify and make those relationships with key stakeholders. And I’m sure that’s not anything new that any chamber person that’s been in the industry for a while has heard, but I probably met with key stakeholders more than I did businesses, just to make sure that we built those bridges, and also we’re being heard of what’s to come from this new chamber and our pursuit of relevance and the impact we wanted, so no one was caught off guard or challenged. And that was the biggest piece, because a lot of what I was saying at that time was deemed political and well, the Chamber’s never done that before. That’s not going to go well. And I go, I assure you, I have surveys and countless of data points that our businesses want this, and chambers are doing this across the industry. This is only new here, and so I kept those voices, those stakeholders, close in that to ensure that they they knew what was coming from our chamber, and now they’ve been on board, even if they are challenging. And I think that really massaging those relationships and building those collaborations, especially with those that aren’t on board with what the chamber is doing, is key. And the other aspect is at the same time, we started a podcast called amplify Worthington that allowed me to use that as a platform to say it even louder to businesses, but also to the community, and then we did it in in a collaboration with our economic development director. So it’s a little bit, possibly a little bit different of approach for a chamber podcast, compared to some who highlight just primarily what the chamber is doing and what businesses are doing, and those. Us to were probably the best investment of time outside of of re kind of retooling our chamber.

Brandon Burton 20:06
I’m a huge fan of chambers having a podcast. I even have a little course. If anybody wants to explore having a podcast for your chamber, it’ll be in our show notes, but going back to your meetings with the key stakeholders you didn’t necessarily say these words, but this is how I heard it. So correct me, if I’m wrong or if there’s a different take, you weren’t going and asking for permission necessarily to say, these are the changes I want, but it was more just so they’re not surprised when they see the changes coming, that they can be on the right side of things and not be like, Whoa, who’s Matt. Think he is coming in here, changing everything, but just saying, Hey, here’s some things that can be impactful for our community. Wanted to bring you in the loop and let you know some things that are coming down the pipeline. Is that, is that kind of accurate, or did I get that off? Yeah, I

Matt Lofy 20:58
You probably even said it better than than what I said. That’s exactly it. I think, as chamber leaders, we also serve as community architects, and the best way to do things smoother is to ensure everyone knows what’s to come, but also to say change in our community at some point, some level, is coming. Let’s control that change and do what’s best for our community. And the only way we can do that is if you join the conversation. And so yeah, 100% I think that that is one of the things we should do, and not ask for that permission, like you said, but just include the voices so that they they feel heard through this transition,

Brandon Burton 21:40
right? I think the worst case is you can come in with a big change and surprise them, and then you’re going to meet, get met with the resistance all the way along, where, if they have a heads up of it, and they feel like they’re in the know, it’s going to go a lot smoother to push along something new. Yeah. So you mentioned, as you came in to the chamber, was kind of on a decline through COVID and everything. You guys have implemented some of these changes. How are you seeing the needle move at this point, now that you’re three years into it?

Matt Lofy 22:10
Yeah, I feel like we have an aircraft carrier moving full steam ahead in the ocean while also going forward on the course, it is altering the course at the same time. So I’m like, I’m just starting my fourth year, and it’s like I’m still having to clean this up. But I think what what we’ve seen greatly is we’ve had a steady flow of new members, and then having to really work extra hard on getting better contacts of those that we want to return retain, just because there’s so much turnover. So we’re still seeing those battles, which I’m sure there’s a lot of people nodding right now listening like, oh, in there. Brother, yeah. But one of the things that we’re seeing is we’re getting a lot more initiatives up and running, and a lot more businesses who have not been engaged are starting to get more engaged and start poking their head out at events or in my inbox. And that’s the most flattering, especially seeing people you know, with all due respect to those leaders before me that said, I haven’t been a part of the chamber in X amount of years, and I’d like to come back. And that’s that’s been a lot of what we’re hearing now. That’s

Brandon Burton 23:23
very rewarding to know that the work you’re doing is being noticed and really making an impact. To be able to not just retain but bring back some of those members that have dropped at some point along the way. So that’s, that’s awesome. I can imagine that those members that hung through COVID and everything too are like, wow, the chamber is like, revitalized, like, they’re really making an impact right now. So I would imagine that first year retention for those, aside from just financial strain through the pandemic, if they could see that impact, that they would hang on.

Matt Lofy 24:00
We’re getting there. I don’t have we didn’t have good enough numbers to know what that retainment level was at the beginning. But yeah, we are starting to hear that. You know what? One of the things to maybe, hopefully not getting too far off your point, one of the things we did with those that dropped and didn’t want to reinvest in our chamber. I still wanted to show value on investment in the chamber and respect and support our Chamber members first. But I worked a little extra hard, and maybe this is political and there’ll be a lot of hate emails or anything that comes through to you or me, I still busted my hump almost as much for non member businesses to see, to show them the value of a vibrant and strong chamber, and I got a lot of return on that. And I don’t mean that ignorantly. I think sometimes, as leaders, we. Too caught up of oh, you’re a non member, or you’re not in, you’re not involved with the Chamber anymore, and we forget them. I’ve tried to work really hard to say, You know what? If maybe it’s a no for them about being a part of the chamber. Let’s talk about how, because at the end of the day, if they come to one event and they find value in the chamber, they found value in me as their chamber President value in our mission, and at the end of the day, we’re chamber leaders, but we also have to think like civic entrepreneurs. We also got that revenue, and so we saw a lot in these first three years, and I’m still seeing now a lot of the networks, like our Women’s Business Network, half of the women coming to these luncheons are non members, but I can almost have enough data points to show this has been one of the best networks to bring in new members and new investors in our chamber by dropping the real significance of how we treat a member versus a non member. Again, wanting to show the value on investment for members, but that’s really been something through this transition to whether they were dropped or they just didn’t see the chamber as relevant, back, you know, a month ago or a couple years ago, that I think, has been one of the biggest things that have led to a success for us, not saying no to supporting them or being involved in the chamber, but asking ourselves as a two person team, How do we get them a part of the chamber or involved with the chamber? And that’s been a huge game changer for us, and we’ve actually gotten positive feedback. Hey, thanks for not being pushy and really wanting to help me first, and now it helped me see what the chamber really means.

Brandon Burton 26:36
Yeah, I think that’s an excellent point. And I think we forget as chambers, we think, you know membership, membership. You know everybody’s got to be a member. And we forget that each business has its own different walk of life, so to speak, where some businesses and maybe against their corporate policy to join a local chamber because they had a bad experience in another community, another state, whatever. So as a policy, they can’t join a chamber, but if you have an event that resonates with their mission, then they’ll sign up and they’ll be a sponsor. They’ll they’ll be there for it. So being able to be there for all the businesses in the community and to show value to the community at large, rather than just being hyper focused on membership, I think is a very smart approach,

Matt Lofy 27:25
yeah. And I know, you know, I can hear the comments and the emails coming in that disagree with that approach. And if not those emails coming to me, they’re coming to you, right? But I think in a day and age to you know, let’s, let’s see the reality. All membership organizations are seeing declines, right from veterans groups to other membership organizations are seeing declines in membership we as chambers, if we want to have a great impact, we need to also switch our mindset. But at the same time, I can think right off the top of my head, five different businesses who’ve come to our events paid a non member price. But if I tallied up how many times I’ve seen them at paid events this year, they’ve done more than their share of an investment in an annual membership and a one time or two time lunch that most of those who are members coming to one or two events have invested so, you know, getting away from mission and thinking about, you know, being a civic entrepreneur, in a sense, having that hat on. I still got that money, yeah, and they got to see the value in the chamber. So I think we got to shift that mindset too. Sorry if I got too far off.

Brandon Burton 28:34
No, it’s all about being community architects, as you said before. So, yeah, I love it. Love the thought process there. Matt, I wanted to ask for chambers listening that are wanting to take their chamber up to the next level. I’d argue that you’ve done that there at the Worthington area Chamber. What kind of tip or action item, what piece of advice might you share with with that chamber who’s looking to take their organization up to the next level.

Matt Lofy 29:07
You know, I think it’s kind of a, I have one answer, kind of a two part response to that. I think, in order to really continue to grow your chamber, and we’re still doing this ourselves, so I don’t want to sound like I have it all figured out, but we have to take chances in doing something that we’ve never done. And if you’re a chamber that is doing things differently than how they’ve been done, what’s that next thing for us to be doing and and to that end, for me right now is we’ve kind of gotten things back our way. I think for us, being here in central Ohio, which is a growing community, is I’m also having a mindset now that’s a little new for me. I want to think regionally to better impact locally. So I really challenge. A two part answer there. Think about what’s that next thing that your chamber needs to do? And just like I said earlier, Channel your inner Miley Cyrus and do it as a wreck, be a wrecking ball. And then secondly, let’s start thinking a little bit more regionally and bring that home locally for that change to really spark that positive change. Yeah, I

Brandon Burton 30:21
like that a lot. I like asking everyone I have on the show about the future of chambers, and how do you see the future of chambers and their purpose going forward?

Matt Lofy 30:34
You know, that is the million dollar question. If I had it figured out, I would be probably living on an island right now, and not in a two person office, but I think for chambers, we have to adapt to what’s to come. That’s why I’m excited about the horizon initiative being updated. I think chambers need to stop thinking so small in some ways, or at least for the smaller chambers, and start thinking a little bit more broadly in what our impact is. Where are we serving and where are we not serving? What chances and opportunities do we need to take? But on on top of that, I think the future of chambers lie in being that that connector for all voices to cut through the noise and be that trusted source that we need to be, and hopefully we’re all serving right now, so that we can hit that same center, that 80% that’s not in the know, or that is voiceless or just isn’t aware right now. And that’s that’s where I think the future lies, right there in the that, that same center. And we have to address that, and we need to address it yesterday, absolutely.

Brandon Burton 31:47
And if you knew all the answers, you could write the horizon 2.0 all by yourself. But this is right, yeah,

Matt Lofy 31:57
absolutely. And again, we don’t have it all figured out. I just want to say that one more time, but some of the risks we’ve taken and some of the initiatives we’ve done have definitely helped us do more than what I thought we could do possible in three years. Yeah,

Brandon Burton 32:12
absolutely. Well, Matt, before I let you go, 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 about how you guys are doing things there at the Worthington area Chamber. What would be the best way for someone to reach out and connect? Thank

Matt Lofy 32:29
you for that opportunity. I’d love to connect, especially on LinkedIn. I’m huge on LinkedIn. You can just find me at Matt. Matt low fee, l, o, F, y, on LinkedIn, or you can email me at mlofy@worthingtonchamber.org and you can just find more about us at WorthingtonChamber.org I’d love to connect in any way that’s perfect.

Brandon Burton 32:53
And we’ll get all that in our show notes for this episode as well, to make it easy to find you and connect with you. But Matt, this is this has been fun to to have you on Chamber Chat Podcast to share your story and the the impact that your chamber making now in the community, and kudos to you and in in your your two person team for being able to to do this. I know there’s others involved, there’s there’s volunteers, and there’s board and all that, but you guys are doing things right to be able to right the ship and turn in the right direction. So thanks for sharing that with us today.

Matt Lofy 33:29
Thank you, and thank you for this opportunity. I certainly appreciate it’s been an honor.

Brandon Burton 33:33
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Bend Chamber-2024 Chamber of the Year Finalist with Katy Brooks

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You’re joining us for a special episode in our 2024 ACCE chamber the year finalist series. Our guest for this episode is Katy Brooks. She is the president and CEO of the Bend Chamber of Commerce in Oregon. Her vision for the chamber is to catalyze and environment where businesses and employees and the community thrive. The chamber supports a collaborative business environment and leads efforts to resolve tough issues like affordable housing and childcare shortage, assisting businesses with resources and advocating for businesses at the local and state level. Katy’s background and economic development coalition building and government relations enables her to understand public policies and issues in order to advocate for the businesses of band as well as forming partnerships and alliances that support a growing business community. Her career has included over 20 years working in public affairs and economic development for the ports of Portland, Oregon and Vancouver, Washington. She has been a public affairs and strategic planning consultant for public and private organizations in Oregon, Washington and Alaska and manage Community Relations for the Oregon Department of Tourism. Katy is a member of the Oregon State Early Learning Council and has served on numerous regional, state and city boards and committees. Prior to coming to bend, Katy served on the Public Affairs Committee for the Greater Vancouver Chamber of Commerce, and the board of directors for the Washington State Business Association. Katy received her BS at Southern Oregon University with and graduate studies at Portland State University. She’s received extensive training and facilitating public issues and resolving conflict her and her family reside in Bend. But Katy, I am excited to have you with us today on chamber tap podcast. And first of all, congratulations to you and your team for being selected as a 2024 chamber, the year finals. That’s a huge accomplishment. But please take a minute to say hello to all the chamber champions that are out there listening and share something interesting about yourself so we can all get to know you a little better.

Katy Brooks 3:25
Well, thanks. I’m really, really honored to be here. It’s just so terrific. Being a finalist. And in this fabulous industry that we’re all in. I have been in the chamber world for about eight years since I moved from the coast and port world working for port authorities for a long, long time. And it’s been a great transition. I live here with my family, we do a lot of mountain biking enjoy a bit of a higher elevation than what I was previously at. And for those of you haven’t been to this part of the world is quite beautiful. And it’s full of great things to do outside, which is what we’re all about.

Brandon Burton 4:09
That’s right. It is a beautiful part of the country for sure. Well, please take a few moments and tell us a little bit about the Bend Chamber of Commerce. What makes you guys so special, what’s your your chamber look like the work you’re involved with? Size staff budget, that sort of thing to kind of give us some perspective as we get into our discussion?

Katy Brooks 4:33
Sure. Well, we’ve had quite a bit of population growth. So the business sector has grown as well. We are population of about 110,000. We are on the east side of the caste range. So we are a little bit removed from where most of the population of the state is. So bend is kind of a it’s a mountain community but it’s really a self sufficient ecosystem here. That’s really unique. And it’s something that we take into consideration. Anytime we put any of our strategies together. We have great networking programs. Here we have a really strong advocacy program because our state capitol is in the valley. And to lift up our voice from Central Oregon, we align with a lot of partners here. We build our leaders, we concentrate quite a bit on how we support a system of of leadership and workforce development that can sustain our growth, not just in population, but our business growth and several industry sectors that have taken off here. And we look for our niche initiatives, we look for ways to take on things that we see and our members see as obstacles and impediments or opportunities. And really try to capitalize those and bring up solutions. And I’ll get into that here in a little bit of what that actually looks like.

Brandon Burton 6:04
Yeah, well that’s the crux of the Chamber’s to solve those problems, right that face the community. So very good. Well, as we focus on these chamber, the year finalist episodes who really like to dive in, in more detail on the programs that were submitted on your chamber that your application, I think those are a really good indicator of the type of work you’re involved with and, and where you’re seeing those levels of importance to be able to make an impact in your community. So I’m excited to dive into what those programs are and all those details as soon as they get back from this quick break.

Visit ChamberNation.com to learn more.

All right, Katy, we’re back. As we dive into the meat of this episode and talking about the programs that were submitted on your chamber, that your application, please share with us what what the first program was? And we’ll dive into that and save the good stuff on second program for for a few minutes.

Katy Brooks 8:52
Yeah, it’s always hard. I’m sure everybody else who submitted an application feels this way, it was hard to choose in some respect. Because we just do so much. And as with all chambers, we have changed so much over the last several years. So when you look at at our programs, it looks like like today rather than yesterday. And it looks like what the key issues are that we’re struggling with here, rather than some of the more traditional things you think about in chamber world. But I’ll I’ll talk a little bit about Ben 101. So Ben 101 was established in collaboration with a bunch of folks from the community from several industry sectors, who said essentially, you know, we are growing faster than any other city in our state we have the more more jobs per capita than any other city in our state and we’re losing touch with the culture we worked really hard to establish we’re very bootstrap kind of a community here. We were lumber mill industry, which declined dramatically in the 80s, we reinvented ourselves. Now we’re biotech, health care sciences, outdoor industry, product development, high tech, all sorts of things are happening here that frankly, didn’t exist 10 years ago. And what happens when you bring that many new people and new industries together, you kind of lose touch with everyone, you go from a small little town to, you’re actually a small city. And that’s got a different dynamic. So Bend 101 brings in key leaders from our community to tell the story of our history, tell the story of our culture, which is be nice, you’re invent, and we’re collaborative, we’re dolphins, we’re not sharks. And we have a lot of ways for people to plug in. So it’s like getting a turbo charge in everything you would want to know if you move to a new place. And not only do you get the information, but we match you up with people from the community in various industries, from the workforce. So it’s not like insta friend, but it’s close to it. It’s it’s hard introductions of folks that you might find really interesting and want to have coffee with later. And then we work with the human resources, folks to really make sure that we follow up. How do your folks feel about this? Did they meet somebody there that they didn’t get to connect with that they want to and really make those connections meaningful? So you have the background information, you know, where we’ve been where we’re going to, and you have access to the people who made it that way? Yeah.

Brandon Burton 11:45
So I think it’s interesting to to inform newcomers on the culture of Bend. And I imagine that’s a tough task to try to infuse culture. But what is it? What does it look like this with Bend 101? What’s the format? How do you? How do you structure I love the overall the, you know, the high level view of making those connections and welcoming those newcomers. But when you get down to the nuts and bolts of it, what what is the structure of it look like? Well,

Katy Brooks 12:15
we use a lot of humor, because we have some idiosyncrasies and little things about them, like every community does that are pretty funny. And one of ours is our claim to fame is roundabouts. They’re everywhere. And anybody who’s new to bend goes what is going on. You can’t get anywhere without going in a circle. So we kind of poke fun at ourselves, we have a really great welcoming video, where we talk about how friendly we are and kind of help people navigate the why of things and kind of laugh at ourselves a little bit. But then we we give the overall here’s how the city operates. And here’s some information for about 1015 minutes. And then every time we hold a one on one, we do it three times a year we fish feature a different part of bend. For example, last time we did this, we featured our healthcare system, educating folks on what that looks like, how do you access it? Who are the leaders there? Who should you know, what should you know, this month, we are, in fact, this week, we’re holding one that features our park system. Our Park system is amazing. It’s very robust, very well funded. There’s mountain bike trails, literally hundreds of miles you can ride and it connects different communities in Central Oregon. So we’ll share all that information. And then talk a little bit about, hey, this is everybody’s chance right now to reach out to somebody you don’t know, unless make those connections happen. So it’s kind of infusing that cultural welcome as much as we can. It changes a little bit every time we hold the event, depending on the information we share, but the outcome is the same. Right?

Brandon Burton 13:57
So does anybody come to multiple sessions have been one on one? How does that like if you want to learn about the parks? And you didn’t get that in your session? How does that work? Oh,

Katy Brooks 14:07
totally. We have repeat offenders. And because it’s really fun. And we are beer town, we have 14 breweries. And so that’s some fun, people just enjoy showing up and interacting folks that have been here for a really long time. They like to show up. In fact, we reach out to them. We want them there. Because how else are newcomers going to meet the establishment? Right? And so you need some of those people to come multiple times. And really mix it up with the old the new the the in between. And if folks are new, and they think hey, that was great. I want to learn about a different sector because I’m thinking about getting involved, then that’s great.

Brandon Burton 14:49
Yeah, that is that’s fantastic. I love that. The idea of it. I love the execution of it and making all the connections and really welcoming people to a community that really sets them up to thrive from the beginning. And I’m sure there’s success stories that you can share with people that have come in and been able to make those connections and, and be able to get their feet on the ground much quicker so to speak. Absolutely. So as we, as we move along, let’s let’s shift gears into what the second program is it was submitted on your chamber the your application. Yeah,

Katy Brooks 15:26
our workforce housing initiative. So I’m co chairing the ACC II horizon initiative that Sheri Ann is, is heading up. And I was so intrigued by this, and I’ll tell you why it matters to the workforce housing issue, asking people about what is the most pressing issue and opportunity in front of you right now? And then saying, Alright, so in 10 years from now, what would that look like? And how do we get from point A to point B, I think is a really useful thing to do. And we’ve essentially been doing this for a few years. And every year, both in the front windshield and 10 years down the line, people are worried about housing, a little bit of background about bend, it’s, it’s quite lovely here, and I’m sure everybody’s community is. But we we experienced something in Cote COVID that a lot of us didn’t see coming. Obviously, nobody saw the pandemic coming. And that is a lot of folks who are professionals who could work from anywhere, say, why not live in Bend, and they came in during COVID, much of the housing stock has been occupied, and it drove prices up 75% In about two or three years, wow, it’s kind of ridiculous. And we looked around and said, Holy smokes, this is not, we knew it was bad. But now we’re 5000 units behind in a community of 100,000 110,000. That’s, that’s significant. So we hear this from our, our business partners and members all the time, we can’t hire biggest thing that’s deterring us is folks can’t afford to live here. So we started out about three years ago with research. And the research was alright, how do we assess how ready Ben dites are to address this population issue in this housing issue, and we ask questions around density. Because this is, everybody has a little yard and your little house and or it’s a cabin or whatever, and started that conversation about so we’re gonna have to go up, we’re gonna have to get more dense, people are going to be living closer together in certain parts of town. And we’ve tested that. We tested what made everybody accept it and feel better about it. And we use that information to form our platform. And one of the things that we ask that I think is really important is who should be leading this effort. And in that public poll, business sector came out at the top, as did the bend Chamber of Commerce, more than government and more than Housing Authority, nonprofits, etc. So we decided to take this on. So we developed several, several, I guess, strategies from they’re all based on research. And one strategy was alright, what we learned from the initial poll is, folks are hesitant to really talk about densification of a community that was an old mill town. But when we talk about what you get in exchange for that, they’re really willing to do it. So we launched a social media program called I Am bent, trying to educate folks on what this is, we’re not talking about everywhere, we’re talking about places in Bend, that are designed for people for community for Makerspace for art, and also here are the people we want to live in this. It’s a full range. And we would feature nurses and firefighters and massage therapists and artists and restaurant managers, the folks who could not afford to get a place here, rent or to own definitely not own. So we started that education process about two or three years ago, and it’s been going really well. So that’s one piece. The other piece was, what is the go fast button? And how In other words, how do you get more inventory out there as quickly as possible? accessory dwelling units. ADUs are one of those ways. If you have extra property, which a lot of people do here in Bend. If you put a small living unit back there, you can create some income for yourself and help solve the workforce housing issue. So we put together a website on how to build an adu. How do you finance it? How do you permit How do you manage it over time? And it’s just an easy step by step process and then we’ve partnered with the city of Bend to have pre approved plans. And we’re going to be starting to populate that here in the next couple of months of choose your style. And you go through a streamlining process streamlined process. So you’re permitted and ready to go much, much faster and much more less expensive. So the adu is another strategy. The other strategy really dovetailed with our advocacy program. How do we raise our voice as a region, the state level and at the federal level, on the need for affordable and attainable housing. So we met with the Tri County leaders in our area, it’s a pretty big area, and came up with one platform that we went to our legislature with, and it was very effective housing was top of mind with Governor Tina Kotek, this session, and a lot of great programs came out of that. And then finally, we brought in expertise from across the country to really take a look at our zoning, and look at our methodology of getting homes on the ground that are affordable and quickly, and use that person and those methods to inform policy at the local level too. So that was pretty successful. And during this time, we also wanted to do the thing, not just talk about it. And so we raised money, we raised a couple 100,000, and just did an initial investment in a nonprofit Land Trust, who was doing an experiment and the experiment was getting some subsidized housing and a cottage style. So for a lot that’s like 6000 feet by 3000 feet, which is typical city a lot you could put in maybe three to four cottage style homes in there. And so they built these, put it on deed restricted property, but lowered the price enough. So folks in in a below area median income could actually afford the downpayment and to purchase that house, and own the house, not the land, but the house. So we bought down that cost, those homes are net zero, they’re worth about, probably about 600,000. Here, we got it under 200,000. Wow. And all of those homes are now occupied by people who work invent. But the real unique thing about this was we decided we wanted to take a risk. And we wanted to demonstrate how employers can actually participate in solving this problem. So what happens is when you donate money for a certain amount per house, you get extra points preferential points in a lottery. And that lottery is alright, if I own Katy’s ice cream shop, and I give X amount of money to one of those houses, I know one of my employees is going to get that house as long as they qualify. And those qualifications included, you have to earn under 80, ami, you have to have had a job and bend for a year, you have preferential points if you’re a minority, and so on, and you have to be pre approved, you’ve got to be able to buy this house and pay pay the mortgage, that

Brandon Burton 23:13
I was gonna ask about that about the qualifications to purchase that house because I could see somebody say, Oh, what a great deal, like get a $600,000 house for 200,000. But the criteria and the application process for that. And I imagine so the the businesses that help pay into that fund, kind of get first dibs, so to speak as far as their employees being able to apply for that routing, is that correct?

Katy Brooks 23:37
That’s absolutely right. And it’s deed restricted for 99 years. So if the house ever sells the same restrictions apply to the next buyer. The great thing is that shit, that preferential chick comes back to you as an employer. So another one of your employees get a shot at qualifying to buy the house. So we bought down four houses. And instead of using it for my employees at the Chamber, we pushed it out to do a demonstration project with any business event. So if you agreed as a business at Brandon’s candy shop, if you said okay, I’m going to pay $2,500 down to help my employee with the closing costs. And here are my five employees that qualify, you would have had a shot and those employees would have had a shot and that’s what we did. And so, folks all throughout the city, radiology technicians, manager, Windows Store, folks who you think of when you think of middle class or or entry, you know, mid level that had access to this home these homes and it was so successful, that they built 50 more this year. They’re in the process of it, and almost all those 50 homes have been subsidized by employers. They built another 100 You In the adjacent neighborhood, to the west, and another 100 plus to the north of us in another community, and they’re doing the same methodology. So in one year, we went from let’s experiment with four houses and just put these these opportunities out as an employer subsidized formula, and proved a concept that is now over 200, or over 100, no 200 homes that will be occupied and subsidized by employers in the area for 99 years. That

Brandon Burton 25:32
is awesome. I can see it being a template, even that some of these bigger employers might might do their own system, right, where they do housing for their own employees, and almost like a military base used to see you know, military housing, but you could you could do something similar with some of these big

Katy Brooks 25:50
kids so that that people earn equity, the whole point to home ownership. Is that generational wealth, yeah. And so that has to be a part of this and doing it with a partner who’s a nonprofit on deed restricted property was the way to go. And we’re just now rolling out our next investment. We raised about a half a million so far, we’re trying to get over the million for a revolving loan to help nonprofits and builders just put more mid market product out there on deed restricted land. So we’re doing our next experiment. Yeah. Which is what chambers should do.

Brandon Burton 26:34
I love these creative solutions. I mean, starting with the the adu website and encouraging people to build the smaller dwellings on their existing land. I mean, that’s, I think any community would rather see that than a big high rise apartment complex or something, you know, it fits in the community a little better. And then, you know, this path with housing and being able to help people own it own a house is amazing. So kudos to you guys for thinking outside the box and really taking ownership of this and finding a solution. I love this. It’s a it’s a great model that can be followed in other areas, as well. So yeah, as we begin to wrap things up here, these chamber the year finalist episodes, I think are special because you guys are top of the game at the moment, right? So for those listening, who are interested in taking their chamber up to the next level, what can a tip or or action item might you suggest for them to employ to try to accomplish that goal?

Katy Brooks 27:38
Be willing to take risks, have a have a board? That is you bring along, work with your board? And identify, ask the hard questions identify what the issues are, that’s preventing folks from growing or the opportunities that would help businesses grow, and go for the ones that are gnarly and tough to do that require convening. And a lot of work to bring partnerships online. That is what we are made to do. And get people on board, do your research and make it happen. Because I think there aren’t very many organizations like chambers, who are built for this. And that’s how we’ve all changed right over the many of us went through COVID. And that changed a lot. But I think it’s much, much bigger than that, over the last 10 plus 20 years, something like that. I think that as businesses change, we have to be the first ones to we have to see it, identify it, predict it and do it.

Brandon Burton 28:46
Yeah. On those gnarly goals. That’s what people can get behind. Right? If it’s just something that’s barely going to move the needle, it’s hard to get get their interest and getting behind it. But yeah, there’s big hairy audacious goals, right, that that’s what people can get behind and and get some ownership in. I love that. So I like asking everyone I have on the show as we look to the future. And I understand you’re working on the horizons report as well. So you might have some additional insight. But as we look to the future of chambers, how do you see their future and purpose going forward?

Katy Brooks 29:22
So I think chambers are the leading edge. I think that we have an intrinsic design of who we are, to convene, to go beyond partisanship, to ask the harder deeper questions and take things on that don’t have an apparent immediate answer. There aren’t any other types of organizations who can do that in the private sector is a huge responsibility and it’s super fun, by the way. And so I think that is our Our future is asking that what’s 10 year out? Question? If it’s 10 years out, what are the signs? Read it? If you don’t know, ask somebody. That’s the other thing that we do is ask a lot of folks with great expertise. We don’t have to have the answers. We just need to know who to ask. And we have to have the the fortitude to identify things that make sense for us to take on that really requires collective effort, and foresight, and a little bit of risk. Yeah.

Brandon Burton 30:32
I love that chambers being the leading edge and taking on those things that don’t have an apparent answer. And that is the the DNA of what a chamber is, though. And especially when you think of AI and advancements in technology, like there’s there needs to be that continuing purpose of a chamber. And that’s it right there. I love it. So Katy, you mentioned asking if you don’t know as somebody so I’d like to see for people listening who might want to reach out and connect with you and learn a little bit more about how you guys are doing things, doing things in band, what would be the best way for them to reach out and connect with you?

Katy Brooks 31:11
Well, anybody can give me a buzz but my email address is katy@bendchamber.org.

Brandon Burton 31:22
Easy, we will get that in our show notes for this episode as well to to make it easy to look up and connect with you. But Katy, this has been great having you on chamber chat podcast and again, huge congratulations to you and your team being selected. As a finalist. It really is a indicator of the impact you guys are making in your community as as indicated through our discussion today. So you guys are are moving that needle and big. Congratulations to you guys.

Katy Brooks 31:49
Thanks so much. We’re so thrilled.

Brandon Burton 31:52
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Paducah Chamber-2024 Chamber of the Year Finalist with Sandra Wilson

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You’re joining us for a special episode in our 2024 chamber of the year final the series and our guests for this episode is Sandra Wilson. Sandra is the president and CEO of the Paducah Area Chamber of Commerce. She joined the chamber in 2013 and before that she was a community volunteer she was the first woman to serve as Chairman of the Board for the Paducah Area Chamber of Commerce in 1996 and later also as the first woman chair of the greater Paducah Economic Development Board. on a statewide level, she served as chairman of the Kentucky Manufacturers Association and on the board of the Kentucky Chamber of Commerce and leadership, Kentucky. She is a past board member of ACCE and serves on the local chamber advisory board for the Kentucky Chamber of Commerce and as chair of the board for the Carson center Performing Arts Center in Paducah. She is the ambassador for Kentucky for the Association of leadership programs. She’s a graduate of Murray State University and leadership Kentucky and leadership Paducah and 2017 that Paducah chamber was named as chamber the year and category two from ACC. They’re also a five star accredited chamber by the US Chamber of Commerce. Sandra holds IMF IOM certification from the US Chamber of Commerce that Sandra, it’s great to have you back with us on chamber chat podcast. It’s always good to get past guests back on the show. But first congratulations to you and your team for being selected as a chamber the year finalist again, what an accomplishment. wanted to give you a chance to say hello to all the listeners and to share something interesting about yourself so we can all get to know you a little better. Oh

Sandra Wilson 2:53
my goodness, Brandon. Well, thank you so much for hosting us and inviting me to be on the show today. I consider it quite an honor. And we are thrilled to be a finalist in 2024 is chamber of the year in Category Two. And we know who the other chambers are. And we look forward to seeing them at the ACC conference and visiting with them we have in the past about sharing ideas. And I think that’s really what chambers are so good at is doing is sharing ideas of what’s working in each other’s community so we can all be the best that we can possibly be for our community.

Brandon Burton 3:29
Absolutely, yes, that category two really all the categories this year, great chambers, great programs, but I’m looking at category two specifically I know them as well. And it’s a good competition all around. So whoever whoever wins, this is going to earn it for sure.

Sandra Wilson 3:48
Not be in the category with with those other chambers. So we’re thrilled about it. Absolutely.

Brandon Burton 3:54
Well tell us a little bit about the Paducah chamber Puducherry chamber and give us some perspective of the size of the chamber staff budget scope of work just to kind of prepare us for our discussion today.

Sandra Wilson 4:06
We are located in Paducah, Kentucky, and it’s in the western part of the state of Kentucky. So it’s kind of a rural area. But we’re located in the city of the rural part of Western Kentucky. And we’re the largest chamber in this area. We’re about 950 members always pushing to get to 1000 staying around that area. We have been at five staff members until the first of June, and the first of June we finally had the opportunity to hire a sixth employee. We during the last couple of years we raised money to launch a leadership center within our chamber of commerce. So we’ve hired a full time Executive Director for that will be staffing that portion of our chamber and he started June 1 So it’s been different having six here. You know you are so excited to be able to grow and add more staff. We are truly the chamber. We, our economic development involvement is we own our building we just bought our building within the last year and the greater paddock economic development is here with us are one of our tenants, we work very closely with them and helping to recruit economic development, but we’re the chamber and we work on behalf of our community, we lead the advocacy efforts for our region. We’re a hub for small business development programs. We’re the convener of people, and we love that part. You know, what we really want to do is just continually work to improve this community. So others that come here and visit it love it as much as we do. Yeah,

Brandon Burton 5:45
absolutely. What a great time to join the chamber though for the new staff member I mean, chamber the year year. Yeah. Great timing. So on these chamber, the or finalist episodes, I’d like to spend the majority of our time discussing the two programs of work that you guys submitted on your chamber the your application. I think there’s a lot there that other chambers listening can learn from and be able to scale and adapt and maybe apply something similar into their communities. So we’ll focus the majority of our time on those programs as soon as they get back from this quick break.

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All right, Sandra, we are back. As I mentioned before the break, we’re going to focus on the two programs that are submitted on your chamber the your application. If you would please introduce the first program that you’d like to address this today on the show and we’ll we’ll dive into the details of that. As

Sandra Wilson 8:34
a chamber, I think it’s really important that you look at what is going on in your community and what is the most important program or something that you need to take on and tackle. And for us, it it’s been the Department of Energy site here in Paducah for many years. But it took a different perspective in the last year and a half that planet that they announced in 2013, that they were ceasing operations and they would go into in what’s called Legacy environmental management. It was for cleanup of the site, which meant that they were still going to be there for probably 30 to 40 years and the cleanup stage. But it’s it’s it’s different than when it was operating. And it was different for us is the way our community needed to embrace the Department of Energy. So we’ve been in that phase for over 10 years now. And it became apparent to us because we got very involved with the national trade association for communities that have a department of energy side that’s in this phase of cleaning up the energy communities Alliance. We started going to their meetings we started meeting you know, we’ve always been the advocacy organization asking for money, but we for the for the cleanup, but we started looking at what needs to be done out there for the future. We really didn’t have a plan for beyond the cleanup phase, where there’s all He’s an opportunity for development, economic development to continue. So we applied for a grant with the Department of Energy to lead the reindustrialization study for that site to really map out the future. Because there there could be a parallel path for this site, you can have it the cleanup going on that we’re working with. Now, again, on our advocacy side, for the chamber, we are fighting for funding, we have fight for long term contracts, those are the things that we’re representing there. On the second side of it, the parallel path would be looking at how we could get the land that has been dedicated and managed, owned by the department of energy transferred back to our community so that we can begin to do economic development project programs, and overall economic development of that site. So we developed a grant request, and we’re very successful to get that, and we’ll be we’re about a year into it now. And we’ll be, you know, continuing throughout the next six months to a year as well on it. So with that, I have grant request had some major pillars in it, of course, that we have to accomplish. And one of those is identifying and infrastructure needs for the land that would be transferred back to the community. And in step one of that also, you had to, we had to do the official formal request from our community, for the very first parcel of land to be transferred back to the community. So that has been accomplished. And so now we’re looking at what the infrastructures would would need water, roads, all of that, to make that successful economic development. And then we will continue with working on prospects for economic development. We’ve been to national conferences to meet with companies that are interested in locating and an economic in a on a Department of Energy site, a joint adjacent to it or nearby. We’re working on the workforce. And really, we’re looking on the workforce for now and for the future. So that’s part of our grant that is really overlapping from what’s happening now, and going into the future for the next few years. And so those were the main things, those were really a little bit unusual for our chamber, because we’re not the economic development organization for our community. But we work with economic development very closely. And we have worked with the Department of Energy for so many years that we know knew that they have a lot of trust in our chamber, that we have built a relationship with them for the year. So they knew that we would take this very seriously, and that we would make sure it’s done correctly.

Brandon Burton 12:50
So what kinds of things were maybe surprising as you went through the study of trying to revitalize this this land? Was there anything that came to light that you didn’t expect? That has kind of course the direction that you’re going going forward?

Sandra Wilson 13:07
I think that identifying the companies that might be interested to come here has been a very interesting prospect. I mean, that we can’t really, you know, we’ve just put in the land transfer request, that had to be step number one, and then we’ll begin to identify who would be interested in coming here. So there’s a lot of opportunity there. The Department of Energy has a lot of funding available for developing new companies. But there’s just a lot of things that will come to light as we begin to work through this process. Yeah.

Brandon Burton 13:43
All right. Is there any specific industry or type of business you feel like would be an ideal candidate for what’s on a former Department of Energy? Land?

Sandra Wilson 13:56
There are some that are, you know, Newt, mislaid, nuclear clean energy potential for small modular reactor. I mean, right now we’re identifying those and who would consider coming here, there are a lot of fuel fabrication, a lot of things that are really all new to us, as a as a chamber, that we’ve been able to work with the context that we built through the many years that we’ve been involved with the Department of Energy to know who they may be. Right.

Brandon Burton 14:24
Now, as I think of a chamber of the year finalists, we’re really looking at chambers that are making a big impact on their community. And what you guys are focused on here with this Department of Energy land, this can be a huge impact to the economy in the Paducah area and just a change of atmosphere, if you will, depending on how that goes forward. So that I see it being a huge impact in the community.

Sandra Wilson 14:51
Thank you. I would totally agree. The decisions we are making today and that we are identifying for the future really are Setting our community for the futures for the next 50 years and beyond. Because it’s so critical that we diversify our economy here, we’ve had this Department of Energy site for 60, year of 5060 years, it was a great employer of some of the best jobs in our community they employed, you know, way over 1000, they still do that. But it’s sometimes in the peaks, I’ve been up to 1800 to 2000. And so we became really reliant on that, because we had such a good base. But it’s important that we continue to diversify all of that economy, you know, community, our size is not a huge geographical large county. So that is available land that we need to focus on for economic development for the future. We have said before, when we’re meeting with the Department of Energy, we don’t want to be part of just their history, we want to be a part of their future. And they have a lot of programs available for working with companies that are looking at the future of energy projects. Our state, for example, we had in our advocacy efforts for 2024, with the state priorities was all quite a bit about nuclear energy. And our state has a set aside, established a new nuclear Working Group advisory board that will be run out of the University of Kentucky. And you know, there’s identifying criteria for making a community nuclear ready. Prior to that our community had already identified and adopted resolutions by our city government or county government, our chamber economic development, our community reuse organization, stating that we are a community that’s a nuclear ready. And by that we meant we’ve been in this arena for many years. We understand it, we know it, our workforce knows that we’re ready to go for the next step. Yeah,

Brandon Burton 16:59
that’s great. I love what you said about, you don’t want to just be a part of the their history but a part of the future as well. So I love being forward thinking like that.

Sandra Wilson 17:11
Girl is also I’ll just say what he’s really put me out in the and a national forefront. I was able to speak at a waste management symposium earlier this year, and was on a panel out there where there were I think 3000 People now wasn’t I didn’t speak to that hopeful 3000, I spoke to a panel on a panel specific about cleanup of the Department of Energy side. But it’s put me in a whole new arena, really talking about that. And I also believe that it is putting a chamber chambers of commerce across the country in a new arena where you can show that you adjust to what your community needs are. And we saw this as a really strong need, we embraced it, we were very intentional on how we would move forward with it. And we are going to deliver the best product that we can for the Ark communities path forward, we call it our roadmap for the community. So that whoever picks it up at the end, knows exactly the next steps for land transfer, who the economic development prospects are and has their contacts and knows what they would want for infrastructure needs, and knows what the workforce would need to be. So we’re preparing our future at the community now.

Brandon Burton 18:24
That’s great. I love it. Love it, love it. Let’s shift gears a little bit into the second program that was submitted on your chamber that your application if you introduce that to us and kind of the the origins and how that’s developed?

Sandra Wilson 18:40
Well, when I talk about economic development, let me just say we say it all the time, it happens one job at a time. It’s great when you have a new company come in and they’re announcing three to 400 500. But you have so many small businesses in Riyadh in reality Chamber of Commerce for us. In located where we are about three fourths of our members are considered small businesses. And they’re reliant on the big employers around them for the customers and the you know, the activity that comes in for them. But they are truly what we would call economic development at its finest. And we have a small business cohort that had we’ve graduated 40 from the program, and we see how they are hiring people. They’re expanding. They’re opening new locations, because of the programs that they have seen that can be successful, how they can develop it and make their own business more successful through what they’ve learned in our small business cohort. We have all kinds of seminars, we have a lot of programs that go on, we get calls every day that how do you do a business plan? How do you get this will central to that was our Small Business Development Center, that chamber How does it how’s that but we have a close relationship in partnership with the Small Business Development Center. The way it is structured in our state is that I have to raise it was it was restricted a little bit where they had to raise the funding locally to keep their program open. When you have somebody that’s supposed to be advising small business owners, I didn’t, we didn’t want them to have to spend their time or decided that the chamber. And we went out in the community and the chamber, first of all, and we went to our economic development, our city or county and our local organizations that benefit from having small business development center in our community. And we were able to raise the money that was needed to keep that program open, and that you’re continuing to be a close partner with us and everything that we do for our small businesses.

Brandon Burton 20:42
So I’m curious and how you went about raising the money? Was it about just getting the the awareness out about what the need was and making strategic assets? or was there some kind of event or fundraiser I had, what was the approach to raising those funds?

Sandra Wilson 20:57
First of all, our Small Business Development Center had a great track record, so they could show the businesses that they had helped, and what it involved with jobs and with economic development, so when you go and talk to a mayor, or a county judge, and you can show them the benefits and the success that they’ve been having, it really helps a lot. And we were able to do that. So it was strategic meetings, and some phone calls. But we did go to a lot of meetings in person. Most all of them were our members, primarily, we did work with an adjoining county that had some support as well. But we that adjoining county is a really close partner with our own county and with our chamber, they’ve been very involved with us through the years. So we had built those relationships. I think everyone that we asked knew that they could trust us as well, that we wouldn’t be behind it if we didn’t know that it was going to be a very successful program. And so that that’s what we did, we mostly, I would say, went one on one with meetings. But it wasn’t an impossible sale, where it was more of an education. And let’s face it, everything at the end comes down to making the ask closing the deal. Yeah.

Brandon Burton 22:11
So you didn’t do like a mass email and say we’re collecting funds, it was more strategic and gave some intention behind that. So

Sandra Wilson 22:22
we knew that their partners were, we knew who the small businesses that they were helping with we’re working with, we knew that overall, no one wanted to lose this resource that we had in our community. I think that was someone the number one thing that we all agreed on. It was just how do we make sure that we’re doing the steps that we need to and somebody has to take the lead on anything that you’re going to do somebody has to take the lead to make sure that it’s being done, it’s being done in a timely way it’s being reported, and that everything that needs to be done, when you’re looking at raising funds, it was going to the University of Kentucky, that everything that needed to be done was was completed the way it should be. So

Brandon Burton 23:09
the raising of the funds, is that something that needs to be done on an annual basis for the Small Business Development Center? Or is it what what kind of interval was that where they need to come up with the funds to justify staying open, we

Sandra Wilson 23:21
set it up on a two year program. So everyone committed for two years, I believe at the end of those two years, we will not have any trouble continuing with that, because he’s already met his goals for the year right now, you know, and halfway through the year, so he’s got the rest of the year to continue. You know, just to build up on that and expand, the one thing that he probably needed to do was be able to expand into other counties. A lot of his work was being done in our immediate area in Paducah and the immediate surrounding area. But there are other counties in our community that did step in our West Kentucky Regional Chamber Alliance stepped in and made a nice contribution to help with them. And they represent 14 counties in West Kentucky. So it was a really opportunity to allow that this service to be expanded as well. Yeah,

Brandon Burton 24:11
that’s fantastic. Guys came in as heroes.

Sandra Wilson 24:17
So I mean, in regionalism, and how important it is that if our county is successful, it’s overflowing into other counties. And if our county next door has businesses opening, more than likely, you know, we’re going to benefit from that in some way. And so, really show the strength I think of working together to support something in your region that you know, is vital and is very important. What was

Brandon Burton 24:43
key to me is how you mentioned it was it was all built upon the relationships that you guys have built over the years to be able to go make those asked to make those connections build lean upon the county next door and to be able to make this happen and it is it’s what chambers do is convening and building those relationships and That’s, uh, you guys executed well on that. So great job.

Sandra Wilson 25:06
It was really fun, because it actually put us out in the community back meeting with our own members. But you know, the underlying factor too is we knew we really couldn’t continue our own small business development programs that we have, if we didn’t have that resource. It was critical for us to have that. So it was a great investment. Right? And resources.

Brandon Burton 25:29
Yes, yeah. So I like asking, especially as we have you on as a chamber, the year finalist for chambers that are out there listening, what kind of tip or action item might you share for a listener who’s interested in taking their chamber up to the next level?

Sandra Wilson 25:46
There are a lot of resources out there that are very beneficial. And I think you have to look at your own region to see how what what’s needed the most. And then you can rely on for us, we rely on our State Chamber, the Kentucky Chamber of Commerce a lot. I mean, we work very closely with them, we rely on the US Chamber of Commerce and rely on them. And as a chamber executive, we rely on the association of Chamber of Commerce executives, there are great resources available, that if you just will take the time, that and I’m just gonna say that’s probably some of the hardest thing. That’s the hardest that you have to find. Because as a chamber, executive, chamber staff person, you’re managing a lot of different tasks, no day is ever the same. No crisis is ever the same. No, celebration is ever the same. And so you have to really be always looking to see what someone else is doing. And then the chamber rolled, you know, I think we call it r&d, the RIP and duplicate, and you make it your own. And we do that, and we’re honored when another chamber does that from something that we’re doing, if they can, if we can help them to be more successful. That’s awesome. Because that’s helping more communities to be successful, more Chambers of Commerce. So identify what’s needed in your community, look around and see how you what would be the best organization for you to align yourself with on any particular issue. And it’s going to vary from issue to issue.

Brandon Burton 27:21
I love that fact, as I introduce what chamber chat podcast is all about to chamber professionals, I’ll use the tagline that it’s your weekly r&d resource, right? So every week, you get new ideas that you can rip off and duplicate. So I love that learning from others. As we look to the future of chambers, how do you see the future chambers and their purpose going forward?

Sandra Wilson 27:47
I’m gonna go back to the fact that I think you have to identify what’s important in your community, because we’re all different. We all have different challenges and different opportunities, and identify what is going to help your community and I didn’t make a determination if that’s something your chamber should be the lead on, should maybe be the second play the second roll in and pushing, sometimes you just have to push, who maybe it’s a different organization, or maybe it’s the government that should be in the lead, and you’re the one pushing them to help them better understand that there are times that you’re going to need to be in the lead and look to others to help you with that. But you’re going to have to stay relevant in your own community.

Brandon Burton 28:32
I like that trying to figure out what your role should be and what your community needs. I think a lot of chambers just jumped to the conclusion oh, we need to be the lead. And like he said, oftentimes be in that second role and helping to push it along and explain why things are important is very helpful. You’re still leading but you don’t have to take that that main charge and carry that that weight that comes with it as well. So great, great piece of advice with that as well. Well, Sandra, before we let you go, I wanted to give you an opportunity to share any contact information for listeners who’d like to reach out and learn more about how you guys are doing things there in Paducah, what would be the best way for them to reach out and connect with you. Okay,

Sandra Wilson 29:11
that’s great. I always appreciate sharing information and I can tell you that I call others all the time to ask for their advice. So you can reach us at PaducahChamber.org And my direct email is swilson@paducahchamber.org. And let me spell Paducah, Pa d u c h Paducah. And wire info if you can’t remember as well send info@PaducahChamber.org. We’ll get you through to ours and we’ll answer you.

Brandon Burton 29:41
That’s perfect. And I’ll get it in our show notes for this episode as well. So somebody can pull that up and find your email and website and all that good stuff. But Sandra, this has been great to have you back on chamber chat podcast and again, big congratulations to you and your team for being selected as a finalist for the great work you guys are doing. Under the Paducah area, and I wish you and your team Best of luck as chamber the year. Thank

Sandra Wilson 30:05
you, Brandon. Thank you for all you do for the chamber profession. We really do appreciate it. Thank you.

Brandon Burton 30:10
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Newnan-Coweta Chamber-2024 Chamber of the Year Finalist with Candace Boothby

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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.

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You’re joining us for a special episode in our 2024 ACCE Chamber the Year Finalist Series and our guests for this episode is Candace Boothby. Candace is the President and CEO of the Newnan-Coweta Chamber in Georgia. It’s a position she’s held for almost 21 years. She is a certified chamber executive, the top professional certification nationally and only one of two CCEs in Georgia. Candace is known for high energy and innovative approach to organizational management traits which assist her in developing many successful initiatives. Her ongoing commitment to excellence resulted in the Newnan-Coweta Chamber receiving the coveted Five Star accreditation from the US Chamber of Commerce and maintaining it for the past 16 years, placing it in the top 1% of chambers nationwide. In 2015. Through her leadership, the Newnan-Coweta Chamber was named the National Chamber of the Year the first chamber in Georgia to receive this designation. Professionally, Candace received her accreditation and public relations in 2002. Graduated from with her IOM in 2005 received her Georgia certified chamber executive recognition in 2007. And in 2013 obtained her CCE designation. She has served on numerous community and professional boards throughout her career including the chair of the Georgia Association Chamber of Commerce in 2013 to 2014 and two terms on the ACCE Board of Directors where she also has chaired the Chamber of the Year program and currently chairs and currently chairs the Fringe Benefits Inc board. In 2021. She was named the Legacy Award recipient by her Georgia peers.

A Texas native Candace. His career spans 37 years 35 of them in Georgia after graduating from Baylor in Waco, Texas. With her Bachelor of Arts degree in journalism, she got her start in chamber work at the Greater Killeen Chamber in Texas. She brightened her background by working for a State Technical College at a Baptist Hospital, a large metro Atlantic public school system and community not for profit. Before coming to the Newnan-Coweta Chamber in September 2003, which became the third chamber she served.

Candace, I’m excited to have you with us today on chamber tap podcast. Congratulations to you and your team for being selected as a Chamber of the Year Finalist again, this is very exciting, but wanted to give you a chance to say hello to all the Chamber Champions who are out there listening and to have you shared something interesting about yourself so we can all get to know you a little better.

Candace Boothby 3:59
Well, it’s great to be here. Thank you and I were sharing earlier, this is my second time to visit with you. And I want to just give a shout out to everybody out there and chamber world. We all know how much we love what we do. And I think that reflection of that is when you do get moments in time opportunities like this. But like you said, I’ve been in my current community 21 years in September. I love what I do as much as I did the very first moment I started in the chamber industry. We all know there are ups and downs that it gets in your blood, and it just doesn’t go away. So we do have an organization we’re about 740 Plus members give or take whatever day of the week. It is our budgets a little over a million dollars. We are located about 25-30 minutes south of Hartsfield Jackson airport. So I like to say I’m, we’re close enough to the gravitational pull of Atlanta to take advantage of all their benefits. But we have a sense of place and a sense of community that’s uniquely ours. So I am proud to be where I am today talking with you. And something interesting. I think you said Brandon about me. Okay, so I’m native Texan San Antonio was my home. I have family in Waco and Macedonia has and variety of places and the only family member to have left. The one day I just happened to be I went down a rabbit hole, following a chamber member who was on a genealogy trip. And I thought, Well, why don’t I just click on My great grandmother whose name was gravestone, Spearman, and I knew that she had connections to Georgia. And she married a man from Louisiana, and they settled in East Texas, Pittsburgh, if anybody knows where that is. And so I did. I googled her. And I recognized my grandmother and all her brothers and sisters on that page was very detailed, was clearly my family. And so I thought, well, let me click on her mother. And I did and I discovered that my great great grandmother was born right here in 1845. And can’t wait Academy. Which What are the odds? Right, so then I clicked on her parents. And I discovered that her father is buried in our historical cemetery across the street from the chamber. That’s like my great, great, great grandfather. So here I am, native Texan, moved to Georgia, when I was 22 ended up in this community and the pleasure of being able to serve here for so many years, discovering that I’m from here, originally. So it’s kind of like one of those moments, I got all excited, because I’m like, what, how many generations is that, and, you know, you have a lot of communities depending on where they are in their lifecycle that might have a lot of history. And you have to be born here, or your grandfather has to be born here, you know, for you to be actually considered from that community. Right? Yeah. And so when I did my math, I called up one of my board members who I knew was one of the older families in town. I think he was eight, eight and a half generations, something like that. And I use 20 generations as my litmus. So I did my math. I called him up. And I said, Hey, Garnett, how many generations are you? And he told me and I said, Well, I told him what store and I said, well, guess what? I win.

Then I told my board chair at the time, and he said, Oh, you’re a homing pigeon. So I feel like that’s why I’ve always felt an affinity for Noonan and Kavita County. It’s been my blood. And they’re no joking, right? Literally.

Brandon Burton 8:01
Yeah, I’m assuming the chamber office as long as you’re there, it can never move because that gravitational pole to that historical cemetery across the street.

Candace Boothby 8:10
Thank you. Yes. There’s a lot of gravitational poles going on.

Brandon Burton 8:13
That’s right. That’s right. Now that’s awesome. How do you guys say, sounds like great chamber, obviously being selected as a chamber, the year finalist again, after winning back in 2015. And that speaks a lot to your chamber and to the the repetitive nature of being able to be selected and to be able to rise to the top of the ranks among chambers again, so great job to you guys. And I’m excited to dive into this episode with you and really spend time talking about the two programs that were submitted on your chamber the year application, and we’ll dive into those as soon as we get back from this quick break.

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All right, Candace, we’re back. So as I mentioned before the break, we’ll spend most of our time today talking about the two programs on your chamber, the your application, if you would like to introduce the first program to us, and we will dive into that and kind of the origins and how that became something of interest for you guys to take on. And we’ll explore that topic, but please introduce it.

Candace Boothby 11:05
Okay. So the first program is the Forward Coweta Summit. Originally, we were calling it the growth summit that, you know, that has different connotations, so we just called it the Forward Coweta Summit. The purpose of this program is really just to educate the citizens create civic engagement and conversation around key topics. So we are a very fast growing community. We’re fortunate in the sense that our governments have made really good decisions over the years. So our growth has not outpaced us. But we’re kind of at that tipping point. And so we also have such a younger generation, it’s important that we bring them into the dialogue in the conversation. So we have actually used the forward can we to summit as a platform to really strategically engage a younger audience. We’ve got several tools that we’ve put into place as a result of that. We started big picture the first year, which was last year. And it brought in some really cool speakers throughout the metropolitan Atlanta area, just to talk about what they’re doing in their community, how they managed growth, what they did in certain areas, how do you create the sustain of vision, this year, we’re actually narrowing it just a little bit. And we are going to focus a little bit more on talent retention and recruitment, in addition to quality of life. So we had great participation, we a lot of strategies on the front end, where we went out and did one on one conversations with each of our elected officials in Jena to personally invite them to be there that day, we had great success doing that. Then we sent out a calendar invite, gosh, probably five, six months in advance. And then as we got closer, we we actually had hired a company to do our marketing. And so we did a very aggressive marketing campaign. Leading up to that day, we had about 300 that participated. And it was the right people to be in the room, which was our, our goal, because we wanted all the key stakeholders in the community, you know, and again, when you do something new like this, people are thinking, what are they doing? Why are they doing it? What’s the purpose, but we have done an Inner Inner community visit right before COVID, which was our first and so kind of dipping our toe into putting that conversation table together, if you will, around future issues. So it’s all a part of a bigger strategy, because if you look at our mission, it’s all about championing economic prosperity. And so this, we don’t do anything that’s not aligned with our mission. And we certainly get asked a lot by different people to do a variety of things, as most chambers do. That this one is probably one of my favorite programs, because it does bring all the right people together to the table to hear the information that you want to want them to hear to start the dialogue. And so this year, we did put a group of young next gen leaders to help they introduced the speakers last year and and have been a part of the process just giving feedback. And so now when this year is over, we’re going to start putting some We haven’t decided what we’re going to call a bit probably a little I don’t know conversation groups to break down some of the topics. And probably one of our biggest goals, outcomes that we’re looking for long term is more private investments. So we have a lot of investment by our government. And it’s fantastic. But we know that in order to really, I guess implement a bigger greater vision, it’s going to require more private invest MIT. So that’s, that’s kind of where we’re headed with all the conversation.

Brandon Burton 15:06
I love that I love having those goals to work forward in the picture of what you want next year to look like. And the idea of being able to bake in some other key factors to how a chamber operates. Like you mentioned, how can the next gen leaders introduce speakers and getting them involved and feel like they have a place in the community and with the chamber? In particular, I love that. You mentioned having the marketing company kind of create the campaign and get 300 participants and being the right people and says you’re considering the stakeholders that you wanted to be there? What did that look like? Who all did you want in the room? And then how did the marketing go out? Or is it open to the community? And at at large? Or was it targeted towards certain demographics of some sort? Or how did how was that planned out and thought through. So

Candace Boothby 15:57
it was open to the community at large, although we didn’t target the community at large. It was certainly open. Our number one stakeholder was our county commission and our city council, starting with the mayor and the county commission, Chairperson, because that’s, that’s where the rubber meets the road. And those are our most important community partners. So that’s where we started. And then we sort of backed our way into meeting with several of the county commissioners, the city council members, and we sort of backed our way into less formally, making sure that we had representation from our school board, from some of our smaller municipalities. And then we turned our attention to some of the larger industries. So we have a lot of internal groups within the chamber. So of course, while we’re doing a lot of the personal outreach, all of our target groups within the chamber as well as our members at large, they were the recipient, the target groups received the calendar invite. And then the bigger broader audience received the Save the date postcard, which came out five months in advance, and then the targeted emails. And then I think our social media campaign kicked in the event was the end of August, though it kicked in. Gosh, I can’t remember I want to say it was the mid to latter part of July. So it’s the last Wednesday in October, so you weren’t planning for this year. And in looking at last year’s timing, we’ve readjusted this year schedule just a little bit. So the calendar invites went out earlier, the Save the date cards are actually going out today. And the social media campaign will kick in mid July, and we haven’t heavily started promoting that will kick in the week after July 4. And, and then from that moment forward, we’ll be having conversations with people. And there is another group that I failed to mention, we did a survey during the events and before the event and after the event. And there were 50 people that that indicated they would like to be involved in this process. So while we’ve communicated with them, we haven’t done anything formal. So when this timeframe rolls around two to three weeks prior to that we’re going to connect with that group, and give them an assignment during the conference or during the summit, to listen for certain things. So that afterwards, we can get them together and do a larger debriefing than what we did last year with just our smaller next gen group.

Brandon Burton 18:42
Wow, I really liked that idea of being able to. So how was that question phrased on the survey then to because they can see, you know, do you want to get involved that can mean a whole lot of different things about what involvement might look like in a summit like this,

Candace Boothby 18:57
that haven’t looked at it in a while. But if I remember, I think it was something like this more gauging their interest in the topic and the conversation and desire to be engaged in conversation moving forward about where we’re growing as a community. So it was rather broad. But the fact that we have that many people that actually said, Yes, I was a little surprised, because that’s your built in audience right there.

Brandon Burton 19:24
It is. I imagine if you if you needed somebody you could pull from that group for one of the conversation groups that you’re talking about doing or something that you have a pool of people that are willing and want to be more involved. So I love that idea.

Candace Boothby 19:38
Thank you.

Brandon Burton 19:39
Yeah. Well, let’s shift gears a little bit to the other program on your chamber. The your application was called go digital. That Correct? That’s it. Tell us what that’s about and kind of the origins and how that’s been developed?

Candace Boothby 19:54
said go digital. We were very fortunate. Our county administer Strader approached me, I lose track of time, sometime you’re in a year ago, you’re gonna have to go about the ARPA funds into the American rescue plan funds. And he said that they were going to earmark just shy of a million dollars for the chamber. But we had to submit the traditional grant, which we did. And then we received two grants. One was for a talent development program. And the other one was for good digital. And I think we had about 400,000 applied to the go digital program. So I love this program. Because what it’s done, we were able to identify, during COVID, there were a lot of our small businesses, because they did not have an online e commerce presence, they were not able to, to really be as successful as they could have been otherwise. So we targeted companies who needed help with their digital assets, specifically, but not exclusively, online, e commerce. So we have a fantastic volunteer, he used to be our board chair, he’s retired senior VP of Finance for Yamaha just does a lot of great stuff with us. So he has been the project leader since the beginning. And he put together a group of digital asset providers, so member companies, and actually, I guess they were all members, we get a little loose about that, like, for instance, on the grant side, you did not have to be a chamber member to receive a grant. And we want to help all companies. And if it’s an opportunity for us, then to expose the chamber to somebody maybe and then turn them into a member. That’s, that’s great, that he pulled together a group of probably eight providers that worked on, you know, developing websites, and social media campaigns and all the things video that you would consider part of the digital assets. So they created the criteria. And they created everything, all the requirements. So there were requirements were the company that applied had to go through training. They only got a percentage of the money on the front end. And they had to complete the project before they received the remaining money. And so we were able to help. And the grants ranged from 2500. To just shy of 20,000, I believe, we were able to help a little over 60 companies believe we’ve given up most of the money we saw, we were able to get just a little bit more transferred over from our other grants into digital aid. So we can do a bit more this year. One of our providers, I thought did something quite clever. So we do a total resource campaign in the fall. One of our products is called other chambers do this as well try it Tuesday, and where we Wednesday, where you go out and you film them. And you see you try that you film them with trying something or show us what you’re doing depending on which day you purchased. And then we put those videos out on social media, we have a page on our chamber website, we promote them to our members. So one of these providers used some of her grant money for her clients to purchase them. These videos, which helped us out I didn’t know she was doing it until much later on. I thought this is brilliant. So when you look at our schedule for the trial to see where we Wednesdays throughout the year, probably of the 24 I’m going to say that at least 12 Or her clients. Wow. And so it’s enabled them to be able to get video for their websites at a very, very well. They didn’t pay for it because it came with a grant. And then we partnered with one of our providers. And he does all of our video for us. So it gives it a little bit more of a professional look. That’s been a great program. It’s it’s, we did a cover story on the program in our Thrive publication back in March. And there’s this big photo of all lay they weren’t all there. But most of the grant recipients are sitting on the wall in front of the courthouse and standing and the courthouse is right there in the background. And they’re waving at the camera. And then on the inside was a wonderful story about some of the outcomes. Some of the companies who talked about just having access to this grant and implementing it how much it’s helped their company grow. So that’s the stories that we tell now is the success stories. Yeah,

Brandon Burton 24:51
I love that. And that gives you a ton of content to tell stories over and over and impact the Chamber’s making it

Candace Boothby 24:59
I have to tell you a sidebar though. Have you seen that cover that magazine?

Brandon Burton 25:03
I have not? No. It’s on our website. Yeah. So that’s me, and I’ll put it in our show notes for this episode too. So people, when

Candace Boothby 25:11
you look at it, it’s the most beautiful blue sky and the most beautiful cherry tree and full bloom. So when we took that photo, it was February. And the tree had no leaves, the grass was ground. And it was it was kind of a gray day. And so I sent it there is a company that we occasionally use in St. Simons called 365 degrees marketing, they do such an amazing work with photos. And they, they’re the ones that created our logo and brand 15 years ago. So I sent him this photo, and I said, this is gonna go on the cover of thrive, and I need it to have your colors featured. So they and I said, I just need a few leaves on the tree and, you know, give the sky you’re pretty blue. Will they sent it back. And the tree was it didn’t just have leaves, it was a cherry tree and full blue. And the sky was this beautiful shade of cobalt blue. And the court has got a lovely new roof. The grass was green, I stare at that cover and pay cash. That’s the prettiest picture ever.

Brandon Burton 26:19
That’s great. That’s a way to sell the community. Right? Your dress? Yeah, that’s awesome. No, it’s so important for businesses to be able to have their online presence to be able to have their ecommerce sites if they’re a retail store, you know, have products that they sell in a brick and mortar, to be able to sell them as out the back door, as we say. And I forget what the stats are. But the percentage of sales that go online versus brick and mortar is it can be, you know, double or triple within store sales are if they’re set up in the right way. And the community is

Candace Boothby 26:57
huge. Yeah, well, here’s one example. So downtown in the square, the Noonan square, there’s this chocolate shop, that it’s it’s let them eat toffee. And they had no website. So when COVID hit, give a love their chocolate, and so they were calling them, you know, and that’s a bit of a challenge. So they were one of the first ones to sign up to be a part of this program. And it has made a world of difference in their ability to expand their customer base.

Brandon Burton 27:28
I bet. So with how the funds from the grant were set up, was there anything that goes into training on how to make that conversion from vo to be able to sell online? Because that’s it’s different right than doing business, just bringing someone up at the cash register versus having the logistics to be able to pull the product and package and ship and assuming that’s the type of business that they are and where they’re shipping material. But how do those that you talked about the eight, the eight providers? Did they provide some of that training and get them up and going with that the grant

Candace Boothby 28:06
there? Yes, there was required training before they applied for the grant. Okay, so as far as drilling down that deeply into onto the E commerce side, I’d have to ask Phil, that question. But I know that there was a needs assessment that was done. And when specifically like the websites were created. So here’s a great example, there’s a travel agency that didn’t have a great online presence. And so when they were done, they had not just the online presence, but the tools to take it to the next level. So I think it was probably a case by case basis, once they went through the first training based on what their needs were.

Brandon Burton 28:53
Yeah, I can see that. That’s such a great idea to be able to, to kind of tag some of those ARPA funds for this type of work to be able to get businesses online and, and like I said before, it makes such a huge impact into the community and for those businesses and they have families and they’re earning a living and all these things just helps perpetuate that throughout your community.

Candace Boothby 29:18
I will tell you this, I think one of the things, least for me, and other people that I talked to, that they’ve enjoyed most about it is for the ones that now have the video that was filmed as a part of either try it Tuesday or Wednesday. That has been eye opening for me because it’s allowed me to be able to go form a different kind of relationship with some of these companies. So there’s a lady that has goats and she makes goat’s milk and she’s got a beautiful storefront in downtown soy. So you know being able to go visit and see her product and when I interviewed her I got to hold the nine day old goat by the name of Daphne A which was kind of cool. And I would never have known about like the dent guy or the junk sweepers. But then to actually be able to sit down with them and drill down, it’s given us another outlet to get to know our members, you know, just a little bit better at a different in a different way.

Brandon Burton 30:18
Yeah, yeah, yeah. And I think we could go down a whole rabbit rabbit hole of the trade Tuesdays Wednesdays and, and I’m sorry, we don’t have more time, because I know that people listening are like, tell us more about that. Tell us more. But as we start to wrap things up, I do like to ask, especially with you guys being a chamber, the year finalist again, you guys are doing something, right. So for the chambers out there who wants to take their chamber up to the next level, what kind of tip or action item might you share with them and trying to accomplish that goal.

Candace Boothby 30:50
So I’m gonna have to go back to my roots. So I’m a big believer in systems and processes. And I think back to, I don’t know, when I first came in 2003, and we discussed, accreditation, and the board wasn’t convinced they really wanted to do it. And so what we decided we would do is we would look at those categories. And we would spend our time identifying gaps, and then closing the gaps. So we did that for about six years, until finally we decided, gosh, if we’re going to put this much work into it, and you also have programs, if you don’t do them within two years, you really shouldn’t use them with some great programs, we need to go ahead and just put this together. And if we’re going to do it, then we need to make sure that we have everything in place to create a five star because you want the five stars, right? So we did that. And so everything that we shored up and the the gaps that we closed and the work that we did, later, really strong foundation. So my advice, and I think had we not had that foundation, it would not have positioned us then to have the data and the numbers and the programs in place. That allowed us then to not just qualify through the numbers, but then to actually, you know, be able to submit the application and be then chosen as a finalist. We also have and have been blessed with a lot of great, not just board chairs, but board members. So I remember when we interviewed back in 2013, I took one of my former board chairs with me to do the interview. And he was as knowledgeable about the organization almost as knowledgeable as I was, and had been integrally involved in a lot of our initiatives, that speaks highly when you have volunteers who are that immersed in the culture of the organization, that they understand it at the same level. So I guess my advice would be if you have the the systems and the processes, the foundation and the infrastructure, it will sustain you. And you can have a year where you maybe your results aren’t what you typically would have, or you have a rogue board member or you have a toxic staff member or whatever it may be. All those things will happen throughout a career of you know, many years. But that infrastructure and that stability that you’ve built, and those systems that have seen you through that is what will create the sustainability and allow you to grow to the next level. So I can actually track that to 2007 when I changed our work environment to be a little more entrepreneurial, and less restrictive, more encouraging of working outside, in the outside of the office if you can be more productive, and then our systems and processes and that’s when we started seeing the results. And then from there, you know, like you’ve read with the bio, we’ve been able to achieve the five stars since that first application in 2013, and then be able to qualify and compete, and then win back in 2015. And then be a finalist this year. So that’s my advice. It’s not sexy, but it is foundational, and it’s systems and processes and keep your eye on the ball and alignment would be my other piece of advice. And then use your data to drive your decisions. All of that. You wrap it up in a pretty little ball and put a bow on it. Yeah, like

Brandon Burton 34:41
you say it’s not sexy. But you had also mentioned before you don’t do anything that’s outside of your mission, right so you can have your systems and processes surrounded by your mission. That’s going to put you in the right course.

Candace Boothby 34:53
But we do like the wow factor. So I years ago I had a board member say to me, we have the state ache but where’s the sizzle in the aroma? So we always want to have the sizzle in the room. And the other thing is always be open to change, embrace change, just because you’ve done it, don’t keep doing it. So every year when we start looking at our program of work for the next year, we always push back throughout the year, we’re pushing back, is this still where it needs to be? Do we still need to do it? There have been many programs we’ve sunsetted. And that we have to that we’re reimagining right now to bring back. But I think that keeps it fresh. And that keeps people like me who like a challenge and change and energy that keeps me motivated as well.

Brandon Burton 35:36
Right? Absolutely. Well, Candace, 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.

Candace Boothby 35:49
So if there are chambers out there that have not read the horizon initiative, I would strongly encourage them to do that. ACC is in the midst of revamping them. But I think all nine of those initiatives are important, I think at the root of it, though, is leadership, there’s one called catalytic leadership. And you can have great communications good technology, you can, you know, be very much aware of what’s happening in the community and what the issues are. But if you don’t have a leadership, that’s going to understand how you embrace that, and how you package it, and how you move it forward, then the rest of this stuff doesn’t really matter. So I think, for chambers to be relevant in the future, there just needs to be a constant attention being paid to building leaders, and it’s harder in today’s world, because people don’t have as much time, the role of leaders in the community is shifting a bit. And, you know, so you have to sometimes redefine who the leaders are, that the leader at the Chamber is the one that has to help keep the eye on the ball and keep that out, or in the forefront. And making sure that new leaders are being identified and brought in and put at the table. And, you know, it can be exhausting. But without the catalytic leadership mindset, you’re not really going to be able to, you know, engage the public or, you know, be aware of what’s happening internationally and be able to be successful in aligning your chamber with that. It takes leaders with ideas, and motivation and courage to be able to do those kinds of things. So that’s my little advice for the future. Love

Brandon Burton 37:39
it, and so much wisdom in that. Candace, is there any contact information you’d like to share for listeners who might want to reach out and connect with you and learn more about what setting you guys apart as a chamber, the year finalist? Sure, and

Candace Boothby 37:54
I’m always happy to share. I’ll share whatever resources we have happy to talk. So you can reach me at the NewnanCowetaChamber.org and my email is very simple. It’s just candace@newnancowetachamber.org.

Brandon Burton 38:10
That’s perfect. We will get that in our show notes for this episode, as well as a picture of the cover of your beautiful magazine and downtown square and courthouse for everybody to pull up and check out but Candace this has been great having you back on Chamber Chat Podcast. I wish you and your team best of luck in Dallas as chamber the year.

Candace Boothby 38:30
Thank you. It’s always a delight to see you and I guess we’ll see you there. Right. Absolutely. Okay. Well, thanks very much for having me. I appreciate it.

Brandon Burton 38:39
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Strategic Planning Pitfalls with Carol Hamilton

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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.

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

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

Brandon Burton 1:44
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Our guest for this episode is Carol Hamilton. Carol is principal of grace social selector consulting, LLC, and host of mission impact podcast. Carol helps organizations and teams become more strategic and innovative or greater mission impact. She facilitates strategic planning, mapping an organization’s impact and organizational assessments for nonprofits and associations. Carol, I’m excited to have you with us today on chamber chat podcast, I’d love for you to take a moment to say hello to all the chamber champions who are out there listening and to share something interesting about yourself so we can all get to know you a little better. Well,

Carol Hamilton 2:42
thank you, Brandon, thank you for having me on the podcast. It’s an honor. Yeah, I so my name is Carol Hamilton, gray social sector consulting. And I, I was trying to think about, you know, what, what interesting thing could I share, but I think one that informs the work that I do is that I am the younger sister of a person, my brother has significant disabilities, he’s autistic and profoundly deaf and developmentally disabled and growing up with him, you know, as as, as my older brother, I definitely saw the way in which the world was not built for someone like him. And so for me, when I’m doing my work, I’m always trying to contribute my small part, to really building a world where everyone can thrive where there really no exceptions to that. And so that’s that kind of what is what motivated me to, you know, come into the to the nonprofit sector and want to be part of movements and groups and organizations that are really trying to help build a world where everyone can thrive.

Brandon Burton 3:52
Yeah, I like that it’s nice to to have that that driver you know, behind you that that background that really motivates you to you know, for greater good. So, I think that I imagined that will come into our conversation today and inclusion aspects as a topic today. But based upon your work and the kind of the focus that we wanted to take our conversation today on the podcast is going to be focused around common strategic planning mistakes. So I’m sure you have some examples and things that you can share with us from your experience and meeting with different organizations and going about strategic planning and I’m excited to dive in deeper and learn from these experiences as soon as they get back from this quick break.

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All right, Carol, we’re back. So as I mentioned before the break, we’re talking about strategic planning mistakes. So for chambers that are tuning in, creating a strategic plan is a integral part of their organization being able to know their mission and purpose going forward. And as they go about creating strategic plans, what are some of these key things that you see that stand out that organizations maybe ought to be aware of? And some of these mistakes, etc, that maybe we can help these chambers avoid some of these pitfalls? By sharing some of your experiences? Yeah,

Carol Hamilton 7:13
yeah, I think pitfalls are probably is a good way to put it. Because certainly nobody goes into the process trying to, you know, have it not be productive and effective for the organization. But I think one of them, and I’ll be a little, I don’t know, whether controversial or contrarian here is that the common wisdom around boards and staff, and I’m sure that there are many of your listeners who are probably maybe on the volunteer side of local chambers, but where they do have staff, it’s been seen that the board, or traditionally been held that the board is the one who’s in charge of strategy. And I, you know, that’s certainly an important role for the board. But I like to take a whole organization approach where really every brain, every part of the brain, both that analytical side, and all the complexities that people bring, all of them are important to the organization’s future, and kind of opening up the conversation, to include more people into how you structure and frame up your vision and will really serve the organization well to help have people be motivated and more motivated to be behind. Whatever you ultimately as a group decide are your big, big goals, the big vision that you’re moving forward. So I would invite leaders to, you know, bring and bring more of a kind of big tent approach so that when a lot of people talk a lot about buy in, and then you know, if they do it with a small group, and then bring the plan to other people and wonder why they’re not excited about it. I would say get the people in the room with you, they’ll get excited about it. Because they’ve been they’ve had a hand in creating that vision. Yeah,

Brandon Burton 9:05
and I think that’s such an important part of creating a vision is getting buy in from as many people as possible and being able to feel like they had a voice and creating that plan. So as it’s unveiled and in you get rubber to the road, you get more people that are willing to participate and help move that mission forward. I like how you, you mentioned how typically, you might see how a board that might be a pitfall, right, where if it’s just the board sitting in a room creating a strategic plan. Maybe they’re missing insights from others in the community. So when you talk about getting more people involved, if you are looking at a chamber of commerce, what examples might you give of other types of people or organizations or what where would you look to to get more involvement in creating that strategic plan? And or chamber. Yeah,

Carol Hamilton 10:01
and I think when I say that it doesn’t mean that everybody is ultimately at, you know, the the planning session or the retreat, it’s that you’ve taken the time to get feedback from a variety of stakeholders, you’ve identified who those stakeholders are, who are important to, you know, moving the vision of your organization forward. You know, the people who are you’re very involved volunteers, your staff, your members, but then wider than that people in the community that you have partners with other other organizations that you have alliances with, the people that you serve, all of those folks will be important, they won’t necessarily all end up in the room making the decisions about the organization, but taking that time to talk to people and get feedback. And oftentimes, that’s where an external party consultant can help out because folks will be more willing to kind of share candidly, with someone who doesn’t have a stake in the outcome. You know, in terms of that, that feedback and input, and will also help to synthesize all that information, because it’s a, it’s a big lift to talk to a lot of people, and then you’ve got so much information, it can feel overwhelming, but how do you sift it down to some of the important nuggets, that then you as a as a smaller group of board, and staff can really chew on and say, Okay, this is what we’re hearing from people, this is what we’ve set ourselves about what we want. And this is a, this is what, you know, this, this is the significance that has for us in our future going forward. And oftentimes, I find that, again, that kind of fear of that big tent is that folks will be overwhelmed by the number of opinions, ideas, all the different things. And in terms of when I’m talking, when I’ve done this work with groups, I’ve actually found that they’ve been surprised by how much agreement there actually is. And pleasantly surprised. And it often will bring issues onto the table that maybe they were thinking and they talked to somebody in the hallway, but you know, after the board meeting, but they they weren’t weren’t willing to bring up in the in the formal session, and so that this process can give, make it safer to have those conversations about critical issues.

Brandon Burton 12:33
I like the point that you make about bringing in a consultant for that specific purpose, because I think there’s a lot of value in bringing in somebody from the outside. I’ve seen myself in that role it were a, I’ll joke about being the bartender, you know, we’re the members, the members of the organization, they’ll tell you all their gripes and all the things you know, that they see wrong with the organization, and the things that they like, and the things that they’re excited about. Sure, exactly. But things that they may not be as open to just telling the chamber directly or to get the face of the chamber executive and say, I disagree with this or that or so having a third party come in, there’s a lot of value to be able to flesh out that real, meaningful data, that information that you can get from people that you wouldn’t get just having your normal day to day conversations. And I think for a chamber staff to be able to try to collect all this feedback, on top of doing their day to day job, it’s a big lift to try to do that and make sense of all the information they’re bringing in. So having a consultant somebody who’s focused on that, and being able to go through with all that information means and present it in a way that makes sense. And you can look at a report and kind of go over and say, Okay, it’s good feedback. So in soliciting that feedback, you’d mentioned talking to individuals. So I imagine there can be an interview portion of soliciting feedback, talking to some of those key stakeholders, surveys, what what are some of the ideal ways you see in soliciting that feedback that have been effective from your experience?

Carol Hamilton 14:24
Yeah, so it’s going to depend on each organization and, and the scope and the scale and, you know, their capacity, the budget, all those things, but generally, it’s a combination of interviews, one on one interviews, focus groups with, you know, groups of people up to eight to 10, and then surveys, and so, some combination of those will will, you know, enable you to really get into what people perceive as the strengths, the challenges, the opportunities, and all the things that are important for the Future of the organization. And I think another mistake that organizations make is thinking that strategic planning is just about about having a retreat. And so for me that that date, that kind of listening tour that you can go on, is a really important fundamental piece to get that good snapshot of where are you at this moment? Where is the organization right now? You know, what are people are saying, across the board? Are challenges and things that are getting in the way? And then what are the strengths that everyone’s seeing and the opportunities? So really being grounded in that kind of what’s our current reality? Right.

Brandon Burton 15:39
And before that retreat happens, you need to have good accurate data to go off of exactly decisions. Right. Exactly. There’s the planning before the retreat that that takes place. Yeah. So

Carol Hamilton 15:51
that’s, that’s part of that data gathering process. Yeah. So

Brandon Burton 15:55
as I’m thinking of these interviews, I think my first thought goes to with the chamber to go to the members of the chamber to get feedback from them, I think it may be important to even solicit others in the business community who are not members to find out what what do they see the role of the chamber being? Why are they not members? You know, they have they been members in the past? What can we get from that experience? But also, committees, right? So there’s different committees within organizations and getting their feedback on their role? And how they see that being a part of the greater organization? And how can things maybe be more efficient? And I don’t know, I’m just trying to think of all the different sources to gather data from to be able to create a rock solid strategic plan. Are there other areas that you would think have to go to for to gather that information?

Carol Hamilton 16:57
Yeah, I mean, you know, usually, I’m working with the organization and a set of small, smaller set of folks from the organization, usually a combination of, you know, staff leadership and board, to really identify who all those important stakeholders are. So the organization will know, you know, who’s really important for us to talk to, and so we’ll work together to come up with that list of okay, who are we going to kind of reserve that one on one interaction with who are we going to invite to more of a group experience? Who are we going to reach out to via a survey? So really thinking through those those important points of you know, who, who most matters to the future of the organization? And also, what do we want to learn from them? You know, what are the big issues that we see that we’re curious about, that we also we kind of know, our perspective on, but how, you know, is that in alignment with how other people are seeing it? So kind of getting that cross check of, you know, is how we’re seeing the things aligning up with everybody else? And, and where’s their agreement? And where’s their, you know, some some divergence of opinion. I

Brandon Burton 18:07
like that. And you said, Something stood out to me, you said, what do we want to learn from them? And that should be the basis of all these interactions? Right? Right, what do we want right from them. And that takes me back to the thought of inclusion when you shared the tidbit about your brother and kind of that lens that it gives you in looking at your work? How do you go about inclusion, and specifically getting these opinions of voices that may not be heard, as regularly as they probably should be?

Carol Hamilton 18:42
Yeah, I mean, I think it’s important to think about, you know, as you’re making those decisions about who you’re going to prioritize, to interview and do focus groups, and surveys is really the power dynamics within organization of, are you only favoring people who already have the most power and already have the most voice and already have the most influence with the people that you you talk to one on one? Or are you doing more of a cross section or of the organization so that you get that rich feedback from a variety of people. So it’s it thinking about it in those terms that will help help define and really put inclusion at the at the center. As an organization, if you want to grow, you know, being able to see the wider net is going to be important. So,

Brandon Burton 19:39
yeah, so we’ve talked a lot about gathering that information, the data, and then the retreats is usually what people think about when you think of a strategic plan. So let’s focus a little bit more on the actual implementation of the plan. What how should that look? What are some of those pitfalls that you’ve seen that people need to be aware of to avoid as they go about implementing their strategic plan?

Carol Hamilton 20:07
So before we jump to the implementation, there’s one thing I wanted to say about the retreat, which I think is also another pitfall that people can fall into. And it’s kind of the, I think it’s the thing that leaders fear when they bring a lot of people in. So they fear a retreat that ends with just flip chart after flip chart, after flip chart, have nice ideas. And they haven’t taken the time to talk together. And I actually asked people to do this at the very beginning, before they start brainstorming ideas of how are we going to decide what we’re actually going to do, because you can never do it all. And you can’t do all the good ideas, you know, so you need a way to discern which ones are going to be the ones that you focus on. And so having that conversation upfront of how are we going to make some decisions, and then ensuring that somewhere in the process, you are making some decisions and discernment is so important. Because otherwise you end up with this laundry list plan that isn’t really a plan. It’s just a wish list. And so if you end up with a wish list plan that that gets in the way of implementation. But yeah, I think that’s that’s another key point that being clear with everybody all along the way that you’re going to have to focus on a couple things, you’re going to have to make some decisions. And if you can be clear with everybody, okay, these are the things that we’re looking for, you know, we’re looking for things that are going to grow revenue, we think we’re looking for things that are going to increase member satisfaction that are that are going to, you know, improve our reputation are going to, you know, contribute in some way to community health, whatever it might be. You’ve, you’ve agreed ahead of time, what those criteria are, that they it all aligns with our mission. So that then when you have that long list, you can go through and actually make some decisions.

Brandon Burton 22:12
Yeah, no, that makes that makes a lot of sense. I know. A lot of times, people and even other organizations will come to the chamber and say, here’s a great idea of something that you should do, right? And then it becomes that wish list of others. So I can see where you can have those turns ended up being a long wish list. Yeah, it’d be great if we could do this and that, but when it comes down to it, you need to have the resources to be able to execute and be able to do it well, right? You don’t want to just take something on and then have it be lackluster, and have it end up being a bad representation of your organization because you’re not doing it well. So yeah, moving beyond that wish list and having a solid plan is is huge. That’s important.

Carol Hamilton 23:03
Yeah, so and that list of criteria that you come up with can be great in that instance, of all the different people coming and saying, Well, you should do this. Well, we can run it through this kind of rubric decision making flowchart, if you will, and decide whether it actually fits, you know, fits our goals or not. But I think in terms of moving from, okay, we’ve got a plan, you know, it’s got three to five big goals, no more than that. We’ve identified, what are some of the action steps that we’re going to take, we’ve really gotten clear and gotten shared understanding about what does success look like for each of those. So oftentimes, I’ll see plans that have that big goal, have a couple action steps, but don’t necessarily go that next step of saying, Okay, if we take this action, what do we expect is going to happen? What do we think that’s going to look like that in the way so that we can know whether we’ve had the success. So this is where you get, you know, your your performance indicators, whether that’s some of them will be, you know, quantitative, but some of them may be qualitative, some of them may be, you know, we decided we’re going to take a new approach in membership. And we’re going to work with somebody to come up with a plan around that. And so, you know, the first success item is going to be we, we have a plan. So there’ll be a variety of different things. So with that, then thinking about okay, so this is a plan over three to five years. How do we actually what are we actually going to do in the next six months, just focus on that and not try to predict what you’re doing in year three, I see a lot of people getting caught up in wasting time, trying to nail down every detail over the five year three, three to five year period. And I say just take that for next six months, that next year. And that’s where you do your implementation plan of who’s going to do what by when? I

Brandon Burton 24:56
like that. It’s hard sometimes to Do you get caught up in the big vision, the big plan and you forget that it’s the day to day actions that execute on that five year plan. So as you talk about these performance indicators, it’s probably good to review what those performance indicators are in some sort of a regular interval. Do you have any suggestions on how how often to look bad like, because you can also get caught up on the data and continually look at it and not move the needle or feel like you’re moving the needle? So what’s a? And there’s probably not a straight answer for it. But what would be your guideline to being able to check those performance indicators and see, you know, how things are trending?

Carol Hamilton 25:42
Yeah, so so the two step for me of really making a plan, integrating it into your into how you do your work, is creating that that shorter term implementation plan, but then also coming to agreement about, okay, so we’re going to check in on this at this meeting. Every you know, quarter, or every six months or every year, whatever, you have an agreement again, ahead of time of how you’re going to do that. And then to remember that the strategic plan it you know, we talk about things being living documents all the time, but somehow, in people’s head, once the board has approved it, it becomes this, like, you know, written in stone, sacred document, and it’s not, it’s a plan, things will happen that you can’t anticipate strategic planning is not about predicting the future. It’s about setting your intentions about where you want to put your energy. So you’re going to have to readjust, you’re going to So it’s that kind of balance between, we have some goals, we have some strategy, we have some structure, and we’re going to be flexible. It’s not an either or it’s a both. And so having an agreement about how you’re going to do that, and who’s going to be able to make some updates is really important as well.

Brandon Burton 26:53
Yeah, I think that pandemic taught everybody that need to be able to be flexible. It’s a plan, but we need to be able to pivot and make adjustments where needed. Yep. Yep. So that’s a great point to make. Are there other things when it comes to strategic planning pitfalls that we haven’t addressed that come to mind that we want to make sure to touch on?

Carol Hamilton 27:17
Yeah, I think, um, you know, it’s, it’s when you’re actually doing that decision making about what are you going to focus on over the next three to five years, it’s balancing, you know, we want to stretch, we want to improve, we want to grow. And we don’t want to, again, it’s kind of a different version of that long laundry wishlist. But if the if the aspirations are so beyond where the organization is, it’s also going to fall flat because it just doesn’t match the capacity. So not to just say, Okay, this is this is all we can do, because that’s all we have right now. But being realistic about where you are, and what’s going to move you forward to actually, you know, so that you have the resources to do what you want to do. So having not having those two things be decoupled. Yeah,

Brandon Burton 28:08
reminds me and I’m terrible at attributing quotes, but I’ll say the quote, you can look up whoever said it, but something to the effect that individuals underestimate what they can accomplish in 10 years, but overestimate what they can do in one year. So Oh, my God, or one week, right? Yeah, one way Yeah. You go out and you say, and this year, I’m going to do all these things. And really, it’s like, no, like, you got to eat the elephant one bite at a time. Right? Right, we’re in a 10, five, or even less strategic plan is three to five year plan. Because we see the quote unquote, failures on those smaller timelines, we don’t feel like we can shoot big because we’ve we’ve seen the smaller steps not come through, but we sell ourselves short in realizing what that cumulative effect of having those small effects has over that longer time horizon. So

Carol Hamilton 29:01
yeah, so it’s, it’s the tricky part of trying to find that Goldilocks spot of, you know, just enough stretch, and also, you know, tempered with some realism about, you know, what can we accomplish with what we have? Yeah. And then what do we need to get if we want to do you know, when we want to do more?

Brandon Burton 29:19
Absolutely. Well, Carol, as we start to wrap things up, I like asking for chambers who are listening who are interested in taking their chamber up to the next level, what kind of tip or action item might you have to share with them as they try to accomplish that goal of raising her elevating their, the level of their chamber?

Carol Hamilton 29:40
Yeah, I mean, the the tagline that I use for my podcast is, you know, people who are in the non in the nonprofit sector, who wants to do good in the world without being a martyr to the cause. And so, I think the thing that I’ve been hearing a lot from people recently is when leaders get in their own way of having the organization be overly identified with one person, and to step back and realize that it’s a group effort where it’s always a collective effort. That’s why we have organizations. And so how can you take small steps you were talking about that eating the elephant, one bite at a time to start building leadership capacity throughout your organization. So, you know, asking a staff member to share and facilitate part of a board meeting, if you do the whole thing all the time? You know, just taking small steps, what’s one thing on your to do list somebody else could do? And they could learn from it. I know, it’s easy for you to probably you could probably do it faster. And it might take a little longer to give them all the context. But I think the more we’re building leadership capacity, the the we’re also contributing to the strength of the organization long term.

Brandon Burton 30:53
Absolutely. And I think that’s such a key point to not have the organization be about one person. So it’s about relying on your board and your organization’s your ambassadors are all the different committees and different things that are involved. And I don’t know who eats elephant anyway. But well, right.

Carol Hamilton 31:13
Doesn’t mean they don’t appreciate it. And it doesn’t sound very tasty.

Brandon Burton 31:17
That’s right. Sounds tough. But I also like asking, as we look to the future of chambers of commerce, how how would you view the future of chambers and their purpose going forward?

Carol Hamilton 31:29
Well, I guess, I would hope that chambers would join me in my, my goal of trying to contribute to a world that really thrives for that really is built so that everyone can thrive without an exception. So whatever businesses can do to to contribute to helping their community thrive. And have it be you know about about all of us, versus, you know, a few people I, I would love, I would love the chamber movement to be part of that.

Brandon Burton 32:03
Yeah, I think that’s great. Carol, for listeners who might want to reach out and connect with you and learn more about your offerings, and how you might be able to help their organizations, what would be the best way for them to reach out and connect?

Carol Hamilton 32:17
So my website’s Grace social sector.com. You can find me on LinkedIn, although my name is pretty common. Carol Hamilton. So also check out mission impact. It’s on all the podcast platforms. You can find me there. So

Brandon Burton 32:35
that’s awesome. And everybody listening is listening to a podcast so they know how to find exactly so looking permission. Carol, this has been great having you on chamber chat podcast. I appreciate you setting aside some time and being with us today and bringing the value and experience from your perspective and strategic planning and helping to give these chambers that are listening to an extra boost as they go about doing that and there are organizations that really appreciate thank

Carol Hamilton 33:03
you so much. Thanks for the opportunity.

Brandon Burton 33:05
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